He also used the word "triggered" in the Reddit comments in the way right wingers are wont to do, and then tried to play the "I'm not American, I don't understand how that word looks to you" card. Never mind that plenty of non-Americans know perfectly well how that looks.

No, it's far more likely he picked up that word and knew exactly how it was used because he's been hanging out in far right spaces.

The reddit account has a username with the number 88 in binary, which led some to speculate its a nazi (88 = HH = Heil H*tler) dogwhistle, to which Andy Yen says its his year of birth 1988. Kinda weird, but he could just be that clueless, who knows

I mean this part I give him a pass on. It was right for people reading him to raise an eyebrow, because political signalling like that does happen, especially in a context where he's making comments like he made. But in this case it was just a nothingburger.

It doesn't make his "wasn't intended to be a political comment" excuse any less gibberish though.

We unfortunately live in the world where saying "Trump is an idiot" and "Actually I was kidding. He's the second coming of Christ" might only be a day apart.

The whole 88 thing is not generally know except probably in Germany and the US.

He is an idiot yes, but the internet is also making it seem like if you agree with one statement you agree with all statements of that person/party which is just wrong.

Always use your own domain on Proton and others. The laws in Germany aren’t as friendly as the one in Swiss so that can be causing issues as well.

https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

Thanks for the link, that's a lot more context than the usual reactionary "Andy Yen said one nice thing about a Republican therefore he's fascist pro-Trump MAGA" takes I've been seeing. Not only does it more or less disprove that narrative, it makes me question how much of the hate against him lately is genuine and how much of it has been seeded and signal-boosted by nation-state actors who don't want people to use encrypted communications.

Yen is clearly trying to be nonpartisan and praise what he sees as good for privacy while pointing out abuses of power, regardless of who has the power at the moment. He sees this as his way of adding weight to the scale in favor of better privacy and tearing down big tech. I know many in my country and on the web are hyper-polarized and addicted to anger, to the point that if someone says anything even slightly positive about their perceived political enemy, it's seen as legitimizing and aligning with that enemy, but I don't believe that's a healthy or productive mindset to have. I believe that kind of divisive attitude is preventing us from uniting with those who should be agreeable to our cause, and that's exactly what the oligarchs want. It's making us weak.

I've been on the fence for a while since this whole thing started, because I do use a paid Proton email, and it sounded bad, but I kept getting this nagging feeling I wasn't seeing the full picture. That's gone now - Andy may be politically and/or socially inept, and he may have a different perspective on what it means to support privacy and democracy, but I think it's clear his heart is in the right place, and the work he and Proton are continuing to do for tech privacy is helping to erode authoritarian power structures, including Trump's.