From Rails to rallies

I learned a good part of my trade from Rails. Convention over configuration, the opinionated thing. I liked opinionated. Then in 2021 Basecamp banned “societal and political discussions” at work and roughly a third of the company took buyouts and left. I filed that under “founders being founders” and went back to my Gemfile.

I should not have. Since then DHH has published a steady stream of posts on politics and culture, and I went back and read 19 of them, roughly year by year, with sources next to them. One by one they look like hot takes. Back to back they look like something else.

So here is every post, what he argues, and why it’s a problem. His posts are linked, and so are the sources against them. Click through.

2021–2022: “woke” as the enemy

Are we past peak “woke”?, December 2021. He argues “woke” culture peaked in 2020-21 and is now going down. Evidence: John McWhorter’s Woke Racism getting airtime on mainstream TV, crime going up in Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco (blamed on “defund the police”), and the Virginia governor race. He closes hoping politics in general goes away from everyday life.

The problem is the method. Crime anecdotes from cities he doesn’t like become proof that “defund” failed, but almost nobody defunded anything: more than half of the 50 largest US cities kept or raised their police budgets.

The waning days of DEI’s dominance, November 2022. Four reasons why DEI is going away: the coming Supreme Court case on affirmative action, BLM scandals, Musk buying Twitter, and tech layoffs.

Two problems. He states as fact that gaps in demographics are no evidence of discrimination. Audit studies say otherwise: when researchers sent more than 83,000 fake applications to 108 of the largest US employers, Black-sounding names got contacted measurably less. And he welcomes the layoffs, because they will make the “fervent ideologues” harder to hire. That’s a CTO cheering for people losing their jobs over their opinions, in a post that complains about people losing their jobs over their opinions.

We must say no to these people, three days later. Readers called him a white supremacist after the DEI post. His answer is McWhorter again: if you get called a racist for dissenting, don’t let it shame you. He also complains about “transitive guilt”, people around him being pressured to distance themselves.

The problem: if every racism accusation comes from “The Elect” and is baseless by definition, no accusation can ever land. That’s a self-sealing argument. Criticism becomes impossible, not because it’s wrong but because of who says it. Reviewers of McWhorter’s book noticed the same thing about the book itself: the religion metaphor turns the other side into a uniform, intransigent cartoon.

The faith of Andrew Tate, September 2022. A free speech argument: banning Tate from social media is a slippery slope. To show a double standard, he quotes misogynistic lyrics from Dr. Dre, Jay-Z and Eminem, who are still celebrated. The ban, he says, hands Tate a “credible martyr role”.

The problem is the false equivalence: a performed rap lyric is not the same as an influencer selling teenage boys a course on controlling women. And reality caught up fast. Tate was arrested in Romania three months after this post, and the UK has since charged him with rape and human trafficking.

2023–2024: the culture war gets a work account

The law of the land, June 2023. The Supreme Court ends race-conscious college admissions. His reaction, as its own paragraph: “Good.” He compares 2020-21 to the Red Scare and hopes companies will now drop their DEI programs.

The Red Scare comparison doesn’t hold. Truman’s loyalty program pushed nearly 7,000 people to resign or withdraw, fired 560, and found not a single spy. A diversity workshop can be annoying (I’ve sat through bad ones), but it is not a loyalty oath. To be fair, he does admit reasonable people disagree here.

Forcing master to main was a good faith exploit, April 2024. He renamed the default branch in good faith, now sees it as an exploit, and promises “the firewall will be ready” next time.

Nothing was forced. Git simply made the default branch name configurable, and if you love “master” you can keep it. What bothers me more is the firewall: he commits to rejecting the next request before hearing what it is. That’s not scepticism. That’s having the answer before the question.

Bad Therapy, March 2024. A rave review of Abigail Shrier’s book about over-therapised parenting in the US. Along the way he declares her earlier book, Irreversible Damage, vindicated.

That earlier book claims the rise in trans teens is mostly social contagion. Science-Based Medicine called that narrative unsupported and a misreading of the evidence. That is itself a contested fight (the same site retracted a positive review of the book), but “settled truth that a mob tried to censor” is not a fair description of it either.

Too much therapy at work, November 2024. An all-hands about a fired COO turned into hours of emotional processing. His conclusion: managers aren’t therapists, take it to a licensed one.

Honestly, the most reasonable post on this list. Plenty of people agree. It just reads different when you remember that this is the company where a third of the staff walked out in 2021, and he frames the anxiety as fragility.

Cold reading an ADHD affliction, nine days later. ADHD diagnosis is a cottage industry, the symptom lists work like a psychic’s cold reading, and he could qualify himself.

He leaves out the parts of the DSM-5 criteria that actually do the work: symptoms before age 12, in more than one setting, with clear impairment at school, work or socially. Those filter out most people who just “recognise themselves”. He also calls the medication speed. To be fair, he does say real cases exist.

Normal boyhood is ADHD, April 2025. Based on a New York Times Magazine piece he argues most diagnoses in boys pathologise normal behaviour, and the meds don’t help learning. Then he puts ADHD medication next to the opioid crisis and puberty blockers.

Factual problem: he calls Ritalin an amphetamine. It’s methylphenidate, a different drug. Bigger problem: lumping ADHD with opioids and trans care turns a medical debate into a culture war one.

2025: the year it stopped being about work

Serving the country, February 8, 2025. Musk is a modern William Knudsen (the Dane who ran US war production in WWII), the most qualified man alive to fix a two-trillion-dollar deficit. “Let him cook.”

Published 19 days after the salute. And the cooking: DOGE never got anywhere near two trillion, and the GAO later found $27.4 billion of its claimed savings came from contracts that were never actually cancelled.

Gender and Sexuality Alliances in primary school at CIS?!, June 2025. His kids’ international school in Copenhagen planned a Pride week for young children, and runs a staff-supervised GSA lunch club for 8 to 11 year olds. After parent complaints, the school scaled both back.

He calls the lunch meetings “creepy” and asks about the staff’s qualifications. Anyone who followed US politics since 2022 knows that move, it’s the grooming trope used against LGBTQ teachers. He also calls it indoctrination and links it to the contagion theory from Shrier.

The parental dead end of consent morality, June 2025. “Consent morality” (anything goes between consenting adults) has devalued parenthood and dragged birth rates down. Jordan Peterson gets the credit, and the post ends with “2.1 or bust, baby!”

Accepting that some people don’t want children is, in his words, nihilistic and cowardly. That’s straight pronatalist rhetoric, and pronatalism is a movement where you want to check the company before you join: religious right, tech people and “new right” anti-feminists, with conference speakers blaming falling birth rates on feminism and on the end of “natural hierarchies” of gender and race.

Building competency is better than therapy, July 2025. Exercise, learning and community beat talk therapy for “garden-variety” depression, especially for men. His example of such a competency is his own Linux distro.

He cites a BMJ meta-analysis on exercise and major depression. The authors suggest exercise next to psychotherapy and medication, and say their confidence is low. In DHH’s hands that becomes: most people don’t need therapy. Plus a plug for Omarchy.

The beauty of ideals, July 2025. Ideals should be unattainable, the 90s made losing cool, Naomi Wolf ruined beauty. A plus-size Calvin Klein ad in Copenhagen is a “grotesque display of obesity”, and representation means celebrating the obese, the lazy, the ignorant and the incompetent, all in one sentence.

Body size as a moral failing, right next to laziness. And it doesn’t even work as motivation: weight stigma does not make people lose weight, it makes their health worse.

It’s beginning to feel like the 80s in America again, August 2025. The Reagan years were earnest and optimistic, and 2025 finally brings that back. He praises American Eagle for not apologising for the Sydney Sweeney “great jeans” ad.

The ad was criticised for a genes/jeans pun with a blonde, blue-eyed model, and the phrase “good genes” has a long history in American eugenics. He applauds the company for refusing to even engage with that, and calls the concern “shit-tinted glasses”.

And then September.

As I remember London, September 15, 2025. London isn’t his city anymore because fewer of the people there are native Brits. The number he links for “native” is the census category White British. Which makes every Black or brown Londoner born in Lewisham a foreigner. He calls it “demographic replacement”, the vocabulary of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and describes Tommy Robinson’s march the day before as heartwarming, the crowd as normal and peaceful.

It wasn’t peaceful. 26 police officers were injured at that march, and the speakers included Musk, French far-right politician Éric Zemmour and an AfD leader. The documented version needs no exaggeration: a tech founder praising a far-right march, in replacement language.

Words are not violence, September 11, 2025. The day after Charlie Kirk was shot, he condemns people celebrating the killing, and argues that words must never be treated as violence.

On its own, nothing to argue with. Celebrating a killing is sick. The problem only shows up two weeks later.

Calling someone a “nazi” is a permission slip for violence, September 24, 2025. Calling someone a nazi authorises violence, and his opponents are “the last loonies on tech’s woke island”.

So words are violence after all. When they point at him. And nine days earlier, in the London post, he wrote that the nazi label had finally stopped working on anybody. Pick one.

So what

Read one post and you can shrug. A contrarian having a bad week, a Danish guy annoyed by American parenting, fine. Read them back to back and it’s not a bad week anymore. It starts with “maybe we passed peak woke” in 2021, and four years later he is writing about demographic replacement and calling a Tommy Robinson march heartwarming. That’s not a series of hot takes. It’s a route, and people have walked it before.

His fans will say this is just centre-right opinion, and some of the early posts are exactly that. Being sceptical of DEI trainings or ADHD overdiagnosis doesn’t make you anything. But the London post is not about immigration policy anymore. It decides who counts as British by skin colour, and that’s the point where I stop debating.

I don’t think DHH is a Nazi. I don’t need to. There are enough pieces of that political culture in his writing (the replacement talk, the rally, the “only my side’s words are violence” double standard) that I don’t want him, his following or his products anywhere near my work. That includes Rails, which hurts, after all these years. Every good idea in there exists elsewhere, from people who don’t come with this baggage.