Cloudflare Bankrolls Fascists

US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea of an unconstitutional third term.

Fascism is clearly on the rise, and they’re winning more and more power. None of this is far removed from us in the FOSS community – there are a number of fascists working in FOSS, same as the rest of society. I don’t call them fascists baselessly – someone who speaks out in support of and expresses solidarity with fascists, or who uses fascists dog-whistles or promotes fascist ideology and talking points, or boosts fascist conspiracy theories – well, they’re a fascist.

If one consistently speaks in support of a certain political position and against the opponents of that position then it is correct to identify them with this political position. Facts, as it were, don’t care about feelings, namely the feelings that get hurt when someone is called a fascist. Fascists naturally do not want to be identified as such and will reject the label, but we shouldn’t take their word for it. People should be much more afraid of being called out as fascist than they are afraid of calling someone a fascist. If someone doesn’t want to be called a fascist, they shouldn’t act like one.

It’s in this disturbing political context that I saw an odd post from the Cloudflare blog pop up in my circles this week: Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy. Based on Ladybird’s sponsorship terms we can assume that these projects received on the order of $100,000 USD from Cloudflare. I find this odd for a few reasons, in particular because one thing that I know these two projects have in common is that they are both run by fascists.

Even at face value this is an unusual pair of projects to fund. I’m all for FOSS projects getting funded, of course, and I won’t complain about a project’s funding on the solitary basis that it’s an odd choice. I will point out that these are odd choices, though, especially Omarchy.

Ladybird makes some sense, given that it’s aligned in principle with Cloudflare’s stated objective to “support the open web”, though I remain bearish that new web browser engines are even possible to make.¹ Omarchy is a bizarre choice, though – do we really need another pre-customized Arch Linux distribution? And if we do, do we really need a big corporation like Cloudflare to bankroll it? Everyone on /r/unixporn manages to make Arch Linux look pretty for free.

Omarchy is a very weird project to fund, come to think of it. Making an Arch Linux spin technically requires some work, and work is work, I won’t deny it, but most of the work done here is from Arch Linux and Hyprland. Why not fund those, instead? Well, don’t fund Hyprland, since it’s also run by a bunch of fascists, but you get my point.

Anyway, Omarchy and Ladybird are both run by fascists. Omarchy makes this pretty obvious from the outset – on the home page the big YouTube poster image prominently features SuperGrok, which is a pathetically transparent dog-whistle to signal alliance with Elon Musk’s fascist politics. Omarchy is the pet project of David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, who is well known as a rich fascist weirdo.² One need only consult his blog to browse his weird, racist views on immigration, fat-shaming objections to diverse representation, vaguely anti-feminist/homophobic/rapey rants on consent, and, recently, tone-policing antifascists who celebrate the death of notable fascist Charlie Kirk.

Speaking of tributes to Charlie Kirk, that brings us to Andreas Kling, the project lead for Ladybird, who tweeted on the occasion of his assassination:

RIP Charlie Kirk

I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.

– @awesomekling

Kling has had a few things to say about Kirk on Twitter lately. Here’s another one – give you three guesses as to which “[group]” he objects to punching. You may also recall that Kling achieved some notoriety for his obnoxious response as the maintainer of SerenityOS when someone proposed gender-neutral language for the documentation:

Replacing “he” with “they” in one sentence of the documentation is the kind of “ideologically motivated change” that Serenity’s CONTRIBUTING.md apparently aims to prevent, a classic case of the sexist “identities that are not men are inherently political” nonsense. Ladybird has a similar, weirdly defensive policy on “neutrality”, and a milquetoast code of conduct, which is based on the Ruby Community Conduct Guideline, which has been itself the subject of many controversies due to its inadequacy leading to real-world incidents of harassment and abuse.

Here’s another one – Kling endorsing white replacement theory in June:

White males are actively discriminated against in tech.

It’s an open secret of Silicon Valley.

One of the last meetings I attended before leaving Apple (in 2017) was management asking us to “keep the corporate diversity targets in mind” when interviewing potential new hires.

The phrasing was careful, but the implication was pretty clear.

I knew in my heart this wasn’t wholesome, but I was too scared to rock the boat at the time.

– @awesomekling replying to @danheld³

And in a moment of poetic irony, a few days ago Kling spoke in solidarity with DHH over his “persecution” for “banal, mainstream positions” on Twitter just a few days ago, in response to DHH’s tweet signal-boosting another notable reactionary tech fascist, Bryan Lunduke.

So, to sum it up, Kling wears his mask a bit better than DHH, but as far as I’m concerned it seems clear that both projects are run by fascists. If it walks like a fascist and quacks like a fascist… then why is Cloudflare giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars?

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