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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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@Gillitrut was asking about entryism and underhanded tactics downthread, and I thought I’d give an account of what I’d seen and maybe try to gather people’s experiences to make a compendium of recognisable tactics.

In my case, I sat on a committee that was taken over by entryists using the following process:

  1. Have a sympathetic head, and vaguely sympathetic or apolitical committee members. It’s hard to do entryism in an org that’s strongly opposed to you.
  2. Demand special representatives be added to the committee for minority groups. Specifically: female, gay, ethnic minority, disabled. The original committee was only about five people, so this gave them almost a majority by themselves and allowed them to reach quorum for minor decisions with just the representatives. Any suggestion that perhaps one representative might be enough was met with tears and fury.
  3. Manipulate procedure. Turns out that there was no actual definition of ‘minor decision’. It had originally been meant so that you didn’t need to convene the whole committee to buy more coffee, but it now meant making political statements on behalf of the organisation, renting busses for protests, and organising mandatory consent workshops.
  4. Bully and outlast the opposition. There’s a classic trick which is that you come up with a few really boring items and get them put on the agenda before the spicy stuff. Then you make sure to keep the discussions going until the meeting overruns. Sooner or later normie members, even if they don’t like your proposal much, give up and go home. This gives you the majority you need, but importantly it also lets you unload both barrels into the remaining opposition, who is now significantly outnumbered. The goal is to make the experience as unpleasant as possible for them so that they dread coming to meetings and start leaving with the normies.
  5. Consolidate. By now the entryists basically have the committee to themselves, and can start using it in earnest. Things like giving the minority representatives the right to review and veto future events in the organisation, or funnelling money to pet projects owned and run by committee members. By this point quite a lot of people are feeling uneasy but learned helplessness is fully in play - it’s very difficult to convince people to join you in fights that they don’t believe you can win, and by now everyone is used to shrugging their shoulders and trying to get on with things. They also don’t apply for committee openings when they join up. The committee has become permanently hard-left.

What tactics have people seen used, and what counter-tactics?

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