> your conflation of libertarians with Trump supporters

I'm not saying all these people are libertarians. I'm saying libertarians are ill-equipped and/or unwilling to subdue the far-right because they value civility over content (or "order over justice" if you want to bring MLK into this).

That said, some supposed libertarians were (and in some cases still are) exceptionally friendly towards Trump but I'd argue that has more to do with being opportunistic right-wingers than specifically being right-wing libertarians. Ironically prior to 2016 there was a wave of people with clearly right-wing conservative (and in some cases even clearly tradcon) views adopting the label of "classical liberals" but I wouldn't call them libertarians either.

> You're positing that there is some subculture of these supposed evil libertarians that have been biding their time here on HN and elsewhere, practicing their menacing writing skills to further their vile plots. You say that anyone who takes this type of rhetorical approach is doing so in order to conceal their true desire to engage in hate speech

The problem with intent is that there is no functional difference between someone using far-right talking points because they're edgy or because they are a true believer but by enabling them by giving them a platform, you're enabling the true believers even when the ones you initially refuse to subdue are just being edgy. This is a well understood phenomenon (meme-fied as the Paradox of Tolerance).

I've literally seen comments on HN openly espousing antisemitism, sexism and "race realism" (aka scientific racism). I've seen HN users do this repeatedly without having their accounts killed even if their posts were downvoted or flagged. More often than not any replies calling them out for it were downvoted at least as much if not more than the comments themselves.

Meanwhile any comment acknowledging racism, sexism or other "social justice" issues will get immense pushback in the form of replies and downvotes compared to a casual mention of well established far-right talking points like the Bell Curve (race and IQ) or evopsych bullshit.

> libertarianism really had its heyday under the Bush and Obama administrations and has flagged quite a bit since then.

I'm not talking about the US government, I'm talking about the US startup VC culture (and to some degree even so-called "Hacker culture" in general) HN originates in and still inherits.

> Talk about authoritarian ambitions.

That's not what authoritarianism means. HN is already authoritarian. Dang can shadow or slow ban anyone he pleases with little oversight. Being a property of YCombinator, theoretically Paul G could interve and ban you personally with zero repercussions. HN users can up and down vote or flag and vouch posts but the HN mods and owners can completely ignore that and boost or kill posts if they want without accountability.

It's not that I'm asking for "more authoritarianism", I'm saying that authoritarianism should be applied differently than it is.

> honestly this is just twisted you're painting your opponents as monsters instead of admitting that someone might disagree with you and it seems you'd prefer to simply ban anyone who disagrees as such.

If your disagreement consists of denying the humanity of other people by espousing pseudoscience like "Jews are naturally more intelligent but can't be trusted" or "Black people are naturally less intelligent but physically stronger and thus more prone to violent crime" or "women can't do science, maths or programming because they're naturally more adapted for child rearing", that's not simply a disagreement, that's a declaration of war and should be treated as such. See Tolerance Paradox as above.

> To top it all off, you Godwin the conversation by comparing this imaginary foe to Nazis.

No, I'm not comparing anyone to Nazis. I only call nazis nazis. There are white supremacists, incels, casual racists and antisemites on HN too but I'm not calling them nazis. When I call someone a nazi I'm specifically talking about someone who wants to establish a white ethnostate and believes in a Jewish conspiracy to "weaken the white race" through immigration (often in the form of a Great Replacement or White Genocide narrative). These people also exist on HN but they are harder to identify for what they are because that kind of talk is much less socially acceptable.

What I did say was that the Nazis believed in a literal conspiracy theory. The only person accusing anyone of believing in conspiracy theories here is you, so if you really want to insist on this being a case of Godwin's law you'd have to argue that I was accusing you of comparing me to Nazis, which still doesn't really match any definition of Godwin's law I've ever seen.

I didn't say you were comparing me to the Nazis though. I said it's interesting that you accuse me of believing in a conspiracy theory because I'm literally talking about the presence of people who believe in conspiracy theories. It's also weird that you double down on this accusation considering I literally explained I don't believe there is a coordinated campaign of undermining HN nor that the moderators are intentionally supporting these people.

So I guess my question really is: who do you think my "imaginary" foe is? And what is your opinion on the Paradox of Tolerance given that you seem to be arguing for a "marketplace of ideas" (often framed as "sunlight is the best disinfectant") approach to "bad ideas".

EDIT: To be redundantly clear, I'm not saying there is a far-right subculture in HN. HN doesn't really lend itself to building subcultures within it directly and allegedly there are protections in place to make brigading an inefficient strategy so coordinating outside HN is also off the table. What I'm saying is, as I've already said explicitly, there are people who hold these views and some of these people use HN. In aggregate, the more of these people feel comfortable expressing their views on HN, the more their views become part of HN's culture, the less people on the opposite end feel comfortable expressing themselves on HN and the fewer of those people will remain. I'm also saying this cycle has already been going on for a while and if you think it hasn't that may be because it hasn't affected you (yet).