brennan.day
Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH
I'm somebody who's written rather extensively on generative AI ethics, and I feel there is a lot that is unethical about the current corporate climate and culture surrounding the technology. And when I write about LLMs and chatbots, I'm careful not to make judgments about the people using the end products—I don't think you're a bad person if you use ChatGPT or Claude, or whatever.
What I'm discussing today is different. There is no room for debate or argument, here—only hard, absolute lines in the sand.
Much of the world has become far too complacent and complicit with people (and their companies) who proclaim and hold far-right, fascist ideology. These are not image boards residing in the fringe corners of an anonymous Internet made up of people who have slipped through the cracks. No, these are wealthy people in power who are blatant and shameless in their support for those who continuously beat the drum of bigotry, xenophobia, transphobia, and cynical accelerationist hatred.
Open source technology has become a culture safe for this rhetoric and ideology, with millions of dollars being invested to continue this status quo.
You need to be made aware of this, and then you need to be vocal and take action.
## DHH
David Heinemeier Hansson is the most well-known figurehead here. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and a Shopify board member.
In September 2025, DHH published "As I remember London", mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits"—a claim that redefines "native Brit" to mean "white." Developer Jake Lazaroff details how DHH describes a Tommy Robinson march as "heartwarming," where speakers called for "remigration" (a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of non-white residents) and one speaker demanded that countries "ban halal," "ban mosques," and "ban temples." DHH invokes abuse scandals to bolster his white-nationalist rhetoric, framing non-white men as predators of "British girls," while UK data shows no such racial skew. LibreNews reaches the same conclusion.
Developer Joel Drapper wrote how Ruby Central had lost a $250,000-a-year sponsorship from Sidekiq after giving DHH a speaking slot at RailsConf a few weeks later, leaving the nonprofit financially dependent on Shopify (where DHH sits on the board); Shopify then pushed Ruby Central to consolidate control rather than lose its funding. The Register and Heise both covered the fallout.
But none of this has cost DHH money—if anything, he's only gained. A few weeks ago, DHH announced the Omacom Foundation to bankroll his Linux distribution, Omarchy, which is nothing more than a few vibecoded scripts on top of Arch Linux.
There are twelve "Founding Patrons" pledging a million dollars apiece:
* Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify
* Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe
* Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
* Jack Dorsey, Block Head and Chairman of Block
* Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare
* Brendan Iribe, Cofounder of Sesame and Oculus
* Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals
* Drew Houston, cofounder and co-CEO of Dropbox
* Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw
* Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase
* Yunjie Dai, cofounder of TapTap
* DHH himself.
And these corporations are each contributing $100,000 a year for three years:
* 1Password
* 37signals
A dozen of the most powerful executives in tech looked at a man who wrote that a British march calling for the deportation of non-white citizens was "heartwarming," and decided he was the person they wanted to hand a multimillion-dollar foundation to.
I should also mention that the same infrastructure companies bankrolling Omarchy and Ladybird are also the backbone of the ongoing violence of U.S. deportations. This includes Amazon's AWS contracts powering ICE, Palantir building ICE's case-management system, and the use of Salesforce's tools.
## "Apolitical"
Andreas Kling, founder of the Ladybird browser project (itself an Omacom-adjacent beneficiary, sponsored by Cloudflare, FUTO, Shopify, 37signals, Proton, and JetBrains), built his project's identity around refusing a documentation patch that would have made SerenityOS's manuals gender-neutral, on the grounds that gender-neutral language was "personal politics" that didn't belong in a technical project. Blogger Kate Vibber wrote how that became Ladybird's official contributing guidelines, which now bar "discussions on societal politics" outright—a policy treating the mere existence of trans contributors as more "political" than excluding them. In 2026, Kling posted in support of Charlie Kirk after Kirk's assassination and, per discussion on Lobsters, bristled at being called a fascist for it—a reaction hard to square with "apolitical," since Kirk was a movement figure who, per his own Wikipedia entry, promoted the "white genocide" conspiracy theory and criticized the Civil Rights Act.
Vaxry, the developer behind the Hyprland Wayland compositor (another Omacom-funded project), was banned in 2024 by Freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team over a pattern of the Hyprland Discord enabling harassment of trans community members, including an incident where moderators changed a trans user's display name to strip their pronouns. Vaxry's own public response framed the ban as ideological overreach by "social justice warriors," while the Freedesktop side, recounted at LibreNews, describes over a year of private attempts to get him to address the toxicity before going public. Hyprland's contributing guidelines now ban "political" speech too.
Enrico "metux" Weigelt forked the deprecated Xorg server into Xlibre as a rebellion against a "RedHat DEI" conspiracy he believes exists. The founding document of the project was a rant about big-tech diversity initiatives, and its code of conduct is a text file that just says "404." FUTO is a funder of Immich and is run by Eron Wolf, a friend and platformer of Curtis Yarvin, the "dark enlightenment" writer whose ideas about dismantling democracy have now found purchase in the current U.S. administration. Brendan Eich, Mozilla's co-founder and now Brave's CEO, used Brave's infrastructure to give payments to Kiwi Farms, a forum whose harassment campaigns have been linked to multiple suicides.
We witness the same pattern over and over. A tech project is declared "apolitical," and defines any accommodation of marginalized contributors as a political act, and keeps the actual politics of the maintainers—nostalgia for ethnically white homogeneous cities and hostility to gender-neutral pronouns—off the table entirely. Because that's just, you know, how they feel. "Apolitical" has never meant a lack of politics. It's meant politics that current power doesn't have to defend.
## The Throughline
We have been watching the fragile fury of white masculinity and hate metastasize and fester over the years, from Gamergate's harassment campaigns through years of anti-SJW cringe compilation content mills, the marking of Antifa as the enemy, the tantrum-throwing #AllLivesMatter movement, and the manufactured panic over DEI and "wokeism."
You are not living in the neoliberal-Obama era where basic compassion and empathy are the default anymore. And you haven't been for a long time. Despite their cries about censorship and deplatforming, and despite their persecution fetish, these people are not on the fringe. They have board seats and sponsorships and multimillion-dollar foundations.
It is no coincidence this is occuring as companies and brands return to X, as the United States votes at a Midterm election being interfered with by a sitting president, as conservatives normalize the far-right in Europe politics and culture.
If you want a more thorough and longer list of people, companies, and products, then I recommend reading up on Devine Lu Linvega's Fashware list on Sourcehut, as well as Drew DeVault's list of Weird Little Guys.
You may be in a position where the specific harms and rhetoric being spewed are not aimed at you, and you may have been coaxed into viewing what I'm saying here as overreaction, or as a rabid, self-righteous screed. Millions of dollars have been spent to ensure this, and it could not be further from the truth.
We cannot afford to continue to shrug off the presence of these people and their projects in open source. A united stand must be taken.
**Speak up on this**. Boycott aggressively. Let people know you don't support Cloudflare, Shopify, 37signals, Dell, 1Password, Framework, Block, Coinbase, Dropbox, TapTap, and any other company enabling the spread of dangerous and harmful political ideologies that will continue to result in further violence and death. And let people know the harm these companies are actively doing.
We cannot allow this to continue; we must be far more proactive and assertive in our fight against the normalization of fascism and the far right. We must be willing to sacrifice ease and convenience, and we must be willing to sever all connections with these entities.
It is our only way forward.
![American Progress by John Gast. From wikipedia:
The painting depicts a landscape of North America in the 19th century. The right side of the picture portrays locations on the east coast, which are already settled by Europeans. There, New York City can be seen, along with various ships around the coast of Manhattan. Also illustrated is the Brooklyn Bridge, which started construction just 2 years earlier and would not be completed until 1883 – 11 years later.
In the midpoint of the painting is Columbia, a female personification of the United States. On her head is what Crofutt calls "The Star of the Empire".[3] She lays a telegraph wire with one hand and carries a school book in the other. Columbia represents the movement of civilization from the already well-settled East to the much more sparsely populated by Europeans West, leading settlers either on foot or by stagecoach, horseback, Conestoga wagon, wagon train, or riding steam trains.
To the left of the painting is depicted the western part of North America. The landscape is drawn to be much darker than the places already settled by Europeans with large dark clouds hanging over the distant mountains.[1] A herd of American bison and group of indigenous people can be seen to be running into the dark, away from the approaching people.
In the foreground, Gast depicts a group of settlers, heading West, where a bear appears to growl at them, while behind them stands an already established farm with a person tilling the fields and another herding livestock, representing the Midwest.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:o5445svp54qlra5w2oc6cr76/bafkreifoww6haan63ijafd5ycqdyuhthlllelmi5bvdkrf56hwevxjrmma)
