(2025-04-27) The Group Chats That Changed America

Ben Smith: The group chats that changed America. ...just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal.app group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right.

their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed

Of course, these are hardly the only power group chats. Anti-Trump liberals are now coordinating their responses on Signal. There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers. A vast and influential parallel set of tech conversations take place on WhatsApp.

This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures.

“It’s the same thing happening on both sides, and I’ve been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality,” said the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was for a time a member of a group chat with Andreessen. “If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism and a few industries.”

But there is no equivalent to the intellectual counterculture that grew up over the last five years on the tech right, and no figure remotely like Andreessen. (counterculture? really?)

In February, he described the group chats to the podcaster Lex Fridman as “the equivalent of samizdat” — the self-published Soviet underground press — in a “soft authoritarian” age of social media shaming and censorship. (jfc what drama queens, I hope they're enjoying the hard authorianism more)

Many of the roughly 20 participants I spoke to also felt a genuine sentimental attachment to the spaces, and believed in their value. One participant in the groups described them as a “Republic of Letters,” a reference to the long-distance intellectual correspondence of the 17th century. Others often invoked European salon culture

“They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Erik Torenberg on a recent podcast, after joking in the name of secrecy that he’d never heard of such groups. “If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.”

It might not seem like it, because of all the sht that people still post on X, but the internet has fragmented,” the Substack author Noah Smith wrote after my inquiries for this story spilled into public Saturday. “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.”*

spring of 2020. As the scale of the pandemic set in that April and the weaknesses of both the US supply chain and government became clear, Andreessen fired off what would become a profoundly influential essay, “It’s Time to Build,” calling for a revival of patriotic industry and innovation.

“The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,” he said. The chats, he wrote recently, helped produce our national “vibe shift.”

Conversations about the essay and the pandemic bubbled on Clubhouse, a flash-in-the-pan social conversation app where Sriram Krishnan was also trying to build communities. Andreessen and Krishnan discussed trying to replicate the free-flowing early Hacker News bulletin board online, and then settled on group chats, as the story they’ve told friends goes

That spring, Krishnan, working as a consultant, launched a group called “Build” on WhatsApp with a dozen of Silicon Valley’s elite figures. Andreessen loved it, and Krishnan began launching more — dozens, within a year, on topics from engineering to design to project management to artificial intelligence.

Someone who sat next to Andreessen at a conference during this period recalled watching with awe as he flipped on his phone from group chat to group chat, responding and engaging with manic speed.
‘How does he have the time?’

Andreessen has told friends he finds the medium efficient — a way to keep in touch with three times the people in a third of the time.

After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.” There, writers including Kmele Foster, who co-hosts the podcast The Fifth Column, Persuasion founder Yascha Mounk, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist Christopher Rufo.

The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement: “He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group — which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.

But the center didn’t hold. The Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an “illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech. The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.

The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams, along with the never-Trump conservative David French and the liberal academic Jason Stanley, wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”
Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,” a participant recalled. The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of ‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.

The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to Rufo, a healthy development.
“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”

Silicon Valley was moving right. In May of 2022, Andreessen asked the conservative academic Richard Hanania to “make me a chat of smart right-wing people,” Hanania recalled. As requested, he assembled eight or ten people — elite law students and federal court clerks, as well as Torenberg and Katherine Boyle, a former Washington Post reporter then at a16z and focused on investing in “American Dynamism.” Later, Hanania added the broadcaster Tucker Carlson. (smart?)

Hanania said he found himself increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics, and he came to see the chat he’d established as a “vehicle for groupthink.” (A friend of Andreessen’s said it was Hanania, not Andreessen, who had shifted his politics.) The group continues without him.

Hanania argued with the other members “about whether it’s a good idea to buy into Trump’s election denial stuff. I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’ I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said. “There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.” He left the group in June of 2023.

Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of 2024... Two of its conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side, but its founder said he’d begun it to have “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats.”

Chatham House includes high-profile figures like the economist Larry Summers and the historian Niall Ferguson, and more partisan figures like Ben Shapiro and the Democratic analyst David Shor. Andreessen lurks. But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with Mark Cuban most often in the center, sparring with conservatives.

The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces, and on the formation of a new conservative consensus.

Donald Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape. You can see it on X, where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices, and where Balaji Srinivasan has been a leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.

“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,” said Rufo. “There’s a big split on the tech right.”

The polarity of social media has also reversed, and while participants used to keep their conservative ideas off social media, “now the anti-Trump sentiment is what you’re afraid to say on X,” one said. (For real cancel, not social cancel.)