Comment by NaOH

Comment by NaOH 6 days ago

30 replies

I'm taking a moment to recognize once more the work that user @atdrummond (Alex Thomas Drummond) did for a couple years to help others here. I did not know him, don’t think I ever interacted with him, and I did not benefit from his generosity, but I admired his kindness. Just beautiful.

Ask HN: Who needs holiday help? (Follow up thread) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38706167 - Dec 2023 (9 comments)

Ask HN: Who needs help this holidays? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492378 - Dec 2023 (210 comments)

Tell HN: Thank You - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34140096 - Dec 2022 (42 comments)

Tell HN: Everyone should have a holiday dinner this year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34122118 - Dec 2022 (58 comments)

Unfortunately, Alex died a few months after his last round of holiday giving, about 1½ years ago now.

Tell HN: In Memory of Alexander Thomas Drummond - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40508725 - May 2024 (5 comments)

If you read the comments in that last thread, know that @toomuchtodo followed through last year and kept the tradition alive. Amazing and magnificent.

Ask HN: Who needs help this holidays? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42291246 - Dec 2024 (46 comments)

tailspin2019 6 days ago

I remember this awesome guy’s posts but didn’t know he’d passed.

Thank you for posting this.

  • whoknowsidont 5 days ago

    He wasn't awesome he was a literal Nazi, through and through.

    • aidenn0 5 days ago

      I don't know what atdrummond's political views were, and after your comment, I still don't know.

      The label "literal Nazi" has become not particularly useful recently.

      At best, it seems to be used to mean that the person in question agrees with one or more of:

      "I think Hitler was awesome"

      "We need to stop letting poor people into our country"

      "Gee London was a lot better when it was whiter"

      "I think we should forcibly sterilize everybody with an IQ under 85"

      "I keep a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion under my bed"

      "I will always use he/him when referring to trans women"

      --

      At worst the label is applied for much more prosaic reasons.

      One can be racist, or a Eugenicist, or a white supremacist, or an anti-Semite, or transphobic without being a Nazi, and those terms are all far more descriptive than "Nazi," so are more informative.

      • whoknowsidont 5 days ago

        >I don't know what atdrummond's political views were, and after your comment, I still don't know.

        You literally don't understand what the term Nazi implies or what Nazi's stood for? And you could not _literally_ take less time than it took to write this comment to research what he was apart of?

        I guess you refuse to.

        Because you're purposefully trying to muddy the waters :).

        >One can be racist, or a Eugenicist, or a white supremacist, or an anti-Semite, or transphobic without being a Nazi,

        He's all of the above. Literally, by his own words. Thanks for spelling it out!

        • aidenn0 5 days ago

          > You literally don't understand what the term Nazi implies or what Nazi's stood for?

          I'm not sure how you could read my comment and come away with that impression. I gave a partial list of the sorts of things Nazi's stood for.

          > And you could not _literally_ take less time than it took to write this comment to research what he was apart of?

          Honestly, I did not search for it before I wrote the comment. After you posted this, I used a few search engines to search up both "Alex Thomas Drummond" and "atdrummond."

          The former turned up a single white-pages listing, the latter various people named "Drummond" most notably a basketball player. There is also a twitter/x account which I can't see posts of without an account but has an Estonian flag in his profile, which matches HN comments I later found so is probably him.

          So now I'm going through his HN comments one by one, which does in fact take longer than writing the comment I wrote.

          I should note that on the first page (which indeed took less time to read than writing my comment), the only thing I saw that gave off any "Nazi vibes" was this sentence, in the context of dealing with homeless addicts:

          > The issue is there’s a cohort who thinks that the solutions that enable safe streets require too much sacrifice of one’s individual liberty - even if said individual abuses their freedom to harm themself and others.

          But that view is not even definitively a politically right view, I'm probably reading it that way primarily because I'm looking for Nazi evidence.

          On page 2 we get this thread[1] which turns into a discussion similar to what my comment was, but specifically defends two people that atdrummond claims to be respectively Jewish and philosemitic and accused of being Nazis.

          At this time, I do not know who these writers are, so I have to search them. Assuming Cremieux refers to Jordan Lasker[2], who (after this comment was made) was revealed to have a Reddit pseudonym where he self-identified as a Nazi, but at the time would have been primarily known for his arguments that white people are genetically superior to black people with regards to (at least) intelligence while also rubbing shoulders with avowed eugenicists. I'm not going to spend a lot more time searching him, but I should note that, as a convert to Judaism, I could not find any evidence that he would be defined as Jewish by Nazis, who were primarily concerned with race (as they defined it) rather than religion, which certainly muddies the waters here.

          Next up is Hanania[3], someone I also had not heard of before, who was definitely an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist, but claims to have changed; journalists close to him deny this, and quotes on the Wikipedia page seem to support that he is at least still fairly racist. In my (admittedly brief) searching I didn't find strong evidence for him being particularly anti- or philo-semitic, though the Wikipedia article did include a quote by him implying that America would be better run by Jewish people than black people (and maybe also hillbillies; he said "voters in Baltimore or Appalachia"). Presumably he considers at least Ashkenazim to be "sufficiently white" in his racial calculus.

          While it seems likely that these two people have not specifically called for the extermination of all ethnic Jews, given that there are far more milquetoast people who have been accused of being Nazis, atdrummond defending these two people specifically makes it seem likely that he has some far-right views, but I still haven't gotten to what those are specifically.

          As I was scrolling down, I almost missed this quote[4] in a collapsed reply, but saw his username:

          > I am frequently called a Nazi (despite being on, and identifying as left wing, my entire life) on X simply for having the temerity to challenge certain orthodoxies.

          X has made it very hard for me to view posts of users, so I don't know what he has said on X, but with what we've seen so far, I suspect he is some form of racist hereditarian. Let's keep going:

          Next item[5] is the first overtly racist post from him, so looks like I may be on to something. In the context of discussing how the former confederate states seem to be a different country with different health and educational outcomes from the rest of the US:

          > The outcomes are primarily due to race, not the contours of the Confederacy. Nearly all of these “red state demographic maps” are isomorphic to the percentage of African Americans within a given state/county/city.

          I was skimming so I may have missed something, but the next racially tinged comment is:

          > Look at the rates of homicides by firearm for White Americans and they’re within the same order of magnitude as European nations.

          > This is a conversation that is verboten in the US because people assume that it means you believe that crime must be intrinsic to race, even though this statistic is actually fully compatible with the liberal orthodoxy regarding the disparate impact of government policy on American Black people.

          With a later reply clarifying that he believes this difference to be not solely due to increased poverty in said demographics.

          At this point, it seems clear that he believes that black people are more criminal, and he's being coy about whether he thinks it is racially intrinsic, which is arguably a tacit admission of what he thinks. I'm also done reading through his HN comments.

          I strongly suspect there are much spicier comments on Twitter, but of the 3 posts that X let me see, the only relevant one was a reply saying "You don't believe correctly" to a post saying "If you believe (correctly) that immigration is a huge positive for society..."

          So it seems clear to me at this point that he likely believes black people are inherently more criminal than white people, and he is opposed to immigration. This is what I could find with several times as much time and effort that went into my first post.

          > Because you're purposefully trying to muddy the waters :).

          I seriously am not, I didn't know what you meant by "literal Nazi" originally; your reply made it clear that you meant "Racist, Eugenicist, White Supermacist, Anti-Semite Transphobe." Please understand that calling someone a "literal Nazi" on the internet does not reliably communicate that today.

          1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38839386

          2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Lasker

          3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hanania

          4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38839371

          5: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515173

whoknowsidont 6 days ago

[flagged]

  • zamadatix 5 days ago

    Can you help share more of how we can know more about these claims? The only thing I could find related to this was https://x.com/jaredlholt/status/1757799398707188046 and the replies don't add any clarity to understanding what is real and what is not. I'm not saying that's all there is, just that I don't know how to find more and figure out one way or the other what is up where.

    • whoknowsidont 5 days ago

      I don't know how to find superchat history, but honestly you can just peruse his own twitter here: https://x.com/ATDrummond

      The guy has had a long running reputation on this site. Which is why he decided to add this to his profile:

      >here from hacker news? don’t be a creep

      And by creep, he of course means "don't call me out for advocating for genocide."

      His last post is even out right decrying ANY type of immigration, and his second post is being critical of Israel. And mind you, not because of any "normal" sociopolitical commentary, but simply because Israel = Jews and "Jews are bad."

      • zamadatix 5 days ago

        Thanks, I don't use Twitter/X so it would have taken me a while to figure out how to see the content of the posts (gee thanks X for requiring login to see most things properly!)

        Knowing this, I managed to find 2 additional things which help strengthen this connection as not just being some random twitter account with a matching name:

        - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38840473 where it doesn't actually link to the Twitter to see what the content is but he doesn't bother denying he'd have a Twitter account that could be taken that way.

        - https://archive.ph/pJqzD where someone acknowledges they interacted with the account knowing it was really him as part of sharing their discovery of the news.

        Much thanks, I would never have thought to look for such an unhinged Twitter account for a seemingly above average HN user being praised long after his death.

        • whoknowsidont 5 days ago

          Yeah, I understand it's seemingly hard to reconcile. And without revealing other aspects of my identity I can say his posts on Twitter and here do not reveal the extent of his views.

          He played this site well. I'll leave it at that.

  • dinkumthinkum 5 days ago

    [flagged]

    • whoknowsidont 5 days ago

      Nick Fuentes is a vocal proponent of genocide and actively mocks the holocaust.

      If think otherwise, I don't know what to tell you. It comes straight from the horse's mouth.

      Use your vitriol towards Nazi's, or yourself. Either is probably deserved at this point.

s5300 6 days ago

[flagged]

  • OJFord 6 days ago

    I don't understand that tweet, I'm not sure if it is something dismissive for you to lose respect over or not? He says it's 'not a disease' but that people with it 'are sick'... I'm not sure if the point is simply that it's not a single well-understood thing with known causes, but more of a description of a state of affairs. (Sort of like 'cellulitis' is just 'a skin infection of some sort'.) But I think that would be correct.

  • silisili 6 days ago

    Nobody is perfect. I wish we'd stop trying to find reasons to hate everyone who is celebrated, or we'll never celebrate anyone.

    • generic92034 6 days ago

      Maybe then do not celebrate a person, but celebrate the good actions of any person.

      • silisili 5 days ago

        But that's basically what we do. We learn about Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, MLK, etc for what good they did.

        Then someone eventually figures out they did or said some wrongthink by today's standards and tell us those people should be hated because they messed up.

        But the kicker is we never once learned about nor celebrated said wrongthink. We celebrated the best in people... and I think that should continue.

  • anonu 6 days ago

    you never really die on the internet.

    • onion2k 6 days ago

      There's a famous quote that says we all die twice, once when we physically die and a second time when we are truly forgotten by humanity. It's attributed to lots of different people. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/10/15/die-twice/

      • inglor_cz 6 days ago

        Whenever I encounter this idea, I think of a certain Henry Symeonis who is, by this standard, still "alive", even though he died in 1264.

        There was so much bad blood between him and the Oxford University that Oxford students had to take a pledge never to reconcile with Henry Symeonis upon ther Bc graduation. This tradition stuck for 550 years.

        https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/culture/bizarre-stor...

        And we are still aware of him today. Neither an important king, nor a great artist, just a guy who triggered a petty revenge from some long-dead academicians who are, ironically, likely completely forgotten, name and all.

    • fragmede 6 days ago

      And thanks to the magic of computers, we can give them everything you've ever written, and simulate you on the Internet. Forever.

  • drekipus 6 days ago

    Real respect isn't lost over one bad take.

    Adding my opinion: Especially if he's done so much good and especially if he's calling out Israel.

    • squigz 6 days ago

      Genuine respect absolutely can - and should be able to be - lost over a "bad take." Whether this instance is one of those is another question entirely.

      I would even argue that respect that can endure through numerous shitty takes, just because there's one facet of that person that isn't shitty, is far less genuine than otherwise holding that person up to a standard for your respect.

      • drekipus 4 days ago

        Separating "one take" from "many takes" -- one should be able to give grace that people are wrong occasionally, and especially that they are fallible and susceptible to being emotional or relying on anecdotes for a particular theme that their experience has affected them differently than your experience has affected you.