one of the least pleasant parts of running a conspicuously lefty online community of some sort is when someone who’s ostensibly all about empathy and kindness comes in looking for a fight
this happens in my discord a couple times a year. someone busts in and starts making garden variety political statements everyone agrees with, but reframing everyone’s agreement as dissent, light-heartedness as spite, and any further discussion of the topic as outright hostility. eventually they’ll declare the chat to be full of conservatives and storm out (or be banned), and then they will go on a farewell tour of the local internet and tell everyone your ostensibly progressive space is actually, like, super right wing so don’t be fooled!!
it’s worse, honestly, than when the nazis show up, because you can identify that right away. they never can hide it for one second. whereas these folks pass a sniff test and tend to wait a bit before they start harassing people. plus the nazis don’t go off and lie about your server: they come up with hilarious names for it like “the joe wintergreen transgender cult”
it’s not limited to discord, of course. i had someone on twitter photoshop a screenshot so that it showed me being transphobic. i had a real-life friend tell me i was racist for not thinking kylo ren should have died at the end of star wars. today’s person called a trans person a book burner for being uneasy with nazi roleplay. these were all to smoke bomb out of a situation where they’d done something they couldn’t justify. the thing of using the language of social justice/therapy/progressive movements to sanitise your own bad behaviour is super known now, but it never gets less insidious
luckily this is just my silly little discord we’re talking about so it doesn’t matter at all
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
stuff like this is why i don’t take people’s publicly-claimed politics at face value, sometimes people are fucking weird
personal favourite transgender cult
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