Short version: Drew, their employee with the most public facing role and known to be a chill guy and left-leaning, left the company with some celebration but zero explanation. This got folks looking, and they saw that the Goulets are heavily involved with planting (think “franchising” or may more accurately “metastasizing”) a new church that was growing out from a larger one that has all the usual disgusting anti-LGBT+ rhetoric, and the new church has a mission statement that includes bible literalism and explicitly places men above women in home life and church roles. Also, Reddit being Reddit, the mods handled it all very clumsily and in a way that makes it look they’ve traded their integrity for a couple of pens.
The Noodlers stuff?
That’s the last round of fountain pen drama. The owner of Noodlers Ink is your sort of standard issue “I’m a very smart Libertarian committed to pure reason!” type, but he was putting some pretty cliche and well known anti-Semitic tropes on his self-designed ink bottles, stuff like drawing little horns on Ben Bernanke’s head.
The Goulets spent a fair amount of time and energy defending him as a good guy who just wasn’t familiar with this stuff and didn’t make the connection before now, before finally joining the chorus and asking for the inks to be changed.
In isolation, their response wasn’t the biggest issue in the world, but it does seem to fit a pattern of using politeness as a cover for tolerating or supporting some yucky stuff.
Ah. I try not to buy from facists or Libertarians (not that there’s much of a difference there). So I guess Noodlers Ink is off the list of things to get. I’ll stick with PenBBS.