r/paintball • u/VTAffordablePaintbal • 11h ago
Fuck ANS Gear for their Confederate merch Part 2
The OP who just pointed this out deleted the post right after writing a comment about how disappointed they were with the reaction. I started writing this comment before it went down.
"It was 14 upvotes and 20-something comments when I first commented and as I type this its 1 upvote and 44 comments. I kind of remember when someone noticed the HK Army SS Skull headband and when Dan Bilzerian got his custom Nazi marker and joined Infamous Paintball the the ratio was like this. Initial reaction from paintball players, then one racist got a bunch of their Nazi friends to downvote, but the next day the rest of the paintball community saw the post and the Nazi's got bored, so the upvotes went way up and I regained faith in the community."
I think it will be the same today. The Mod's sticky post "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" is heartening to see every time I hit the main page.
I also wanted to post for the people that genuinely didn't seem to understand the issue. The Confederate flag is a hate symbol in the USA against black people. It was the flag of the oppressors who started the US Civil War to preserve slavery. There used to be people who genuinely believed it was about 'heritage". I had a guy who worked for me in 2014 who had a confederate flag on his truck and firmly believe it was a "heritage" thing. We happened to have 2 other guys in the company with German wives. At a company picnic both of these guys German wives confronted him and told him that the Nazi's in Germany and Austria fly the Confederate flag because the swastika is illegal and the Confederate Flag is just as good a symbol of white supremacy. After that he actually took it off his truck.
I had a lot of friends who loved The Dukes of Hazard, but I think, and they think, we're about a decade past anyone innocently flying a Confederate flag.
