You would think that the last place for an outbreak of extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome would be a website devoted to knitting and crocheting. Well, these are not normal times and such a case of TDS to the extent that the Thought Crime of just expressing approval of President Donald Trump would be punished by banishment from the Ravelry website.
Here are their June 23 banishment rules, "New Policy: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration," in which although any type of Trump support is taboo, it is still okay to declare yourself to be a Bolshevik or to support Elizabeth Warren for president:
We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.
This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. If you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.
We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.
So Ravelry is calling about half of America white supremacists for supporting Trump. The good news is you can still knit socks with red hammer and sickle patterns.
Here is the Ravelry policy details in which they attempt to make themselves appear tolerant of political views but achieve the exact opposite:
- You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
- We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
- We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
- We are not banning people for past support.
- Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
- Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.
They are not endorsing Democrats but only any indication of support for Trump is banned. How "non-partisan" of them. Oh, and how big-hearted of Ravelry for not banning people showing their past support for Trump. Perhaps they believe such deplorables can be re-educated.
They are also encouraging a tattletale system to rat out anyone suspected of any hint of supporting Trump:
You can help by flagging any of the following items if they constitute support for Trump or his administration:
- Projects: Unacceptable projects will be provided to the member or made invisible to others.
- Patterns: Unacceptable patterns will be returned to drafts.
- Forum posts: right now, only posts written after Sunday, June 23rd at 8 AM Eastern
- Profiles: Please do not flag profiles yet if the only banned content is an avatar or avatars. There is not yet a flagging system for those.
Please hurry and develop a flagging system for avatars. My life will be in turmoil just knowing such avatars which somehow can be interpreted as indicating support for Trump in any way still exist on your knitting website. Oh, and can we understand that "right now" only posts written after June 23 at 8 AM Eastern means that you will retroactively ban such Trump supporting posts from before that time?
So who can we thank for coming up with these Big Brother ideas?
Much of this policy was first written by a roleplaying game site, not unlike Ravelry but for RPGs, named RPG.net. We thank them for their thoughtful work.
A "roleplaying game site?" We thank you for your inadvertent humor.
Of course, this embrace of Torquemada ethics by Ravelry has earned them quite a bit of well-deserved mockery on Twitter.
