At least 17 staff (and counting) contributing to Everything Board Games have left the site after its current owner, Lake Leafty, not only refused to issue a statement in support of Black Lives Matter, but said such a statement would be “virtue signalling”.
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In a statement released on June 17, staff say that in response to recent events in both the wider world and the board games community, they “asked directly when we could expect to see even a simple BLM statement from EBG”, and were reportedly told “This is everything board games, not everything politics”.
The full statement, signed by 17 staff at the mostly volunteer-run site, reads:
In response, Everything Board Games’ owner, Lake Leafty, issued a statement of his own, and it’s…something. Leafty calls their statement “false and defamatory”, despite the fact it’s merely calling for something that was never forthcoming, and calls their publishing of the above statement on Everything Board Games’ community page “a coordinated attack”.
He then says the lack of support for BLM on the site is because he wants to “refrain from getting involved or advocating certain positions in regard to politics”, before showing his true colours by calling any statement in support of BLM “virtue signaling”, which would require “the membership of our community to prove their moral and ideological purity, and all the other nonsense that comes with adopting that kind of mindset.”