CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
The CEO tries to run the company like a personality cult. Everyone was expected to be available 24/7 to respond to his demands. He liked to demand things on Friday night, weekends, or holidays to test people's loyalty. My friend was told he had to schedule his weekend activities with the company because everyone was on call all the time (he wasn't devops).People who didn't drink the kool-aid were filtered out quickly.
Banjo is also extremely aggressive with NDAs and threatening legal action against employees who speak out. Their Glassdoor page has been flooded with extremely dubious glowing reviews and I've watched many of the negative reviews slowly disappear over time for some reason.
The CEO recruited both of my friends with some grandiose stories, including the same story about being close friends with Zuckerberg. I don't know if he's actually close to Zuckerberg, but the Banjo CEO has been telling many people in Utah that he and Mark Zuckerberg are close friends, at least as a recruiting hook.
Banjo was already unpopular in Utah because they were awarded some very questionable state surveillance contracts. The state of Utah has already paused the contracts. As a Utah resident, I really hope this is the end of Banjo's involvement with Utah's surveillance.
Based on my experience, I'm more inclined to think the inverse it true. Those types of leaders are actually pretty bad at their jobs but appear subjectively good through manipulation and abuse.
Some people just want a fair trade of labor provided in exchange for money. All sane people, actually. Save the motivation bs for the army.
Quoting Buffett, recessions like we're heading into now are where the tide goes out and you can see who's swimming naked.
Like you, I've also thought about this a lot, but if anything, it's changed my opinion toward "career politicians", a category people love to dish on. It takes real talent to deal with conflicting interests over years/decades and not self-destruct.
You don't even have to get into cutting-edge management theory, the entire USA was built for the first half of its life by slaves of one kind or another.
I know because I was a Banjo employee myself (3+ years), before Damien step foot in Utah (during a company party, he told us while casually chatting that he gave his wife a budget of $3m to find a new house - they lived in Vegas at the time).
During my time there, Banjo was building a team in Vegas, NV and Redwood City, CA.
He is a workaholic. This would not be a problem, if he did not identify with Banjo (literally) and expect everyone else to work on his schedule (most weekends included, since he has no life).
If you are a high performer and take pride in your work, be sure that you'll be asked to put your life on hold, work weekends (a lot of weekends), and work toward the "greater good": Saving lives and reducing human suffering - what a joke! I wish I can say that during my tenure there we actually saved lives. But that would be a lie. A lie that everyone I worked with knows too well.
I've read several of his statements that the "life saving" technology was born in Utah. This is not true. We worked on the algorithms long before, and we did not remove users info for a long time. Only after the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal emerged in 2018, he mandated the engineers to remove all user identifiable information before posting it on our platform.
Yes, this is exactly what I was told.
Strangely, one of my friends was recruited with promises of work/life balance and plenty of vacation time. Then they were asked to work non-stop, weekdays and weekends, as soon as they started.
I'm sure you're already on top of it, but it's not hard to find similar stories on social media:
Former employee on Damien's excessive labor tactics: https://twitter.com/LAtweets22/status/1255225658298507265?s=...
Another former employee with who is gathering e-mails and texts from her time at the company: https://twitter.com/djlilelle/status/1255156543017762816?s=2...
...does that work for some people?
If the stuff about the banjo ceo still being a bad person is true, then he deserves all that’s coming, but if it’s not and it’s just competitors or people with a personal bone to pick pilling on with fake stories then I actually feel sorry for the guy.
People deserve second chances. Particularly for the stuff they do before their brain fully develops at 25 or so.
If he ran away from a highly traumatic home at 15 and ended up with the wrong crowd until he matured, then broke all contact with them, reformed and never showed antisocial behavior again, for the next 20+ years. Instead become a contributing member of society to the point of managing a seemingly successful startup launch. If that’s the guy’s actual story then he truly deserves a second chance from society.
I agree about second chances, but with limits.
This guy is the CEO of a surveillance company with government contracts to collect people's data, including relationships with police departments and other sensitive sources. If he has a hidden past with the KKK, including being part of an attempted murder (they shot into a synagogue, hard to believe that wouldn't be considered terrorism these days), then how many other people have photos of him with the KKK? His situation is the definition of being compromised.
When someone has this much compromising info combined with government-related positions and access to people's sensitive data, that compromising history is a massive risk for extortion. It would be one thing if he had previously admitted his actions and publicly apologized, but instead he waited until the information surfaced.
Does he deserve a second chance for actions committed when he was young? Sure. Does he deserve lucrative government contracts that give him privileged access to people's sensitive data? No, I don't think so.
"32 years ago I was a lost, scared, and vulnerable child. I won’t go into detail, but the reasons I left home at such a young age are unfortunately not unique; I suffered abuse in every form. I did terrible things and said despicable and hateful things, including to my own Jewish mother, that today I find indefensibly wrong, and feel extreme remorse for. I have spent most of my adult lifetime working to make amends for this shameful period in my life. In my teens, I dropped out of school, lived on the streets, ate out of dumpsters and raised money panhandling. I was desperate and afraid. I was taken in by skinhead gangs and white supremacist organizations. Over the course of a few years, I did many things as part of those groups that I am profoundly ashamed of and sorry about. Eventually, I was able to get myself away from this world while serving in the United States Navy. This turned my life around. While serving my country, I worked with law enforcement agencies in hate group prosecutions and left this world behind. Since then, I have tried and failed to completely accept and come to terms with how I, a child of Jewish heritage, became part of such a hateful, racist group. One thing I have done, through therapy and outreach, I have learned to forgive that 15 year old boy who, despite the absence of ideological hate, was lured into a dark and evil world. For all of those I have hurt, and that this revelation will hurt, I’m sorry. No apology will undo what I have done. I have worked every day to be a responsible member of society. I’ve built companies, employed hundreds and have worked to treat everyone around me equally. In recent years, I’ve sought to create technologies that stop human suffering and save lives without violating privacy. I know that I will never be able to erase my past but I work hard every day to make up for mistakes. This is something I will never stop doing."
I’ve known many who were stupid when they were young. It often is a direct result of malignant or neglecting parents. Some recover and do great things. This guy appears to have “recovered” and then went on to monetize state surveillance ambitions.
What exactly do you think a second chance is?
Credibility is part of the job of a CEO.
You call yourself a Jew? You're welcome.
There are way more people shunning their Jewish identity, but I've never met someone pretending to be Jewish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yada_Yada
I guess (anecdotally/hearsay) at least one person has done it to get a free birthright trip?
Did you expect his transformation to be instantaneous?
How does one "end up" meeting with neo Nazis? He fails to take responsibility for his behavior after his hate crimes conviction!
Probably the same way that alcoholics often end up at bars.
For alcoholics their existing friends are often all alcoholics too, and to them normal people just dont "feel right" and are hard to meet when the only place you feel comfortable is a bar.
Similarly, when tryin to extricate oneself from a undesired community (toxic or otherwise) one has to learn where to meet people from the desired community, unlearn the undesired values+vernacular, learn the values+vernacular of the new community. etc.
We're herd creatures and, for many, not having a herd feels like being on the brink of death.
For one, if you happen to be in the same military unit, "meeting with them" is kind of an inevitability.
Also, this was still 30 years ago. If this is seriously the most recent example we have of him continuing to interact with neo-Nazis, then I feel like it's reasonably plausible that he's sincere barring further evidence to the contrary.
Equality through jail isn't the goal, but we'd be remiss to ignore that he's admitted to a hate crime and living a pretty full life.
It is yet another example of the cracks in the rule of law
Well come on, it takes more than being "sorry" and building companies and "trying to treat everyone equally." Nothing he mentioned, besides apparently turning snitch in some cases, is even a hint of undoing the damage he did. Said another way: one way to make amends is to at least do something, you know, like even try to walk a path, any path. It doesn't sound like he's done more than stop hanging out with some people, which, congratulations, but it's no Nobel Peace Prize material. He should strive for Nobel Peace Prize material. Again: anything.
I interpret "while serving in" to mean that the process overlapped with his time in the Navy. If there was no overlap, to me it would have been more natural to say something like "upon joining" or "by joining" instead.
"The US Navy and law enforcement freed me from my racist past" is a bit difficult to believe.
You might be surprised, but the vast majority of law enforcement officers and soldiers are not, at all, racist.
Sure, there are racists in the military, just like with every given set of people you could care to name. The Navy absolutely does not put up with it, though, and it's a career-ending mistake to act on any of those leanings.
Look, the man participated in a drive-by shooting on a synagogue when he was a legal adult. It's disgusting that people on this site are defending a literal terrorist because "he's one of our own."
He clearly shows remorse for his hatred. I am not defending nazism in the least, but I think "cancelling" someone who made absolutely terrible decisions as a literal child is not a healthy way for our society to operate.
I disagree with your second paragraph entirely. I do not want to live in a society where CEOs of multimillion dollar companies have indiscriminately shot up places of worship when they were 17 years old.
We need to round them up and contain them somewhere. Their remorse can't be enough. We can't have them contaminating our air. If we put them in a single location and kept them from getting in and out, concentrated, we could keep ourselves safe from these people.
/sarcasm
Since you evoked concentration camps, I'd be remissed if I didn't point out that the vast majority of Nazi bureaucrats, including many directly involved in the administration of concentration camps, faced essentially no punishment and quickly re-entered the postwar workforce. No one involved in the illegal incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII was ever sent to prison.
Can you tell me what the difference is between a neo-nazi gang and MS-13 and why one gets crocodile tears while the other has the book thrown at them?
[citation needed]. There are very few crimes eligible for capital punishment in the United States, and neither juvenile delinquency nor property damage are among them, even if ethnically motivated and/or involving a firearm.
> I do not want to live in a society where CEOs of multimillion dollar companies have indiscriminately shot up places of worship when they were 17 years old.
I do not want to live in a society where teenagers are prevented from "the pursuit of happiness" (one of the three inalienable rights upon which my country was founded) for the rest of their lives simply because they were victims of white supremacist grooming/brainwashing.
> "the pursuit of happiness" (one of the three inalienable rights upon which my country was founded)
inalienable rights are, by definition, forfeitable in the cases where one's actions violate another person's or group's inalienable rights. Shooting up a synagogue qualifies as one such action.
> simply because they were victims of white supremacist grooming/brainwashing.
"These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal."[1] Once again, let me state that I find it incredible that many people such as yourself believe that the CEO of a multimillion dollar company, who participated in a violent hate crime and avoided the consequences of his actions due to a sympathetic court and typo, is the victim in this whole affair.
Per the article: "No one was struck or killed in the shooting."
So again, [citation needed] about people committing the "exact same" crime being on death row, given that the crime described in the article is far below the bar necessary to warrant capital punishment.
> let me state that I find it incredible that many people such as yourself believe that the CEO of a multimillion dollar company, who participated in a violent hate crime and avoided the consequences of his actions due to a sympathetic court and typo, is the victim in this whole affair.
And let me state that I find it incredible that many people such as yourself believe that people (especially teenagers) can't be victims of indoctrination, can't possibly feel genuine remorse for their mistakes as teenagers, and must be deprived of their rights forever because of those mistakes. I don't give the slightest sliver of a damn whether he's a CEO or a cashier. Morality is morality.
Comparing a crime that resulted in zero injuries or deaths to two men beating someone to death face-to-face is nonsensical. We can possibly argue intent (i.e. did Patton et. al. intend to actually kill people inside the synagogue), but it should be entirely unsurprising that someone who neither injured or killed someone went relatively unpunished due to said lack of injury or death, especially given that he was willing to plead guilty and testify against the other perpetrators.
Patton still did a shitty thing, but we have every indication that in the 30 years since then he's turned his life around and is genuine in his remorse. If there was evidence he continued to fraternize with skinheads even after that trial, especially recently, then by all means it's reasonable to be skeptical, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
And if you do, great. Lets work towards fixing the mass incarceration problem in our country. That way, many more people can be given the same second chance that allowed Patton to attain a material wealth that vastly surpasses the overwhelming majority of humans on the planet.
Yes, I do, which is exactly why I'd much prefer we work against that issue instead of advocating for making the problem worse.
The American justice system has a chronic issue of prioritizing retribution over rehabilitation, and while I'm thankful to not have been a victim of that myself, I also recognize full well that I'm one of the lucky ones, and that millions of Americans (whether currently incarcerated, or having already "done the time" but still effectively-permanently handicapped from being productive members of society due to having a criminal record) are not so fortunate.
If you are going to continue to attack a complete straw man of my arguments, I’m not sure how productive continuing this chain will be.
Your entire argument is predicated on 1) Damien, at almost 18 years of age, having absolutely no culpability for his actions, and 2) that he has shown genuine remorse for his actions, despite receiving essentially no punishment for a premeditated murder attempt and having shown no signs of remorse until he was asked to comment on the story. In other words, an entirely speculative argument that relies on your own personal character projections.
I would encourage you to extend the same level of generosity and charitableness you seem to show Damien Patton to the next person who challenges your worldview.
It would be a strawman if the arguments against which I'm arguing were of my construction, but they don't seem to be.
> Your entire argument is predicated on 1) Damien, at almost 18 years of age, having absolutely no culpability for his actions, and 2) that he has shown genuine remorse for his actions, despite receiving essentially no punishment for a premeditated murder attempt and having shown no signs of remorse until he was asked to comment on the story.
Meanwhile, your entire argument appears to be predicated on 1) Damien, at less than 18 years of age and therefore legally and (arguably) psychologically a child, was somehow a perfectly rational actor with unquestionable culpability for his actions and was perfectly able to resist manipulation (which began, mind you, at 15, if not earlier) by adults wanting to use him as a tool for their hateful agendas, and 2) that he should be considered guilty of continued antisemitic beliefs/associations until proven innocent.
I won't pretend to know what that says about your personal character projections, but your argument is visibly just as speculative. Neither of us have enough information to judge that aspect of his character. Unlike you, apparently, I prefer forgiveness and the presumption of innocence in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
That's not to say that I don't judge him for being complicit in other immoralities, though (namely: being a current perpetrator of and accomplice to an unethical and likely-Constitutionally-illegal surveillance state, and his own resulting perpetration of such a state's implicit guilt-until-proven-innocence attitude).
> I would encourage you to extend the same level of generosity and charitableness you seem to show Damien Patton to the next person who challenges your worldview.
Like I said: I don't care who he is or how successful he became after apparently turning his life around. I just care that he apparently turned his life around and stopped associating with violently-antisemitic groups. If you have evidence indicating that he did not, then by all means present it and I'll gladly reassess.
And this is a standard I apply to all humans universally (both in theory and - as I grow older and hopefully more mature - increasingly in practice). I haven't exactly kept my attitudes and beliefs and opinions around rehabilitation-over-retribution and its impact on recidivism much of a secret over the years, whether here on HN and elsewhere on the World Wide Web.
I've given the benefit of the doubt to people who have done worse, specifically because I have the self-awareness to understand that people can and do change on the scale of decades (I know I've changed a lot in just one).
> I’m not sure how productive continuing this chain will be.
Neither am I.
I definitely would.
On that note, you'd might be surprised by the degree to which "jihadist" and "neo-Nazi" overlap, especially when the latter's of the Christian fundamentalist flavor; the Venn diagram more often than not ends up looking like a slightly-out-of-focus circle.
Unfortunately, I'm just a random citizen with effectively no power to help, so that's probably cold comfort for him.
At that time Banjo was a social network that let you see where other people were. It was the time when privacy was dead.
I think they may have pivot into news and then I lost track... Until today.
When you raise so much money there is a lot of pressure to return it with the interests. I do not know enough about what the company does now but it seems there may be something off.
But this is not about the company.
This is a vile attack to a person that seems to have reach some kind of success.
Some of us can see his past just as a data point but it is obviously different for the general public.
I heard somebody says that in these days the standards are too high. Somebody should have never made a mistake and if he did, he has that mistake on his head for the rest of their days. The Internet does not forget anything.
There is a lot of polarization and hunt for something or somebody to blame and complains about. The press and social medias play an important part in this positive feedback loop of negative comments. But this is not new. Witch hunting has existed for a long time.
The world does not need more of that. It needs more compassion.
I believe people can change and I believe in forgiving those that try their best to become better human beings.
Is it a vile attack to just tell everyone, "Hey, this guy who has a sensitive govt surveillance contract shot up a synagogue with his skinhead gang and never went to prison for it"? Those are all facts. You perceive them as an attack because they reflect terrifying, repulsive behavior.
The alternative is not to report it because it makes him look bad, but... doesn't he deserve to look bad, especially if he didn't do any time in prison?
> I heard somebody says that in these days the standards are too high.
"You should not get a government contract if you were a dangerous skinhead" is not a high standard. Almost every human who has ever lived can meet this standard. I have personally found it incredibly easy to get through life's hardships without shooting at a synagogue. So have countless other people who would love the same contract this guy got.
> The world does not need more of that. It needs more compassion.
If you think compassion is finite, as some people do, then who should we spend it on? Should we lose sleep over ex-skinheads, or should we worry more about their intended victims?
I don't really see why we need to shed tears over people exposed for things they did. No one is smearing him -- just talking about what he did. People may change, but the facts of their life don't.
If you think compassion is infinite, then I'm not sure your suggestion makes sense anymore. If compassion were free, we would have more of it in the world.
> I believe people can change and I believe in forgiving those that try their best to become better human beings.
Absolutely! I agree 100%.
However, he continued hanging out with skinheads even after joining the military, and it's not really clear he feels remorse beyond the "I got caught and now I have to apologize" angle we're seeing in the news now.
Why hasn't he been working with anti-skinhead orgs? Why hasn't he written about his mistakes at length, like Sen. Robert C. Byrd, who was a Klansman and white supremacist as a younger man? Surely if a long-serving senator can rehab his public image, so can this guy.
I guess I just believe people can change for the better and I want to encourage that more, rather than seeing people shunned after trying to become better and potentially being a danger to society once again as a result.
I'd probably have a leg up selling anti-personnel mines to the US military if I were a former officer, but using this advantage would be unethical (because land mines are fundamentally evil).
At what point does the vague goal of "deter crime" start to infringe on privacy? We're already seeing this happen and it's a bullshit argument, frankly.
Yet something remarkable happens to all of us when people who don't deserve them, are given one.
Some people won't ever change....
The ones who will, will stun you. And we are all made better by the effort.
We can't accept both that people change, and it's ok to lie about it to everyone.
I suppose this mindset could be an ingredient for a CEO that wins. But there's a difference between forgiveness and credibility of character, and credibility is part of a CEO's job.
What Damien did was drive white supremacists to a synagogue shoot-up, and in the Navy he continued to befriend white supremacists. All these matters affect credibility, and credibility is part of the CEO's job, and hence why Banjo is being distracted right now.
It's one thing for a person to atone for their mistakes. ...it's another more sinister thing to demand that they apologize to everyone perpetually.
I find these demands for public apologies disgusting in their own right. All these social media types demanding that they deserve an apology for someone else's historic transgression.
If you think about it - it's really just a power rush you get forcing people to cow to you.
It sounds more like he tried covering up his mistakes once he became a public figure, which was his decision. He could’ve acknowledged it during any of his media appearances, which would’ve allowed him to discuss the issue on his own terms instead of letting a devastating article dictate the tone of his past. He chose to hide it instead.
There’s nothing wrong with publishing this kind of information, it’s absolutely in the public interest when a CEO of a successful company was involved in white nationalism. Nobody is explicitly demanding an apology, the public just demands to know these things.
...for a crime you were not a party to. ...at a time you likely weren't even born.
Ask yourself what emotional chasm are you trying to fill to get people you've never met to apologize to you.
The people he hurt do. Since when does the general social media community deserve to be apologized to. People are getting an emotional power rush by forcing apologies from people who never transgressed against them.
This is poisonous behavior.
The comment I replied to questioned whether publishing stories like this ruining people is right given the subject’s success and the public’s propensity to judge, which I didn’t agree with. It’s not the responsibility of the press to filter stories on compassionate or moral grounds, and there was nothing wrong IMO around its release.
I don’t believe that the public deserves an apology here, just as I don’t believe that journalists should refrain from publishing legitimate accounts of this kind of behavior, no matter how old.
They do, because he claims to serve the public by fulfulling government surveillance contracts.
This assuredly won't destroy his finances. It probably won't absolutely kill his reputation; he's not the worst guy in the circles he runs in. That doesn't mean that suddenly others should respect him or give him the time of day, though.
Also, the products his company sells are not on offer to the public but to a small elite of powerful government and private officials, who definitely don’t care what the public thinks since all this can be shrouded in secrecy and ignored or denied.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bgky/banjo-ai-used-secr...
That should be illegal. Are there not any laws against this?
CMA (UK)/CFAA (USA) both make unauthorised access a crime, so, yes there are laws against this.
Most of it reads like run-of-the-mill data collection.
How remarkably lucky for him.
It is striking that such luck, and second chances, are rarely afforded young men of color who find themselves on the other side of the law in this country.
Utah Attorney General suspends state contract with Banjo in light of founder’s KKK past
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/04/28/utah-attorne...
Discussion on HN
Admitting such things before building a career would instantly be a non-starter. I also think as a society we have to acknowledge that rehabilitation and forgiveness needs to be possible, especially for mistakes we make as kids. The mob seems to want people like this to be disappeared, which is unfortunate for a country so influenced by Christianity, in which forgiveness is a prime value.
On the other hand, this guy seems to have really been a subscriber to some bad, dangerous ideas, and more importantly, he doesn’t seem to have done much to atone for it. Donating to the synagogue, getting involved with the community or somehow seeking forgiveness by acknowledging his mistakes would have been better than just hiding it.
He didn’t need to do anything public that would dig up the past either: I imagine he could have donated or helped the synagogue in an pseudonymous way. Certainly the people he hurt would be far more willing to defend his rehabilitation now if he had done so.
How do you know he hasn’t donated anonymously?
> Certainly the people he hurt would be far more willing to defend his rehabilitation now if he had done so.
I think “I did some donations” would be perceived as self-serving, or would simply be cynically attacked.
Your comments feel would be damned either way.
But if you deny people second-chances, then said criminals have no incentive to make amends. If they cannot make amends due to it being absurd, then society should be prepared to reduce them to menial slavery... because that's the only other way to prevent them from continuing the bad behavior (given that society made it impossible for him to move on from the past).
I have discovered that there are exactly three objectively unforgivable offenses:
1. Inducing another human to despair thereby depriving him of a right to a future.
2. Accusation with the intent of marring another human's soul with eternal guilt.
3. The deliberate and intentional reduction of another human being to slavery.
Notice that being a murderer isn't one of them.
This is a really, really interesting take on it. I happen to agree, but if they're public officials, then how do we square the absolutely massive incentives to action at the expense of the public good?
If you look at the press releases and publicity Banjo has released as well as the talks Damien Patton has given, their big success story stems from a trial run in 2013 where the Utah CPS ran a simulation of a child kidnapping and Banjo identified the probable location of the (simulated) kidnapper. Since then, there has been nothing.
Meanwhile Patton's message has continually evolved in perfect lockstep with the hype cycle, from mass shootings to the opioid crisis to, these days, some mysterious power to provide predictive security while still protecting individual privacy.
[1] He probably has a reasonable social media/text analytics product with some geographic aggregation. But it's hard to separate from the promises because no one has actually seen it.
I'm not excusing any of his behavior in youth, although I believe he feels very bad about it, but the person I know has definitely evolved from the distorted personality described in the article. It is possible, please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSH5EY-W5oM.
The time I worked at Banjo was a great experience and still think he's one of the most skilled founders I've ever met. Great sales skills and tech chops. I was an immigrant and have always been treated with respect. At the same time it isn't surprising for me to read a comment like the other one on here about working at Banjo: with such a strong personality at the head of the company it can be like that for some, but I wouldn't consider it very different from other SV realities like FB or Amazon.
Sad that he participated in those crimes, and hope this becoming public can bring him to give back more to the community.
What you perceive to be the right wing, possibly. Some would call these types 'Neocons' or 'RHINOs' implying they're not actually conservative, they're authoritarian statists. This is why there was the 'tea party' deal a few years ago.
Many people actually do believe in smaller government and individual liberty, but the media likes to point out the crazies and the statists as proof that all 'conservatives' are bad, immoral people. So far, their propaganda is working.
Edit: Spelling
For example, when Republicans have DC strangled, they still don't make serious efforts to ban abortion despite their rhetoric over the past 50 years. Why would they? That's one of their best wedges to divide the voting block of the working class. If they actually banned abortion, they would lose a talking point at best, and swaths of single issue voters at worst. The tea party movement is another great example. Funded by conservative groups like the Koch brothers under the guise of a grass roots movement. It strengthened support among the R base, some new faces appeared in DC, but the overall economic ideology of the republican party did not change. The Republican party is powerful in this country, most of all because it is a single beast where every member from the highest to the lowest office tows the party line.
I know of another party that operates in a similar fashion.
> Fiscally, every R in DC is a neoconservative
No argument here. But we were talking about 'conservatives' rather than a particular political party. Parties have done a great job at branding themselves towards different viewpoints, even if their actions don't match the branding.
I'm a one issue voter. I will never vote or support someone that voted for the Iraq war, I will never vote for someone that supports any ongoing foreign military intervention of any kind. My options, as you might imagine, are quite limited.
Strangely, killing people overseas is not the #1 issue in the US when it comes to politics. People are selfish, immoral idiots that don't actually care about others.
Here's a political platform I could get behind: States decide what's best for themselves when it comes to social and economic issues, end all wars, remove military from all foreign outposts, keep all warships within our international waters.
California is a great example of the heterogeneity of the democratic party. Most state and local politicians are democrats in name only. Sure, they support democratic social platforms like not being discriminatory to marginalized groups, who wouldn't? But looking at policy positions regarding land use and the role of public government, many hold very conservative positions. This is still the land of Reagan, and his politics never really went away even if the Rs seemed to disappear from ballots.
I think it's interesting to look at the different types of democratic voters in CA. Nationally, Bloomberg was sort of a DINO candidate. Take a look at the vote breakdown (1). I know LA so I'll give an overview for that city. Sanders held working class areas including neighborhoods with the highest population density in all of LA county, the region along Vermont Ave. from the 10 freeway to the hollywood hills. Biden was a mixed bag, drawing a lot of support from predominantly Black areas due to the association with Obama, but also from upper class white areas in the south bay such as manhattan beach, hermosa beach, and redondo beach. Support for Bloomberg only was found in some of the wealthiest zip codes like Brentwood and Beverly Hills, as you might expect given his positions.
1. https://www.latimes.com/projects/2020-california-primaries-p...
> Nationally, Bloomberg was sort of a DINO candidate.
I don't agree. I think he's the prototypical national Democrat. Rich, well connected, wants to expand state powers. Supports well fare and broad taxation, supports war.
It's very much not a blindness. They just look out for n.1 first and foremost; everything else is a philosophical veneer to justify their instincts.
I don't know who you're talking to, but the national Libertarian Party has always been against domestic surveillance and foreign wars. Unlike the Democrats or Republicans, it is the official position of the Libertarian Party that FISA courts should be ended[1] and that the CIA should be abolished.[2] The Libertarian Party also wants to pardon Snowden[3] and Ulbricht[4].
1. https://www.lp.org/libertarians-congress-stop-government-spy...
2. https://www.lp.org/news-press-releases-libertarian-party-cal...
3. https://twitter.com/lpnational/status/1037392054559690753
Let me find the world's tiniest violin.
To take a page from southpark. He fuck off
1. Clickbait exploitation.
2. Conflating people who have sought redemption from past deeds with those who are jerks for other reasons.
3. Social fascism isn't the proper response to actual fascism. Throwing people away, instantly and permanently, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. If people "can never change" when they clearly have, this isn't the sign of a decent, functional, nuanced, or tolerant society in touch with the meaning of words or self-awareness.
1. It's a literal description of what happened. He admitted to being a neo-nazi terrorist.
2. He has not sought redemption in any meaningful way, but has instead started a surveillance company. That his conduct has continued to be abusive just shows it is a permanent lack of moral character.
3. I think you might need to adjust your definition of fascism. The "social fascism" you describe dilutes the word of all meaning, which is probably your intent.
He helped commit a terrorist act at the age of 17, and continued to be associated with Nazis for some time after. A tolerent and open society means that we cannot tolerate these kinds of people running surveillance companies with government contracts. The reasoning should be obvious. See also, Popper's paradox of tolerance.
One consistent lesson of moderating an internet forum is that titles dominate discussion virtually completely.
Considering it was on the front page, now doesn't appear 4 pages deep just minutes later, a mod clearly nuked this.
The submission was "nuked" by user flags and the software known as the flamewar detector or overheated discussion detector.
Not sure how to balance transparency on HN's moderation with the fact trolls and bad faith actors will abuse it.
I'd be careful about jumping to conclusions. If you see an egregious comment that ought to be moderated and hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
"Civil" is not the guiding value here. We took that word out of the guidelines because, as I pointed out a year ago, its main effect was to make people think we have dumb ideas about civility. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19663839
This guy literally worked with the FBI to bust skinheads.
I've turned off the flags for now and replaced the title with a less sensational subheading in the hope that that might support more substantive discussion, though it probably won't. (Edit: well maybe it is.)
https://www.history.com/news/study-suggests-adolf-hitler-had...
There were a lot of articles about that and here’s a recent one:
https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/study-suggests-adolf-hitler-was...
Not to mention this is standard ahistorical conspiracy theory fare.
Welcome to HN - the new Reddit.
Once I loved a woman there, her skin was red as the fires of the volcano of Taris.
Once I dueled with a man in the foggy morn at the royal park, I killed him, it was a fight over honor and I barely remember the particulars now.
But all that is gone, destroyed years past, you sir, are a scholar of deep erudition to remember the name of Gralås in this degraded age.
The problem is that people (all of us) are more likely to notice and remember the things they dislike. That basically causes everyone's image of the community to turn into a reflection of their own dislikes—and the more strongly you dislike something, the more vivid the image will be. It's a serious problem and I don't know what to do about it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But it's definitely not the case that the HN readership generally supports a comment like the GP. Note that the comment was maximally downvoted.
Given the depth of his past involvement in white supremacist terrorism, though, he should probably explain himself publicly, given his current success and public profile.
That's why we require evidence before we reject someone's claims.
No it hasn't.
The subject here, Patton, may be reformed, but there's a substantial possibility they are not and are using their ill-gotten money to fund further hate crime, or other anti-social racist activity.
You have zero evidence of that. Anything is "substantially possible" if your bar for evidence is non-existent.
His company, Banjo, was awarded surveillance contracts for the state of Utah. The state was paying Banjo tens of millions of dollars and giving them access to untold amounts of state surveillance data.
As a resident of Utah, I do not want my tax dollars sending surveillance data about me to a company founded and run by a white supremacist who assisted in shooting up a synagogue and then admitted to continuing his white supremacist associations long after the conviction.
Utah Attorney General suspends state contract with Banjo in light of founder’s KKK past
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/04/28/utah-attorne...
Isn't it human nature to reach for familiarity when in new places? You're reaching.
But this is your schtick, so continue to perform it.
No one is suggesting we throw him in jail for being involved in a fucking KKK drive-by shooting, just that maybe he not run _a fucking surveillance company_.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-tech-algorithms-become-infect...
KKK supporters and such can be redeemed, but it takes work and reflection.
You have paid for your stupidity and life goes on. In this case life has certainly moved on and it doesn't seem like he is secretly creating a 4th reich in his free time.
Of course if you can do something easy to hide it like spelling your name better great. It has been a long time, but some people don't seem to understand this and seem to want criminals to be punished forever.
Why bother about this?
Integrity.
Interesting and somewhat horrifying. Maybe SoftBank failed to do some due diligence here and have essentially funded a CEO with direct connections to the KKK. I can only see Banjo's next chapter going through three options:
* Option 1: Softbank cares enough and ends their investment in Banjo and the CEO stays on.
* Option 2: Trial by Twitter will pressure Banjo CEO to resign and everyone's happy.
* Option 3: Nothing happens.
Help me write the next chapter in which option is likely.
"Claiming?" Maybe you didn't read this sentence properly with a pair of glasses:
In the article:
> Patton revealed that, as a 17-year-old, he was involved with the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
That is a solid indisputable fact written in history. If that doesn't sound like a "direct connection" to the KKK, then I don't know what is. Some may say he was still responsible for his own actions at the time during the Navy in his early adulthood even when he was still involved with white supremacists. With his statement on this, he has just taken responsibility for his previous actions and 'apologised'.
> If you want to claim Banjo is otherwise an evil company, OK, it may be, but that's a separate point. But claiming that this episode as reported constitutes a direct connection to the KKK, and implying it's ongoing, is off the mark.
Well I just stated a fact and didn't imply anything. Mind you, I think Option 3 is likely to happen because of his apology, but there are those out there that can be less forgiving... What do you think?
Edit: as the getaway driver. Seems like a strange charge to bring up for the incident.
> With Patton at the wheel, the Ku Klux Klan member fired onto the synagogue, destroying a street-facing window and spraying bullets and shattered glass near the building’s administrative offices, which were next to that of the congregation’s rabbi.
Paragraph 6 in the linked article.