The Group Chats That Changed America

Semafor, April 27, 2025, by Ben Smith (co-founder and editor-in-chief).

The claim

Private, encrypted, disappearing-message groups on Signal and WhatsApp — formed mostly from 2020 onward around Marc Andreessen — functioned as an invisible staging ground for opinion that later surfaced in public. Smith’s phrase for them is the one worth keeping: “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion.”

Named groups include “Build,” “Everything Is Fine” and “Chatham House.” Participants reported include Andreessen, Sriram Krishnan (a16z, later a White House AI advisor), Erik Torenberg (who founded Chatham House), Balaji Srinivasan, and at various points Mark Cuban, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson and Larry Summers.

The arc

They began as tech-focused problem-solving spaces during COVID, were initially centrist, shed their liberal participants around 2021, and by 2024 were operating as coordination hubs for pro-Trump sentiment and strategy. Smith reports the coalition fracturing afterward over economic disagreements, tariffs in particular.

Why it matters, and the caution

The mechanism is the point: a venue that is private, high-status, and self-deleting produces consensus without producing a record. Positions harden with no public trace of how, and then arrive downstream already formed. That is a genuinely new shape for elite opinion formation, and it is why the piece belongs in this wiki rather than in the news pile.

⚠️ Read with the obvious caveat. Reporting on disappearing messages depends on participants who chose to describe them, so the account is necessarily partial and interested. Smith is also a media figure writing about a group that had turned against media figures. Treat the structure as the finding and the narrative as contested.

Connections

• The anchor source for Memetic Supernova. The draft’s thesis — that ideas now detonate from small dense clusters rather than diffusing from broad ones — is exactly what “memetic upstream” describes.
• Connects to The Death of Discourse and Media Trust: if the real argument happens where there is no record, public discourse becomes a downstream performance of a settled position.
• The same Reddit thread Kyle saved (r/TrueReddit) is the discussion of this article; Semafor is the primary source and the one to cite.