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Notes -
2/2 (so far)
Note, this comment has been significantly updated and extended since first written (and replied to, sorry).
The fundamental difference between WWSD 2017 and WWSD 2020 is the monolithic polymer lower receiver, originally the GWACS CAV-15, and then later the KP-15 from KE Arms. The KP-15 is a successor design to the CAV-15 which had gone out of production (and with GWACS effectively dead as a business). While obviously inspired by the CAV-15 with similar features, it is a fresh redesign without reusing any specific design or feature from the CAV-15 while improving function with additional features (e.g. flared magwell). Extensive research and testing went into the production methods and polymer molds.
As KE Arms was ramping up production to meet the considerable demand for the monolithic polymer lower, two significant events occurred: GWACS sends a cease-and-desist to KE Arms over intellectual property concerns regarding the CAV-15, and a deal is struck with Brownells regarding marketing, distribution, and retail sales for the WWSD concept including both parts and complete rifles. KE Arms sues GWACS over the cease-and-desist, and GWACS countersues KE Arms as well as several related organizations and individuals. Kasarda is not named as a defendant but is deposed as a witness.
Fast forward to 2023. Due to COVID and legal interference, the production ramp-up for the KP-15 takes longer than expected, but the lowers are now produced in significant quantity, available from both Brownells and KE Arms directly. However, forum drama is about to upset the apple cart once again.
I wasn't aware of the forum drama or any of its basis until Karl himself posted to the InRangeTV subreddit, seeking consolation for what he felt were unfair attacks on him. The basis for the forum drama, as I was to find out, was mostly Karl's own social media posting, often under his InRangeTV brand. I was mostly just watching the YouTube channel, which had a pretty strict focus on guns, 2 Gun Action Challenge Match stuff, and occasional forays into First and Second Amendment issues and advocacy, along with complaints about Youtube content policies. The social media posting, mainly Instagram, was a different beast entirely.
One Father's Day, Karl posted:
Now, there is obviously some attempt at humor, here. Still, I find it pretty offensive and abhorrent. I love my dad, and it's largely because of him that I am comfortable with guns, gun safety, basic carpentry, basic mechanic skills, motorcycles, etc. To take something like Father's Day and twist it into a sick joke just rubs me the wrong way. Still, I have very thick skin and am pretty much a free speech absolutist, so Karl is welcome to hold and express these views. I just find the holder of such views to be disgusting.
He got a pretty negative reaction to this post, and tried to play it off as "just a joke" and not any sort of self loathing or promotion of genocide; it's not anti-white but anti-racist. Yet in the very same post and reply chain, he complains about white fragility. I find it very hard to square this circle. While I struggle to find the humor in the Father's Day post, there is a very obvious butt of the "joke". It's a troll post that targets white people in an attempt to expose white fragility (which he clearly admits).
A later post:
This is pretty clearly a call to murder people, which Karl and his buddies attempt to deny. And which freedoms, exactly, are we talking about, Karl?
There is a lot more of this stuff, all posted by Karl to social media, going very much against the grain of American gun culture. As people started to notice this, compilations of Karl's material were posted to ar15.com forums. As the drama was blowing up, Brownells backed completely out of the WWSD deal, which Karl had some stake (5% of something, I forget) in.
I have some thoughts about what is motivating all this drama, which I will save for a further comment.
From Karl's reddit post:
AR15.com is owned by... Brownell's.
Maybe it wasn't the best idea Karl ever had to enter that forum swinging hist fists around.
I liked Karl a lot when the first InRange videos were gaining steam. The spirit of intended use, practical application and halfway 'scientific' testing of things other than 'when does it blow up' was something that seemed missing in a lot of channels. And thinking back, it definitely had a sort of 'blue' approach to guns as opposed to 'red'. For better or worse, at least it was different. Karl was also kind of a 'sperg'. But it seemed appropriate for the subject matter and company.
Fast forward through satanism, open findom relationships, antifa friends, trans rights and racist jokes, if you care about 'ethical consumerism' like is clearly done by Karl and friends, why should any right of center person support or tolerate someone like Karl?
Hopefully Ian will be doing a video on 'his own' rifle, recounting how he and his partner, after a lot of time, effort and research, advertised a product they weren't selling, before realizing there was money to be made by selling it. Hastily trying to figure out how to procure the parts they had already told everyone about, that had become very scarce as a result, so they could sell them themselves. Going through a lot of work and hassle trying to get the ball rolling before helplessly watching the project crash and burn since his partner was too autistic to handle social media and keep his extreme politics in his pocket.
A humbling moment of becoming a part of history, if nothing else.
Do you ever get upset when progressives refuse to tolerate somebody because they expressed right-of-center views that aren't central to what that person is primarily known for? Do you ever feel like, you know, it's kind of unfair for somebody who's really good at something like acting or writing or programming or making cool YouTube videos to suddenly have no platform to do those things because they said something completely unrelated to any of those things that progressives happened to disagree with? If so, then why would you think it's okay to do that when the shoe is on the other foot?
FWIW, I have enjoyed owning, shooting and maintaining guns for years, but I find it increasingly hard to enjoy the hobby as somebody who's culturally blue tribe because of exactly the attitude you just expressed, and the fear that in order to be a "gun guy" you also have to hate non-whites and LGBTQ people or you won't fit in.
Not anymore, no. When I actually believed in the concepts that have now been expressly refuted by lib/left/progressives I assumed that there was a broad recognition and understanding of the value of free speech and all the rest. I, through experience with exactly the kind of people Karl enables, learned that I was wrong.
Not anymore, no. Everyone is already playing by the rules of the lib/left/progressives. You can't say X on 99% of platforms. Most of the internet I liked, the youtube channels, twitter accounts, podcasts, subreddits like this used to be and everything else, has been relegated to obscurity or simply scrubbed from existence. Users lost, essays, exchanges, information and friends, all gone. All of this happened years ago and continues to happen. Because of the kind of people Karl is rubbing shoulders with.
Because controlling 99% of the internet vs. controlling 1% isn't comparable. Regardless of everything else, no one lives by the libertarian ruleset Karl pretends to support. Everyone has to, in 99% of cases, contort themselves to the ruleset of lib/left/progressivism. In 1% of cases some people, who are not on board with the lib/left/progressive ruleset, can tell the 99% to fuck off and act and speak more freely. That's where Karl comes in and decides to take a principled stand on free speech and call everyone out for their hypocrisy? Give me a break. How about he make that stand anywhere else and see how long he is tolerated. Maybe he'd recognize just how good he has had it with the people he so indignantly accuses of hate.
And just what kind of attitude is that? The kind that every single blue triber mandates for everyone else, everywhere else? Take a good hard look at yourself and read what you are saying. Imagine how it feels like for someone red to have to live with what you are pretending is pushing you away from guns, but in night every aspect of their lives. They can't use the internet without blue signaling people prodding their fingers around, looking for an excuse to take everything they can away from them. They can't turn on the TV without being bombarded with blue propaganda.
And when they manage, by chance and luck, to carve out a space where they can exist, a wolf in sheep's clothing starts knocking on their door. Asking to be let in. After they let it in the wolf demands that the space conform to the practices of the 99%. And when they tell it 'no', the wool comes off and it goes for the jugular: 'Why do you HATE me so? The minorities, the gays, the oppressed? Why are you so evil? Why do you HATE?'.
The only thing you need to be a gun guy is a gun and an interest. You are not just a gun guy, you are intolerant. The existence of people who you perceive to be not like you is so insufferable that you are willing to drop your own interest for the sake of it. Contrast that with anyone not drinking the lib/left/progressive koolaid and how they have to contort and stifle themselves just to be allowed to have a job, and maybe have some empathy before baring your fangs.
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It would be perfect for his "gun manufacturing is harder than you think" series, wouldn't it?
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I'm not sure how much I should say here as I generally try to keep my internet persona's separate for OPSEC reasons and this is coming dangerously close to crossing the streams but...
...I would feel remiss if I didn't bring it up. When GWACS when out of business KE arms bought up the tooling along with several former GWACS employees with the intent of restarting production of polymer lowers. Meanwhile the rumor is that the GWACS name and IP was bought by some progressive culture warrior with the intent of undermining the opposition and that the cease and desist letter was effectively culture-war motivated. This had the effect of drawing in additional "combatants" from outside the immediate 2A legal and Southwest competitive shooting communities (parallels to jihad in the ME are left as an exercise to the reader). The ensuing drama (both internet and legal) in turn lead to Ian catching a lot of flak from Karl and the John Brown Gun Club for "Associating With"/"Failing to Denounce 'Nazis' and 'Far Right Agitators'" like Mike Jones, the Volokh Conspiracy, and Administrative Results (who TBF between the Obi-Wan-Nairobi aesthetic and making his handle a play on "Executive Outcomes" kind of invites those associations) but even so.
Edit to add: TLDR a bunch of people on the internet lashed-out out at Ian and in response a bunch of people showed up to defend him which in turn lead Karl and a bunch of others to lash out in response leading to the dynamic described in the OP, "Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight." This in turn lead to a number of arguments within ARFCOM's mod-mail that ended with an agreement on all sides to lock the thread and walk away.
This explains a lot. Also there is good info here: https://old.reddit.com/r/liberalgunowners/comments/sltls3/forgotten_weaponsheadstamp_controversy_summary/
Edit Edit to add. This is not intended as a call but I seem to recall @ymeskhout having ties of some sort to JBGC and I wonder if he's got any insight on this front.
I was, but haven't had any involvement at all since I resigned in late 2018. I'm not familiar with the names in this thread, nor do I really understand the "controversy", except that everyone loves Gun Jesus.
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I second that emotion. I definitely recall JBGC affiliation from reddit comments and maybe B&R podcast. I like hearing Yassine's takes, even when I have some quibbles.
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My thought process through Karl's comment got me perplexed.
Not knowing anything about this Karl guy (and honestly skimming your well-written post), I read the Father's day post and just interpreted as a guy sarcastically making fun of woke culture. After reading the "white fragility" comment well, that threw me off, maybe Karl was actually serious OR is doubling down on sarcasm, but doesn't seem so.
If it's not all sarcasm then FarNearEverywhere is right, replying "congrats" or just ignoring it's the only way. Incredible.
I have followed Karl for quite a while and I still don't know what he was thinking with that post. He is far enough left where it is not beyond the pale that those are his true feelings, though more extreme than anything he'd publicly expressed before. However, he is also a troll, and an explicit part of his mission statement is to "slay sacred cows." He even made an emblem of a silhouetted cow with a sword through it to represent this idea for his channel.
Personally, I have decided to walk away from his content. Regardless of his true beliefs I cannot support someone who makes such agitating statements. It's not a decision I made lightly.
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I don't know this guy or anything about this entire topic other than what I have just read here, but without knowing how old he is, yeah - that's the kind of edgy contrarian stuff I'd expect. The best retort is not to get upset, it's to reply "Congratulations on the vasectomy! I completely agree that you should not reproduce!" and leave it at that 😁
Church of Satan/Satanic Temple/whatever other splinter group types do evoke 🙄 in me - not because I'm afraid they are teaching little kiddies to worship the Lord of this World, but because they're still stuck in the 50s mindset about shocking the squares. Anton LaVey was a clever grifter and I admire his showmanship in monetising the California weird scene, but come on people: society has moved on and even the squares are out there waving flags for Pride month. You're fighting an enemy that only exists in certain places and mostly in your imagination (even the Bible-basher types are using contraception and getting divorces and multiple remarriages today) and you're no longer on the cutting edge of being daring. This is this year's German Eurovision entry, for pete's sake. If you honestly did believe in and worship Satan, that would be shocking nowadays.
For the people I know personally who are still very edgy atheists (admittedly not Church of Satan stuff) as fully grown adults in the year of our lord 2023, it's because they also happen to exist in those certain places. They all live in very religious areas (one in a heavily Christian part of the US, one in the Middle East and one in South America) and grew up in very religious families. On the internet their views are passé, but in their day to day lives it's still very much counter-cultural.
Basically anything "edgy" is highly context dependent- there's a big difference between burning a Quran in rural Texas, burning a Quran in London and burning a Quran in Saudi Arabia. And the internet removes local contexts, so beyond edgy stuff in all forms inevitably being kind of cringe, you end up with it being especially cringe in places where it isn't counter-cultural. An example in the opposite direction would be the South American atheist finding the "based tradcath converts" cringe beyond all belief, since basically every authority figure around him is Catholic.
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The actual ARFCOM thread about this is pretty long and has some interesting content, ought to be okay to post since it's already locked: https://www.ar15.com/forums/General/Looks-like-Karl-from-InRange-TV-isn-t-shy-about-his-love-of-Drag-Queens-Karl-buttmad-p-32/5-2607124/
I used to post on ARFCOM a lot in the early-mid 2000s, back when PHPBB style boards were the main type of social interaction online.
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This is a bizarrely small second part of your post. No mention of the GWACS legal drama? No deeper explanation for what happened with ARFCOM? Did you hit the character limit in part 1?
Criticism accepted. I completely revised the post. Less than ideal, I agree.
Much better, thank you.
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The whole saga has some major plot points that are missing here. I think it would have been better to hold off on posting until it's all together.
Criticism accepted. I completely revised the post. Less than ideal, I agree.
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Just gotta say, the comment histories of the accounts in that inrange thread are something else. I still have no idea what the drama is about, but at least it's easy to see what side the literal trans maoists are on. And wow they're going mask off these days.
Edit: wow, Karl did videos with one of the murderers in the CHAZ militia, that's way worse than I was expecting. And all the info was collected by kiwifarms, which once again explains why this crowd is so adamant about shutting them down.
They're turning on gun jesus too. May Satan help them, because God obviously won't.
Edit: that arfcom thread is amazing. If I was more into guns it would be a "finding my people" moment.
Are you repeating a statement from the ARFCOM thread/other socials or is that your assessment? Genuinely curious.
I ask because the escalation of rhetoric throughout this ordeal has been really bothering me. The first one that stuck out at me was how Karl and all of his supporters are now "groomers." It's easy to see how his detractors arrived here: he allegedly made comments supporting "drag queen story hour," and drag queens have been reported making sexual comments to children. But is implicitly, nay, explicitly accusing Karl of grooming children helping? As far as the "antifa CHAZ murder" claim goes, to my knowledge this has been leveled at Tacticool Girlfriend, an openly trans gun YouTuber. I have never seen this claim made with evidence, though I haven't made any effort to confirm or deny it myself. But again, it's now more often than not that I see this person referred to as "the CHAZ killer" as if it is hard fact.
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Fringe loonies will do what fringe loonies do. I wonder if the usual suspects over on /k/ are still fervently denouncing Ian as a dirty commie for disabling comments on videos related to Rhodesia.
I have a huge amount of respect for Ian for staying the course by remaining professional and basically apolitical. The man just wants to talk about guns, their workings and their history.
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It couldn't be Ahuviya Harel, could it?
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I was surprised to see in /r/dankchristianmemes, a heavily upvoted thread about wanting traditional hymns, but not wanting "conservative/far-right ideals" in the church. All the comments are about how great it is that mainline Protestant denominations are affirming of all kinds of alternative lifestyles.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dankchristianmemes/comments/11i1mit/is_it_too_much_to_ask_for_both/
Honestly this really made me think. On Reddit, the gun people are leftist, the Christians are leftist, etc. etc. I spend so much time on Reddit that it makes me think leftism has literally taken over everything. Then I went to church this morning and realized there's an entire big population of people who don't use Reddit, have never heard of Reddit, and who still exist across the whole spectrum of political belief.
I need to get off of Reddit.
Yes
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At least here it's the modern worship churches that are right wing and traditional denominations that song hymns and hang rainbow flags and seem pretty left wing, are those still too far right for reddit?
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Reddit looks more leftist than it is because leftist groups are very good at two things: mod takeovers and brigading from their discord hangouts. Stalking post histories made me realize that in most cases the "radically leftist highly upvoted post in a normally non-political sub" is completely artificial.
But my god it's an amazing tactic for imposing the appearance of consensus. Back in the days of the open internet the left was at a disadvantage, but they've adapted wonderfully to this new environment that rewards procedural manipulation and party organization.
I have to wonder, if this is true, why was this? Was it harder to entry-ize a regular old forum somehow?
There were too many of them. Take over some forum and you have control of one of a thousand comparable discussion forums. Take over the relevant subreddit (and leverage that into more control over other subreddits) and you can control a much larger portion of the internet.
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The thing about that meme was its use of “extreme right-wing beliefs”. After browsing the thread, I found myself wondering what they might consider “moderate right-wing beliefs”.
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Before KE Arms announced the development of the KP-15 lower, the subreddit was very low traffic. Its tone mirrored that of the youtube channel, which had none of the weird racial and sexual politics stuff. For the 2-3 years of development and production of the KP-15 lower, the channel was pretty much all about eager anticipation and then people showing off their builds. Once the forum drama hit, there was a large influx of "supporters", and I think the brand and community will never recover the tone that I enjoyed.
Karl was already subtly working an agenda with his historic pieces, that were often about convincing leftists that guns benefited black people. His view of history was often a bit dubious/one-sided as well.
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There's your answer: it's Reddit
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