sigh I understand and agree with the spirit behind the change, but I still think this is going to end badly.
Pretty much my position in a sentence. I can see where the staff are coming from, when a forum is advertised as both a right-leaning space and one where there's free speech (certainly, at minimum, relative to what you can find on overpoliced hellholes like Reddit and many more social media/forum spaces), in a time & cultural zeitgeist where most thoughts to the right of Lenin are viciously scrutinized and cracked down on across the online sphere, it's inevitable that some of the users 'right of Lenin' that you'll be getting will be genuine racists - whether antisemites, anti-black people, anti-Asian, or all of the above and more. (The real fun comes with the really loopy types that despise literally everyone and even 'their own kind' for failing to match whatever deranged ideal they have in their heads, I believe a Filipino-Canadian member who fits that exact mold was banned a couple months ago.)
And if the unironically, deeply hateful racist types are allowed to run unchecked, they'll attract a lot more likeminded people and trash the place for everyone who doesn't like seeing racial slurs and derailment into bashing whichever ethnic group they loathe the most that day in every other post, even (or especially) in threads that have nothing to do with such politics. I remember that's what happened to Voat, one of the early attempts at spinning off Reddit with free speech being prioritized. Neat place with a more relaxed atmosphere than Reddit sure, until you couldn't post a thread talking about games (any games) without whichever lunatics were online at the time flooding it to drop N-bombs left & right, posit that the game industry was run by Satanic Jews and that you should never give them your money under any circumstance (even if the game in question was made by, say, a Japanese developer and far predated the post-2014 culture war), find some convoluted ways to twist the discussion toward their pet obsessions, etc.
Yeah, suffice to say that site stopped being useful even for culture war/Gamergate discussions very quickly (that moved back to other forums including either of the KiA subreddits or, after further squeezing by the Reddit admins & jannies, the sparsely-populated .win), chased off everyone who was both right of Lenin and left of Himmler, and died ignominiously from lack of activity & funds back in like 2020. So I can perfectly understand why the staff might want to avoid
that.
However! I also remember that no small number of the forums I used to frequent as a younger guy and which allowed political discussion at all often took this step as their first one towards greater censorship. Most people don't like antisemites and their more over-the-top rants are an easy target for mockery & bashing in turn, so fine. But then the rules against antisemitism get interpreted more & more stringently, moving (whether over months or years) toward outlawing even legitimate criticisms of Jewish groups and Israel generally, and either concurrently or afterwards moving to make more and more groups & topics of discussion off-limits. And I don't even mean things like exercising influence on the American gov't through AIPAC or whatever; I mean things like
allowing criminal degenerates on the level of child rapists and cartel collaborators to find refuge, and even live comfortably, in Israel, something which
@mrttao has brought up in this very thread and pointed out earlier is something which (rightly) gets slammed by Jews too.
Ah, but accusing Israel of harboring child rapists can easily be construed as an antisemitic attack echoing much older accusations that the Jews are out to corrupt society and prey on your children by uncharitable and/or overzealous mods and posters, thus, something worthy of deletion or even a ban. Seen it happen on older forums myself, like the political discussion section of Total War Center (site's been largely unusable for months, and from what I saw on the rare occasion that I was able to access it it seems only the most rabid & entrenched far-left and far-right partisans still bother to remain active there - it's really not useful as anything but a repository for old TW mods nowadays - but I digress). The same is true when social conservatives point to the disproportionately high number of Jews involved in the porn industry, from prominent actors & actresses like Ron Jeremy, James Deen or Nina Hartley up to owners, producers & propagators like Al Goldstein, Adam Glasser or Steven Hirsch, who will say shit like this...
"The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don't believe in authoritarianism. Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged." (Al Goldstein, XXX-Communicated: A Rebel Without a Shul, 2004)
"I never really bought into the faith-God type of situation, but what I did enjoy was the Zionist movement, the culture behind it, the community...I identify with Judaism as a culture, and the culture encouraged me to learn, ask questions and strive for knowledge. I know how to shoot and light and edit, because I'm always trying to strive for knowledge at work. I don't think I would have this type of mentality if I didn't have my Jewish upbringing...The Jews know we're better than everyone else — that's all that matters. It's true we're the chosen people; it's a fact." (
James Deen, Haaretz interview, 2013)
And then either scurry off to leave other Jews (certainly including those who aren't of the same godless, liberal persuasion like themselves) to deal with the inevitable accusation of being morally corrupting subversives and/or racial supremacists who consider 'the goyim' but beasts to be used & abused for their own pleasure which are newly buttressed by what monstrous bile they just spewed, or fall back on using their Jewish identity as a shield against their critics, which unsurprisingly just entrenches such accusations even more strongly in the long run. But again calling such evil self-admitted behavior can easily be and has been spun, by paranoid/uncharitable and overly controlling mods, into not merely attacks on these individual vile characters but the entire Jewish people, based on the old stereotypes and theories of Jews conspiring to undermine their country, poison morality and corrupt the non-Jewish youth for their own ends.
Then you end up with censorship not merely of genuine anti-Semitism but a valid criticism of what certain Jews have actually done (and very proudly admit to doing), and that's usually followed up with broader & broader expansions of the original rule in my experience, until the forum becomes unusable and people start jumping ship en masse.
I'll trust the discernment of the Sietch staff on this count because I haven't seen much reason not to, but I don't fault the critics and I do agree with them that this new rule could easily become the start of a slippery slope. As a humble user, there's not much I can do but ask that the staff exercises such discernment carefully and consistently to avoid slipping down said slope to a point where criticism of Jewish figures in any way becomes functionally illegal and holding sociopolitical opinions to the right of Ben Shapiro becomes a bannable offense, which I don't believe would be to the Sietch's benefit any more than becoming an open sewer crossed with an insane asylum like Voat would.
(As far as challenging overt antisemites on the forum goes, I'm not a terribly active user - if I don't have an active project going on I usually just post memes once or twice a week, and the memes poking fun at ethnic groups I've posted have a lot more targets than just Jews, including my own (Chinese). Suffice to say that while it has happened, on account of my low activity it's rare for me to get into it with other users for extended periods of time, whether over antisemitism or any other topic. But both of the timelines I've posted on here should make it clear that I'm not an antisemite, I consider Jews to be much like any other people in that individual Jews can do good or bad and that as a nation they can go through periods of both ascendancy and decline whether they're in possession of Israel already, as in
Dewey Defeats Truman, or not, as in
Vivat Stilicho.)