Nazis in the Basement

NOTE: For background in this piece, put "Reddit" into a google news search and it'll all make more sense.


We here at Headplaces have been contacted by an anonymous source at the Bureaucracy of Better Businessmaking. They have supplied us a sampling of complaints filed against the Reddit Heights chain of apartment complexes. In order to protect the identities of our sources, we will be redacting all identifying information.

We will also be looking at cat pictures while we type this out.

-----

Hello, my name is [REDACTED]. I would like to file a complaint against Reddit Heights Apartments. I have been living in the building since just after it was built. Lately, something changed, I started noticing more and more hate groups moving in. Any time I would bring it up to the manager [REDACTED], he would brush it off by saying they have a right to free speech and I should just ignore them.

This all came to a head recently, when members of a certain floor, mostly populated by young, angry, white men found out I was employed as a [Job related to tech industry]. They started following me around the halls any time I would step outside of my door yelling nasty names at me. A male friend of mine told some of them to knock it off and they called him a "white knight beta cuck mangina" as though those words mean anything and then keyed "SJW" into the side of his car. They gave out my personal information and now the SWAT team has been called to my apartment several times. I get death and rape threats stuck to my door regularly. Eventually I had to leave because nothing was being done about them and then they just followed me to my new community. I can literally hear them mouth breathing outside my apartment door right now and complaining about the feminazi conspiracy. Don't they have anything better to do?

Reddit Heights was complicit in all of this. Every time I confronted the manager about it, all he kept saying was "free speech".

I hope you are able in some way to help clean up the Reddit Heights community, because it really was an ok place to be with some great people in it. Now it has become a hostile place to be and management just pays lip service to stopping harassment.

Thank you,
[REDACTED]

-----

To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing this to file a complaint against Reddit Heights. My name is [REDACTED] and I am a [Occupation]. I was initially drawn to Reddit Heights by their varied sub-communities. There were groups who liked to discuss music, popular culture, science and technology, as well as cute animals. I also quite enjoyed the informal Q&A sessions they would host regularly (which they called "AMA"s). Overall, I found their community to be very welcoming.

Then I learned something that shocked to my core. There were Nazis in the basement. I'm not trying to be cute here, there was a concentrated group of actual white supremacists congregating in the basement. I heard about it from another community member.

When I confronted the building manager about it, he confirmed it as if I had asked him where the washroom was! "Oh yeah, down the hall to the right and watch out for the Nazis." He said our building was the largest hub of Neo-Nazis second only to the Stormfront Trailer Park across town. They occupied several levels in the basement, in sections given names such as [portmanteau of "racial slur for person of African decent" + "smaller than a city but larger than a village"] where they would gather to talk about how much they hated people of colour. When a white man walked into a black church and shot 9 people, you could hear the cheering from the basement all the way up most of the other floors. To say it was disturbing to find this out would be an understatement.

I asked him why they were here and the manager said that they hadn't actively committed a crime so kicking them out would be a violation of their free speech rights. I explained that freedom of speech does not mean a private company has an obligation to provide hate groups with a platform and that he was well within his rights to evict them. He explained that recently, certain "objectionable" communities were "reclassified" into a new two-tier system.

The manager told me the objectionable communities would be kept to their own floors, with a separate entrance and the entrance would be hidden so passers by could not see them. He didn't seem to understand why I had a problem with providing a hate group a special, private place to meet up, invisible to the outside world and unencumbered by a need to abide by the rules, after all, he had already created a separate set of rules just for them. Needless to say, I got pretty upset and asked him how he could justify filling his pockets off of hate. The manager told me, part of the new system meant that Reddit Heights couldn't be seen making money from them, so they were living there free of charge.

That meant that the rest of us who were putting up with advertisements in the hallways and following the rules of civil discourse were subsidizing the Nazis in the basement who were living there on Reddit Heights dime without any oversight or enforcement.

He tried to tell me that I would hardly notice them, but I left the office before he could finish. As I was leaving, in a panic he meekly squealed "FREE SPEECH!" as the door closed behind me.

How can I continue to contribute to a system that not only allows, but incentivizes hate? A system that rewards do-nothing management who are afraid to piss off the ignorant, the unstable and the uncivilized. 

I guess it wasn't always this way. Reddit Heights used to have a no tolerance policy on hate speech. Management used to take an active role in creating a welcoming community but not allowing toxic elements in. Somewhere along the line, they allowed the inmates to run the asylum. Now, they can lock the place down, they can flout the rules, and they can basically enforce whatever standards they want to because management is so detached. A once lively and vibrant hub of discussion and, yes, debate is now a playpen full of tantruming children who will not hesitate to fling  their crap on the walls at a moments notice. Now it's become a safe haven for every racist, misogynist, anti semite, homophobe and conspiracy nut.

It comes to a point where cute animal pictures just aren't worth it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sincerely,
[REDACTED]

-----

Thank you to our anonymous tipster for forwarding these. The BBB has indicated it won't do anything, because it's largely a useless organization bought and paid for by big companies and it's power is mostly symbolic anyway. So...thanks for that I guess.

It really is a shame about Reddit Heights. It seems like it could have been a nice place to hang out.