In the early 2000s, the entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) created Ruby on Rails, an open-source set of tools for building apps. In the years since, GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, and early Twitter — plus who knows how many startups — were all built on Rails, and upwards of 300,000 developers use the framework professionally.

However, roughly 0.04% of said developers are very unhappy with DHH.

Last week, about 140 people in the Ruby community (who DHH recently called a “sad contingent” of malcontents) published a petition to “cut ties with DHH” because of his “racist and transphobic views, as well as a number of other traits undesirable in any figurehead and community leader.” Practically speaking, the group wants to “hard fork Rails,” meaning take the existing open-source code, copy it, and start a new thing. But really, the intention here is to “cancel” DHH, making him a persona non grata, and generally punish him for his “toxic” opinions.

One example of these opinions, cited in the petition: earlier this month, DHH wrote that a “demographic nightmare” has enveloped London (the percentage of “native Brits” there has dropped to about a third), eroding Britain’s “national identity” — while folks are increasingly punished for “wrongthink,” as DHH put it (this comedian was recently arrested for tweeting that trans women in female-only spaces should be punched in the balls).

What’s more, the petitioners have branded their campaign Plan Vert, a reference to, as they put it, “a railway sabotage campaign by the French resistance during WW2.” Playing out this metaphor, that would make DHH literally Hitler. So, doing my journalistic due diligence over Signal, I asked DHH is he is, in fact, a Nazi.

His response:

I mean, it all depends on what the new definition of nazi is, I suppose! If it means “won’t use the orthodox woke word list,” “refuses to stop calling things retarded,” “insists on sticking to the original git master branch,” and “thinks politics should not be part of open source,” then maybe??

But if we’re talking about the common understanding of a third reich and killing jews, then no. Most certainly no 😄

The activists probably won’t be successful in banishing DHH from the Rails ecosystem. But, as he writes in the following essay, originally published as two blog posts, labeling people as Nazis can have a more lasting and insidious effect.

—Blake Dodge

The last loonies on tech’s woke island are getting desperate. It used to be that a wide variety of baseless accusations of racism, misogyny, or white supremacy could inflict grave social and professional consequences for the accused, but that’s no longer true. So now they’ve had to up the ante, and that’s why everyone is suddenly a Nazi to these people.

Because if you can’t intimidate people into silence and compliance with the woke orthodoxies by threatening their job or their social circle, you might be able to threaten them with actual violence or worse. That’s what the “Nazi” accusation is there to convey: That violence has been authorized.

The slogan has been around for a while: Punch a Nazi. It has a sorta quaint, winking phrasing, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that maybe it wasn’t actually meant as a real threat. But I think that theory has gone out the window. Just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk.

This is a natural consequence of all the lost terrain. The DEI bureaucracies in tech have been decimated or dismantled. The tone-setting social media, X, can no longer be wielded for narrative control (and Bluesky keeps shrinking from purity purges). And finally, the American administration went from blue to red in 2024.

Lost terrain means lost leverage. Which means the usual threats have stopped working because they relied on that institutional and broad social leverage to be effective. And these loonies know that.