Ravelry Knitting Site Bans “Support of Donald Trump and His Administration”
“Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy”
A popular free knitting and crocheting website has banned all things pro-Trump, including any indication of support for the president’s administration. Because white supremacy.
The website, Ravelry, describes itself as “a place for knitters, crocheters, designers, spinners, weavers and dyers to keep track of their yarn, tools, project and pattern information, and look to others for ideas and inspiration.”
On Sunday, they announced the ban.
We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry. We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. More details: https://t.co/hEyu9LjqXa
— Ravelry (@ravelry) June 23, 2019
The website provides a detailed new policy regarding their ban of all things (pro-)Trump.
We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.
This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. If you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.
We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.
Policy notes:
- You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
- We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
- We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
- We are not banning people for past support.
- Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
- Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.
They’re also dead serious about this, apparently.
https://twitter.com/Pancho93528792/status/1142779031911325696
https://twitter.com/Pancho93528792/status/1142783109554941952
Despite their claims to the contrary, they do indeed embrace political positions.
In spite of claims that the site was not making any endorsement, more than 160 pussy hat patterns remained active on Ravelry — and the original pattern on the site boasted over 12,000 projects made. Those hats, made popular at the Women’s March held just after President Trump’s inauguration, have become a ubiquitous symbol of the anti-Trump “resistance.”
Additionally, one of our readers wrote in that “If you do a search right now for ‘Fuck Trump,’ you can find an assortment of patterns free or for sale.” So apparently, some hate and intolerance is perfectly fine, even celebrated.
In case you’re curious about the sorts of patterns deemed unacceptable, I found this tweet from one member of the Ravelry “community.”
The problem was that it had already become political. There were Trump patterns, build the wall patterns, Confederate flag patterns. Ravelry took a stance against hate
— Emily L (@NoNeinNyet) June 23, 2019
So yay! to “Fuck Trump” and “pussy hats” but “oh, the hate! I’m so triggered!” to “build the wall” and the Confederate flag. Surreal.
Needless to say, this new policy is receiving some interesting responses on Twitter.
So you're banning over half of America? Smart move #Dolt
— Sharon (@SweetFreedom29) June 23, 2019
Can you give a specific example of his “open support” please? Bet you $100 bucks you can’t do it.
— ? Bean ? (@BeanFromPA) June 23, 2019
What exactly will you do to the wrong thinkers? Will they be purged from the site?
— Aunty Bru (@BruhahaEtc) June 23, 2019
Needless to say, they can ban anyone for any reason, but I hope that some intrepid Ravelry member who supports our duly-elected president starts their own site for those no longer welcome on Ravelry.
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Comments
Interesting yet when I go in Star If You Got the Bucks you have to talk about race. If you enter targay the first thing that hits you is rainbow shirts.
This is just not true.
So as you decree, so shall it be?
Is that how it works in the House of Milhouse?
It’s a simple question of fact. The facts are not as 2dumforcons claims.
links?
got no idea what you are referring too.
Current message on the site is:
“registration is closed temporarily
registration will be open again in a few days”
I deleted my account so I won’t be able to follow up on this.
It wouldn’t let me create one, either. I suspect they don’t want anyone reporting on the existing content (the only reason I tried to register).
I had an account because a quilter/knitter I follow would link to it to show patterns she was thinking about. I think I saved about 3 free patterns, but I deleted my account.
My friend had a long post this morning – she has about 11 years of patterns stored online so she’s not leaving it now. But, she doesn’t like the action, so she will use it to maintain access to her patterns. She deleted her participation in any forums and will not link to the site. If she can find the pattern at another site, then she’ll link.
So, Ravelry will also be losing new people checking into the site via links. Too bad.
They also locked the comments on the new policy page.
Then they tagged it with “courage”.
Planetpurl.com, I’ve read that in a number of places today.
It should be tagged with stupidity, only an idiot injects their politics into their business. The end result will be a massive exodus of about 50% of their base.
Yet Granny can still knit a ‘pussy hat’ emblazoned with ‘F^ck Trump’ vulgarity.
The tonedeaf TDS of these crap weasels is gonna leave a mark come November 2020.
I stopped buying yarn from my local yarn store the day that I got an email from them asking me to come in and buy some pink yarn to knit pussy hats to donate.
I’ll never darken the door of Ravelry again – and that includes the “designers” who post there.
Leave politics the heck out of my knitting and purling!!
I quit going to my local yarn shop when they hosted a local artisan who named her one of her yarn colorways after Maxine Waters.
Making the intarwebz safe for knitwits.
Todays internets winner!
So my needlepoint pattern of a bull terrier labeled MAGA chewing on Shrieking Crow Warren’s Butt will not pass muster, eh?
2smartfoibs: I must be doing something wrong. I’ve ptobably been in well over 100 Starbucks all over the nation, and several more world wide. No one has ever addressed the subject of race to me, or, even in my presence.
I was at Target yesterday. Nothing rainbow that I can recall.
The polarization continues…. easier to separate the wheat from the chaff. The question is who will be what?
Some days the Samson Option is appealing …
As ye knit… so shall ye reap
I’m going to open two gas stations across the road from each other. One will be pro-Trump and the other Anti-Trump. I bet I can get people to drive for miles around to come support one or the other.
It sounds like they are trying very hard to thread a needle that doesn’t really exist. The accusation that Trump supporters are white supremacists, or that Trump supports same, is ridiculous.
It’s an interesting thing to see, someone giving in to hysterical partisan delusions while trying to give the appearance of being even-handed (You can be here if you support Trump, you just can’t talk about it!).
Remember when McCarthyism was a bad thing?
Crafters use a website to track their crafting supplies they use and store at home? And this ravelry website sells retailers this personal client stock data? Seems likely. And then people wonder why ads targeting them pop up on their phones and in emails.
Bleh. Stop using these seemingly benign data collection centers. Write a list on scratch paper. Hobby stuff can be expensive, but try to shop locally and you won’t end up in thirty different data servers all trading on…. you.
Planetpurl.com has crashed. Guess where all the Ravelers are going.
Bite me, Ravelry.
No, it is an international forum where knitters can share different ideas, we can buy yarn from independent vendors, and have hundreds of thousands of patterns are available for free or purchase. It is much more than yarn stash tracking.
Thanks for the clarification. One of our local independent yarn and loom shops closed recently – which is why I’m bit cranky regarding local shopping.
Uh-huh. The Nineteenth Amendment continues to pay dividends.
A question is: dividends for whom?
Target has rainbow crap everywhere, including children’s clothing, toddlers. I complained to corporate and to the stores 20 year old manager (lol)
Every time I go there I take the children items and hide them all over the store
Tee hee chuckle guffaw. That’ll show ‘em, by crackie! All you do is cause needless problems for the salespeople and stockers on the floor.
Grow up.
Let them have their fun. Every target I’ve been to has “employees” that need something to do other than stand around on their phones or gossiping with one another.
A color judgment, including racism, sexism, a.k.a. “diversity”.
The Left will not be satisfied until they insure that the Right hates them all as much as they hate us.
Completely pathetic. What are the gals so afraid of?
You’re not the first to mention “gals.” I believe that “fiber arts” are very popular with the various alternative sexuality folks. I suspect it is they who are running this site.
We are already two or more hostile nations trapped together inside one set of borders. We are gathering into like-minded groups in preparation for settling who is in charge of the country. They have chosen a side for themselves. Others are choosing other sides, all over society. There will be further steps.
Subotai Bahadur
Who’s a white supremacist? Derbyshire replies to John McWhorter with what gets called white supremacy.
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2016-12-02.html#05
This is far from the first time a hobby site has banned Trump support. It happened to a Dungeons & Dragons site last year:
https://mashable.com/article/rpgnet-forum-bans-trump-support/
The point is to exclude people with the wrong politics from more and more spheres of life, in order to pressure them into conforming with the “correct” politics.
Everything is politics to these people. Everything.
Eric Erickson, 2013: “You will be made to care.”
Ravelry, 2019: “Anyone who says they support the current President of the United States will be banned from this site. Find them and report who they are!”
You know you’ve lost the argument when you can’t come up with anything better than, “Shut up!”
Nothing says “inclusive” Like SHUT UP and GET OUT!!!
There were just too many users on the site. But they’ve solved that problem. Traffic will drop.
They’ve been busy erasing criticism from their FB site, and banning the critics. Poor brittle gals!
The reason that websites like Ravelry go hog wild for deplatforming is because they think Trump supporters (in addition to being racist) are lazy, stupid, and too weak to give up their free service.
Prove Ravelry wrong. Boycott the website and anyone who advertises there. Make it clear to the advertisers why you are boycotting them.
Deleted my account and already started contacting yarn companies of my intention to boycott.
Oh darn.
Heh!
Knit us ’til we glow, Ravelrys!
So to speak.
“I have a lot that I want to say about why it’s important that we recognize and celebrate Pride and talk about it here on Ravelry. I’ll be able to do that next week. Right now I just want to speak to the LGBTQIA+ folks that make up our community:
We see you, we love you, and we support you ????️????✊????✊????✊????✊????”
This is from Ravelry’s homepage.
WHY are they compelling their members to care what people do with their genitals?
It is a knitting/crocheting website.
Next week will be a l Nh week for them, I suspect.
Like I responded up a little higher, it’s because Progressives think of themselves as crusaders for justice.
Most people might say, “Look I don’t care about any of that, I just want to go about my business and be left alone.”
Progressives would say, “No! Everyone is either part of our solution or part of the problem. We will make you care.”
Those knitted pink hats reminded me of the red guard.
They are being mocked so heavy on social media right now it’s pretty funny.
“Soooo-be a business that just drove out 50% of the population-smart accounting move.” “They’re a frickin KNITTING site-Bwahahaha”, “Wow, driving you customers to Hobby Lobby, that’s got to sting” etc.
In the larger world, a web site for crafters can hardly afford to lose a huge percent of their “eyes on”.
And people look at me funny when they realize that I’m serious that this country is heading towards some type of civil war in the next ten years.
You see the left now consistently doing everything they can to cut anyone on the right or perceived to be on the right (like Dave Rubin for example) out of civil society.
Essentially the left is trying to make the right goose step the way the left wants or the price is ostracizing of said offender.
That process of ostracizing is accelerating. Eventually we reach a point where both sides are so separated that the only left to do is fight.
“Othering” The left is in the process of ‘othering’ the right, the conservatives, the normals. Hitler did that with the Jews, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao did that with the middle class. H3ll, African tribes do it with one another. The left is turning America into an “Us or Them” nation. Successfully.
Hobby Lobby, here they come! I hope you have space for the newcomers!
Our K-Mart closed, and they are converting the building into a multi-store shopping center. We’re getting a Hobby Lobby, and am glad this is so.
“In order to maintain the most open and inclusive community possible, we are required to exclude the half of the country that disagrees with us.”
Seems perfectly logical to me.
I don’t knit or crochet (I think my wife has dabbled in both), but I never thought I would consider a knitting and crochet website as being run by fascists….but…. here we are.
Free advertising for a site I’ve never heard of. I bet they get a spike in traffic for a little while from this cheap stunt, but I doubt it lasts and bet it reverses course.
They have closed new registration—mostly because Trump people overwhelmed it with user names reflecting their support.
In other news, Google is making huge in-kind contributions to the Democrats, and they know it. Project Veritas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re9Xp6cdkro&feature=youtu.be
You seem not to understand the word “contribution”, or the phrase “to the Democrats”. A contribution, by definition, is something that is given to someone else. In this case, you’re alleging it’s being given to the Democratic Party. But nothing in the video suggests that anyone at Google even consulted the Democrats about this. Google is simply doing its own thing to influence voters, as is its perfect right. That is not a contribution, whether in kind, kine, or anything else.
This highly political, unjust move by, of all things, a crafting website, reminds me of the BDS nonsense that the Palestinians pull.
They go to some tiny organization that has nothing to do with international relations, and hijack it when nobody is looking, in an effort to “prove” that there is real support for their addled positions.
There’s either some person, or some money, that is new at that website.
No, the owners did this.
As the owner of a small business, I make it a strict rule that politics are not to be discussed with ANYone servicing our business, or purchasing from/selling to us.
No matter what, you will offend half your list.
Do you have real information that this was an action by the owners, or are you speculating? At this site, we have seen, time after time, ultra vires political action by small groups having nothing to do with international politics. In the guise of ordinary business, they take over a few voting positions, for example in a student organization or a homeowner’s association, and then they pull a political stunt relating to international politics.
Now we have a previously apolitical site, with a history of hosting a wide spectrum of political views, suddenly defame a pointed subset and deprive them of their ordinary privileges. The alleged basis for this action is the utterly false statement that DJT and all his supporters are white supremacists. They haven’t thrown out the pussy-hat makers, so it is blatantly obvious that their notion that they are maintaining their apolitical stance is a lie.
These people are doing exactly the same thing as Google: they are discriminating against people based on political opinion. It makes me wonder who made the decision, and why. Is this an action by, or at the behest of pussy-hat knitting Google employees? The Project Veritas video I cited above has a woman babbling about how her idea of fairness is favoritism of political views like her own. It is an astounding example of doublespeak.
Who is newly influential at Ravelry, and why are they suddenly pulling a political stunt at the expense of the business?
Ravelry.com was founded by Casey and Jessica Forbes, I think in 2005. Casey, the husband, describes himself as a “code monkey” which implies that he is employed elsewhere. They live in Boston, apparently, so it is a high order of probability that the employer backs their move. Or perhaps not, in which case there could be second order consequences if it is brought to their attention. Their “about us” page has a rainbow flag on the top left corner, which implies that this is a Leftist site from the beginning and this is not a coup.
There are pictures of the two owners and their three employees with names on the “about us” page. And a link to a “http://blog.ravelry.com/2012/01/25/how-does-ravelry-make-money/” post that apparently lists advertisers. I say apparently, because it goes to a 404-ed page. I suspect that they do not want those who disagree with their stand to express such to their sponsors.
Subotai Bahadur
That does it. I’m cancelling my subscription. I’ll get my knitting news elsewhere. (Just my luck that as soon as I do, they’ll break an important story).
Interesting that the featured pic has hats for newborns. I wonder what would happen if they instead called them “hats for abortion survivors “ whether that would be banned as well.
what do you expect from site that associates with BLM?
Inclusive, friendly website for ???? people around the ????. Site status tweets: @ravelrystatus #BlackLivesMatter ????️????
“inclusion” – I do not think that word means what they think it means.
Opens the door for a free speech alternative.
Yarns: “Where illogic does not get to ban logic. If you are going to call others racist because YOU refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration, expect an earful, as we all enjoy our knitting.”
Bitter old lesb.os UNITE!
Go check their Twitter page, most of their members are old pu55yhat owners.
Mdm Lefarge was unavailable for comment.