There’s the part of me that rolls my eyes at the headline. Not at the fact that “bronie” culture has a major white supremacy problem, because it most certainly does, but just… take me back 15 years, and this would have been a perfect headline for The Onion. And I think, to an extent, it’s easy to overlook how pervasive and dangerous this all is. It’s easy to look at MLP fanboys and be dismissive: at best, they’re harmless goofs that you know. To each their own when it comes to fandom, and I’m not going to judge. At worst, they’re “living in their mom’s basement”, just obnoxious trolls to be ignored.
“Beautiful,” one user responded to the image. “Perfect for subtle messaging.”
There it is. The bottom drops out and it’s not just the obnoxious trolls, it’s a propaganda machine. The basement dwelling racist isn’t the Problem-with-a-capital-P, but it’s the actual card carrying Klan member who is taking their Tiki torches, polo shirts, and khaki pants to the streets. They know who they are trying to reach. If their message rankles us, gets us to engage, then they’ve “triggered another snowflake”, and tell us it’s not racist and we just need to “take a joke”. They also know they’re just as apt to be ignored by us. Either way it’s the same net result.
So, who isn’t ignoring these messages? Obviously their compatriots, but also individuals who are vulnerable to radicalization, or younger fans who are perfect targets for indoctrination.
It really needs to come down to communities, especially larger ones, to step up and point out “we aren’t the government, the first amendment does not apply here” and start to go to town with the Banhammer. Don’t appease, don’t be wishy-washy. If you try to argue “they’ll just set up shop somewhere else” then let them. Keep forcing them out of spaces.
In an email, the owners told me that the presence of white nationalists in the My Little Pony fandom is “unfortunate.” They insisted that they have always tried “to act against content [that] displays genuine racist intent on behalf of the poster,” adding “we have not always been as strict as we would have liked to be.” They also clarified that the removed images would be gone only temporarily, because of the moderation headache the images have been causing. They will later be restored to the site, the owners said, “as an artifact of the moment.”
Derpibooru’s stance is weak. It’s akin to saying, “well, those Confederate statues might be historically important so we better keep them up.” We can learn from other sources the historical facts of the Civil War. We can learn from other sources the historical facts about the BLM protests. We don’t need “artifacts of the moment”, we need to stamp out white supremacy wherever it’s found.
:smiling face with heart-eyes: About damn time! :smiling face with heart-eyes: