Back in 2013, when the Gauntlet was getting its start, we had a member who I had to chase out of the group. Back then, I wasn’t the leader of The Gauntlet, and so the main tools I had at my disposal were just straight up social antagonism. The reason this person had to go? They were wildly toxic from a political standpoint. They regularly demonized Muslims, regularly demonized liberals, told me to my face that my family would not be wrong to disown me for being gay, and more.
Now, at the time, this cat had a lot of sympathizers within the group (some of them are active in The Gauntlet to this day). They didn’t believe in his politics, but they thought it was wrong for me to hound him out. So, it was less a criticism of the substance of what I was saying, and more a criticism of my tactics.
Is this starting to sound familiar yet?
I continued to follow this person on social media, and they became more and more unhinged. Everything was a deep state conspiracy, President Obama was getting ready to take your guns, Hillary was a puppet of the Russians (ha!) and so forth. I didn’t pay attention long enough to see where he came down on Trump, but I have no doubt he is a red hat-wearing MAGA fuckface. I know he eventually moved to Israel because he wanted to get away from the tyranny of the Obama administration.
Anyway, whatever happened to that creep is unimportant. My point is this: today The Gauntlet is awesome, quite possibly one of the best online communities anywhere. I like to think my unwillingness to be accommodating to that dude’s proto-MAGA bullshit is part of the reason why. There were others, too. I weeded them all out, one by one, and then took a firm stand on our values as a community. As a result of this, I am very, very unpopular in the Houston gaming scene. There are a lot of people who have been nursing their wounds for years now, and to them, I am the fucking devil.
But I do not give a fuck.
I’m not here to make people feel better about their malignant, amoral politics. I’m here to help create a gaming space organized around principles of kindness, camaraderie, and mutual affection. And that is just all there is to it. Point blank. End of story.
The reason I’m putting all this out here today is I think about how awful our current political circumstances are–the absolute and utter debasement we have suffered the last couple of years–and I wish some of the people who criticized me back then for taking a hard position on right-wing fuckery had chosen to instead take the same position in different areas of their lives. (Note: This regret goes all the way back to 2010, when a lot of my liberal friends were softpedaling the Tea Party.)
As a fun aside, some of those same creeps who were so angry at how they had been treated by me in The Gauntlet ended up forming their own Houston-based RPG group. I encourage you to check it out: https://plus.google.com/communities/100733634801755782287
