ResetERA is a widely popular online video-gaming forum created as an offshoot of NeoGAF in light of the NeoGAF site founder Evilore’s sexual harassment. A majority of members of the old NeoGAF community moved to the ResetERA community and, as a result, a variety of the subcultures from the old forum moved with them. One of those communities, PoliGAF, presently known as PoliERA, has been used as a platform for the targeted harassment and abuse of various members of the broader ResetERA community due primarily to their positions of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as well as broader issues with regards to their support of US President Joe Biden. This activity has been taking place primarily on their official public-facing Discord, which is accessible by a non-expiring invite link in their official ResetERA thread. In addition, they maintain a second, invitation-only Discord in which they can discuss with more privacy, known as Infrastructure Forever. They have multiple times admitted to organizing campaigns specifically to silence their opposition, including a suggestion by one member to weaponize the FBI against a black queer ERA moderator they consider to be their political enemy, amongst other calls to report ERA to the ADL, news outlets, law enforcement and the parent company of the site. Their campaign against this moderator has become something more akin to a transphobic hate campaign than any particular political opposition. In addition to this, they have floated antisemitic conspiracy theories about a Jewish member who supports Palestine, and have targeted other users for their political beliefs. Furthermore, they have become a safe-haven for genocide denial, not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is a community that supports, endorses, and enables such people to harass minorities due to their political views– and while only one or two dozen people at a time are engaged in harassment, they do this openly in front of a community of hundreds and receive little to no pushback. Frequently any little dissent that occurs is quickly eliminated through bans from the server.

This document covers the behavior of this group in its totality as thoroughly as possible, to expose said behavior to the broader ERA community and the Internet at large. We believe that it is a matter of personal safety for the broader community to know who they are, what they believe and what they are willing to do to anyone who stands in opposition to those beliefs. We understand that screenshots can be misleading, so out of an abundance of caution, archives have been taken of the relevant Discords for the purposes of corroboration by trusted parties.

Targeted Harassment

NEPENTHE

Background--Inciting Event

PoliERA members have been agitating against ERA administrator Nepenthe for a significant length of time, going back months. This came to a head when prominent PoliERA user BradytheGOAT received a month-long ban for misrepresenting a UN report on sexual violence in Palestine, provided for reader verification of what activities could be verified by the UN:

While there are surely going to be disagreements from some readers of this document on the validity of the ban, the ban itself is presented first and foremost as an instigating factor.

In retaliation for this, a PoliERA member posted a message from moderator Nepenthe’s Twitter account, which was neither affiliated with ERA nor provided to the forum at any point for public viewing, without censoring their information:

This post has since been deleted, as has the Twitter account in question. This PoliERA poster, Treble, has been commenting on US PoliERA OTs (official threads) going back to 2018. This poster has been frequently active.

While Treble does not appear to be a member of the PoliERA server, the poster has come to their attention and been celebrated for their posts attacked Nepenthe previously:

The tweets were presented deceptively, as this was part of a longer reply chain between Nepenthe and another user.

The user who posted this tweet chain without context was permanently banned. Posters on the PoliERA Discord would go on to celebrate this act and insist that the poster who did this deserved a memorial:

Additionally, they responded to the closure of her Twitter account in real time, deriding her as a coward for taking steps to ensure her own safety:

Despite going private, they would also continue to post screens of the account and tweets in question, as well as suggesting others continue to post them on ERA:

Indeed.

ERA moderators have occasionally been public about the fact that they have received significant off-site harassment and attempts to doxx them, and digging up their unrelated accounts is a major risk to their safety. PoliERA members have since been agitating for the reversal of bans and the removal of Nepenthe as an ERA moderator, making implicit statements that the removal of the tweet was ineffective at concealing her privacy:

User CreepingFear in particular would go on to admit to using harassment site KiwiFarms, which has targeted ERA moderators in the past, to continue their “investigation” of Nepenthe. They were permanently banned from ERA for this. Their post prompted the collection of evidence that would go on to become this document.

CreepingFear made sure to post about their banning to the PoliERA discord as soon as it happened:

Note the immediate comment of user Pwnzington:

CreepingFear responds:

As an attempted deflection, CreepingFear posts a screenshot of an earlier post confirming that they had indeed looked through a KiwiFarms post, an assertion that will go on to contradict their later claims:

Eventually, ResetERA administrator B-Dubs would confirm awareness of what should by now be evident:

PoliERA Discord user Addie would announce support of continued use of Nepenthe’s screenshotted Twitter content:

In connection with the tweet thread Nepenthe posted, users of conservative harassment site TheBore would go on to fully doxx Nepenthe and post photos in front of her house.

In response to the news from Nepenthe that she filed a police report regarding this invasion of her privacy, the PoliERA Discord responded with reactions expressing satisfaction at this turn of events:

Over time the number of reacts would increase:

Note TopJeb’s deletion of the post laughing at her that was seen in the prior screenshot.

Another user, BradTheJeb, made light of the police report post while tying it to Nepenthe’s participation in the furry subculture.

A Pattern of Abuse

Nepenthe originally engaged with the PoliERA community on their original Discord (which they would repurpose into the private Infrastructure Forever) but was removed by them due to political disagreements. The PoliERA community haven’t really liked her since:

While they have always been hostile to her, she particularly agitated the community starting on November 27 of 2023 when discussing the Israeli campaign on Gaza:

This initial post was followed up with clarification posts after she was accused of antisemitism:

From this point on, members of the PoliERA Discord would heighten their criticism into an obsession.

In the above, user Punditry Delenda Est (ERA username Funky Dude Sparkster) can be seen writing several messages over multiple weeks about Nepenthe, despite not being able to properly spell her username.

Over the month of February, user TheLostBigBoss made multiple bizarre statements disparaging Nepenthe for participating in the furry community and tying that disparagingly to her position on Israel-Palestine:

On January 16th, user Zacky expresses the desire to see the campaign against Nepenthe escalate:

A sentiment he shared again on January 21st:

This was again front of mind for Zacky in the midst of Nepenthe’s doxxing:

On February 27th, Zacky described Nepenthe as reliant on the power of her administrative role to present her positions on any given topic. This post also insinuates user Thordinson, another figure of PoliERA’s ongoing obsession, that we will further address later in the document. Zacky would later go on to be one of the major figures inciting further harassment against Nepenthe in the days leading up to her doxxing.

Her position publicly in support of US Airman Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation at the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC garnered condemnation and led PoliERA Discord user Parkscope Joe (ERA name Theme Park Joe) to suggest that she herself should commit suicide, to the agreement of at least one other poster, demonstrating a complete disregard for her safety and her life that will become more apparent as we proceed:

On February 13, 2024, BradytheGOAT posted, requesting that someone draw Nepenthe into “going too far and saying something that gets the FBI calling the company that owns the site.”

Nepenthe is a queer black woman. Within the context of her Blackness, queerness, and radical politics, asking for someone to bait her into being a target for the FBI is a clear request that someone put her in a situation that would be dangerous to her life. On February 26th, user Brad the Jeb further insinuated that Nepenthe wanted people to die due to her beliefs, a statement that was reacted to with wide agreement – rhetoric that makes it difficult to represent BradyTheGoat’s statement as 1) a joke or 2) not reflective of the PoliERA Discord’s broader beliefs:

This demonstrates a clear chain of escalation, leading up to the events of Thursday, March 7th.

During the Doxxing

The period between Nepenthe’s tweets being shared without her consent and her full doxxing, consisting of about a day, represented a period of heightened activity on the PoliERA Discord. The full extent of their obsessive behavior began coming into view at this point. It was at this particular point that CreepingFear acknowledged utilizing KiwiFarms. In addition, some of the previously-mentioned posters escalated their behavior towards Nepenthe.

Previously-mentioned ERA poster Funky Dude Sparks began insinuating over multiple posts that Nepenthe was capable of violent acts, with the broad agreement of other PoliERA Discord members.

He would go so far as to insinuate, without any evidence, that Nepenthe is collecting guns:

It is worth holding these posts in mind, as the PoliERA community will later maintain that the post seeking to find recourse to report her to the FBI was not serious:

Presumably this just happens to be one of those running gags.

Besides these posts, Funky Dude Sparks made various extremely racist posts and one creepily sexist post about Nepenthe:

He even went so far as to outright describe her as a Nazi:

Parkscope Joe, the user who opined on her suicide as noted earlier, also began adding to the strange conflation with participating in the furry community around this time:

(Brief aside for completeness, the “parkscope joe” username can be tied to ERA user Theme Park Joe through this post:)

At this point, it bears noting the resemblance this sustained behavior has with the fixation that sites like 4chan, KiwiFarms, and TheBore have when they target individuals who happen to participate in the furry subculture.

User Zacky makes a series of posts throughout this period psychoanalyzing Nepenthe and making claims about her state of mind based on her position on Israel-Palestine:

Zacky acknowledges the non-consensual release of the tweet, but – and this is notable, particularly since TheBore had yet to actually post evidence of their doxxing of her via a photo of her home – compares the act of “doxxing” to releasing a politician’s private views publicly:

In doing this, Zacky is effectively arguing that Nepenthe represents a public individual and that a non-consensual release of her information is the same as exposing her, which is an argument that suggests she is not owed the right to privacy. Beginning to mount this justification before this escalates into her doxxing is worth highlighting, particularly because Zacky’s response after CreepingFear’s KiwiFarms post got acknowledged by ERA moderation is rather particular:

It is worth recognizing, however, that Zacky was not the only PoliERA Discord poster who responded in a similar manner:

User Pwnzington additionally referred to Nepenthe as an “it” during this period and ties this to her furry identity.

Reporting ERA

During this time, PoliERA posters made a point of trying to report ResetERA as a forum to as many organizations as they could, with the intent of connecting Nepenthe’s personal views on Israel to paint ERA’s broader personal views as problematic. Initially, user Midnight Jon floated the idea that only force of law would change what they interpreted to be ResetERA administrator B-Dubs’ position on current moderation policy on topics of importance to them:

Throughout this period, more users confirmed their own contact of various agencies relating to Israel-Palestine:

MEKANOS

ResetERA user Mekanos is an American Jew. On January 7th, 2024, he made clear his rejection of the state of Israel’s criminal actions as a Jew, his belief in other young Jews beginning to share this opinion after greater awareness regarding the state’s actions against Palestine, and explained how he felt that conviction amongst the younger cohort of American Jews was deemed to be irrelevant to current US President Joe Biden:

Mekanos further elaborated why he believed many Jews still supported Israel in this conflict with personal anecdotes about the resulting tension:

On January 9th, Mekanos argued against a user connecting an increase of awareness of the Israel-Palestine conflict with a diminishing of the Russia-Ukraine conflict:

While Mekanos would go on to make other posts condemning the actions of the state of Israel, it seems that these are the primary posts that would bring Mekanos onto their radar. Starting on January 13th, posts about Mekanos began to become more and more frequent. To begin, replying to a post wondering if ERA administrators had cleared their policy on Israel-Palestine discussion with their Jewish members, PoliERA Discord User Cat Dad replied by insinuating that Mekanos was responsible for what they considered to be the current policy.

It should go without saying that there is a rich irony present in self-styled defenders against antisemitism insinuating that a Jewish man is pulling the strings on current forum administration, reminiscent of a common antisemitic trope. It should go without saying, but it seems if someone said it to Cat Dad, they weren’t listening.

On January 21st, another post was made about Mekanos. This one is rather remarkable, for a number of reasons. PoliERA user Zacky is describing (in what will be further detailed later on in this document) his desire to make a thread about how ERA has become antisemitic after October 7th, with Sirpopopop responding by invoking Mekanos’ name in a frankly arresting way:

Sirpopopop decides to use Mekanos’ name not only as though it were a slur against him personally, but as a euphemistic pejorative for any person of Jewish descent in the world who opposes the state of Israel. In response, Zacky expresses that Jewish people would be less willing to call out another Jew for statements he thinks they otherwise would be called out for.

Let’s not beat around the bush. A little over a week after getting on the PoliERA Discord’s radar, the Discord felt comfortable not only insinuating that Mekanos was a self-hating Jew, but used his name casually as a stand-in for anyone they wish to label as such. The genuine contempt on display for a Jewish adult who disagreed with their stance on the subject of Israel-Palestine took less than two weeks to begin to show.

Mekanos’ name was raised again on 24th January, this time with the claim he is “supporting anti-Semitic statements”:

On February 9th, Mekanos received a ban from the ResetERA Administration. That same day, PoliERA Discord user Brad the Dead made this post:

Now they’re comparing an adult Jew to a dog, one who’s leash is held by ERA moderation, of all things. That’s how you can tell they’re serious about antisemitism; Mekanos is both the mastermind who gives administration the OK to enact policies they don’t agree with, and a pet that must obey its master, simultaneously.

The same day, Cat Dad begins articulating a plan that they feel can be discussed now that Mekanos has, in their eyes, been removed from the picture:

The full particulars of the event will be discussed further in the section covering the PoliERA Discord’s various attempts to control and manipulate site discourse. For now, let’s just reveal who agreed with these reacts and move on:

A day after his banning, Funky Dude Sparks made sure to invalidate Mekanos’ perspective as a Jew while fantasizing about the kind of conversation he wanted Jews to have on ERA, speaking as a Gentile:

As if to confirm that the “Jewish mastermind” trope was not confined to merely one PoliERA Discord poster, and to demonstrate that PoliERA could walk and chew gum at the same time, Funky Dude Sparks chose to reference the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Mekanos was controlling the moderators one more time during the controversy with Nepenthe:

THORDINSON

Thordinson is, like Mekanos, a regular poster with no administrative privileges. Unlike Mekanos, though, we decline to introduce Thordinson with any particular post or set of posts, as Thordinson has been a regular commenter in the PoliERA thread on ResetERA going back months, and has not received major administrative action on his account in over a year. Like all the posters contained in this list, he fell afoul of PoliERA primarily for his support of Palestine. The results are predictable:

Due to the fact that Thordinson has never been banned from posting in the PoliERA thread, there appears to be a certain amount of controversy surrounding him. The by-word for this debate is whether or not Thordinson is truly engaging in discussion “in good faith”-- what that precisely means in their perception is not clear. However, the concept of good and bad faith comes primarily from philosophy, analyzed by the Romans to Jean-Paul Sartre (where he outlines “bad faith” as submitting to the will of society and surrendering one’s own freedoms and ability to form independent opinions in the process) and beyond. In general, though, bad faith discussion typically refers to situations where one’s beliefs and actions are in opposition to their publicly-stated opinions or words, either knowingly or as a symptom of self-deception. This should be kept in mind as this document proceeds, to determine the veracity of such claims and whether or not the accusations may instead be confessions.

There’s little to say regarding Zacky that hasn’t been said, except to note that at least five people believed this point of view was worth agreeing with. This also isn’t the first time a Zacky post mentioned Thordinson in this document either. Less then a week later, this post already referenced in the Nepenthe section references Thordinson:

Even on the days leading up to their confrontation with Nepenthe, the debate seemed to rage on, making unverified claims of being protected by moderators on ERA, with the only evidence being a lack of a ban when they believed one is deserved:

Similar to Mekanos, posting activity referencing them increased in the immediate aftermath of Nepenthe’s banning, which seems to have quelled the debate – or specter of one, at any rate:

No evidence of this post being referenced has been found, incidentally.

Last but not least, PoliERA Discord member sunbaker decides to inject some kink-flavored homophobia into the conspiracies around outside control of ERA administration:

PoliERA Discord User Sirpopopop mentions Thordinson among a number of names he believes will be left once ERA administration, according to him, has unjustifiably purged PoliERA members from the forum:

HACHIKOMA

Hachikoma is a leftist trans activist. She is active on Twitter and was, at one point, present on their Discord; If you’re curious as to why a trans woman in the activist community might be interested in participating in the PoliERA Discord, their posts insisting that queer people should not support Palestinians because they’re all homophobes should be instructive:

(we reached out to hachikoma through Discord mutual friends and were provided this context from her time on the server)

As a result of her open leftism on the ERA forum and on her social media, she would intermittently receive harassment. In response to this harassment, she would occasionally joke on Twitter:

It should not need to be stated that “the soviet'' is not an extant political organization that exists to assign hachikoma the labor of spying on Discord servers associated with a video game forum in between shifts at her job doing trans-affirming legislative advocacy. Nevertheless, as a result of this post, she was removed from the PoliERA Discord. It is difficult to ascertain if her harasser, or his great uncle for that matter, were removed from the same. The next time she was banned on the forum, PoliERA Discord users were swift to pass on her Twitter posts to the administration as evidence of off-site harassment. Lo and behold, her ban status was upgraded to a permanent ban. If this seems like it would necessarily have to be idle speculation, that would only be the case if they did not openly brag about having done so in the immediate aftermath of them having harassed another queer woman:

Turning back the clock, on January 8th PoliERA user Brad the Jeb reflects on how good it felt to get hachikoma banned, and expounds upon the involved nature of the process:

Not to distract from the subject at hand, but referring to Thordinson as a cockroach isn’t great. Worse still, given the terms they would go on to use to describe Nepenthe, the use of the words “meltdown” and “ticking timebomb” to describe a trans woman who is also an activist is instructive.

In this post, PoliERA user Zacky celebrates and thanks administration for removing hachikoma:

In yet more rather disturbing evidence of their animus towards their enemies, Hachikoma’s discussion of owning a firearm has them comparing her to George Zimmerman:

As is by now standard, during Nepenthe’s banning they made sure to direct some of their wound-collecting activities in the direction of Hachikoma:

In this case, PoliERA Discord user Cat Dad is articulating the theory that, in fact, “the Soviet” was the likeliest culprit behind attempts to tell ResetERA moderators about their interaction with KiwiFarms. This was, however, not speculation unique to Nepenthe’s banning. In a surprise crossover, PoliERA user Theme Park Joe furthers the theory by interjecting it into the debate regarding Thordinson’s membership into the Discord – he would merely become another pawn of “the Soviet”:

If you couldn’t tell by now, the PoliERA Discord has a dynamic theory of leftism.

Connections to TheBore

So far, we have been content to merely establish a pattern of obsessive, harassing behavior coordinated in the PoliERA Discord against those to the left of their own ideologies who they see only as their enemies and opponents. However, it could hypothetically be presumed that they contributed no part to the mounting harassment campaign against Nepenthe which led to her doxxing, aside from a PoliERA poster who submitted her non-ERA Twitter account (and thus her personal life) on a public platform when they were likely aware that she had been harassed in the past. Maybe all the harassers merely passed by the perpetually-open Discord invite link at the top of the official thread where they were also complaining about Nepenthe’s antisemitism. That is unlikely, though. However, to repost:

It does not take twenty people to monitor a Discord as an admin team. But then, maybe PoliERA Discord member Pwnzington knew that, given the other places he admitted to hanging out in:

It turns out that, not only does Pwnzington know of TheBore, the site where Nepenthe would go on to be doxxed, he’s read enough of it to ascertain that TheBore actually really has a point when it comes to ResetERA, and they have a lot of common despite their disagreements. Wonder why they don’t like each other. Kind of a strange way to put it like that, really, and ironic, too, given that in a few hours TheBore would go on to post pictures of the front of Nepenthe’s house.

…Oh. And he thinks Nepenthe is worse than Tyler Malka. And at least pretends to be familiar with Nepenthe’s Twitter account. And mentioned that TheBore got excited the day before she got doxxed, as though they read the site frequently enough to know their day-to-day actions and feelings...

… but as it turns out, he has an account there, using the same name as on ResetERA.

“But it could be a coincidence,” some of you might think, “an anomaly”. Our avid TheBore-reading friend here who called Nepenthe an “it” and thinks she’s worse than NeoGAF site founder Evilore could just have been a lurker who never got in touch, never really cut loose.

Well, he’s got enough experience talking there to have particular advice for not getting in trouble and fitting in with the culture. Also, he’s not the only poster in there willing to equivocate the discourse on ResetERA with discourse on TheBore, like PoliERA Discord user milos_dad (ResetERA username DeathbyVolcano):

“But that’s not good enough”, some others might think. No, what is needed is proof. Some sort of defense of TheBore as a site, maybe, or even a specific reference to particular users of that forum.

Up until now, we have been sourcing Discord messages from one of PoliERA’s multiple Discords from which they coordinate behavior. It has only been necessary to, even though conversations regarding Nepenthe (and all others noted) happen across several. At this juncture, we will introduce Infrastructure Forever – initially PoliERA’s first official Discord, it was at some point set to invite-only. Since you not only have to be invited to this Discord, you also have to know that it exists, it serves as a place for some more veteran members of the PoliERA community to sit back and discuss.

This also means that it’s the place where a former ResetERA administrator mentioned they didn’t think all members of TheBore were crazy and mentioned two members by name they were friends with.

Reintroducing PoliERA user and Former ResetERA Administrator SirPopopop:

Connections To Former Site Administration

As part of a joke during this period, Sirpopopop and other users decided to change their names. In the public-facing Discord, and the public-facing Discord only. Lucky for us, we can keep his name straight throughout all this by connecting a post on Israel-Palestine he was too proud of not to share:

This, as well as use of the same profile picture across servers, confirms that PoliERA Discord user Sirjebro is, in fact, Former ResetERA Admin Sirpopop. Just because he occasionally uses a different name, though, that doesn’t mean he makes it any less clear who he was to anybody in the area:

Hate to give known conservatives banned from ERA some chum to circle around in all of this, but it is corroborating testimony of his role on the forum and he could have just refrained from mentioning it. Mistakes were made.

During Nepenthe’s harassment, Sirjebro was focused on the important things – validating the need to hunt for spies and infiltrators into their publicly accessible Discord they had a permanent invite open for:

Here we see the resurgence of espionage narratives surrounding hachikoma, as well as a tacit admission that the PoliERA Discord has had problems with TheBore members infiltrating before. What else does Sirjerbo bring to the table? Well, he likes to give personal details about his account of the life of the site founder who disaffiliated from the website and who, much like Nepenthe, was doxxed:

Or, knowing that he’s presented himself as a former ERA administrator with knowledge of the politics behind the scenes, egging on his audience by giving off-the-cuff personal interpretations of current moderation staff’s political leanings:

How about baselessly speculating that ResetERA administrators removed the rule conflating Israeli war crimes with Nazi war crimes when people have been banned for that in the time since October 7th, and state that they protected Hamas supporters?

How about doubling down on fanning the flames by giving descriptions on how moderators literally raged about not conflating Israel with Nazis?

Hell, that’s maybe a bit too indirect, buddy, let’s mix up some incitement – why don’t you tell them they’re correct to Report ERA to the ADL multiple times?

Hell, fanning the flames against the mods is a bit too narrow, why don’t you reinforce your community’s conspiracy theories about “the Soviet” and leftists more broadly?

How about telling a Jewish member they are being persecuted for their identity, with some help from the peanut gallery?

How about making off-the-cuff suggestions for who needs to go to “fix” the website?

That’s… weirdly specific and considered. Sirpopopop, you’ve given this some thought, haven’t you? Can’t help but notice two of those moderators are open leftists, and one of those admins is the trans woman that the site you have friends in is about to harass. Well, I’m sure that won’t come up later. But just in case it does, let’s have him confirm he was still around as administrator when Nepenthe first was picked up on the ResetERA team as moderator:

Next, we’ll take a brief divergence from the topic at hand to explore how PoliERA attempts to control site discourse.

Controlling Site Discourse

In the previous sections covering distinct instances of targeted harassment, we covered the time when a PoliERA Discord user proposed to use the banning of Mekanos as an opportunity to pursue a discussion on antisemitism.

However, leaving aside why they’d need to silence a Jewish man to make their points on antisemitism, as Zacky and Sirpopopop articulated, the Discord felt that they needed a Jewish poster to make the thread. The Jewish poster that ended up making the thread was ResetERA user Bor Gullet:

Their PoliERA Discord username is HulkBuster, which was confirmed via the post they used explaining why they used a picture of Watto, from the Phantom Menace, as their avatar to other PoliERA users:

The insinuation being made here is that all leftists associate Jewish people with the defaming Jewish tropes that have been associated with this particular fictional character. Charming.

Later on, Bor Gullet would take the opportunity presented by Nepenthe’s doxxing to expound on his views on what constitutes antisemitism regarding Israel-Palestine:

This post is notable in particular for its insistence that European Jews who colonized Israel, and understood their own process of settling the land as an act of colonization, were actually indigenous to the land. Because the Bible said so. And implicitly connects Palestine with intrusion and invasion through Hebrew linguistic roots. This post, in its fervor, knowingly erases Arab Jews from existence, exclaims that no Jews lived in what would become modern-day Israel until the ostensibly de-colonial movement of primarily European Jews settled the region, and declines to explain where and when the Palestinians arrived in the Levant if they were not indigenous to the land. It should also be pointed out for clarity that Palestinians are not descendents of the Romans or the Greeks– in fact, the latest genetic studies date back the bulk of their ancestry to the Levant where they reside today. Not that it matters; all that is important to know is that deviating from the post’s conception of history is deemed to be antisemitic. Meanwhile, Bor Gullet/HulkBuster forgives the general ERA population of their antisemitism, claiming it was imprinted upon them by the pervasive power of the far left.

Apparently, comparing Jewish people to kept pets or using them as a byword for all Jews who they perceive as thinking the wrong way is not antisemitic enough to mention.

We’ve seen the process take place on a strategic timescale. Let’s narrow it down to the tactical. In this ERA thread, banned ResetERA user Chindogg opines on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians:

Meanwhile, on their Discord:

They’re furious that a PoliERA Administrator Intervened while their prey was “hanging himself” on his own rhetoric.

Remember: if you don’t make specific care to point out that only some soldiers are committing theft and murder on camera, you are clearly intentionally filled with the conviction that the whole country is doing genocide TikToks. The verdict: inoperable antisemitism.

How does this interlude conclude? Well, banned ResetERA Member Chindogg got banned. Not much story content in this one. But the team at the PoliERA Discord knows who really pressed the ban button, and can’t help but opine about “the majority” being in their favor, as though that’s historically always been a sign of being on the right side of history:

This is a healthy relationship to have with moderation. It will not lead to any abuse of a minority in a few hours. There’s not an admitted TheBore member interjecting between your praises for this righteous crusade.

Everything’s fine.

Apologies for the sarcasm poisoning there. This is only an illustrative example of the many ways that the PoliERA Discord chooses to pursue ideological hegemony. As we’ve learned with Nepenthe, the pursuit of that goal has little support for the feelings or safety of minorities. Here, PoliERA Discord User BrutishMrFish expounds on how utilizing Nepenthe’s undisclosed and unaffiliated social media accounts is like unveiling a right-wing transphobic Trump supporter covering a major video game release that the ERA administration missed:

We’ve already covered the similar example of hachikoma, where a trans legislative activist was run out of their Discord and the forum because her joking (and blatantly snarky) tweet was thought to be a very real confession of her affiliation with “the Soviet”.

If we really want to illustrate how little the feelings of minorities actually matter to PoliERA, though, we need look no further than a conversation the Discord had on January 21st to try and put an end to the discourse about Israel.

Using the Language of Social Justice

Opening salvo by former ResetERA Administrator Sirpopopop on trying to stop people from criticizing Joe Biden’s behavior in Israel:

Expositing a little more, then suddenly inspiring understudy PoliERA Discord user Zacky:

It’s worth noting the emphasis on “leftist” terminology. One would be forgiven for forgetting that the speaker regularly disparages and disavows leftism. But we’re not done. PoliERA user Zacky makes the concept sing:

Ah. “Uses their own ideals against them.” Right. But suddenly, dissent! PoliERA user Kinvara suggests… just maybe not engaging with things that you feel might be “bad faith”. But PoliERA user Zacky sees:

There is no good faith in their opponents’ political discussions.

Let’s review:

Use their language
Expose them for who they are
Who they are is vile filth, there is never “good faith”

If you are suddenly remembering the definition of “bad faith” previously provided, that’s not a coincidence. The accusation does appear to be a confession.
This sure seems like a recipe for a sustained harassment campaign, but oh by the way, how does former ResetERA Administrator Sirpopopop feel about trans people agitating for their rights in Era?

Oh. They think it was a brigade. Not an expression of outrage by trans people and a natural outpouring of support by trans allies, no, couldn’t be, it must be a cynically coordinated tactic. And PoliERA Discord User Zacky thinks such a tactic is a good idea. Wonder if Former ResetERA Administrator Sirpopopop shares his views on trans brigading with his friends at TheBore.

Let’s not be mistaken here, either. PoliERA Discord views this behavior as genuine political activism, and they celebrate it as such. Here they are describing their “work” towards Nepenthe in exactly those terms:

And hell, why let a good furore go to waste? Even the controversy with Nepenthe’s tweets is an opportunistic time to organize:

However, lest we be accused of misrepresenting the diversity of opinions on the PoliERA Discord, we need to highlight that not all members agree with the view that the use of social justice language is effective. Here’s Former ResetERA Administrator Sirpopopop expressing his dissent by directly advocating for infiltrating communities with ResetERA administrative staff in them as well as “rallying support and brigading” instead:

Zacky also had further tactical considerations along those lines:

Fascist Political Views

Ostensibly, PoliERA presents itself as a haven for domestic US political discussion. Historically, it has been primarily a location for liberal US political discussion; this is well known by all members of the community, and should not be particularly controversial.

However, it’s quite clear while perusing the PoliERA Discord that certain members are, as it were, “hiding their power level” on the forum. The political positions displayed here frankly call into question if liberalism is an appropriate label for it whatsoever.

Genocide Denial in Israel-Palestine

Perhaps it will come as no surprise that PoliERA user BradyTheGOAT, serving as inciting incident for this debacle, has some… interesting views on the situation in Israel-Palestine that he was unwilling to share publicly on ERA but comfortable sharing with his compatriots. Can you guess what they are?

While PoliERA user BradyTheGOAT wants people to know that he condemns Netanyahu, as the above image demonstrates, mostly for the ethical failure of being “reckless”(and implicitly crediting civilian deaths in Palestine as merely collateral damage), we would be remiss not to note that he also brings smoke for the hypocritical position people critical of Israel hold when it comes to… believing Israel doesn’t have the right to herd Palestinians around like cattle:

Implicit to this argument is that Israel has the right to fire on a civilian neighborhood if that just happens to be where the winds of fate choose to carry the hapless heavily-armed and advanced nation-state that has put the Gaza Strip and Palestinians under surveillance and intimidation for decades. This naturally receives agreement and hearts from the peanut gallery.

This is not the only hypocrisy BradyTheGOAT perceives. He also has the courage to stand up to ignorant Palestinian activists for… not caring about the West Bank:

The mendacity of this argument speaks for itself, even knowing a Palestinian activist in real life will systematically refute what can only be described as a gem of compressed imbecility, but it’s worth noting the reason people are focusing on the genocide in Gaza and not the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is because while the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank carried out by settlers and supported by the IDF is truly despicable, it is inarguably the state of Israel which is carrying out vastly worse atrocities on the civilian population of Gaza. The only reason it bothers Brady that people are paying attention to the worse thing is because the worse thing makes Israel (and those enabling their indiscriminate violence with armaments) look worse. The alternative is that Brady is not only denying the genocide, but altogether denying the atrocities taking place in Gaza.

We should also note a pattern. Whenever PoliERA user BradyTheGOAT deigns to actually condemn Israel for its repeated, sustained, and inexcusable war crimes against the Palestinian people, he always has to find a way to diminish or minimize the extent to which Israel’s actions are unacceptable, or find some way to make them understandable.

Remember, children – if you’re not the initiating party in a war, you get to use white phosphorus on at least a few residential neighborhoods. And again:

It’s true that war refugees are, y’know, sad. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and call that a genocide, now.

As a general rule, PoliERA Discord user BradyTheGOAT is at all times seething whenever someone accurately describes the events occurring in Palestine as a genocide:

Really note the dates on all these examples. They take place days, weeks apart. They all take place after the wide publicization of bombing of hospitals, the murder of children, the circulation of TikToks taken by IDF soldiers depicting war crimes; all of this has been out in the open for all to see for months. None of it dissuades him from his conviction that a genocide is not occurring. As we will soon see, it’s likely nothing ever will:

Brady outright states that he believes that all Israel is conducting is a “self defense war.” Against a “rape invasion.” Here, Brady is demonstrating that it was fully justified to ban him for his commentary. He demonstrates that he goes well past believing that Hamas raped various hostages, which is undeniable. What he believes is that Hamas deploys rapes, tactically, as part of the pursuit of its goals. That the UN report on sexual violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict (reliant as it was on Israeli intelligence) does not in any way, shape or form corroborate these assertions is immaterial to Brady. In light of this evidence, it is a disservice that pressure from others in his cohort succeeded in reducing the length of his ban on ERA prior to the revelations herein, as the people doing the pressuring knew full well where he stood and continued on in his defense as if they didn’t. As we will see later, the full ramifications of this position on what actions are sanctioned and who bears the culpability in response are chilling.

Moving on from that, BradyTheGOAT is also keen to deploy the current war in Ukraine as a way to diminish the human rights abuses in Palestine.

What’s particularly curious about this post is that, officially, Ukraine reports the civilian deaths at Mariupol at 25,000; it is not particularly clear where BradyTheGOAT got the 50,000 figures or why he believes that the Ukrainian government would underreport its own civilian deaths and thereby make its enemy look less reprehensible than it was. What is convenient for PoliERA user BradytheGOAT is that the figure of 50,000 manages to dwarf the civilian death toll (as of the time of this writing) in Gaza.

This is not the only instance where PoliERA user BradyTheGOAT will draw from other regimes to attempt to diminish what is happening in Gaza:

Additionally, he is not only willing to emphasize that Hamas is impossible to ignore for Israel, he is furthermore of the opinion that Israel’s historical funding of Hamas to undermine the militant PLO and Benjamin Netanyahu’s propping up of Hamas for political gain is wholly immaterial to their response and imposes no responsibility upon them. This garners the derision of even some of his compatriots (for a change):

Let us not be unclear, however: BradyTheGOAT only felt this confidence to state his fervent, virulent convictions because he was in the presence of like-minded individuals. Here he is getting the love-in from his peers, while also insisting the majority of the critics of the state of Israel are inherently pro-Hamas:

PoliERA User BradytheGOAT not only believes that this isn’t genocide, he believes that Hamas cynically slapped on the label to this activity, with people allegedly unable to come to their own conclusions and are instead merely following the pied piper. Another PoliERA Top Mind, TopJeb, believes that this is comparable only to the abuse that the concept of sexual assault suffered from current President Joe Biden being accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade (making sure to use scare quotes to tell the audience what he really thinks of those accusations to a chorus of agreeing reacts). Nor is this the only time Brady would go on to make those representations:

Not only does this mean that Brady believes that IDF actions like the massacre of unarmed peaceful protestors in 2018 do not represent a breaking of a “permanent ceasefire” in Gaza, he also again reaffirms the broader PoliERA view that conflates support for a permanent ceasefire with support for Hamas. And, as we’ve already established, support for Hamas is (in his view) support for an “invading rape army.”

It is worth noting and dissecting PoliERA user BradytheGOAT’s position on the State of Israel’s founding in 1948 and his characterization of Arab states’ response to the partition of the land it had been falsely represented would be returned to them during World War 1 by the British only for the British to pledge that land to Jews out of a desire to remove them from the UK without Arab consent. Despite the fact that Arabs had been lied to by the League of Nations, it is presented as the height of irrationality for them to object to this UN declaration in which they had no input. At every turn, at every point in history and no matter the circumstances, this individual manages to construe Palestinian resistance to colonial management as the lashing out of a savage and irrational people refusing to bow to a higher, purer, ordained authority. Given the absolute contempt that PoliERA displays to Nepenthe’s citation of anti-colonial thought, this should be paramount to consider.

Let’s also not allow the misconception to slide that this “nuanced” take on Israel-Palestine is unique only to a handful of PoliERA Discord users, either.

PoliERA Discord user Zacky in particular makes it clear his belief that the Israeli military response is proportionate, that they are acting as rational actors in their campaign in Gaza, and that it is leftist delusion to represent otherwise, thus justifying Biden’s continued support for military aid to Israel:

He even goes so far as to openly admit that he supports the IDF’s campaign in Gaza and is not merely against a ceasefire, but outright pro-war:

Let us also be clear, for the record, that the belief that Israeli settlers are actually indigenous to the land is not solely the remit of Bor Gullet and the cadre that works to manipulate the discourse on ERA:

Here PoliERA Discord user Bertram Cooper asserts, to raucous support from his audience, that European Jews were never really Europeans; no amount of geographical distance, time, or intergenerational dwelling in the land could supplant the fundamental Levantic character of Jews. A character which Palestinian Jews apparently do not possess. This belief is common in Israel, as persecution of Arab Jewish representatives in the Knesset attests to the belief that Arabs are eternally less worthy of presence in the region than Jewish settlers. But we simply cannot leave it unsaid that this is the dual loyalty libel that has been used to tar and feather generations of those very same European Jews, the same dual loyalty libel that was used to displace them from their homes, merely repackaged and given a shiny coat of paint to explain the existential necessity of the state of Israel for Jewish people, in an attempt to construe opposition to the state of Israel as antisemitic. While the depths of PoliERA’s endorsement of Israel’s brutality will soon become repugnantly clear, the methods and means they employ in defense of the state of Israel are already dangerous to Jews by nature of how slipshod and poorly conceptualized they are.

Support for Collective Punishment

ResetERA poster Sirap, commenting on the grassroots push by Muslims to vote uncommitted in the Democratic primaries, made the following statement:

PoliERA user EddyZacianLand proceeds to present this post for the consideration of the broader PoliERA Discord public:

PoliERA Discord User BradytheGOAT responds primarily with laughter:

Guess he finds the idea of Muslims grieving their dead family entertaining. Bodes well when a community doesn’t immediately and permanently remove someone for behaving so callously toward human suffering. Earlier, on February 28th, BradyTheGOAT expounded on his moral philosophy in the Israel-Palestine conflict when a ceasefire deal was declined to be extended:

Yes. Hamas is responsible, in Brady’s eyes, for the over 30,000 civilians killed in Gaza by the IDF. Hamas is responsible for IDF soldiers recording themselves looting civilian homes in Gaza. Hamas is responsible for the systematic killings of thousands of Palestinian children. And no less than seven other PoliERA Discord users agree with him:

But lest we believe PoliERA poster BradyTheGOAT is anything less than a humanitarian, he emphasizes how much he wanted to see a ceasefire…

...before edgily posting about how “now the IDF’s job is clear.” I wonder if the torture of UN workers is part of that clearly stated purpose.

After TheBore Revelation

The revelation that PoliERA Administrator B-Dubs had evidence of the admitted KiwiFarms activity from Discord screenshots, the primary topic of concern was less about Nepenthe’s wellbeing and more the fact that their Discord, which was freely available for the public to join, was “compromised”:

Former Resetera Administrator Sirpopopop’s contributions to the episode of paranoia demonstrate his willingness to fabricate events to further agitate when the facts on the ground simply do not provide enough intrigue:

One can sense a bit of panic here:

Apropos of this lack of evidence, administrators of the PoliERA Discord server defer to Former ERA Administrator Sirpopopop’s expertise in an attempt to plug a leak and stop any further damning evidence from surfacing:

It is worth noting that the effort to disseminate the activities of the PoliERA community and make administrators aware of the people victimizing them was the result of members of various other communities within ERA of various political views and orientations choosing to act on conscience. None of them were ResetERA user Mezentine, as is evidenced by the above screenshot. Even this document is the result of multiple people collaborating to create a record demonstrating the extremes PoliERA will engage in to escalate their abusive behavior, out of a real concern for peoples’ safety if they are allowed to successfully diminish and erase the full extent of their clear complicity. ResetERA user Mezentine did not work on this document, either. Yet he was still maligned as the culprit.

He was also quick to rile up his audience’s paranoia with further invocations of leftists:

Remember – Sirpopopop was someone who advocates for the use of brigading and reporting to achieve political goals. He is someone who admitted to having friends on TheBore and defended their views. He’s used multiple opportunities to incite and rile up his own community to deal with people he has identified as problems needing to be “fixed.” And when the situation has fully gone out of his control, he once again resorts to constructing an Other for his community to fight. Their preferred other is “the Soviet”, “SocialismERA” and any group of people that represents anyone ideologically to their left whom they see as some sinister cabal within the forum. Yet any glance at the Official Thread for socialism on ERA will show one a mass grave of accounts. They are, in effect, tilting at windmills because they are upset that other people on the forum do not uncritically adhere to their particular orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, PoliERA Discord User CreepingFear decided to try and defend himself by equating Nepenthe’s use of an unrelated non-work Twitter to the behavior of a public figure:

On ERA, the story started to be represented a little different, of course:

As we already established, by his own admission, CreepingFear had seen enough in his casual perusal of a known harassment website to begin to develop pity for Nepenthe. Now, though, the official statement (and what would become the official PoliERA party line) was that he was barely there at all. But in general, the PoliERA Discord has a bit of a hot-cold relationship with KiwiFarms. When one poster expresses that they wouldn’t even know how to get to KiwiFarms…

… another is helpfully nearby to explain exactly how one can find Nepenthe’s details on KiwiFarms.

By and large though, it was unnecessary, as PoliERA community support was wildly in his favor, even after news of the doxxing by TheBore had dropped.

After the (failed) attempts to purge their leak had subsided, on the whole they tended to express defiance regarding the situation, throughout the various instances of ResetERA administrator B-Dubs sharing information about how the situation had worsened.

Posts made on ResetERA reflected activity going on within the Discord:

In general, the attitude of the Discord was heavily of the opinion that Nepenthe deserved to be exposed for publicly expressing her support for the Palestinian people.

PoliERA User Pwnzington/Jebington, meanwhile, was focused on the real issues here – equating Nepenthe’s position on Palestine with Nazism.

Given the websites he admits to reading, presumably he considered himself an experienced judge of that.

It is also notable to recall prior statements where Sirpopopop was criticizing ResetERA staff for ostensibly not wanting to ban users for invoking Nazism in the context of the state of Israel. “Nazi equivocation for me, not for thee”, I guess.

While these conversations were taking place in his Discord, PoliERA Discord Administrator Slash was in talks with B-Dubs, representing that no endorsement of doxxing had been taking place:

His thorough investigation, while somehow not coming up with the screenshots we included, comprised such steps as… telling people to self-report:

A different PoliERA Discord Administrator, Mr. Snuffleupagus, took a different tack by simply expressing that her views were available – not on her own Twitter curiously, but on Google Images.

An interesting suggestion to make in light of what other images relating to Nepenthe might come up.

Of course, with all that in mind, it’s also important to let everybody know that this is all hearsay and they won’t be acting on hearsay:

This is an interesting position to maintain while banning people who are opposed to further dissemination of Nepenthe’s tweets, however:

Worth remembering that the Tweet remains “publicly available” in part because KiwiFarms and TheBore are preserving it as we had mentioned and members of the Discord have demonstrated familiarity with this fact.

At this point, the Discord accuses the individual defending Nepenthe’s right to privacy in the face of abuse of being a liar:

Soon, accusations of alcohol use start getting incorporated:

Ulterior, secret motives to break solidarity with the Discord start being discussed:

And ultimately it is revealed that they are banned:

Leaving the positions of the PoliERA Discord team aside, let’s pick back up with some of the regular users.

PoliERA Discord user TheHunter was particularly adamant that ResetERA Administrator B-Dubs was an outright liar:

It wouldn’t be a PoliERA Discord conversation without insinuating that leftists were the real threat behind it all along:

But of course, it is not only a leftist tactic, it is a Trump tactic:

By and large, PoliERA Discord users didn’t see a real problem with a white man hoping a queer Black woman would say or do something that would allow his social group to report her to the FBI:

The Infrastructure Forever Discord in particular was especially skeptical of Nepenthe’s claim of even having been doxxed in the first place, and by and large dismissed B-Dubs as piecing together a narrative ex-post-facto while sharing stories about his alleged drunken posting on their server.

Infrastructure Forever Discord user Becka in particular has strong skepticism that Nepenthe was really doxxed:

They expressed the opinion that PoliERA Discord User BradyTheGOAT’s desire to have her reported to the authorities should be understood as a joke:

They expressed the belief that police would laugh at Nepenthe for fearing for her safety:

We’d like to close out our interlude from Infrastructure Forever by pointing out that, on top of their skepticism, they were more than willing to add fuel to the fire by outright fabricating lies about what Nepenthe’s tweets actually said:

Among those who believed Nepenthe was actually victimized, they still had little sympathy for her views or concerns about what it would mean for an Administrator to step down in the face of such pressure.

Discord members notably reacted in approval of this message asking for a Black forum administrator to step down with a dozen particularly-shaded hand clapping emoji reacts.

PSA: Site Spinoff Attempt

We hope that, at this point, we have established how dangerous the PoliERA community can be to members of marginalized communities. It is as a result of this that we believe it is appropriate to share evidence of a supported and acknowledged plan to create another splinter forum from ResetERA.

Here, Former PoliERA Administrator Sirpopopop establishes that he’s working on creating such a site, so he can “solve this once and for all”-- this referring to the deficiencies that he and the rest of the PoliERA community perceive. Earlier in the day, he established as a matter of fact that he was acquiring hardware working towards the goal – and other posters demonstrated familiarity with his broader plans of creating his own forum.

As we established previously when introducing the role Former ResetERA Administrator Sirpopopop played in this drama, he also cultivates particular lists of which staffers he believes would “fix” the site. This all tends to indicate just how thorough his planning is regarding what an ideal site would look like – lucky for us, he clearly emphasizes that this will take time for him to implement. And it will hopefully take less time to write and disseminate this document.

Let’s consider what kind of community someone like Sirpopopop would make. A community run by someone who posts on and has friends on TheBore, who interprets trans people and their allies advocating for themselves as “brigading” and encourages his political allies to engage in brigading in turn, who can look at this community and engage in denialism with the best of them rather than reject it outright for its contemptible behavior. Hopefully any readers can see why we felt it important to bring attention to this PoliERA project and to publicize these actions before it could come online.

They Won Anyway

One of the immediate posts ResetERA Administrator B-Dubs made after being aware of the full doxxing of Nepenthe was this:

Of note were “policy changes all ready to go” and “fault being admitted and apologies written.” This establishes that, in the immediate aftermath of Nepenthe’s private Twitter being posted without her consent, consideration was being given to substantively change policy based on the concerns of a community which full-throatedly denies that a genocide is taking place in Gaza and which, as we have demonstrated in this document, had both engineered the presentation of these concerns to control the discourse and had been obsessed with Nepenthe over a span of months.

It took less than twenty-four hours after Nepenthe’s home had been posted online by her harassers before ResetERA Administrator B-Dubs posted comprehensive site rules overhauling political discussion, addressing concerns both of antisemitism and of posts deemed to be drive-by in nature regarding the election. This post is far too long to fully reproduce in this document, so the relevant excerpts are presented here:

Of greatest concern is this excerpt:

The official ResetERA position, as of this moment, is that arguing that Israel does not have a right to exist is the equivalent of saying that all Jews should be forcibly removed from the region. It is unclear if B-Dubs realizes how aggressively colonialist this position is. First, it bears noticing that it effectively claims Arab Jews do not exist, because it represents that Jews had not existed in the Levant as communities prior to European attempts to settle the region of Palestine. This is blatantly false and this kind of erasure reflects real bigotries in Israeli society against Arab Jews, which we have covered elsewhere in this document. It is staggeringly irresponsible to frame the issue in this way on that basis alone, but furthermore it effectively forbids discussion of a one state solution with a right of return for victims of the Nakba, making it a bannable offense. Effectively, by creating a false equivalence between saying that Israel should not exist with the logical leap that all Jews in Palestine should be rendered stateless (rather than the obvious possible position that all Jews born in Israel should be repatriated as Palestinian Jews in a Palestinian state), it becomes easier for opponents of Palestinian unity to paint the movement as antisemitic and hateful while simultaneously setting a hard line on what solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict exist within the bounds of acceptable speech. While PoliERA Administrator B-Dubs’ rules spend a significant amount of time in other elements of policing antisemitic hate speech, which is wholly fine, this particular excerpt is clearly targeted at the position that Nepenthe posted in her own Twitter thread and essentially sides with PoliERA by eliminating any distinction between what her words meant and what they were claimed to mean.

Moderation actions taken after the policies were put in place demonstrate exactly the full implications of this position:

Now, calling a genocide what it is demonstrates an incapacity to “demonstrate ability to handle nuanced discussion” in the view of administrators and moderators of the forum. They are explicitly making it clear that they will present the refusal to engage with what is happening in Gaza as what it it is – a genocide – with a personal failing on the part of the individual. This language robs individuals of even the validity of their opinion, reducing it to an outburst. To say nothing of reducing the clear crime of genocide to a murky situation that demands “nuance” or suggesting that “nuance” might not lead to a similar conclusion.

Even after the substantial changing of moderation policies to accommodate the community that had harassed Nepenthe, various posters expressed their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs and Nepenthe’s ongoing association with ResetERA administration, prompting former ResetERA moderator Windrunner to make the following post:

Consider this post within the context of the earlier post where B-Dubs exclaimed that fault had already been admitted and apologies were being made. Consider how that post by a sitting administrator and a post by a former moderator who worked with Nepenthe, insinuating that she “might have got swept up in that bile” and describing anticolonial positions on Palestine as infantile, reflects on the processes taking place behind the scenes.

Less than 48 hours after TheBore had posted a picture of her house, less than 72 hours after someone had posted her non-disclosed and non-professional Twitter without her consent and had the PoliERA community rushing to dig deeper into someone else’s personal life so much that it brought them to KiwiFarms, Nepenthe posted an apology for her views. As might be expected, it is particularly lengthy, to the point where it is difficult to wholly reproduce in a document that is already so long. Additionally, it was, once again, posted on a part of the ResetERA forums that is intentionally obscured from lurkers, so we feel it is inappropriate to produce the apology in its entirety, for reasons that will be apparent soon. That being said, we believe excerpts are appropriate, particularly as they do exonerate Nepenthe of the worst of what has been said about her.

While the fact that Nepenthe has to produce an apology to begin with is nearly unconscionable, two notable elements have to be acknowledged. The first is that, in the immediate aftermath of having her tweets posted, apparently people close to her were primarily focused on explaining to her why her throwaway argument months ago with a stranger was disqualifying. Given everything that was happening to her at that moment, not great. Secondly, the argument produced for her about why her arguments were antisemitic happens to identically mirror historical fears that white South Africans harbored and disseminated (and still use, invoking various tropes) as to why the unjust system of Apartheid had to be maintained. As someone versed in anti-colonial thought, Nepenthe would be all too aware of this. So consider the circumstances under which someone committed to the cause of decolonial thought would find themselves platforming these views in an apology. Lest this be considered pure inference, that subtext clearly becomes text:

This is the point where Nepenthe makes it clear that these conversations were held by Jewish members of staff. She makes it clear that she and these Jewish members of staff had to “force each other to stop beating around the bush,” without clarifying the position opposed to hers. She explicitly cites the example of Apartheid in South Africa. She makes it clear that she has no consideration for members of marginalized groups who support oppression whatsoever. She explicitly states, here and at other places in her apology, that death is an inevitable part of de-colonial processes, in no small part due to resistance from colonial forces. And, in her conversations with Jewish members of staff, she “learned quickly that this is an outright cultural disconnect.”

We would like to call attention to the example of Mekanos to remind readers that, while there may be a disconnect, it is a euphemism to call it a cultural disconnect. Culture is no determinant for support of oppression. We would also like to state that, given Nepenthe’s position throughout all this, it is an understandable recourse to euphemism, not something she should be blamed for. Despite her best efforts, Nepenthe ultimately claims that the history of Jewish culture makes it impossible for onlookers to know if she means to commit genocide against Jewish people or not, and accedes that this has permanently tainted Jewish members’ ability to trust her:

Her statements here ultimately reveal that, in an official capacity, she is declaring herself incapable of moderating on issues of Israel-Palestine, removing herself from moderation of all Israel-Palestine issues and publicly states that she is receiving ongoing education from another member of staff on antisemitism. It is markedly interesting that she attaches no name to the member of ResetERA staff who made the argument claiming that Palestinians might wish to commit a “genocide in the other direction”, even while she names the member of staff who has given her resources on the topic of antisemitism in the Israel-Palestine debate. We want to clarify that our intent is not to conflate the two, as we have no evidence of who said what to her; it is merely to point out what it signifies to be comfortable naming one individual but not the other.

Given what we have presented thus far, is it reasonable to conclude that Nepenthe’s apology was effectively coerced? We propose that it does not matter; taking the violation of someone’s privacy and the pressure of their removal from their position as the opportunity for a “teachable moment” is fundamentally incompatible with a good-faith attempt to interrogate someone’s beliefs, and that not deferring this process to a later date in the face of an actual threat on Nepenthe’s safety demonstrates a depth of true contempt for her beliefs.

Ultimately, PoliERA’s months-long campaign to remove moderation that was publicly opposed to the genocide of Palestinians by Israel was, in every sense that matters, successful. While Nepenthe has, as of the time of this writing, retained her role as administrator in ResetERA, her role in moderating coverage of the conflict has effectively ceased. The member of staff who has concerns about “genocide in reverse” has not revealed themselves and there are no plans shared to remove them from moderating the issue.

Make no mistake, PoliERA’s hatred of Nepenthe extends to her decolonial outlook. In the tweet thread they deliberately misrepresented to attempt her ouster, she made clear that her commitment to the view that Israel’s land claim was illegitimate extended to the Americas. To construct the narrative that she was antisemitic, they had to excise that part of her identity from the record. It’s just another insult to injury that it worked.

They’re Not Stopping

If these posts were meant to be an act of appeasement, they were ultimately ineffective. PoliERA Discord members began to share conversations on Infrastructure Forever regarding dissatisfaction over the existing bans and reiterating their continued conviction to maintain their community away from ResetERA:

We cannot comment on whether or not ResetERA administration gets paid for their work, but we can corroborate that it is a commonly held belief in many ResetERA communities including Infrastructure Forever. Were it to be factual, it is worth re-analyzing Nepenthe’s apology within that framework from the perspective of someone who may risk losing their livelihood and it is worth re-analyzing PoliERA’s behavior from the perspective of a group looking to not only report a Black woman to the FBI but take her livelihood away from her.

Users continue to defend CreepingFear, while asserting Nepenthe should be forced to step down:

On the ERA thread, PoliERA poster Volimar went so far as to, after complimenting Nepenthe’s apology, begin asking if maybe house uploads on TheBore were completely unconnected and released extemporaneously to the escalating abuse of Nepenthe by the PoliERA community:

Another post emphasized that the apology represented a “great first step” while simultaneously asserting that various bans of individuals were unfair:

PoliERA user RexNovis not only asserted that bans should be reversed, but went so far as to say that Nepenthe’s apology should be further publicized to the forums:

It bears reiterating that the community discussion thread is not visible to people who do not have an ERA account, and that it has been repeated multiple times that there is an active campaign of harassment so intense that it has required police involvement. In spite of this, ResetERA user RexNovis believes that Nepenthe’s concession to the community that harassed her should be viewable on parts of the forum that everyone can see, ostensibly for the sake of the Jewish community who already have access to the community discussion thread. “Something that’s worth consideration imo.”

Thus far, one PoliERA member’s ban has been reversed from the moment their Discord messages started being made public; other posters are currently trying to get even more of the bans reversed:

In all, this event has been a significant policy win for the PoliERA community, though in certain respects a costly one. PoliERA Discord member BradytheGOAT has been permanently banned from participating in the ResetERA forums over the FBI comments– though the fact that it is only Brady does demonstrate just how limited consequences have been for that community given the extent of their animus towards Nepenthe and how often the view of her as a threat to herself and others was repeated. Additionally, the current PoliERA Official Thread was locked, with its replacement “US Politics” thread being started by someone outside their community in the new subforum. Despite these symbolic gestures, it is hard not to see this as a success on balance for their community, and they don’t seem to be done yet..

Conclusion

We believe this document speaks for itself as to why this campaign by PoliERA against its ideological opponents has to be opposed. Their success is the culmination of months of hatred toward Nepenthe and various other posters, was built from the ground up in bad faith through the absolutely cynical use of progressive and leftist rhetoric or obfuscation of their actual beliefs, and came from a community that has deep ties to the site that ended up being a threat to Nepenthe’s physical safety in the first place. There is the distinct possibility that one of the people with ties to that harassment site and a history of incitement intends to found a new forum, purporting to fix what they view as the dysfunction present in ResetERA. Every indication is that, in the midst of this period of personal turmoil for Nepenthe, people who are potentially her employers were more concerned with getting her to speak against her entirely reasonable views than protecting her privacy or well-being. And having capitulated to this crowd, there is no evidence in sight that this is going to satisfy them, no evidence of their intent to back down and not request further concession. Within that context, we feel it is imperative to try and put a stop to all this. We believe that the planned spinoff forum, were it to be successful, would be a tremendous threat to marginalized viewers, and would give these people a platform to further expand their thus-far fruitful attempts to whitewash a genocide.

Furthermore, we believe that this example of harassment conducted by an online community that vehemently defends Israel in the face of its crimes against humanity can give insight into the tactics and approaches taken by those who wish to silence people speaking out against the genocide in Gaza and any number or other truths they find too inconvenient to bear. This is what we believe carries this account beyond the petty and parochial world of internecine online struggles. It is a comprehensive account of a campaign of propaganda carried out against a particular individual, and is of interest to any who would seek to thwart the activity of such groups against the marginalized or their allies and to identify these tactics in the field. We forward the tragic example of an actual Palestinian being banned for expressing their grief and rage in the wake of these moderation actions as an example of the real stakes underpinning these arguments:

Lastly, while ResetERA was the focal point of this document, we also acknowledge that it is not the only place in which these behaviors from the PoliERA community may present themselves, as PoliERA members can count themselves as present in various other similar forums (like Famiboards, XboxERA and Install Base, to name just some of the ones that spun off from ResetERA) and in other Discord server communities. And while the Israel-Palestine conflict was central to this particular flash point, one can reasonably assume that with their success manipulating discourse and forcing administration to bend to their desires on ResetERA, the PoliERA community may not hesitate to use these proven-successful methods elsewhere regarding any number of political or ideological topics where discussion is not proceeding in a direction that aligns with their orthodoxy, if they haven’t potentially already done so. As such, we consider that outlining this moment in full is necessary for administrators and moderators across multiple locations of discussion, to help them identify the levels of insincerity, deception and malice members of the PoliERA community will stoop to in order to achieve their desires, and to provide information that may be relevant to protecting their own users from similar behaviors by the same bad actors.

These points are what made the composition of this account a moral imperative to us and we hope that it can fulfill the goals we set out to accomplish.

Appendices

Over the course of this research, we discovered further communications from the official PoliERA Discord that we believed were illuminating in various respects but which were outside of the scope of the main body of the document. They cover not only further evidence of the group’s toxic and dangerous obsession with particular ResetERA posters, or further documentation of their fascist views, they also serve as an instructive guide for those seeking to combat the pervasive societal movement to cover up, excuse, and diminish the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Appendix A: Strategies of Genocide Denial

PoliERA’s treatment of Nepenthe should be grounded within their broader attempts to alter the discourse surrounding Israel-Palestine. We believe that collating their closed-door strategizing can provide a valuable resource for people trying to understand and overcome these strategies.

ERA-specific strategic discussion

This covers discussions we thought were salient regarding their attempts to steer discourse in Israel-Palestine coverage on ResetERA.

Love-Bombing

If we are to take PoliERA as a case-study in the furtherance of genocide denial, it is not sufficient to categorize their treatment of out-groups but also their mechanisms of in-group cohesion. Within that framework, it is important to document PoliERA Discord user Zacky’s consistent use of praise and positive reinforcement with regards to their forum activities.

As usual, though, it is worth mentioning that like much of the activity covered in this document, this was seldom the sole remit of one poster. In-group reinforcement was common:

Appendix B: Gaza Genocide, Trans Genocide

This section covers a strange line of discourse in PoliERA’s thinking. Namely, how they view the term “genocide” as suffering abuse through its use describing the systematic persecution of trans people in the United States, a campaign which involves both the state and extralegal methods. In addition to covering their denial of another genocide, these posts demonstrate their attempts to weaponize discourse attempting to bring harm to trans people to light to discredit the use of “genocide” for what is happening to Gazans.

In general, they have a bit of an obsession conflating trans issues with Palestinian-Israeli issues on the whole:

Appendix C: Making Light of Genocide

As part of this document, we want to make it clear how deep the denialistic and diminishing rhetoric towards Israel war crimes runs in this community. This appendix covers various examples of the way that they made light of the term “genocide” to mock their ideological opponents, and various calls for Israel to escalate its campaign in Gaza. Again, we believe that this information is a useful resource to cover the distinction between in-group and out-group presentation in propaganda covering for the Israeli genocide. PoliERA Discord user Zacky opens us up with the remarkable statement that there is nothing wrong with an ethnostate:

Appendix D: Further Harassment of ERA members

Our document ultimately covered only a small part of the total harassing discourse surrounding ERA members. Furthermore, our search was necessarily not exhaustive and we are sure we have missed various targets of PoliERA’s hostile activities. This appendix serves as a supplement to cover the total of the harassing activities we are aware of that PoliERA has engaged in.

Violent Fantasies

We start this section outlining some of the more egregious violent fantasies put forward by PoliERA Discord users.

Individual User Obsessions

This section is a supplement to the main body of the document, covering in further detail the simply astounding amount of hate directed towards users that attracted the attention of the PoliERA Discord group.

Nepenthe

This is the start of the “collective nation of Jews” saga:

Finding Nep’s Ko-Fi and discussing using it to harass her:

Thordinson

Hachikoma

In this series of posts, PoliERA Discord User Midnight Jon (same name on ResetERA) goes through a series of interactions that his ostensible “cousin” had with Hachikoma’s Twitter account. While it would be alarming enough to bring personal family and friends into an online vendetta against a legislative activist, personal details shared by this Twitter seem to one-to-one match those posted by Midnight Jon publicly on ResetERA, making it highly likely that “cousin” is in reality one of his own alt accounts. Included in this document is the use of ableist slurs by Midnight Jon’s alt to again demonstrate how the in-group and out-group presentations differ in PoliERA.

We would be remiss not to point out Midnight Jon uses similar language on their own Twitter as well:

Beyond their “cousin” activities, Midnight Jon’s obsession with Hachikoma continues.

Others

This example of their treatment of ResetERA User IpKaiFung demonstrates their use of coordinating reports to eliminate views they disagree with.

Appendix E: Miscellany

This appendix covers a series of interludes that we believe are mostly instructive in exploring the psychology of the PoliERA community.

Blaming The Left

We believe it is salient to see how PoliERA Discord User Zacky shifted a tremendous amount of blame on the Left in particular and made special emphasis of his alienation from Left-wing causes, as well as his constant description of Leftism (which to him encompassed the mainstream Democratic party) was understood as a cult whose commitment to political positions, including LGBT issues, is simply irrational.

This is a strange exchange where Zacky ties the use of a watermelon emoji to the behavior of radical leftist activists:

The Further Adventures of “The Soviet”

On that same theming, it is important to demonstrate how the PoliERA Discord’s antagonisms towards shadowy leftist cabals resulted in them attempting to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their ostensible rivals running the forums mostly not existing on the forums. The general consensus centered around their disengagement from the forums culture as being evidence of their inability to reach new members, unlike PoliERA– and their secret attempts at controlling the forum being symptomatic of their own lack of control.

There are further attempts to tie former ResetERA Administrators and their political differences to the current situation:

Of particular note is this rather telling deflection from Former ResetERA Administrator Sirpopopop:

A White Fragility Hypothesis

PoliERA Discord User EddieZacianLand in particular expressed the notion that it was systematic bias against white people that was explanatory for what he believed to be the insufficient support the people of Ukraine were receiving compared to the Palestinians, receiving the broad support of PoliERA Discord user Zacky.