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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ.

You do not know what you're talking about.

TheMotte is rationalist-adjacent because of our origins, but we (and especially the mod team) are not enforcing some kind of "rationalist consensus" on anything, least of all race and IQ. Hylnka was very open about his disdain for HBD and HBD posters. Most of the mods are also critical of it and HBD obsessives to varying degrees. What consensus were we trying to enforce?

A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee"

Hlynka said a lot of stuff that was rank bullshit.

and the fact that his ban was announced as a top level post without citing any specific rule-breaking comments would seem to suggest that whatever happened to justify his ban happened out of the public eye.

This was officially the post that finally earned him a permaban, but it was really an accumulation of posting over months and months, during which we repeatedly asked him to stop doing that (I mean, we literally told him "Please stop doing this or eventually we will have to permaban you and we really don't want to do that"!)

Is there an epic blowout in some mod's DMs that we never got to read?

No. He did argue with us in DMs, but it was not much different from what he was saying in public: that we should be quicker to ban people and we should especially ban the people he didn't like, and police the place up more. Meanwhile he'd continue aggressively attacking the people we weren't banning.

Conspiratorially he and the mods knew that the 2024 election might make him a public figure and target for "journalism"

That's, uh, quite a theory all right. I know of no such discussions among the mods, and if Hylnka has become a public figure under another name I am unaware of it. And of all the regular or former motteposters who might draw the Eye of Sauron on us, Hlynka wouldn't be in my top 10.