It mostly refers to a discussion -- now flagged, though there's no reason it should be, as it's perfectly within HN's community guidelines -- about an interview he had in the NYT recently ("Peter Thiel, Trump's Tech Pal, explains himself", or some variant thereof) in which he definitely soft-peddles, and attempts to district attention from the famous Billy Bush tape, in which the Grabber-in-Chief-Elect says, well, you know what:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378029
That's what I mean by "normalizing" -- "it's no big deal, what are all these people so uptight about?" -- that whole line.
As for "basic awareness of political history", I'm referring of course to events in the 1920s and early 1930s. With respect to which it is, in my view, really, really hard not to see close parallels (despite certain differences) with the current situation. Unless, that is, one spent one's formative intellectual years going out of one's way to not become aware of certain things.
