Yeah, you're right.

Could it be because of the history of radio and early electronics being full of inventors getting ripped off by unscrupulous parties...?

It's kind of alarming how much more enjoyable the less legal communities in the radio hobby are to spend time around.

If you walk around Defcon and keep an eye out for small clusters (2-3) of 40+ yr old white dudes who are loudly, intentionally bitching about something minor/tangential and chasing anyone remotely interesting away from the area by their mere presence..... 100 times out of 10 they are hams.

The phone phreaks have their own quirks too, but it's usually just being smelly and/or chomos. But also that's a tiny percentage. They're way more chill.

Lockpicking is the best village. Honorable mentions to car/hardware hacking and biohacking villages.

yeah

It's not even just a pro-trump thing. That's not even the thing particularly annoying about hams because that's annoying across all of society. I can tolerate disagreeing with peoples opinions but not disagreeable/disharmonioous behavior.

Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny.

The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.