What We Can Learn From Roseanne’s Handling of SJW Attacks

Watching what happened to Roseanne yesterday was incredible. One tweet mocking an appointed official — a single person mind you — and her job was gone, her reruns pulled from other networks, her agent dropped her as a client.The entire weight of hollywood and the media came on her to trash her and act like she was worse than an MS-13 murderer over a couple of angry words.  It all happened so fast and so hard it looked like this had been coordinated and planned for some time.

Her first mistake was apologizing. Once she was on record as agreeing to having done “bad” — by which we’ll define as insulting someone in a tweet who isn’t allowed to be insulted because of politics — the sharks decided to come out to play. SJWs are never interested in apologies or righting situations. There’s no good faith disagreement where they believe people can have arguments and move past it. They only want to completely and utterly destroy people over identity politics.

So they proceeded to do so. Roseanne had a lot of pressure immediately.  She posted about quitting twitter, the first sign she wasn’t able to handle this immense negative pressure. She’s an old lady after all, not a culture warrior. She’s never faced this kind of scrutiny before coming out for Trump. This is the kind of pressure I’ve faced for months when SJWs targeted me as a lower-level entertainer, with banning, trying to dox my kids, sending a creepy package to my house. This kind of pressure I faced for standing up for myself over their identity politics was designed to break me the way they did Roseanne yesterday.

Eventually she returned to twitter, with a bunch of angry retweets. But she posted some bizarre things too. And I don’t mean attacking the SJWs for their hypocrisy. I wish she’d come out a little harder and nailed them to the wall. After all, ABC hires Joy Behar who calls Christians “mentally ill”, and Keith Olbermann who’s said all sorts of crazy offensive things toward conservatives. The double standard is incredibly clear.

But she posted “don’t defend me,” ‘don’t boycott ABC” (The latter is now deleted).  Even while retweeting, a passive aggressive move, she wouldn’t stand up for herself and for the complete wrong in tne way the industry treated her.

When SJWs attack, again, there’s no getting back in good graces. SJW author John Scalzi wrote a blog about it this last month about how, according to him, it should take 10+ years to even consider allowing someone back into the fold once they’ve crossed the SJW cultural line. However, that won’t even happen in reality. Once you’re a target, you’re shunned for life. 10+ years is meant to make everyone forget about you and your entire existence, to make you irrelevant in culture, which is why he suggests that.

We don’t have to take that anymore.

It’s really hard. It requires a lot of stamina and when the attacks come in on this extreme a level, it can break a person down. We see Roseanne going through the stages of grief already:

1. Shock – Quitting twitter immediately. Can’t handle it
2. Denial – Don’t blame ABC! Don’t defend her! Now this is moved to just the ambien.

Next will be anger. We’ll see how she lashes out and if she does publicly. At this stage it can get crucial, and you can be made or broken to an extreme degree at this point.  Last September, when the president of SFWA went around to people to “warn” them not to associate with me after I wrote my article detailing how science fiction publishers discriminate against men on the whole, I found myself angry. I lashed out because she had the power to make me lose friends I’d spent years cultivating. These people were afraid of her and afraid to cross her, and when she presented the “him or me” ultimatum both in public and in private, it shook my world. It even shook my business when my cover artist went full crazy, blocking and refusing to respond even on business matters.

That kind of thing can make you really upset, really angry. Even someone like me who’s pretty strong about these kind of things fell into a pretty dark depression at the time. My friends were worried for me personally, worried that they were going to break me. It took time, but I persevered through it. I can only imagine what it can do to someone with less willpower.

Roseanne looks like she’s in a bad spot, and I don’t see her coming out of it as a fighter. It’s not her nature, and she’s going to be in for major trouble personally. Being under SJW attack is very difficult. It’s stressful, painful, and it’s designed to be so so that you can’t think straight about what you’re doing. But if you ever get in this situation, here’s some handy tips:

1. Never apologize. Apologizing just makes them push harder. I can’t tell you how many times I was told by industry professionals to apologize to the SJW elites. “For what, they attacked ME?” I’d reply. They’d never have anything specific, but told me I had to set pride aside anyway. No, you don’t. That’s a tactic they use to isolate you and put you in a position of submission. You’ll never be accepted no matter what you do. Embrace that. It’s over on that front.
2. Surround yourself with friends who understand. There’s a lot of us out there now. It didn’t used to be that way. If you’re under attack, reach out to me. Reach out to Vox Day. Reach out to Chuck Dixon. We care. We’ve been there. We want to help as best we can. They cast us as pariahs and make people afraid of us as boogeymen intentionally as well — it’s to cut off the support network of anyone who wants to stand up and fight them.
3. Build your own platform. They love to deplatform. They pushed me out of conventions and major publishers — so I came out with my own work through superversive press, through my freestartr, I’m doing my own discussion panels via periscope and youtube. That’s what makes me successful. Never backing down for a minute. Work harder. They want to censor your work from the world, that’s the entire goal is to maintain lockstep over culture.
4. Laugh. You really have two choices with the attacks, laugh at it, or get so angry/depressed you cloud yourself. When you’re laughing, you’re having fun, and that’s the key to producing great culture. It also drives them far crazier when you’re laughing at them — because they’re supposed to be respectable. If you take away that respect, you are going to make them lose their cool and make mistakes. You’ll also have an intoxicating element of your personality where people will enjoy and follow — people love laughter. It’s a game. It’s funny. None of this matters in the scale of eternity. Have the most fun with it you can.

And that’s all you can do. Ride the wave. It’ll go in cycles for how hard you’re attacked if you’re on the right an committed to making culture. You’re either in it to win it, or you’re going to flounder and lose. Which will you choose?

Sean Barrows had hard choices involving a much bigger scale than simple culture production. HIs choices impact not only all of humanity, but the balance of power in the whole galaxy. Read The Stars Entwined and see the excellent worldbuilding and hard work on character I built when I was under the heaviest of pressure. It’s some of the finest science fiction of the last year. Read it here.