It started before the freepathon ended, and shortly after it got rolling a major donation came in to end it.
I did see several rudy people suggest a major purge was coming right after the freepathon ended. At the time, I thought they were paranoid.
However, having watched a half-dozen of them basically walk in and say "Jim, please ban me", I think they weren't being paranoid, they were just telling me the plan ahead of time. That's just speculation, of course, but I'm hard-pressed to otherwise explain smart people calling Jim names and calling him a baby-killer, or saying to him "go ahead and ban me if you dare", or some such thing.
I'm speculating some more here, maybe during this freepathon, which was going slowly, several people he respects wrote him and told him they had trouble giving money any more because the site wasn't living up to its core principles. I know that people get focused more on that kind of thing when they are forking out bucks. So maybe it WAS somewhat based on the freepathon, but in the opposite way than you might think.
Actually, that makes sense, Charles. And thanks for not belittling me.