TechTakes

“my favourite conspiracy theory is the one that Michelle Obama is a man.”

That isn't even a good conspiracy. (that is also why it is a dogwhistle, if you enjoyed those kinds of crazy conspiracies you would say 'transvestigations where everybody famous is actually trans' is my fave (and yes they do it to everybody, it is very dumb). Focussing only on Michelle is odd, and shows in the kind of environments you hang out with (My example would be Andrew Tate, but it also isn't funny, as it is part of the wider 'make trans people unsafe' campaign, and people should understand that))).

If you’ve ever watched his live streams, he lets the mask slip from time to time. [...] There are other tells and dog whistles if you pay attention.

Totally. I've never even heard that comment on Michelle Obama but it tracks with all the other things I've seen slip by. I couldn't point to a single moment that convinced me, but one of the earliest warning signs I saw was him defending another dev streamer who's decidedly more lib-coded (theo-of-the-t3-stack/ping.gg/the-t3-llm-chat-app) to his community by stating "he helped me out when some people were trying to accuse me of being alt-right, which I mean come on <smirk>". This being when he still had skinny anime girls as his pc desktop on-stream and would make "blue hair + pronouns" jokes about rust while simultaneously advocating to use the language.

It should have been obvious earlier to be honest.

But we're supposed to be the unprejudiced ones, not the crypto-fash (I'm only being half sarcastic). It's tiring how they exploit benefit-of-doubt, and it's so hard for me to tell the difference between someone who's well positioned to fall down the pipeline and someone who's actively part of said pipeline.