The longest-serving Republican speaker of the House admitted in 2016 to abusing teenage boys decades earlier. He was 84.

Looks like I’ll be putting away my Daring Fireball and Accidental Tech Podcast shirts for a while. It’s a pity, they were comfy shirts and I thought I was supporting good people with them. See, Marco Arment and John Gruber have, for some reason, decided that now’s the time to let their privilege flag fly, and it’s not a good look: > And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew > everyone’s hot takes on everything. > > The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for > going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang > out with our friends. “Pizza is an open-faced sandwich” is a _hot take_. “Chicago-style pizza is a casserole” is a _hot take_. “Brown people are poisoning the blood and soil of Europe and must be removed” is _Nazi shit_ and _that’s_ the sort of thing that DHH, the creator Rails and that slop Linux distribution, has been saying. > If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” > considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at > their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside? > > Should I be condemned for supporting or associating with them in non-political > contexts? > > Should I be condemned for not publicly condemning them myself? Yes, if those “political views” are _Nazi shit_ that’s _exactly_ what should happen. These are not views about which reasonable people can disagree, like tax policy. We’re talking about views that deny the fundamental humanity of some people and whose existence is a call for violence. If Marco or John were not white, straight, cisgender men, they might have realized they had to put a lot more work into deciding whether Bob and Van were safe neighbors. If they were black, brown, Asian, Jewish, indigenous, gay, trans, or women, they would have known that everyone you interact with at anything more than the most superficial level needs to be vetted for subtle signs that they don’t actually see you as a fellow human being–or that even if they see _you_ that way, they may see your friends or family differently. They should ask their respective wives whether they ever had to be concerned, when they lived on their own, whether any of their neighbors might be a misogynist or worse, or whether they were able to just give straightforward trust to them, and why. It might shed some light on an unfortunate aspect of the human experience that they missed out on. As for me, I’m _glad_ people are finally openly stating that they’re Neo-Nazis and fellow travelers, and that other people are stating that they’re comfortable breaking bread with and supporting Neo-Nazis. It’s important to know because the first step to rooting them out–and make no mistake, they _must_ be rooted out–is seeing them clearly. There’s a German saying: > If there’s a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to > him, you got a table with eleven Nazis._ Don’t be one of those ten, no matter how nice you may find that one particular Nazi personally.