'Chatham House Rule'

Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of 2024,
naming it after a British think tank that formalized the insight that
trusted conversations require a degree of privacy.

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 #Shapiro and the Democratic analyst #David #Shor.

#Andreessen lurks.

But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with #Cuban most often in the center,
sparring with conservatives.

(“no idea what you are talking about :)” Cuban emailed in response to an inquiry about his arguments on Chatham House.)

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.

Both of those are now fading
(though Torenberg has invested in a company called #ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).

Since Elon Musk turned X to the right
and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack,
“a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman.

“It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”

And 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 #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.

By mid-April, #Sacks had had enough with Chatham House:
“This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,”
he wrote, shorthanding
“Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Then he addressed Torenberg:
“You should create a new one with just smart people.”

Signal soon showed that three men had left the group:
The Sequoia partner #Shaun #Maguire,
the bitcoin billionaire #Tyler #Winklevoss, and #Tucker #Carlson.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america

Stephen Wolfe grew up in Napa, California,
and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to
“do the Wendell Berry thing”
in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe”
and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.”

The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online.

He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure.

Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited.

Women would not be allowed to vote
—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed.

“I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy,
but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper,
suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.”

The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty,
so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé:
“I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity,
or Judeo-Christian worldview,
or Judeo-Christian whatever,
and really eradicate that from our thinking.

Because if we say that America is a
Judeo-Christian country,
then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

What role, I asked him, would Jews play?

After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech,
and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about
"America as a people".

The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.”

America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness,
but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.”

Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America
—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all,
but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him.

“I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life,
and to seek to restore that,” he said.

“This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was"

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,”
Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot
“an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.”

WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted,

and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate.

As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.”

Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/theobros-jd-vance-christian-nationalism/