Iâve never seen Brantly treat anyone as different or lesser because of who they are.
Nick, given what weâve seen and heard tonight, I donât understand the logic of this statement.
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Everyone at ENS and TNL are probably complicit at this rate for the most asinine takes in crypto project history.
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This is what I came here to highlight. Did anyone from True Names tell Brantly to get off the Spaces? The entire True Name team looks incompetent tonight.
Getting on a Space to share your personal views took from all of who are part of the DAO. Brantly you took the attention and respect given to you be ENS and used it to your own ego. I donât care what your personal battle is here. Go do it on your own without dragging ENS into it.
And worse, the True Names team stood by and allowed it to happen. Nick, Alisha, we expected better.
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While I agree with you, I donât know how they could have practically stopped him even if they wanted to. Everyone works remotely. Web3 native issue. Canât tape their mouth shut.
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Itâs not just Brantly, thereâs a lot of trash behind the ENS team.
I donât know how it works as a company or how itâs structured. I doubt a DAO would even be compelling legal basis to remove them.
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I asked them in the other thread here: Clarify DAO's democratic power to remove members of the core team
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The future accessibility and inclusivity of web3 cannot be decided, even partially, by people that stand on the opposite spectrum of things like inclusivity. Or women/human rights, judging by the things mentioned in his postâŚ
Itâs a very damaging and hateful day-to-day experience for a lot of people living in this world.
The digital world - which is often a place to escape from the hateful reality for all kinds of people all across the globe - making this space inclusive is what should be on everyones mind.
Projects like this should actually be making waves with accessibility, being borderless and inclusive - instead we have brantly.eth and his âopinionsâ.
You canât even look at anything ENS related without there being âbrantlyâ plastered all over it - i think ensdomains needs to re-think their representatives and their publicly shared values - as they are clashing with the project and itâs values & what web3 should be standing for.
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This gaffe was likely a long time in the making. A core team member doesnât just stand up and grab the mic one day and demand the spotlight for personal use. It builds over time. ENS needed a real communications manager months ago, not someone just winging it. Policies for how to engage media and brands.
But in terms of answering your question on what to do â illustrated to demonstrate they werenât powerless, rather than trying to change the past:
- stepping into the Twitter space and saying âJust a reminder, Brantly doesnât speak for ENS on this.â
- Telling Brantly to cool it for a few hours.
- Team meeting as soon as it was clear the Spaces was a narcissistic move that would deface ENS
- Not writing a âBrantly is a good guyâ post by Nick
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I would like to say a few things that will hopefully put peopleâs reactions into perspective for @brantlymillegan
When you say that homosexual acts are âevil,â you are implicitly saying that the people committing those acts are evil too, because what kind of person commits evil acts day after day other than an evil one? So, people think you believe that they are evil because they express love to their partner in life. The idea that one could be evil for consensually expressing love is deeply hurtful, in a way that you may never be able to truly understand. It is also a problem because labeling someone as evil â dehumanizing people like that â opens the door to ârighteousâ violence in some deranged peopleâs minds, so you have to be careful about calling someone or something evil, especially when it is directed at a community that has a history of violence committed against them, and especially when you are in a position of public power/authority.
Now, I believe Brantly has said that he doesnât believe that people that commit these âevilâ acts are evil themselves. That is not how people interpreted the tweets, and I think some clarification on that would have gone a long way. Just a quick âHey, I do not believe those in the LGBTQ+ community are evil, and I believe you should be treated with love and respectâ could have alleviated a majority of the pressure. Instead though, it was doubling down on what was already said multiple times which had the opposite effect.
Brantlyâs position as the public leader of the ENS community is inherently one of trust and goodwill, and both categories took a pretty large hit tonight. Action may have to be taken to protect the interests of the ENS protocol and DAO, but I will let other more prominent members chime in on that note. I really just wanted to get my thoughts out in a medium that Brantly has a good chance of seeing.
To close, I just want to say that people generally just want to live their lives and be respected as human beings; not told their love or identity is invalid and/or evil. And honestly, it really isnât that hard to make the effort to express that you respect others without agreeing with them or their life choices. Whatever happens with this situation and ENS DAO, I hope that Brantly recognizes this and makes an attempt at expressing his own respect for others as human beings.
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Web3 will be built with humane mindsets.
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I want to make sure ENS the product and projects are inclusive. I wouldnât feel right being apart of a community where my friends and family arenât welcomed. I wouldnât feel right being apart of a community where the leaders donât recognize my friends and family as human.
I will vote with what little i have for what I feel is right. Iâll respect the outcome either way.
At the very least he needs to take anything ENS related out of his twitter bio. fucking clown 
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Letâs not bring toxic cancel culture to Web3. Brantly I love you regardless of your crazy views. Letâs all work together, maybe we can convince him to change some views over time. We donât know his personal history, we donât know his upbringing. Cancelling anyone you disagree with just means we all continue living in bubbles. As far as I can see he is not hating anyone, he just thinks some acts are immoral.
Whatâs the best way to deal with things like that? Find some inspiration here: OFFICIAL Video: Russell Brand Interviews Westboro Baptist Church - YouTube
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Dear all, hate speech and bigotry should not represent and/or associated with this initiative. A strong reaction is needed. Please start with considering to re-delegate your $ENS and I also agree that core team should not consist of people who is explicitly doubling down such expressions.
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The DAO is proposing a vote to remove him. We need to get that vote up and let the DAO decide.
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Someone needs to say it Brantly.eth has the right to say what he believes and so do we all
Let a decentralized protocol be ruled by opinion, ENS be ruled by the dictatorship of opinion, no other opinion allowed, no other .ETH domain names against some opinions is allowed, this is not a decentralized web3 itâs just a shitty centralized company than, more than half of the world is against LGBTQ+ communities, what do we do that for another half of the population we cancel them??, this is neither the United States nor Europe, itâs not you local elections nor the BBC, it is a global protocol, this kind of political point of view should not be in decentralized and censorship-resistant protocol.
I am a muslim and am against the evil of homosexuality will you cancel me and 1.8B muslim and 2B Christian then, let cancel Africa and Asia, India and China, I canât believe this kind of bullying exists in this decentralized protocol.
Brantly.eth will have my vote
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You and Brantly should go for a Decentralised Caliphate. I heard Saudi Arabia is investing $1B in metaverse. Who knew ENS is full of fundamentalist nutjobs? Well, now we do. Your goats need herding brother. Go back to pre-web1 tribal era.
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Last time I checked you were using anything based on programming from algorithms put together by mathematician MuḼammad ibn MĹŤsÄ al-KhwÄrizmÄŤ, damn you have to go and live in the farms with your pigs, let cancel everything no more experimental science no number no camera no ⌠(all by muslims) donât be a hepocrit, cancel all things
This situation seems like itâs gone a bit off the rails. Currently weâre looking at a DAO vote on Brantlyâs job, which is risking becoming an index on whether voters agree with, or find abhorrent, his opinions on certain very sensitive subjects. Either way that vote goes, ENS loses big time, because such a vote would be pretty obviously partisan, and would destroy ENSâs neutrality in the ecosystem. We do not want a reputation (whether deserved or not) as either a community and project that supports homophobia, transphobia, and bigoted hate generally, or as a community and project that supports religious or cultural persecution via âcancel cultureâ or âthought policeâ. We must remain a neutral protocol that everyone can feel equally supported and advantaged in using.
What is the actual problem here, from my perspective?
Brantly, in his role as project representative, essentially the âface of ENSâ, has not maintained suitable neutrality in his communications. Via his Twitter account, he posted frequent official ENS updates, mixed with various personal updates. A very early tweet espousing various exclusionary ideas may or may not be relevant, given its age dating back to 2016. But in the past 24 hours, he released several tweets and at least one Twitter Spaces, again conducted with the same Twitter account that many associated directly with ENS as a protocol, which doubled down on that early tweet.
Essentially, Brantly, in his role as Director of Operations for ENS Domains, posted his divisive and very non-neutral opinions in a manner that very directly linked those opinions to ENS itself. They could very easily have been construed to originate from ENS itself, since they were stated by an official ENS representative, using the same social media account normally used by that representative for various semi-official news and postings.
This action risks destroying ENSâs extremely valuable legitimacy in the web3 space as a neutral protocol. It risks alienating a substantial subset of the ENS community. It risks politicizing ENS. Perhaps itâs already too late.
To me, this is the crux of the issue. The Director of Operations chose to risk everything he has extremely adeptly and capably built, along with many others, over the years, by surfacing and re-emphasizing his personal opinions while in a role which requires strict, fastidious neutrality.
Where do we go from here?
ENS must respond in an official capacity. To do otherwise invalidates and disregards the very real concerns expressed by the LGBTQ+ community, women, and the other all-too-often-targeted demographics impacted. They form a crucial and invaluable component of the global web3 and ENS community, and deserve a real, thoughtful, non-trivializing, efficacious response.
ENS must not respond in a way that commits the opposite error: alienating the enormous global audience of people with belief systems that produce the kinds of ideas at the center of this situation. This audience also forms a crucial and invaluable component of the global web3 and ENS community, and deserves to be treated thoughtfully and even-handedly as well. These belief systems may seem incompatible with an inclusive and accepting web3 and ENS community, but rejecting them on that basis is also excluding.
The only path forward, to me, seems to be one that returns as directly and diplomatically and firmly as possible to a position of clear neutrality on ENSâs part.
Evicting Brantly on the basis of his beliefs would completely fail in that. Ignoring the issue would completely fail in that.
I believe Brantly must apologize. Not for his beliefs, because I donât think he would be willing to do that, nor should he be required to, because a personâs beliefs are their own business, no matter how much many of us may vehemently disagree with them personally. I think he must apologize for discussing those beliefs while serving in an official ENS role, and from a social media account that often promulgates official ENS information. I think the apology should address the inappropriateness of those actions, and the impacts and risks that they present for the ENS protocol and web3 as a whole. I think it would be much better if this message explicitly apologized for dehumanizing and invalidating the impacted groups, but such an apology would need to be sincere, and Iâm not convinced it would be in this case.
I also think that ENS itself, either the DAO or core team members, should issue an official statement on the matter. This statement should formally and clearly disavow any affiliation with the personal ideas and opinions shared by Brantly. It should be clear that ENS is a neutral protocol where all participants have equal access. It should be clear that those ideas and opinions are antithetical to this principle of equal access, but that persecuting Brantly or anyone else on the basis of holding those opinions would also be antithetical to the protocolâs neutrality and principle of equal access. Lastly, it should apologize for allowing the public and private messaging of its team members to become entangled to the point where this became an issue. Official statements going forward should not be given from any individual team member social media accounts where any non-official ENS business is also discussed. To do otherwise, again, puts its status as a neutral protocol in grave danger.
I think that ENS might pursue additional disciplinary action against Brantly for these lapses in judgement, up to and including removing him from his position, but also think that this could prove too controversial and damaging and must be handled with great care if at all.
Overall, I think this is a very serious matter that must be carefully addressed by ENS if it is to maintain its legitimacy with certain large subsets of the web3 community. I would encourage the DAO to act as swiftly as it can while still achieving all due deliberation.
Thanks.
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