(( Over on Twitter, someone asked FB era Calleo what his thoughts on Grindelwald’s Acolytes were. Not surprisingly, he has opinions. ))

This really is the Aurors opinion reworded.

Oddly enough, the two are related to a degree.

The thing is, it’s the policies put into place and upheld by Magical governmental bodies, including the International Confederation, that allow movements such as his to start and gain traction in the first place.

You take large groups of people and shove them to the fringes of society, telling them they’re corrupt, they’re evil, they don’t belong, they aren’t welcome, they’re an example of failure and shame, and that doesn’t do anything useful or productive except give people--in this example, you’re very clearly taking aim at Grindelwald--an amazingly easy opportunity to recruit people to their cause.

And it doesn’t matter what that cause is, it doesn’t matter what it is under the surface, what matters is it’s offering large groups of people who are either openly marginalised or who fear being marginalised, thrown into prison, or executed for having an interest in or practising forms of magic that the government has deemed ‘wrong’ regardless of whether or not they ever injure anyone else or even themselves in their studies, or people who have had family or friends harmed or killed by those policies a place to belong, a group in which they’re told they’re not broken, they’re not damaged, they’re not corrupt, they’re not wrong and that they’ve been treated poorly by the same society and same governmental bodies that were allegedly designed to include and protect them along with everyone else.

That’s tempting. Most people wouldn’t think twice about being offered a place where they won’t be looked down upon, where they’d be readily accepted and told they’re fine exactly as they are. Once they have that, it’s still something society at large never offered and actively denied them so they’re willing to overlook a great deal or justify a great deal because the alternative is worse: The alternative is being thrown back into the gutter, only this time it’ll be two ‘societies’, as it were, that rejected them. The majority of them will stay, regardless of any personal misgivings they may develop along the way, because of that alone.

When you have laws in place that treat addiction as a crime, that treat even so much as casual socialising with Muggles as a crime (one you can be executed for in some areas), when you’re expected to cut off family and friends because it turns out someone in your circle can use magic, when you’re viewed as a violent criminal by default regardless of what you do or do not do, when you’re repeatedly told you have to hide a large part of yourself if you want to continue living outside of a prison or living at all, and someone comes along and tells you that there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s the laws and the people who blindly and brutally uphold them without question that are the problem, very few people are going to be in a position to even want to resist that, and just as many will be pleased and eager to be able to make the same people who went out of their way to make them feel worthless feel even a fraction of what it did to them--so they’re not going to bat an eye at a little death and destruction here and there.

It’s also easy to recruit from the more conservative aspects of Wizarding society, and to do so with not nearly as much effort: Simply tell them that their way of life is under attack, aim it at whatever it is you want to take down, tell them the nasty little things you dredged up from the gutter--that would be everyone described above--are only there as fodder (and make no mistake, that is what they are, every last one of them) but please do keep quiet about that as if they knew those on the upper tiers of the power structure thought just as poorly of them as the rest of society it’d all fall apart very quickly, and there’s where you get the majority of the political and economic power.  Nobody is easier to spook about “their way of life disappearing” than old money Pureblood families.

Give them the illusion of a position of power, and they’ll follow you right off the edge of a cliff without batting an eye.

If you were asking what I think of them personally, that’s not a question that has a blanket answer; they’re not one large person, they’re any number of individuals. On an individual basis I may like or dislike them based on a number of factors.

In general, I get on just fine with the three who work under me in the Archives but I certainly wouldn’t consider them anything other than work friends; we never speak outside of work and never really have.

The ones I’ve met have been all over the place in terms of what I think of them; some of them are absolutely dreadful and the human equivalent of scraping a fork down a blackboard, some are incredibly dull and forgettable, others are a great deal of fun, and some I’ve known for decades and know exactly how and why they ended up where they are--and it’s usually not that they’re “old money Purebloods”.

If you were looking for somebody to blame for the lot of them, look to the governments and laws that spawned the movement and gave it what it needed to grow the way it did, because they’re nothing more than the result of it.

They’ll get what they deserve in the end.

Dream Home: The Pines

The Pines, a magnificent estate on Lake Tahoe, is located just south of Glenbrook, the site of Lake Tahoe’s first shoreline sawmill and the largest lumbering settlement in the 1870s and ’80s. Tahoe is a bit of a recreational paradise with skiing and snowboarding all winter long and golf, hiking, fishing, and boating in the summer months.

Originally 26 acres and named Whispering Pines, the…