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Seattle Spent Millions on Hotel Rooms to Shelter Unhoused People. Then It Stopped Filling Them.

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This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KUOW public radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Reporting Highlights

  • Using a Hotel as a Shelter: Seattle leased the Civic Hotel as shelter space, and a nonprofit used the Civic and other buildings to place homeless people coming off the city’s troubled Third Avenue.
  • Placements Halted: After filling the city-funded rooms, the nonprofit was told to let them empty out — even as the city signed a $2.7 million lease extension.
  • Major Need: Of an estimated 5,000 shelter beds in Seattle city boundaries and on nearby Vashon Island, an average of 3% were free each night last year.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

When Brenna Poppe moved into the Civic Hotel off the damp streets of Seattle in late 2022, she cried with joy. During her next year at the city-sponsored homeless shelter, she’d meet other guests who felt the same way — overwhelmed by the sudden realization that tonight, they would not sleep outside.

The Civic got quieter last year, however. Rooms around her, their doors still painted bright yellow from when the hotel was a boutique property, started to empty out. A “deafening silence” crept in, she recalled.

The 53-room hotel was converted to a shelter in the early days of the pandemic, and the city of Seattle kept it going. After Poppe’s first year there, the city in February 2024 signed a $2.7 million lease extension to continue using rooms at the Civic and other buildings as shelter space through the end of the year. And yet, despite committing to pay the rent, the city stopped sending people there.

Existing residents moved on to permanent housing or elsewhere and no one took their place. Dozens of rooms went unfilled.

By December, Seattle taxpayers were paying a hefty $4,200 a month per empty room — at a time when thousands of Seattleites were without a roof over their heads.

City officials described their decision to leave the rooms vacant as simply a “pause” while they evaluated what to do about an anticipated budget deficit.

One-time federal funding was going away and, if the city eventually succeeded in securing long-term funding, officials wanted to find a cheaper location than the Civic. They said the uncertainty forced them to both hold onto the Civic and stop placing people there, to avoid later sending clients back to the street.

But internal records reveal more complicated motives. At the same time as the city was halting placements, it rejected a move to a cheaper shelter location, which the main advocate of the plan said would keep the program running without interruption. A top official in the office of Mayor Bruce Harrell, explaining the decision in private, voiced animosity toward the nonprofit leader who pitched the new location and signaled an end to city support for the leader’s program.

Regardless of the rationale, the outcome of the city’s decision was that for nearly a year, Seattle paid for just as many rooms as before yet helped fewer and fewer people off the street with them.

Placements resumed this year, in a new location, after a 16-month gap.

Many West Coast cities are struggling, as Seattle has, with a rise in homelessness in recent years. Before referrals were halted, the effort that placed people at the Civic had already moved hard-to-reach homeless people from the street to a shelter space and, in many cases, then on to long-term housing and stability.

Seattle’s decision to keep dollars flowing to an effort it had suspended comes as cities such as Los Angeles are facing criticism for failing to accurately track outcomes of their massive outlays on homelessness.

Allowing vacancies to grow at city-leased shelter space also seems to be at odds with a commitment by Harrell, whose 2022 plan to address homelessness promised efforts to “better track shelter capacity and ensure beds do not go unfilled.”

(A spokesperson for Harrell responded that it’s important to note city-funded shelters had 2,850 units in all last year, 87% of which were full on any given night. The city declined a request to interview Harrell.)

Poppe, who lived at the Civic through 2024, viewed its empty rooms as a squandered opportunity, and she told the shelter staff as much.

“Multiple times,” Poppe said, “I spoke to staff about this egregious amount of open rooms.”

The Blade

On any given day in a section of Third Avenue between Pike and Pine streets known as The Blade, disorder is commonplace. Some people are screaming at the air, their pants falling off their frail frames. Others are sleeping, huddled in doorways to keep warm and safe. This human suffering stands in contrast with neighboring symbols of Seattle’s affluence: Pike Place Market, Benaroya Hall and the downtown shopping district are within a five-minute stroll.

A walk-up-only McDonald’s on the corner has been dubbed “McStabby’s,” referencing violent crimes that have taken place nearby over the years.

In 2022, nonprofits and downtown businesses came up with a plan that would ultimately involve the Civic Hotel.

The Third Avenue Project was designed to reduce the violence and open drug use through extensive outreach and the deescalation of conflicts between people on the street. But housing was also on the minds of the organizers.

Many believed in a modified version of the “housing-first” approach, which is predicated on the idea that any issues people struggle with on the streets are best addressed if they first find shelter, with no requirements for sobriety. Despite Seattle’s shortage of shelter beds and affordable permanent housing, the nonprofit leaders involved with Third Avenue hoped to help at least some clients move indoors.

The concept seemed to line up with the priorities of Harrell, who on his campaign website the year before had promised “an accountable, ambitious plan with transparency and benchmarks to expand and provide housing and services on demand to every unsheltered neighbor.”

Third Avenue Project organizers got to work after Harrell took office, with significant funding from the city.

“Safety ambassadors” were the first step. They would reverse overdoses and intervene when scuffles broke out, but also develop relationships with people in the street and then connect them with shelter and services.

“The hardest thing that we do is seeing people in the dire straits that they live in daily,” said Stephenie Wheeler-Smith, CEO of the company that hires the ambassadors, We Deliver Care. “This is not easy work. People don’t want to come out and touch these people or look at them or see their wounds or help them get health care.”

Importantly, safety ambassadors wouldn’t just move people along. They also could be a first point of contact on a path to permanent housing.

As one element of their $2.1 million contract with the city, the safety ambassadors referred homeless people on Third Avenue to housing and emergency shelter providers. The main one they’d use was a nonprofit-led program called CoLEAD, which had a $4.6 million contract with the city in 2023 that included placing people in temporary lodging and providing support services they needed.

The next step was the Civic Hotel. City officials signed a $1.1 million six-month lease with the Civic’s owners for its 53 guest rooms. CoLEAD would also let Third Avenue clients use rooms in any of the other shelters it managed, and at the same time the program would send clients from other referral sources to the Civic.

Unlike with some other shelters, these clients did not have to stop using drugs or alcohol, and they had access to their own space, which was ideal for people who may have struggled at traditional shelters.

The plan got results.

By November 2023, city-funded rooms at the Civic and other buildings were packed.

Marco Brydolf-Horwitz, who studied CoLEAD for nearly two years as part of a doctoral program, said he saw people transformed by the stability of temporary lodging.

“You can’t do much when people are on the street,” he said. “Once people are inside, then you can figure out what level of housing resources are needed.”

The Halt

For all the success stories, the problem with the Civic was cost. The county had snapped it up as a temporary measure during the frenzy of the pandemic, and the city inherited it. After the initial lease, rent had risen to the equivalent of $2.6 million a year in 2023.

On Jan. 2, 2024, Lisa Daugaard, one of the nonprofit leaders managing the Third Avenue Project, pitched the city on a cheaper alternative: an apartment building in North Seattle with 11 more rooms the city could use for $1 million less.

The city’s obligations with the Civic had ended when its lease expired the month before. Daugaard could get the city’s clients moved by February. Daugaard simply needed some assurance the city would keep backing the project because she was considering a three-year lease on the new location.

A few weeks later, Daugaard had her answer: Stop placing Third Avenue clients in city-funded beds, cycle existing ones into permanent housing and “ramp down” the Civic Hotel shelter. It was couched as a “pause” in placements through CoLEAD, records show.

In emails to Daugaard — and, in at least one case, internally — city officials cited uncertainty created by a looming budget deficit as one of the main reasons for the new marching orders. They reiterated this explanation, along with an expected loss in one-time funding, in interviews and emails with KUOW and ProPublica.

The mayor’s press secretary, Callie Craighead, said the city was “committed to maintaining shelter investments” but had “no way to provide such confirmation” to Daugaard until the city developed its next budget. She said the North Seattle apartment building was also not move-in ready at the time. Extending the lease at the Civic was a stopgap to avoid sending clients back to homelessness.

Chief Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington described the halt in referrals as a way of “winding down” operations at the Civic in anticipation of a move to a new spot, a “best practice” among social services managers.

But a chat message from Washington to a colleague, released to KUOW and ProPublica last week through a public records request, spells out additional reasons for turning down Daugaard’s proposal. It says, in part: “because I want her out of the homelessness business. She is not good at it.”

Washington stated in the message, incorrectly, that the proposed North Seattle location was another hotel, “which is not cheap” and concluded, “This means we would be leasing hotels forever.”

She also asserted that CoLEAD had a high rate of returns to homelessness and a low rate of placements in permanent housing.

Data provided by the mayor’s office and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority shows otherwise. The year before, CoLEAD moved a far bigger share of its clients from its city-funded beds into permanent housing than emergency shelter operators as a whole: 65%, compared with 26%.

Contacted by KUOW and ProPublica last week, Washington said she’d known Daugaard for 10 years and that “I have nothing but respect for her work.” She said of her chat message about ending CoLEAD’s role in the city’s response to homelessness: “Discussions are different than decisions.” She noted that the city’s relationship with CoLEAD continues today.

Daugaard declined to comment on Washington’s private message naming her. The nonprofit that employs Daugaard and oversees CoLEAD issued a statement defending the program’s track record at placing people in permanent housing as “exceptional.”

The mayor’s proposed budget for next year supports programs that follow CoLEAD’s approach, the statement said, “and we greatly appreciate that, in the end, the City has backed this model which has proven to serve the interests of Seattle neighborhoods and chronically unsheltered individuals alike.”

As of February 2024, the North Seattle plan was formally off the table. The city extended its lease with the Civic.

Officials committed to spending $225,000 a month for 53 rooms through year’s end — despite having just told nonprofit shelter managers to ensure those rooms emptied out.

The Fallout

The disruption to the flow of clients off Third Avenue and into the city-funded rooms gradually became noticeable.

The kind of shelter that the Civic Hotel provided — individual rooms that came with services such as help in accessing health care — is a valuable resource, especially when it comes to people who may be struggling with mental illness or addiction, like many of those on Third Avenue. Traditional shelters lack privacy and personal space.

With the ending of placements at the Civic and city-funded rooms in other CoLEAD shelters, safety ambassadors who were paid to quell the violence on Third Avenue turned to other shelter organizations. But it wasn’t enough to fully offset the loss of CoLEAD’s buildings.

KUOW and ProPublica examined data from We Deliver Care for placements to organizations that provide shelter or housing, including the nonprofit that operates CoLEAD. The number went from 47 in 2023 to 30 in 2024.

Meanwhile, 35 rooms at the Civic and other shelters that CoLEAD managed sat empty as of December 2024.

Among the people who would have said yes to one of the rooms the city had left unused was Tiffany Fields, who at the time was struggling to stay safe outdoors.

“It ain’t no joke,” Fields said of life on the street. “It’s not fun. It’s not for play.”

Fields slept at downtown bus stops, often gathering with groups or pretending to have a firearm in her coat to stay safe. She spoke to herself out loud when she felt at risk in the hopes that feigning mental illness would ward others off.

“I’ve seen a lot of weird things,” Fields said. “They tend to prey on women by themselves, but I know how to hold my own.”

A 2023 University of Washington study of the Third Avenue Project found that of the 980 people contacted by We Deliver Care’s safety ambassadors through October 2023, 90% were unhoused.

“From a human perspective, people want to be inside and they want to be sheltered,” said Wheeler-Smith, leader of the outreach efforts to connect people on Third Avenue with services. “And unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of places to send people to be sheltered, period.”

Daugaard, whose group works alongside Wheeler-Smith’s safety ambassadors, said it was demoralizing for the outreach workers to keep talking to people on Third Avenue about their struggles with limited chances to fundamentally change the path they’re on.

Losing the rooms that the Civic provided meant that “all they’re doing is kind of keeping a lid on the level of disorder and its impact on other people,” Daugaard said.

(The University of Washington report, based on time spent on the street with the safety ambassadors, described reversed overdoses and defused conflicts.)

Of the estimated 5,000 shelter beds available in Seattle’s city limits and on nearby Vashon Island during early 2024, only 3% were free, according to an annual point-in-time count. Another 4,600 people lived without shelter at the time.

Rachel Fyall, associate professor at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, said the cost of not housing people includes emergency room care, jail cells and police on the street.

“Philosophically,” Fyall said, “any room that is unused is too many rooms.”

But when organizers know a shelter is likely to close soon, does it then make sense to leave rooms unused so newcomers won’t have to relocate shortly after they arrive?

Noah Fay, senior director of housing programs at another nonprofit that runs homeless shelters, said the desire to avoid disruptions for residents has to be balanced against the desire to keep beds full when unmet demand in Seattle is enormous.

He said his organization recently prepared for a shelter shutdown by halting referrals two months ahead of time. The city did so 11 months before its lease ended.

“Pause” Lifted

In July, Fields was strolling through the Third Avenue area.

A safety ambassador called out to her and said Fields’ caseworker had been looking for her. The caseworker had good news. She was getting shelter.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding?’” Fields recalled. “‘Please tell me it’s not a sick joke.’”

The city had recently ended the “pause” on placing CoLEAD clients in temporary shelters.

The new venue was the North Seattle apartment building Daugaard had proposed more than a year earlier. The nonprofit running CoLEAD named it the Turina James.

Washington told KUOW and ProPublica CoLEAD had “significantly improved” its record of moving people to permanent housing since the pause, proving it was a good decision. (Data show CoLEAD’s success rate with city-funded clients declined from 65% in 2023 to 56% last year, while its success for all clients improved marginally, from 69% in 2023 to 71% last year. The city did not address the apparent discrepancy.)

Fields’ intake was done over the phone, and an Uber was sent to pick her up and take her to her new temporary home. When she arrived, she said, she was welcomed with open arms. She was given gifts and a key.

“God, he works in mysterious ways,” Fields said. “Sometimes when you call on him, he may not come right then and there, but when he does come, when he does show up, he shows out.”

Fields said she’s felt much more stable since making it indoors.

“I’m happy. I’m in a very, very, very good place,” Fields said. “So I can, you know, get my life back on track, get my life back in order.”

Others on Third Avenue are still waiting for housing. But the paths available to them look much different now, even with referrals resuming, than they did in 2022 and 2023. When making placements at the Turina James, unlike at the Civic and other CoLEAD shelters, the city is no longer emphasizing Third Avenue clients but instead people from Seattle’s Chinatown-International District.

Brenna Poppe, the woman who lived in the Civic as it emptied out, was still sleeping indoors as of July. She was staying at the North Seattle property, still thankful to have a roof over her head.

Around her, the rooms were starting to fill up.

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Eventually You're Going to Have to Stand for Something

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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Steve

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Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
In fairness to Adam and Eve, nowhere in Leviticus are you told not to obey a talking snake.


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Rewrite it to "Blame Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve" and it actually works without explanation, no?

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem, an interview with Ted Chiang...

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Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem, an interview with Ted Chiang from earlier this year. “I don’t believe it’s meaningful to say that something is better art absent any context of how it was created. Art is all about context.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

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Fantastic interview. So many good metaphors and stories from Ted Chiang, one of my favorite writers.
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I ask candidates their salary expectations, and I don’t feel bad about it

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A reader writes:

You’ve talked about how inappropriate it is for employers to ask candidates about their salary expectations without giving out any info on salary themselves.

I became a small business owner without having received training in that aspect of things, but learned early on when I am hiring to always ask the candidate their salary expectations before giving any information out about the range I am willing to offer. Why? Firstly, the money comes directly from our pockets and frankly if we can get away with paying $20/hour instead of $22/hour, why wouldn’t we? It also gives us room for raises, bonuses, etc. without taking too much of a financial hit. You always advocate that employees look out for their own interests. Why should that be so different for me as an employer? Maybe we tend to think of employers as big corporations but in our case we’re just hard-working individuals hoping to keep expenses in check.

The second reason I want that information first is that if I were to give my range, a candidate expecting more might well say, “Sure, that’s fine” while planning to take the job and keep looking for something else. Frankly, I want to know if they’re likely to be unhappy with that salary! Hearing that they expect more is valuable information for us to have and if I can get it, I will.

So there you have it from a brazenly unapologetic employer who plans to continue asking the question. (For what it’s worth, we are excellent employers whose staff have been with us for years and seem very happy).

I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

The post I ask candidates their salary expectations, and I don’t feel bad about it appeared first on Ask a Manager.

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“The times are changing. Change with them—and don’t gloat about doing something that hurts people.”
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DHH Is Way Worse Than I Thought

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Have you ever known someone who seemed nice enough and perfectly normal, until you saw one of their social media accounts and realized they were insane? Like, you became Facebook friends with your uncle, or followed that friend-of-a-friend who's fun at parties on Instagram, and it turns out they constantly post about weird shit like the deep state and demographic replacement and the pedophile ring that Hillary Clinton definitely runs from the basement of a pizza parlor?

Over the past couple weeks, the tech community has been slowly coming to terms with a prominent person like that. He seems congenial — started a successful open source project, co-founded a reputable company — until you come across his blog filled with unhinged political diatribes. I’m speaking, of course, of DHH: Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson.

If you, like me, don't pay much attention to this person, the last thing you might remember him from is the fracas a few years ago over his company Basecamp banning political discussions at work. While I had my opinions about that, it seemed to fit within the general range of politics you can expect from most people. I assumed David was just a normal guy with whom I had some political differences, and went on with my life.

That all changed when I heard about the recent hostile takeover of the RubyGems package manager, which appears to have started over a lost sponsorship for giving David a conference speaking slot. My interest was piqued, so I checked out his recent post "As I remember London". By the time I finished reading, my jaw was on the floor.

DHH's politics are not normal.

Maybe they used to be, I don't know, but as of right now the dude is way the fuck outside of what most people would consider moral or acceptable.

But don't take my word for it. We can get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Let’s go through David’s "As I remember London"[1] post and see exactly what he’s all about.

Native Brits

David's post starts off fairly anodyne:

As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice as much, through the Blitz and the rest of it, yet never lost its nerve. I thought I might move there one day.

Yeah, man. I have cousins not too far away from there, so even though I live across the pond I've been lucky enough to visit a few times. London is great!

That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

The honeymoon is over: Big Ben and Trafalgar Square are only majestic if enough passersby are “native Brits”.

That’s a little vague, but he links "native Brits" to a Wikipedia article called "Ethnic groups in London" so we can see exactly whom he’s talking about:

Greater London had a population of 8,899,375 at the 2021 census. Around 41% of its population were born outside the UK, and over 300 languages are spoken in the region.

59% of Londoners were born in the UK! How could it possibly be that only a third of them are native Brits?

The article’s first section breaks down the demographic data in a table. The first ethnicity listed? “White British” at 36.8% as of the 2021 census.

Ah.

As for other ethnic groups: the table rolls up “Asian or Asian British” at 20.8%, “Black or Black British” at 13.5%, “Mixed or British Mixed” at 5.7% and “Other” at 6.3%.[2] No other group is even remotely close to a third.

It turns out that when DHH says “native Brits”, he’s specifically referring to white Brits. That's why it's "a statistic as clear as day when you walk the streets of London": it's his coy way of saying that too many of the 59% of Londoners born and raised in the UK are not white.

So if David means "white Brits", why doesn't he just say that? Why bother with the innuendo?

Because complaining that there aren’t enough white people sounds weird and racist! David bristles at that label, but there's a reason he's hiding behind euphemisms rather than just saying what he means. Most people don't go around thinking “boy, all these Black and Asian people make this city so much worse.”

Most people, that is, except for David:

But I think, what would Copenhagen feel like, if only a third of it was Danish, like London? It would feel completely foreign, of course. Alien, even. So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country.

He thinks that a city that has too many Black people feels “completely foreign”. That it’s “alien” to see too many Asian people as he walks the streets. David tries to throw "mass immigration" in there — but as we know, his problem with the "culture and makeup" is how many people are not white, whether or not they're immigrants.

Unite the Kingdom

David continues:

That frustration was on wide display in Tommy Robinson's march yesterday. British and English flags flying high and proud, like they would in Copenhagen on the day of a national soccer match. Which was both odd to see but also heartwarming. You can sometimes be forgiven for thinking that all of Britain is lost in self-loathing, shame, and suicidal empathy. But of course it's not.

Who's Tommy Robinson? According to his Wikipedia entry, he’s an “anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK's most prominent far-right activists with a history of criminal convictions”.

Not a great start! But maybe Wikipedia just has a left wing bias?[3]

Well…

How about the march he organized? HOPE not hate reported on what the speakers he invited had to say.

“It’s not just Britain that is being invaded, it’s not just Britain that is being raped. Every single Western nation faces the same problem: an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens is happening.”

That one’s Tommy Robinson himself.

The Dutch far-right commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek delivered one of the day’s most incendiary speeches, appearing in a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Generation Remigration”. She said:

“They are demanding the sacrifice of our children on the altar of mass migration. Let’s not beat about the bush — this is the rape, replacement, and murder of our people… Remigration is possible, and it’s up to us to make it happen. We are Generation Remigration.”

I had to look up the word "remigration". It means "ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants, sometimes including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry".

“This is a religious war,” said Brian Tamaki, leader of New Zealand’s Destiny Church. “Islam, Hinduism, Baháʼí, Buddhism — whatever else you’re into — they’re all false. We’ve got to clean our countries up. Get rid of everything that doesn’t receive Jesus Christ. Ban any public expression of other religions in our Christian nations. Ban halal. Ban burqas. Ban mosques, temples, shrines — we don’t want those in our countries.”

I mean… these people are clearly deranged, right? You'd think any of this would warrant at least a passing mention, but for some reason David doesn't include a single quote about what the people at this "heartwarming" march actually said.

David is well aware that these people are extremists. That's why he tries to preempt that accusation:

The easy way out of this uncomfortably large gathering of perfectly normal, peaceful Brits who've had enough is to tar them all as "far right". That's not just a British tactic, but one used across Europe, and previously in the US as well. It used to work very well, because the historical stigma was so strong, but, like hurling "nazi" and "fascist" at the most middle-of-the-road political figures and positions, it's finally lost its power.

Note that David never actually addresses the "far right" label on its merits — he just pivots to calling it overused, trying to direct your attention elsewhere like a magician distracting the audience as he performs a trick. We are meant to believe him that because people sometimes use “far right” and “nazi” and “fascist” too liberally, that must be happening here as well.

But of course, that’s not what’s happening here. Calling these people far right is "easy" for the same reason it's "easy" to say Joe Biden is liberal: it's obviously true! These are not "middle-of-the-road" positions — they're literally calling to ban non-Christian religions and to ethnically cleanse non-white citizens. It takes no stretch of the imagination to figure out why these people are far right.

Demographic Replacement

Let's say you wanted to trick me into believing a conspiracy theory.

You'd have to start with a grain of truth, right? You can't come out of the gate with the COVID vaccine nano-chips that Bill Gates uses to track us through the 5G cell towers.[4] That'd scare me off!

No, the first step is to find some common ground. Something we can both agree on. Then you can slowly mix in the crazy stuff.

That in mind, let's continue with David’s post:

I really feel for the Brits because it's not obvious how they get themselves out of this pickle. They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.

The child sexual abuse scandals were real and horrible. The perpetrators were mostly British-Pakistani, and the victims were largely white. No one is disputing that; it's the grain of truth.

But like any good con artist, David has mixed in some other not-quite-so-true things he wants you to believe as well.

For one: David really wants to make sure you know that the perpetrators were largely Pakistani: scary brown foreigners. He’s insinuating that there’s some connection between their ethnicity and sexually abusing children. It's not just that many of these abusers happened to be Pakistani; David's implying they did it because they were Pakistani. (Many of them were also British — but as we know by now, in David’s eyes that only counts if you're white.)

When it comes to the victims, though, David brings out the dog whistles. He describes them as "British girls" (read: white). "Barbaric outsiders preying upon innocent white women" is a classic racist trope that would be perfectly at home in the Jim Crow South or Nazi Germany.

I don't know. But I'm glad that there clearly are many Brits who are determined to find out. Unwilling to just let their society wither away while their bobbies chase bad tweets instead of the rampant street thefts or those barbaric rape gangs. Unwilling to resign the rest of the country to the kind of demographic replacement that befell London over the last two decades.

On top of the "barbaric rape gangs", David also brings up "rampant street thefts" — suggesting that the same scary brown foreigners are responsible. The problem is that his implication is only backed up by bigotry. The source he links to about the street thefts, for example, never mentions race or ethnicity. And in spite of the salacious rape gangs story, data show that non-white people in the UK are ever-so-slightly less likely to commit child sexual abuse.

After planting the grain of truth and making lurid insinuations, David finally gets to the crazy stuff. "Demographic replacement”: a reference to a debunked conspiracy theory that there’s a plot to replace white people in Western society. It's the same thing that motivated the deadly Charlottesville Unite the Right[5] march's infamous chant: "you will not replace us!"

“Far Right”

David ends with a quote from Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats. Someone, he says, that “nobody could credibly charge with being ‘far right’”:

There are really a lot of us Danes who believed that when people came to this ‘world’s best country’ and were given such good opportunities, they would integrate. They would become Danish, and they would never, ever harm our society. All of us who thought that way have been wrong.

Notice how moderate her words are compared to what David says and supports! Frederiksen is not saying that her country is being "invaded" or "raped", for example. She's not calling for it to be ethnically cleansed, or accusing of foreign men of being predators.

This is a running theme for David. He is desperately trying to convince you that he is not "far right", his people are not "far right", his politics are not "far right". Probably because – for all his bluster about how the label has lost its power — David knows that it's actually a huge red flag.

Personally, I don't think the label matters. I've been calling these people "far right" because it's convenient and accurate, not because I'm invested in that particular term. Shit by any other name would smell as foul, and David and his friends are extremely pungent.

Let's ditch the superlatives and review David's post objectively:

  • He thinks that even if you were born in the UK, you only count as British if you're white.
  • He wouldn't consider living in London specifically because it has too many people of color.
  • He uses racist tropes to accuse Asian men of being dangerous predators who attack white women.
  • He pushes debunked conspiracy theories about immigrants replacing white people.
  • He finds a march where speakers called for banning all non-Christian religions and ethnically cleansing immigrants "heartwarming".
  • Finally — and maybe most alarmingly — he argues that all of the above is normal and not extreme.

You can use whatever word you want to describe all that. But if you, like me, didn't realize that this is who DHH is, we can probably agree that he's way worse than we thought.


  1. I'm linking to the archive.org page rather than directly to his site to avoid giving it any more Google juice. ↩︎

  2. The rest are non-British subcategories of "White”, which come in at a cumulative 17%. ↩︎

  3. More like Wokipedia, amiright? ↩︎

  4. This is a real thing people believe. ↩︎

  5. You might notice the name is similar to Tommy Robinson's "Unite the Kingdom" march, which I am skeptical is a coincidence. ↩︎

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fxer
2 days ago
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Guess I’ll uh, continue never using 37Signals products
Bend, Oregon
rocketo
2 days ago
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yikes
seattle, wa
acdha
4 days ago
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Washington, DC
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