Perhaps there are people in power who would benefit from portraying those communities in a different light.
The rationalist community I was talking about is well known. They split from SSC after the ban on culture war topics. They left Reddit a couple years ago because so many of their posts were getting flagged by Reddit for policy violations.
I'm not making this up. You can go see for yourself: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_...
- make right-wingers feel vindication as if they were rational all along,
- cause suspicion and division within the left/liberal rationalist community, and
- make the community, its people and their ideas less palatable to the general public.
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[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ggl0mh/jd_...
Isn't intention the essence of the concept of the "dog whistle"?
I'd also like to observe that Scott Alexander does a yearly survey, which provide unusually robust evidence that if we're going to impute to him the cultural affiliations of those who read his posts, his politics can only be "all of it".