Ever since I came out of the closet with how I voted, it’s been one thing after another in an attempt to gatekeep me out of the industry. It started with a convention removing me from their speaker circuit as most readers are aware, with many of the same people from that convention then enacting a full ban in an unprecedented move at Worldcon, so they literally wouldn’t have to even see a conservative because it might trigger them.
When I started getting big last summer, the lone professional writer’s guild Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America decided had their president go on a blacklisting and defamation campaign—not only to try to make sure markets wouldn’t publish me, but asking authors to not speak with me.
Her antics led to attacks from big NYT Bestsellers like John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig, both of whom would ramble about me on their blogs and twitter out of nowhere in an effort to try to destroy me.
SFWA’s president’s followers also went way overboard in those months, doxing my children, posting about their medical issues, and all culminating in sending an anonymous spring-loaded package to my house. SFWA’s president has never apologized, never told her fans this was over the line, but last week made bizarre false accusations about me (without naming me) on Twitter to further escalate the rhetoric.
It only gets crazier on the comics side.
A year ago, I wrote an expose about how Marvel Comics blacklists conservatives. Rich Johnston of Bleeding Cool turned it into a fake news hit piece on me (I was a nobody at the time, so very odd he would dedicate a piece to that on his site). From there, I had several trolls come over from the SJW comics fandom. They still follow me around to this day, though I’m not sure what they want as they’re not looking at my work. Several anonymous people, making account after account to just come say nasty things to me. And they’re all white males attacking a Hispanic, I might add.
But these last couple of weeks have had complete harassment of professionals who have fans in the #ComicsGate crowd by online cowards who are actively attempting to hurt our businesses.
Both Ethan Van Sciver and Diversity & Comics have IndieGoGo campaigns running, and both campaigns were hit by duplicate mock campaigns to try to confuse buyers and frighten away customers. They were identical in every way, making clear impersonation attempts to fraudulently raise money based on the names of these hardworking professionals.
On top of that, the imposters took to twitter making mock accounts of EVS, D&C, Mitch Breitweiser, Brett R. Smith, Jon Malin, and me. They went to trouble trying to make a number of identical tweets to us, and then set to following all of our fans. I was inundated with messages (do you have another account, were you banned?) for a few days as the person harassed me and others. Eventually, the person broke the bit and started making posts rambling about how terrible President Trump is, making it look like I was doing it.
On top of this, the same person (I believe, as it’s all anonymous) made accounts dedicated to mocking my Christianity, made more accounts to mock my science fiction writing, and just continued over and over to just make out of left field nasty remarks. The other comic professionals received the same.
This is the type of harassment the SJWs all claim they face, and then never actually have anything beyond someone criticized their work and it sent them into a mental-disorder aided tailspin. It’s being done to us, and it’s being done on levels that would absolutely break these people if they truly had to face it. They’re trying to mess with our psyches and make the pressure so immense that it forces us out of the business. Why? Because we’re starting to be successful. All of the crowdfund campaigns have done very well so far in comics, and we’re bypassing the gatekeeping establishment that’s been culling comics for decades. For the first time. This is a revolution like indies were to Amazon several years ago in books, and they don’t want that to happen to their fragile comics.
But we’re going to keep going. And we’re going to keep winning. It just needs to be out there how much pressure we face simply for the act of speaking out.
In a society where everyone’s got telepathic bonds, it’s very hard to speak out when you see problems going on in your society. The pressure that mounts is even worse. Commander Tamar has to deal with this among the Aryshan people as they’re getting drawn into an interstellar war that will be bloody for both her people and the humans they face. Read how she handles herself in The Stars Entwined.
It’s always interesting when the left cries about how bad they are being treated, then they turn around and pick on someone else the same way they were claiming they were treated. It’s almost like they expect it. Hopefully they start leaving you alone soon.