Slowly sinking further and further into irrelevance would be the best outcome. A massive scandal would be really bad for all parties involved. The gradual, excruciating decline of ERA will offer a documentary for the internet to see where this ideology takes you. It's already like a little terrarium of venus fly traps, snapping at any innocent insects who enter. Fascinating to watch. Bit by bit, they'll isolate themselves.
Of course, ERA won't view it as "isolating themselves". They'll view it as purifying their ranks. The True Believers are already sharpening their knives.
Let them act out their little power fantasies. It will hopefully shock anyone who watches it go down, bit by bit, and it might inoculate them from falling prey to this sort of brainwashing in the future. ERA isn't just a bad forum. It's a cult that is abusing its own members. Now, this abuse is diluted across thousands of members, but make no mistake: the people running that circus are psychopaths bent on extracting subservience and personal grandeur. You only see ten bans here, twenty bans there. Everyone says it feels like walking on eggshells. This is not accidental. The mods aren't like "hey folks, lighten up. We're really sorry people feel this way. How can we turn around this impression?" No, they are reinforcing Right Thinking and doing it openly.
A massive scandal would be unfortunate. ERA is already displaying the same paranoid skepticism that they accuse Trump supporters of falling prey to: they hardly believe anything they see in the media, except for a few enshrined sources.
Any "massive scandal" concerning ERA that comes to light would instantly be denied and downplayed, and the mods would go into full PR mode. It would confuse their members and would give them even more leverage to play their game of manipulation.
Right now, some members are saying openly "a lot of our members aren't really as progressive as we all tell ourselves". I expect soon this will further degrade into a paranoid attitude of "ERA as a forum is being attacked from all sides, and we are being smeared, and only we carry the torch of truth and freedom". If the forum survives implosion, it will eventually reach that point, and it will be amazing to witness.
A scandal would prevent that. Instead of letting them all bear witness to the homunculus they all sacrificed GAF to create, they would be drawn in further into the fantasy-drama known as ERA. It would be another opportunity to isolate ERA members from the outside world.
ERA is without a doubt one of the most fascinating online experiments I have ever watched unfold.
I'm curious if they'll ever make their forum member-only visible like they "accidentally" did a few months ago.
Ah, it's whatever. Hopefully some of those misled members feel welcome to return here, as long as they understand the nature of GAF now that the authoritarians are gone.