Checked 13 October 2026

Record

Omarchy's homepage says the distribution is "by DHH." The doctrine says he makes the call. The posts below are the call he has already made, in public, under his own name. The company history is the same two founders.

London, September 2025

On 15 September 2025 DHH published "As I remember London." The post is still at world.hey.com. The lines below are the ones independent writers quote in common, and they match the post those writers link:

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 link under "native Brits" goes to the Wikipedia page "Ethnic groups in London." On that page the White British share is 59.8 percent in the 2001 census and 36.8 percent in the 2021 census. The share of Londoners born in the UK, on the demographics pages those writers compare it with, is about 59 percent in 2021. His "about a third" tracks the White British row. His "by 2024" is the 2021 census. He wrote that the change is "as evident as day when you walk the streets."

On 28 November 2025 he quoted a Telegraph column, "In 1975 the white British population of London was about 85%. Today, fifty years later, it is just 37%, and falling," and added: "Remember when noticing this was beyond the pale two seconds ago?" The link on that post is the London essay.

The same essay describes the 13 September 2025 march organized by Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) as a gathering of "perfectly normal, peaceful Brits," and objects to calling them far right. Robinson's criminal record is a matter of court outcomes: assault, mortgage fraud to which he pleaded guilty, stalking, and illegal entry to the United States on a false passport, among other convictions. The Wikipedia article "Tommy Robinson" collects the cases. DHH's word for the march, in the lines writers quote, is also "powerful." He cites "Pakistani rape gangs" in Rotherham and Rochdale as part of the case against immigration. The Jay Report on Rotherham, the inquiry into those crimes, said there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation and that across the UK the greatest numbers of perpetrators are white men. Tekin Süleyman's account of the post, and Niccolò Venerandi's, both put the Jay finding next to DHH's sentence.

He frames the essay as ordinary worry about immigration. The fractions he chose, the page he linked, and the November tweet that says "white British" out loud are how a reader checks that frame.

Wolves, July 2026

On 21 July 2026 he published "Wolves, sheep, and gypsies," and posted the sentence himself:

When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.

On 8 August 2026 he posted another line from the same essay: "Whether it's wolves or gypsies, you can't just let the problems get out of hand. You have to act. You have to protect the sheep." The comparison is his. Deportation of Romani people is the policy he describes as self-preservation. Romea.cz, a Roma news site, reported the post when 1Password's pledge became public. Ikey Doherty, founder of Solus and an Irish Traveller, called the comparison horrific and started a separate distro-building project in response. That reaction is his, and it is on the record.

The Omacom Foundation's launch announcement is dated 21 August 2026, one month after the wolves post. The pledge total on the homepage was $23.5 million by 9 October 2026.

The rest of the blog, by title

Other posts from the same period are cited by Ruby developers who have worked in his community for years. This page does not summarize pieces it has not quoted in full. The titles, and who sent readers to them, are:

• "The waning days of DEI's dominance." Duke University Libraries, cancelling Basecamp in November 2023, quotes his description of the 2020 protests after the murder of George Floyd as "riots," and his pleasure that mass tech layoffs would leave "the most fervent ideologues" unable to find work. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project's accounting of that summer found the demonstrations overwhelmingly peaceful. Duke's post says why a library would rather not pay him.
• "The law of the land," celebrating the US Supreme Court ruling that ended race-conscious college admissions. Duke read it alongside the DEI post.
• "The beauty of ideals" and "You expect principles but should wish for none." Tekin Süleyman writes that in these DHH called an advertisement featuring a plus-sized Black woman "grotesque" and welcomed replacements featuring "blond babies."
• "Bad therapy," "The parental dead-end of consent morality," and "Cold reading an ADHD affliction." Tekin cites these as the anti-trans, pronatalist, and anti-ADHD entries in the same run of posts.
• "The rape of Britain" and "Three sacred cows that must die so Europe can live." Both are linked from the 1Password forum thread by customers who had just learned where the company's open-source budget was going.

He has also written that he holds some positions associated with the left: he has called the Israeli occupation apartheid, supported legal abortion with restrictions, and called structural racism in America a serious problem. Niccolò Venerandi's long account quotes that self-portrait and then reads the blog against it. The blog is what he publishes when he is not assembling the mosaic.

Basecamp, 2021

In April 2021, chief executive Jason Fried banned "societal and political discussions" on Basecamp's internal chat. DHH followed with his own post and offered buyouts to anyone who disagreed. About a third of the company's 57 employees took them. Casey Newton's reporting in The Verge is the primary public account.

The ban did not arrive on a slow day. Customer-service staff had kept a list, from about 2009, titled "Best Names Ever": customer names they found funny. Many were American or European. Others were Asian or African. Managers knew about the list. Employees asked the company to account for it. An employee argued that mocking the names laid groundwork for racially motivated violence. Fried and DHH closed the thread, disbanded the volunteer diversity committee, and announced that political and social discussion at work was over. Head of strategy Ryan Singer was suspended after he questioned whether white supremacy existed at the company, and then resigned.

Fried's stated reason was that political conversation had become a distraction and that employees should not have to wonder whether silence was complicity. The discussion that triggered the rule was about a document the company itself had kept. Employees told Newton the political talk inside Basecamp had been about Basecamp. Jane Yang, a data analyst there, pointed at a profit-sharing plan that paid more to longer-tenured employees, a group that was majority white and male, and noted that a ban on the topic freezes the formula.

The company that ships Basecamp and HEY is 37signals. Both founders are founding patrons of the Omarchy foundation. The distribution's default app list, in Marius's 3.x inventory, includes icons for Basecamp and HEY.

Duke University Libraries had subscribed to Basecamp for almost a decade. On 30 November 2023 they published "Why We're Dropping Basecamp" and let the subscription lapse. The post quotes the "riots" line and the layoff line, and says a library that already knows what hate literature looks like can recognize the rhetoric and, in this one case, buy a different tool.

Ruby, 2025

DHH created Rails and sits on Shopify's board. His X bio lists him as a Shopify director. Tekin Süleyman, a long-time Rails contributor, wrote in September 2025 that DHH holds the Rails trademarks, chairs the Rails Foundation, and that almost half of the twelve Rails Core members were employed by Basecamp or Shopify. In 2025 that stack of positions met the RubyGems maintainers.

What is public, without anyone's anonymous source:

• Ruby Central put DHH on the program at the last RailsConf. Mike Perham withdrew Sidekiq's $250,000-a-year sponsorship of Ruby Central because of it. He said so in public.
• In September 2025 Ruby Central removed long-time maintainers' administrative access to the RubyGems and Bundler GitHub organization and to the bundler and rubygems-update gems. One of the people locked out, André Arko, had worked on RubyGems for more than a decade. Ruby Central's unsigned post called this supply-chain stewardship and a fiduciary duty.
• DHH amplified that post: "Ruby Central is making the right moves to ensure the Ruby supply chain is beyond reproach both technically and organisationally."
• In October 2024, when WordPress took the Advanced Custom Fields plugin away from its maintainers, DHH wrote: "This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it."

Joel Drapper's 23 September 2025 account goes further. He says he spoke to about a dozen people involved, and that he watched a recording of the meeting between maintainers and Ruby Central's Marty Haught. His report: Shopify told Ruby Central to take the repositories and the gems, and to keep Arko out, with funding as the lever. A board member, Freedom Dumlao, wrote publicly that voting the other way felt like voting to shut Ruby Central down, and that a deadline was inside 24 hours. Drapper discloses that he worked at Shopify from 2017 to 2022 and that he is not a professional journalist. Jean Boussier, a Shopify employee on Rails Core, replied in "Dear Rubyists: Shopify Isn't Your Enemy." Read both. DHH had already described this shape of takeover as crazy when WordPress did it. He applauded it when Ruby Central did it.

On 17 October 2025 Ruby Central said the Ruby core team had taken ownership of the RubyGems and Bundler repositories, and that Ruby Central would keep operating rubygems.org and share governance. That announcement came after the September removal of the existing maintainers.

Tekin Süleyman's "The Ruby community has a DHH problem," 19 September 2025, asks the Rails Core team, Ruby Central, and Matz to say that the posts are not the community's. A 2014 lightning talk by Tom Stuart, also called "The DHH problem," made a narrower version of the same request, years before the political blog: listen to him, and do not let him speak for Ruby. Jeff Atwood had already written, in 2008, that the through-line of DHH's public arguments was the pleasure of putting other people down. The 2025 posts are specific. The habit of being certain, and of enjoying it, is older than Omarchy.

Shopify, on the core team

Tobi Lütke is chief executive of Shopify, a founding patron of Omacom, and listed on Omarchy Core. He is an immigrant to Canada. His company's number-two executive is a separate fact, and it belongs on this page because the company is on the masthead.

Kaz Nejatian, Shopify's chief operating officer, is a director of the True North Centre for Public Policy, the charity behind the Canadian right-wing site True North. He and Candice Malcolm, his spouse and True North's editor-in-chief, are among its largest donors. Malcolm told PressProgress in July 2024 that Nejatian has no role in day-to-day coverage and sits on the board as a "placeholder." Canadian charity law still makes directors responsible for the charity. In July 2024 True North published, then deleted, an interview between staffer Harrison Faulkner and Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys. PressProgress describes McInnes railing against immigrants, using racist caricatures, and defending the Proud Boys, a group Public Safety Canada lists as a terrorist entity. True North removed the interview after PressProgress asked about it. Shopify did not answer PressProgress's questions.

Lütke's own public line, reported earlier, is that "products are speech" and that Shopify is "pro-free speech." Journalist Rachel Gilmore has documented Shopify shops selling Nazi memorabilia, and Shopify processing payments for anti-LGBTQ merchants. She reported an internal note telling employees to hold the tension between opposing ideas or to discuss with their manager whether they could "continue to feel engaged." The acceptable-use policy on paper forbids hateful content. The shops Gilmore identified stayed up.

None of that is a quote from Lütke about London or about Romani people. It is the company whose chief executive helps set Omarchy's direction, and whose director wrote the posts in the sections above. The patron wall presents these men as a quality signal. The wall is accurate. It signals who considers the project a good use of a million dollars.

What the critics named it

After the pledges passed eight figures, the descriptions got blunt. Jürgen Geuter wrote that running Omarchy means joining a fascist project. Brennan Kenneth Brown's essay is titled "Normalized fascism in open source." A "Stop Omarchy" page calls it a political movement disguised as a Linux distribution. Matthew Garrett wrote that the project is incompatible with the goals of free software on the politics and, separately, that it is bad at the technical level. The Register's 17 September 2026 piece collects those reactions and notes that Hansson's immigration posts are part of why the money arrived.

Those are conclusions. The sentences they are conclusions about are further up this page, in his words, with the dates.