Gwen's Minions

The thing that seems most puzzling to me in the entire Gwen Gale/Heidi Wyss saga is the role of her minions - the Antandruses, the CharlotteWebb's, etc., who reflexively and ruthlessly defend her even after her wrong-doing is exposed. They do much of the grunt work, banning users and deleting awkward material which may reveal a bit too much about what Gwen has been up to. Why do they do it? For most of us, the bonds of friendship are not infinitely elastic. If we discovered that our friends were, in fact, serial killers or rapists, we wouldn't hesitate to turn them into the police. We certainly wouldn't help cover up their crimes. Yet that is what Antandrus et al. are doing. It's not like they don't know about it. The evidence has been shoved in their face and they have simply deleted it. 

Is it possible we are dealing with some kind of strange entryism phenomenon here? Entryism is the term used when members of an extremist faction deliberately infiltrate a larger organisation in order to advance their agenda within its ranks. By joining in large numbers, keeping their agenda secret and voting in concerted ways, they are sometimes able to change the whole character of an institution. For example, hardcore communists would sometimes infiltrate trade unions and attempt to seize the reins of power, swinging the whole institution to the left. When the Pat Robertson candidacy died, America's nutball evangelicals pursued an entryism strategy within the Republican party, helping pave the way for the extremism of George W. Bush.

If Gwen's minions, like her, are members of some extremist ideological faction, that would go a long way towards explaining their behaviour. In that case, they don't care about right or wrong. They just want to advance their propagandistic goals and increase their own power. But what ideology could it be? Heidi herself talks about "radical feminist separatism." Is it possible these people are all radical feminist nutballs? Or scientologists? There is a Gwen Gale who is a scientologist. It hasn't been definitively established whether this Gwen Gale is the Wikipedia Gwen Gale. I myself think she is probably not. But certainly if they were all members of a creepy cult like scientology, that would explain their bizarre and concerted actions.

Whatever the explanation, once Gwen Gale/Heidi Wyss finally gets her comeuppance, and what is surely the greatest scandal in Wikipedia history is finally exposed, it is important that her partners in crime - like Antandrus and CharlotteWebb - are held to account too. They cannot be allowed to get away with their complicity in this monstrous abuse.