Gus Diggs wanted to tell his customers why he was moving his business.
He didn’t intend to cause upheaval, nor did he want to be dragged into the quagmire of online commentary or cancel culture or find himself evicted from the building where he operated his business, Keymaster Comics and Collectibles.
And he really didn’t mean for vandals to target the building.
Yet that’s exactly what’s happened after his Instagram and Facebook posts.
In the post, Diggs asked the building owner to move Nazi memorabilia set up as part of a World War II display near his booth in the N.C. Art and Antique Mall in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
“It’s not the vibe I’m trying to send,” he said. “An SS (Nazi) uniform in front of my booth is just not me.”
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But when a satisfactory arrangement — a compromise in other words — couldn’t be reached, Diggs decided he had to move, so he took to social media to explain.
And all hell broke loose.
Social media megaphone
The Antique and Arts Museum, if you’ve never been, is basically half furniture store and half antiques, collectibles and knick-knacks.
On one side, small business types, entrepreneurs and collectors can rent small spaces to showcase their wares. Shoppers can stroll aisles set up on the other side to look for deals on bookcases, tables, credenzas and the like.
Recently, though, a World War II display set up near the front that included German regalia rubbed Diggs wrong. So he asked management if it could be moved.
“I’ve got customers with green hair, LGBT people, kids, minorities,” he said. “I told (management) that it was a very sensitive subject with some of my customers.”
Deirdre Thompson, the owner of the mall, offered to cover parts of it, Diggs said, but that didn’t go far enough. “My customers had to walk right by it,” he said.
Frustrated, he decided to move and said he told managers that he was going to use social media to explain himself.
So he did.
“To be transparent, they did offer to cover the swastikas with construction paper,” he posted earlier this month. “But hiding hate behind a thin veneer and proudly displaying your SS uniform in front of our GIs is the type of bigotry and hate that has to be called out.”
And with a few clicks of a keyboard, Diggs set off an unintended series of events.
Swift reaction
Few things put out into cyberspace go unnoticed. And the reaction was as swift as it was predictable.
“It’s sad that people are so easily offended these days,” one commenter added to the online discourse. “I don’t agree with any NAZI beliefs but you can’t erase history because it offends you. The Swastika originally was a symbol of peace, good luck and prosperity. Learn from history and stop trying to erase it.”
While that may be true that the swastika may have once meant “good fortune,” it’s sure as hell doesn’t anymore.
“I find it offensive that (some don’t understand) why it’s offensive,” a receptionist at Temple Emanuel synagogue said in taking a message for the rabbi. “I suppose there are people who still need to be educated.”
Calling that out, though, resulted in Diggs being called an agent of cancel culture and worse.
“What was that one word they used? … Virtue signaling,” he said. “(It means) trying to make yourself look better than others. I was just trying to let people know why I was leaving.”
The weekend of March 2-3, emotions peaked and the outside of the mall was vandalized. Diggs assumes it was in response to his post. He condemned the vandals, and said he apologized after it happened.
Thompson, the mall’s owner, didn’t want to say much about the exchange. She lamented the vandalism and acknowledged that she asked Diggs to move.
“I’m just trying to run a positive, happy business,” she said. “(The display) was part of another booth, a military dealer. He had Army and Navy stuff. Some Russian stuff and some German stuff that had a swastika on it.”
To be fair, Thompson also set up a booth that pays homage to Sam “the Dot Man” McMillan, a local African-American folk artist who gained a national reputation for his signature splash of polka dots in his work.
Still, a disagreement over Nazi symbols caused Diggs to move his collectibles and set up shop across Peters Creek Parkway in the Lost in Time Antiques store.
The vitriolic responses to his post saddened but didn’t surprise him.
“It is what it is,” he said. “It didn’t have to get to this point.”