Gatekeeping
24 January 2021 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dime_novel_heroThe Twitter thread went something like this: A guy walks into a bar and is immediately chased out. A patron asks the bartender why and the bartender explains that the guy’s vest had “Nazi shit.”
“You have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend.”
He explains that if you don’t stop the first guy, more of his friends show up and eventually the Nazis have taken over.
This is not a new thing. The working class, ska “skinheads” of the late 1960s had their fashion and their name taken over by neo-Nazis by the 1980s.
In the Society for Creative Anachronisms in 2018, the king and queen of the west coast Kingdom of Caid wore swastikas on their coronation rainments. While they claimed that the swastika was medievally period (true), it was clear that they were intentionally defying SCA policy in an attempt to normalize the symbol for their own alt-right agenda.
LARPing and Ren fairs have an ongoing infiltration by the alt-right.
And lest you think there is something inherent in groups that have Vikings and Crusaders, both of which have had their historical symbolism appropriated by Nazis, My Little Pony fandom also has had to deal with an infiltration of white supremacists.
My Little Pony.
The reason being, as the bartender observed; once you let one of them into your community, he invites his friends. And then more. It’s not necessarily any sort of deep conspiracy or page one of the fascism playbook, it’s really just the way that out-groups normalize their presence in a culture or sub-culture.
I had been involved in multiple fandoms over decades when I fell into the steampunk community. I quickly saw steampunk to be the most diverse of any of the fandoms I had ever been in. More women, more minorities, more varied gender identities, and more inclusive and welcoming of those because, being a new fandom, it started out that way rather than having to rebuild itself from an old guard.
Even then, at one of my first conventions, was the guy who showed up in his full SS Stormtrooper gear.
So, when I act on behalf of the several forums on which I am an admin, I take my role as gatekeeper seriously. When people want to become members of the group, I check out their Internet presence and if I see them to be some flavor of fascist, I deny their request. If they are already members of the group and get involved in alt-right apologetics, they get dropped. My applications of filters at the beginning means that I don’t have to deal with them later and, again like the bartender observed, once they have a foothold, they are much more difficult to deal with. I have been in several other forums (such as Steampunk Revolution) that have not taken action and so, when members start actually spouting Nazi or slavery apologetics, it’s people like me who loudly call them out on it that are targeted as rabble-rousers and sanctioned.
So here we stand at the end of a fascistic administration ending in a failed coup attempt. This is not hyperbole, this is what was going on. And even though it failed, the people who wanted it to happen, those who believed they would benefit most from it’s happening, are still out there. As they have done time and again throughout American history, they will regroup, reorganize, adapt, and pushback. They and their kind will be back looking for a new home and I, for one, will still be here to hold the gateway.
“You have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend.”
He explains that if you don’t stop the first guy, more of his friends show up and eventually the Nazis have taken over.
This is not a new thing. The working class, ska “skinheads” of the late 1960s had their fashion and their name taken over by neo-Nazis by the 1980s.
In the Society for Creative Anachronisms in 2018, the king and queen of the west coast Kingdom of Caid wore swastikas on their coronation rainments. While they claimed that the swastika was medievally period (true), it was clear that they were intentionally defying SCA policy in an attempt to normalize the symbol for their own alt-right agenda.
LARPing and Ren fairs have an ongoing infiltration by the alt-right.
And lest you think there is something inherent in groups that have Vikings and Crusaders, both of which have had their historical symbolism appropriated by Nazis, My Little Pony fandom also has had to deal with an infiltration of white supremacists.
My Little Pony.
The reason being, as the bartender observed; once you let one of them into your community, he invites his friends. And then more. It’s not necessarily any sort of deep conspiracy or page one of the fascism playbook, it’s really just the way that out-groups normalize their presence in a culture or sub-culture.
I had been involved in multiple fandoms over decades when I fell into the steampunk community. I quickly saw steampunk to be the most diverse of any of the fandoms I had ever been in. More women, more minorities, more varied gender identities, and more inclusive and welcoming of those because, being a new fandom, it started out that way rather than having to rebuild itself from an old guard.
Even then, at one of my first conventions, was the guy who showed up in his full SS Stormtrooper gear.
So, when I act on behalf of the several forums on which I am an admin, I take my role as gatekeeper seriously. When people want to become members of the group, I check out their Internet presence and if I see them to be some flavor of fascist, I deny their request. If they are already members of the group and get involved in alt-right apologetics, they get dropped. My applications of filters at the beginning means that I don’t have to deal with them later and, again like the bartender observed, once they have a foothold, they are much more difficult to deal with. I have been in several other forums (such as Steampunk Revolution) that have not taken action and so, when members start actually spouting Nazi or slavery apologetics, it’s people like me who loudly call them out on it that are targeted as rabble-rousers and sanctioned.
So here we stand at the end of a fascistic administration ending in a failed coup attempt. This is not hyperbole, this is what was going on. And even though it failed, the people who wanted it to happen, those who believed they would benefit most from it’s happening, are still out there. As they have done time and again throughout American history, they will regroup, reorganize, adapt, and pushback. They and their kind will be back looking for a new home and I, for one, will still be here to hold the gateway.
