Friendship In The Time Of SJWs

An author friend of mine wrote an interesting blog about social media and politics from the perspective of a European living in America, citing how bad it’s become. As I mentioned on Vox Popoli last week, “The Science Fiction and Fantasy writing and convention scene is one of the worst SJW converged subcultures.” When people you think are your friends are part of that establishment, you’ll find that it’s far more exacerbated than any other group on social media. Dario’s post provides an interesting perspective, which is worth reading. From an American right perspective, despite his conclusions, where we have to deal with the hatred, the death threats, the physical violence, all of those things deserve proportionate response. We cannot stand down while they keep hitting us over and over.

Dario states:

“Like myself, most Europeans, especially older ones, have longtime friendships across the political and ideological spectrum. It’s not uncommon to have a dinner gathering where one person has communist sympathies, another is a nationalist conservative, another an atheist, another a churchgoing Catholic, and so on. We talk freely, argue like hell over the dinner table, and even occasionally insult one another: but as heated as it gets, at the end of the evening, everyone hugs and is still friends. Friendship trumps ideology.

Not so in America. Even when I first moved here in 1989, I noticed that people don’t tend to form friendships across ideological and religious lines, and stick in safe little groups where everyone shares the same views and politics. I suspect it’s partly because the US media has always been more dominant and divisive due to the need to cater to the bottom line, and partly because of social divisions that go back to the days of the settlers.”

That’s because America is founded on ideology, not long-time genetics or nationality. While as England or Italy has the base fact that most (other than the recent wave of Muslim immigrants who further illustrate this point) have their English/Italian descent to fall back upon, many in America, especially as those on the extreme left have shunned the religious identity that we were founded on, only have their political party as their ego and their god both.  That’s why this is so toxic on their end.

I’ve watched this last week as many of my former “friends” SJWs and perennial Baycon guests, have, instead of looking at Baycon’s very real political problems as they should, decided to raise middle fingers at me. The reasoning behind this has nothing to do with logic. All of these people incidentally warned me about my associations beforehand, signaling that their responses would be to betray my friendship as soon as the going got tough. I expected this. Their attempts at social pressure doesn’t do anything beyond make them look like idiots at this juncture. But it does give a nice illustration as to how they think. In their minds. To them, I didn’t open up a dialogue about an uncomfortable subject matter, but instead I self-identified as a heretic to their identity religion. And vocally. Their reactions are colored by the politics first, and then applied.

Reading into Dario’s article, one would think that Dario took a centrist stand on this matter, especially given his euro-upbringing. He’s not from here, and by nature it does put him somewhat on the left side of the aisle in our terms. However, he is extremely brave in identifying where the problem is at:

“The thing that shocks me most of all is that the worst of this hatred—and I use the word in its ugliest meaning here—comes from my friends on the liberal left, not the right. My conservative and Christian friends grumbled and feared for their beliefs and values during the eight years of Obama’s (a man I greatly liked and admired) presidency; sometimes they complained. But I never heard them express naked hatred or abandon a friendship over ideologies.”

This is brave to call out, and the unfortunate truth is he’s going to bear a burden for that. The ideological purists in the SJW cabal are not okay with dissention in their ranks, especially from people who are supposed to be in their ranks.

To his point though, I get called a Nazi on average at least once per day. I never did anything like that in the last 8 years to the SJWs, never saw any of my friends doing anything like that to them. Few were even willing to comment or be brave enough to state anything when watching that bashing going on. My SJW friends didn’t back me up when they saw it, but laughed and pointed at me along with the vile fearmongers.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when you psychologically fill your mind with “these people are Nazis!” and couple that with the fact that we as Americans are brought up in school, culture and everything else with the understanding that if only someone had risen up and shot Hitler, the world would have been a better place, then your result will be violence and hatred. You get angry people in science fiction conventions trying to teach me a lesson over speaking out about my beliefs. I count myself lucky they’ve stopped there so far, as it could be far worse. Indeed, a long time guest from Baycon threatened far worse directly after the election. At another time, when I wore my Trump hat around town this summer, I had a gang of big, angry white men throwing glass bottles at me, trying to kill me. What’s incredible is confronted with this, another perennial Baycon guest and multiple-time Analog writer tried to blame me for that incident, citing that my act of simply wearing a hat was some sort of aggression that justified violence. This is how extreme much of the science fiction community has become. The easy road is to disinvite people like me, when confronted with guest behavior, say “it’s not our responsibility and their opinions aren’t our own.” Note how they defend it on that level when they agree with that behavior. It’s shocking, and needs to be stopped.

“I have older posts in this blog where I talk about discourse, civility, and building bridges. How is cutting yourself off from everyone who holds a different view from you going to ever result in any good? When you buy into hatred and allow yourself to become so narrowly polarized, the only winners are the media, news and social, who get more clicks and eyeballs, and who are largely responsible for all this in the first place.”

Dario’s conclusion is to settle down, and that’s where I’m going to disagree from the perspective of the American right. On the right side, we need to speak out against the verbal and physical violence done by the SJWs. It needs to be socially punished at every turn or it will only escalate for them. Expose and condemn. Call out by name as I did when someone gets extremely personally nasty over your policy thoughts. The SJW cabal does not respond to logic or rational discourse. My original post had the logic, had the policy solely. I posed a problem and solution without naming names. They went nuts and tried to torpedo my career as a result (also according to Baycon: “not our responsibility what [fake news website] writes about you”, despite them writing most of said article. Disavow the garbage, you cowards!). They only respond to social pressure. If you have that, or the threat of that, you will see results. At this juncture, they are mostly leaving me alone and I’ve had some privately championing my right to free speech. Funny how that works when you show a deadly left hook.

For the random reader: I’ve become friends with a lot of the center-right’s community of authors. As much as many science fiction writers shriek and call them horrifying names on a regular basis in hopes that people will ostracize them, I’ve found they’re kind, accepting people. They’re nice. They don’t care about your politics. They’ll chat with you and befriend you much more easily than the left.

My interactions with Sarah Hoyt and Larry Correia have been far different than with leftist author Sharon Lee as an example. The first two hardly know me at all, but have promoted my book, been encouraging to me and others, been stellar people all the way around. The truth is the exact opposite of what’s whispered (and sometimes shouted) about them at sci-fi convention halls. By contrast,  I’d been a staunch fan of Ms. Lee for years, have all of her and her husband’s work including self-printed chapbooks. They know me, and don’t like me first because I’m openly Christian (another story), which bothers them for whatever reason. Even though my novel contained a lot of homage to them, and probably would appeal heavily to their fans, they wouldn’t lift a finger in that regard. When the going got tough with politics, Ms. Lee turned her social media into a hate fest. She called me names and blocked me instead of standing by me. That’s the difference between the two sides at this juncture. As Vox Day said, SJWs have no loyalty, and despite Dario’s call for civility, one has to remember that truth.

The Puppies rallying at the Hugos was, in hindsight, a good and healthy step, a pure policy point much like my original article on my own political matters, meant to bring health to the science fiction community. Right now it’s spiraling into darkness, and it’s getting even worse with social media. One only has to look at John Scalzi’s twitter account to see how much bile is been thrown constantly. The attitude difference is astounding.

It’s no wonder people decided to take a stand against that when that’s the position of, at the time, the president of SFWA. It’s no wonder I took a stand against the attempt to ostracize me that started last November. I’m not personally attacking your friends, angry Baycon guests who may be reading, but they certainly are personally attacking me. Now you’re joining them. To the Baycon organizers privately messaging me about how to resolve this: you have to be brave and take a public stand against this hatred that you stirred up when you made it personal. That’s the only way to bring peace. We’re done handing you the rope so you can tie us up and burn us at the stake.