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CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

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Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone verify that he actually has a "Jewish mother?"

Claiming to have a Jewish mother (and thus being considered Jewish by pretty much everyone else, regardless of how you self-identify) does it for me. You call yourself a Jew? You're welcome. There are way more people shunning their Jewish identity, but I've never met someone pretending to be Jewish.

Me neither, but I've also never met someone with this much incentive to play the card..

Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait... so you expect people to walk around with a giant billboard on their chest reading "I used to be in the KKK"? It's one thing for a person to atone for their mistakes. ...it's another more sinister thing to demand that they apologize to everyone perpetually . I find these demands for public apologies disgusting in their own right. All these social media types demanding that they deserve an apology for someone e…

He's been lying. He practically wrote a book about it and lied about that part. You invented the part about forced apologies - I didn't say that.

Not writing about a 2? year period that happened 32 years ago isn't lying.

Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#244

I know two people who took jobs at Banjo. Both of them quit within months because the place was so incredibly toxic. Second hand info, so take with a grain of salt: The CEO tries to run the company like a personality cult. Everyone was expected to be available 24/7 to respond to his demands. He liked to demand things on Friday night, weekends, or holidays to test people's loyalty. My friend was told he had to schedul…

NDAs don’t really stop bad reviews online in my experience. Good luck tying them to any real person with some foresight.

If the stuff about the banjo ceo still being a bad person is true, then he deserves all that’s coming, but if it’s not and it’s just competitors or people with a personal bone to pick pilling on with fake stories then I actually feel sorry for the guy.

People deserve second chances. Particularly for the stuff they do before their brain fully develops at 25 or so.

If he ran away from a highly traumatic home at 15 and ended up with the wrong crowd until he matured, then broke all contact with them, reformed and never showed antisocial behavior again, for the next 20+ years. Instead become a contributing member of society to the point of managing a seemingly successful startup launch. If that’s the guy’s actual story then he truly deserves a second chance from society.

Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#245

I know two people who took jobs at Banjo. Both of them quit within months because the place was so incredibly toxic. Second hand info, so take with a grain of salt: The CEO tries to run the company like a personality cult. Everyone was expected to be available 24/7 to respond to his demands. He liked to demand things on Friday night, weekends, or holidays to test people's loyalty. My friend was told he had to schedul…

i'm a reporter on the team that broke this story, if you don't mind passing along my email to those people: dave@medium.com. much appreciated, and sorry to barge in on your comment.

I'll pass it along, but I don't think they're interested in going on the record against their former employer given the circumstances.

I'm sure you're already on top of it, but it's not hard to find similar stories on social media:

Former employee on Damien's excessive labor tactics: https://twitter.com/LAtweets22/status/1255225658298507265?s=...

Another former employee with who is gathering e-mails and texts from her time at the company: https://twitter.com/djlilelle/status/1255156543017762816?s=2...

Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#246

I know two people who took jobs at Banjo. Both of them quit within months because the place was so incredibly toxic. Second hand info, so take with a grain of salt: The CEO tries to run the company like a personality cult. Everyone was expected to be available 24/7 to respond to his demands. He liked to demand things on Friday night, weekends, or holidays to test people's loyalty. My friend was told he had to schedul…

NDAs don’t really stop bad reviews online in my experience. Good luck tying them to any real person with some foresight. If the stuff about the banjo ceo still being a bad person is true, then he deserves all that’s coming, but if it’s not and it’s just competitors or people with a personal bone to pick pilling on with fake stories then I actually feel sorry for the guy. People deserve second chances. Particularly fo…

> People deserve second chances. Particularly for the stuff they do before their brain fully develops at 25 or so.

I agree about second chances, but with limits.

This guy is the CEO of a surveillance company with government contracts to collect people's data, including relationships with police departments and other sensitive sources. If he has a hidden past with the KKK, including being part of an attempted murder (they shot into a synagogue, hard to believe that wouldn't be considered terrorism these days), then how many other people have photos of him with the KKK? His situation is the definition of being compromised.

When someone has this much compromising info combined with government-related positions and access to people's sensitive data, that compromising history is a massive risk for extortion. It would be one thing if he had previously admitted his actions and publicly apologized, but instead he waited until the information surfaced.

Does he deserve a second chance for actions committed when he was young? Sure. Does he deserve lucrative government contracts that give him privileged access to people's sensitive data? No, I don't think so.

Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#247
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets be clear, he showed remorse once he was caught, but none before then. What dues did he pay? He appears to have moved on from that stage of his life fairly quickly, and appears to never have been rejected employment/housing via background checks due to a technicality. There are men on death row who committed the exact same crime. I disagree with your second paragraph entirely. I do not want to live in a society w…

> There are men on death row who committed the exact same crime. [citation needed]. There are very few crimes eligible for capital punishment in the United States, and neither juvenile delinquency nor property damage are among them, even if ethnically motivated and/or involving a firearm. > I do not want to live in a society where CEOs of multimillion dollar companies have indiscriminately shot up places of worship w…

> [citation needed] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_and_the_death_pe.... There are quite a few under-18 cases.

> "the pursuit of happiness" (one of the three inalienable rights upon which my country was founded)

inalienable rights are, by definition, forfeitable in the cases where one's actions violate another person's or group's inalienable rights. Shooting up a synagogue qualifies as one such action.

> simply because they were victims of white supremacist grooming/brainwashing.

"These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal."[1] Once again, let me state that I find it incredible that many people such as yourself believe that the CEO of a multimillion dollar company, who participated in a violent hate crime and avoided the consequences of his actions due to a sympathetic court and typo, is the victim in this whole affair.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vincent_Chin

Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check this out dave https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14783521

You're absolutely correct about the info both of your friends shared. I know because I was a Banjo employee myself (3+ years), before Damien step foot in Utah (during a company party, he told us while casually chatting that he gave his wife a budget of $3m to find a new house - they lived in Vegas at the time). During my time there, Banjo was building a team in Vegas, NV and Redwood City, CA. He is a workaholic. This…

> He is a workaholic. This would not be a problem, if he did not identify with Banjo (literally) and expect everyone else to work on his schedule (most weekends included, since he has no life).

Yes, this is exactly what I was told.

Strangely, one of my friends was recruited with promises of work/life balance and plenty of vacation time. Then they were asked to work non-stop, weekdays and weekends, as soon as they started.

Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#249
Yes, people deserve second chances. No, they can't become C.E.O.'s because C.E.O.'s are effectively unelected government officials of the United States and the same criterion that says it's a bad idea to let him run for president means it's a bad idea to have him continue being C.E.O.. It's not like "bad man become good and pays back debt to society as a small-time business owner" because of the power differential. Interesting story though.

But if you deny people second-chances, then said criminals have no incentive to make amends. If they cannot make amends due to it being absurd, then society should be prepared to reduce them to menial slavery... because that's the only other way to prevent them from continuing the bad behavior (given that society made it impossible for him to move on from the past).

I have discovered that there are exactly three objectively unforgivable offenses:

1. Inducing another human to despair thereby depriving him of a right to a future.

2. Accusation with the intent of marring another human's soul with eternal guilt.

3. The deliberate and intentional reduction of another human being to slavery.

Notice that being a murderer isn't one of them.

Re: CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You might be surprised, but the vast majority of law enforcement officers and soldiers are not, at all, racist. Both have substantial ties to white nationalism, and neither have a reputation for helping people move past such racist views. Everyone involved doesn't need to be racist, somebody that already has connections to the KKK would find plenty of like minds.

From the article: > On the evening of June 9, 1990 — a month before Patton turned 18 — Patton and a Klan leader took a semi-automatic TEC-9 pistol and drove to a synagogue in a Nashville suburb. With Patton at the wheel, the Ku Klux Klan member fired onto the synagogue, destroying a street-facing window and spraying bullets and shattered glass near the building’s administrative offices, which were next to that of the…

>>He would have been tried as an adult and put in jail for a long time.

Do you have evidence for this allegation of systemic racism?

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