There were plenty of minor con sideshows but I think one that's forgotten about was the death of Califur. A furry named TheBigKK carried out a 24 hour op against babyfurs by calling up CaliFur's hotel (and allegedly threatening them) after Len (the former leader of some old AltFurry discords who has
his own thread here) decided to
tell his server full of edgy far-right kids to call up the con hotel over hosting babyfurs. What happened next was an autism storm that caused an intersection between the fractured far-right and furries.
TheBigKK/Nate decided to phone up the hotel and impersonate a reporter. This is a classic prank calling technique, and he decided to bring up the babyfur thing by calling it "child molestation". One of the callers who weren't in this recording allegedly threatened them though.
View attachment 1287199
This was my write up on this at the time of the event:
What was interesting about Nate is that he was doing plenty of other exceptional things too. He was pals with not-fed Richard Spencer, who was declared "leader of the alt-right" by CNN. In August 2017 there was a infamous rally that devolved into political violence resulting in one death, police inaction, and prosecution afterwards that only resulted in one side being punished. It was then followed up by massive internet censorship involving sites that had remained up for years losing their domains/hosting and all, which even scared Dear Leader into making
multiple threads worrying about the site's future.
Within the far-right there were schisms from that infamous protest, and one such event afterwards was that Weev (infamous troll turned Nazi) ran a blog post
not only exposing his ties with Spencer, but even revealing a time when he also blackmailed a 14 year old. It also talks about how he was a furry for years and required people joining Spencer's Discord to dox themselves. Not long after he was mentioned
in an article by another site about how Richard Spencer was datamining the shit out of his supporters. In other words, the guy who fucked over Califur ended up getting into some insane gay op Nazi drama.
But what about the furry con side of things? Well the big long term impact from this is that Califur was sent into a downward spiral it's still unable to recover from. They found themselves in a RMFC style situation but this time actually instigated by the other side. Califur was already financially fragile and this ended up pushing it in the red hard from security costs.
The WikiFur page talks a bit more about it,
they had to pay $25,000 in security costs from these calls and 2018 got canceled. While the WikiFur page solely lays the blame on this incident, Twitter furries had been talking about how Califur was badly run beforehand as well and was losing money. How much money? Well, for starters the people who ran Califur started a literal fucking gofundme (related
fandom drama thread post) to raise money when the con went belly up in something that one can draw parallels to nowadays with the Coronavirus con shutdowns. To add to that,
Califur had a mixed reputation among local furries which added another layer to the story.
The most fitting thing about Califur and what happened is probably the next to last tweet on their account, where they were at a comic con trying to promote a dead con. In 2019
there was a booth as well.
View attachment 1287353View attachment 1287358
Allegedly Califur is no longer a thing and congoers will never get refunds, and clouding this is the fact that one of the main con people
died and had funeral bills and all as well according to the replies.
View attachment 1287360
There's probably more shit I could dig up about Califur, but that's the gist of it. A crazy exceptional Nazi reject furry ended up killing off a con that was badly run.
