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Chuck DarwinAlong with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z, Andreessen joined a slew of others, including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions. The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted, and they had different settings. (“Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,” Andreessen told Fridman. “People will set to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.“)After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.” There, writers including <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kmele" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Kmele</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foster" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Foster</a>, who co-hosts the podcast "The Fifth Column", Persuasion founder <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yascha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Yascha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mounk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Mounk</a>, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a>.The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement: “He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group — which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.But the center didn’t hold. The liberal Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an “illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech. The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams, along with the never-Trump conservative <a href="https://c.im/tags/David" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#David</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/French" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#French</a> and the liberal academic <a href="https://c.im/tags/Jason" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Jason</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Stanley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Stanley</a>, wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,” they wrote.The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle, and considered their position a betrayal. Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,” a participant recalled. The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of ‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a>, a healthy development.“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.” <a href="https://c.im/tags/MarcAndreessen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MarcAndreessen</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/LexFridman" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#LexFridman</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/ChrisRufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#ChrisRufo</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/VivekRamaswamy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#VivekRamaswamy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/ErikTorenberg" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#ErikTorenberg</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Krishnan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Krishnan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NoahSmith" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#NoahSmith</a><a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america</a>

Chuck DarwinIn February, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Marc" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Marc</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Andreessen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Andreessen</a> described the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chatham" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Chatham</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/House" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#House</a> group chats to the podcaster <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lex" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Lex</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Fridman" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Fridman</a> as “the equivalent of [Soviet era] <a href="https://c.im/tags/samizdat" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#samizdat</a>” “The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,” he said. The chats, he wrote recently, helped produce our national “vibe shift.” They have rarely been discussed in public, though you can catch the occasional mention in, for instance, a podcast debate between <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mark" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Mark</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cuban" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Cuban</a> and the Republican entrepreneur <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vivek" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Vivek</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ramaswamy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Ramaswamy</a>, which started in a chat.But they are made visible through a group consensus on social media. Their effects have ranged from the mainstreaming of the monarchist pundit <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Curtis</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Yarvin</a> to a particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer <a href="https://c.im/tags/Taylor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Taylor</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lorenz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Lorenz</a>.They succeeded at avoiding leaks (until, to a modest extent, this article) in part because of Signal’s and WhatsApp’s <a href="https://c.im/tags/disappearing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#disappearing</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/message" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#message</a> features, and in part because the groups had formed out of a mix of fear and disdain for journalists they believed were “out to get us,” as one member put it. “People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media, and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone,” said <a href="https://c.im/tags/Erik" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Erik</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Torenberg" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Torenberg</a>, an entrepreneur who was the first employee of the tech community hub Product Hunt. As <a href="https://c.im/tags/Krishnan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Krishnan</a> was setting up a set of tech group WhatsApp chats at a16z, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Torenberg" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Torenberg</a> independently founded a group of tech chats on WhatsApp and some more political Signal chats.“They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast, after claiming in the name of secrecy that he’d never heard of such groups. “If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.” Their creations took off: “It might not seem like it, because of all the sh*t that people still post on X, but the internet has fragmented,” the Substack author <a href="https://c.im/tags/Noah" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Noah</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Smith" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Smith</a> wrote after my inquiries for this story spilled into public Saturday. “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.”<a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america</a>

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