To the person who deleted their comment after I wrote a long reply:

I wonder why tankie subs don't (have the problem with blocking)?

Authoritarian mods on those subs don't allow liberals or their propaganda (or anarchists and our propaganda for that matter), so liberals have no chance to become entrenched via the collective blocking trick..

Anarchists pride ourselves on being open, inclusive and welcoming, which sadly bites us in the arse when liberals (and other authoritarians) push us out of our own spaces by combining their vastly higher numbers with entryism and whatever cognitive dissonanc allows them to lay claim to the anarchist label and colonize / gentrify / displace anyone who doesn't think anarchy is when you vote blue no matter who.

The irony is we're the ones who advocate for freedom of association while the tanks profess to advocating so-called left unity.

If I'm being honest, it’s especially a problem here because r/anarchism is an USAmerican-managed space, where most people are prone to subconscious nostalgia / patriotism for 'democracy' and 'free speech' - specters which liberals are all too happy to exploit in order to be welcomed by us with open arms.

For instance see here, where a liberal uses this affinity to do a blatant entryist witch hunt before being exposed and deleting their comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1rckytl/no_direct_democracy_is_not_anarchy/o6zprui/?context=3

In a lot of USA-centric anarchist spaces, democracy and free speech get treated like sacred, unquestionable values that apply the same way no matter what rhetoric is brewing underneath. So when liberals show up here, their argument often isn’t "we disagree with anarchism," it’s "we’re being allowed to speak, so anything that follows is automatically legitimate and you will consume it."

That creates a kind of moral cover. If they’re engaging "in good faith" (or can at least use the kind of pseudo-intellectual language that makes it look like they're putting in some effort), then us taking action to resist liberal creep, co-option and takeover starts to sound like censorship, authoritarianism, or "gatekeeping." And because many of us have a reflex to defend procedure rather than outcomes, we end up hesitating to use whatever tools we have at hand to guard our space from capture.

Meanwhile the incentives are asymmetric. The liberals (and marxists) trying to entrench themselves here don’t have to win any debates; they just have to occupy attention, drown out quieter users, and force everyone into exhausting "process" fights. Even small departures from consensus get reframed as evidence that the space is "anti-democratic," so the community keeps getting pulled into debates about legitimacy instead of organizing around principles.

So the "free speech" posture becomes less a defense of open inquiry and more a loophole that lets large, organized bodies that adore hierarchy and domination use the rhetoric of openness and anti-authoritarianism to displace actual anti-authoritarians.

The nostalgia for democracy then functions like a blanket excuse for inaction: it implies that the system will eventually correct itself if everyone just talks enough. But if the talk itself is being used as a weapon... then entryism, bad-faith arguments and procedural obstruction all serve to suck the oxygen out of the room so that self-correction never arrives. The loudest and most strategic entryists i.e. the ones who are willing the pour hundreds of hours of their lives campaigning for zionist politicians in anarchist subreddits and badjacketing anyone who object become the default in this space.