The more people (FOSS devs, users, or anyone) try to make the holding and expression of right-wing views socially unacceptable, the more moral capital accrues to the political right.

While I was growing up the left were always the good guys and the right just seemed like cartoonishly simple-minded bumblers and sour- faced greed-driven thugs. They could never actually explain their own views in a way that made them understandable (or desirable) to outsiders.

Now the left is having the same problem. Their views are so inherently correct in their eyes that the very idea of having to explain them is disgusting.

And according to psychological studies, disgust is a typically conservative trait.

I think it causes some sort of cognitive malfunction in left leaning people, when they have to express disgust but they subconsciously understand that this expression “outs” them as being in some dimension, conservative.

If you find DHH’s views to be disgusting, expressing that disgust will inevitably drive more people towards those views—at to least to consider seriously, if not to adopt per se.

It would be far better to say something like “I disagree with his views but I’m glad he’s contributing to open source.” If the idea of saying something like that seems wrong to you, then you are probably exactly the sort of person who is unable to accept their own conservative disgust reaction as I explained above.

If you consider youself a thinking person who wants to find some path for humanity to navigate the terrible mess we’re in, you could do worse than reading Haidt’s research regarding conservatives being able to model the minds of liberals better than vice versa. This checks out for me anecdotally and imo explains a lot about why the left continues to lose.

Here’s an excerpt from an article about Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind”:

…conservatives can relate to the moral thinking of liberals, but the converse is not true at all. Haidt, who is liberal himself, elegantly explains how and why conservatives will view liberals as merely misguided while liberals tend to view conservatives as incomprehensible, insane, immoral, etc.

Full article: https://orangeleader.com/2015/07/22/the-righteous-mind-understanding-conservatives-and-liberals/

From the wikipedia page on Haidt:

Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help the Democratic Party win more elections, and argues that each of the major political groups—conservatives, progressives, and libertarians—have valuable insights and that truth and good policy emerge from the contest of ideas. Haidt's first essay in this area was titled "What Makes People Vote Republican?" Since 2012, Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist.