Chuck Darwin<p>‘What really matters is defeating the left’</p><p>The messages in “Everything Is Fine” are all long gone from the chats. So are many of the liberals. </p><p>By then, Silicon Valley was moving right.</p><p> In May of 2022, Andreessen asked the conservative academic <a href="https://c.im/tags/Richard" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Richard</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hanania" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Hanania</span></a> to <br>“make me a chat of smart right-wing people,” <br>Hanania recalled. </p><p>As requested, he assembled eight or ten people <br>— elite law students and federal court clerks, <br>as well as Torenberg and Katherine Boyle, <br>a former Washington Post reporter then at a16z and focused on investing in “American Dynamism.” </p><p>Later, Hanania added the broadcaster Tucker Carlson.</p><p>The substance of the chats no longer exists, but Signal preserved the group’s rotating names, which Andreessen enjoyed changing. </p><p>The tone was jesting, but “Marc radicalized over time,” <br>Hanania recalled. </p><p>Hanania said he found himself increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics, <br>and he came to see the chat he’d established as a “vehicle for groupthink.” </p><p>(A friend of Andreessen’s said it was Hanania, not Andreessen, who had shifted his politics.) </p><p>The group continues without him.</p><p>Hanania argued with the other members “about whether it’s a good idea to buy into Trump’s election denial stuff. <br>I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’ </p><p>I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said. </p><p>“There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.” </p><p>He left the group in June of 2023.</p><p><a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">semafor.com/article/04/27/2025</span><span class="invisible">/the-group-chats-that-changed-america</span></a></p>