The True Threat

In the geek culture wars, Peter Simeti - publisher at Alterna Comics - is a true neutral. While the rest of us have been bickering heatedly over the future direction of geekdom, Simeti has stayed out of the fray to focus on reducing the price point of his single-issue comics by over 60% compared to current industry norms. His simple business model? Use cheaper paper and be unfailingly polite to customers.

You might think such a mild-mannered guy would be the least likely target of a vicious harassment campaign -- especially since his newsprint comics are genuinely accessible to all people. Indeed, you might think that he'd be lauded for opening up a hobby to those of more modest means.

You might think that, but you're wrong. Simeti, in fact, has been defamed as an "alt-right Nazi" for months -- and a few days ago, one of his live-streams was interrupted by armed police.

I just had two guns pointed at me tonight because someone made a call to the police and gave them my address along with a falsified report.

I'm shook up, but everything is OK now.

I'm going to talk to the police tomorrow and see if I can find out more.

— Peter Simeti 💬 (@petersimeti) February 13, 2019

To be sure, at the time I'm writing this post, we still don't know who exactly tried to swat Simeti. It could be someone utterly unconnected to the #Comicsgate spat. But personally, I think this is very unlikely. I find it difficult to imagine that Simeti has pissed off someone in his personal life. No: someone connected to one of his many detractors is probably at fault. Somebody decided to ruin this man's day because he had the unmitigated gall to establish a social media policy that forbade the use of block chains.

Let's be absolutely clear here: Simeti did not tell his creators that they couldn't block trolls. On the contrary, he encouraged his creators to seek his assistance if they truly are being abused. He simply stated that association with a disfavored hashtag - #Comicsgate or #movetheneedle - or a controversial Youtuber was not an adequate reason to block a potential customer. The monster! Clearly, the only right thing to do was to launch a Two Minutes Hate to try to ruin him.

In all likelihood, people who don't give two God damns about comics are going to read this post. But I suspect they will nonetheless recognize the themes in Simeti's story because they are being played out in virtually every corner of our society. Everywhere, people are being victimized by the radical, totalitarian social justice left for failing to be sufficiently "woke".

As I've noted many, many times, I'm not one of Trump's enthusiastic cheerleaders. I think he's doing some things that are right and some things that deserve to be criticized. (This week's emergency declaration on the border wall, for example, is something on which I have doubts.) But even when he's doing something unwise, I've never been afraid of the president. Quite frankly, I think it's a mark of mass hysteria to be afraid of him.

I'm also not afraid of the alt-right. Yes, they put on quite a display in Charlottesville, but their numbers are vanishingly small, and they have zero - zero - sympathizers in the mainstream press. Nor am I afraid of the liberal left; though I may haggle with them over the value of tradition or the appropriate size and function of the government, I know they and I still share roughly the same goals.

What I fear is the aforementioned radical, totalitarian social justice left. These people are already exercising their power in academia, the media, and corporate America to threaten everything I value -- and their rhetoric makes it perfectly clear that they want me and mine silenced, broken, jailed, or dead.

I don't think I'm panicking. I don't think I'm being absurd. How else am I supposed to interpret, for example, the concerted campaigns to block our income streams and/or render us jobless? How else am I supposed to interpret the widespread enthusiasm for violence against us? It's heroic to punch a Nazi -- and oh, by the way, I get to define what a Nazi is, and you, my dear classical liberal, fall into that category.

Social justice warriors are thoroughly convinced of their self-righteousness, and that makes them especially dangerous. As C.S. Lewis rightly observed, "...those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." As time has worn on, it has become increasingly clear that the SJW program, if implemented without opposition, would destroy absolutely everything:

• It would destroy meritocracy and consequently halt technological and scientific progress. The race is already on in some quarters to dumb down STEM programs in the name of "equity." But your skin color or genitalia won't make you a good brain surgeon or rocket scientist; a rigorous, knowledge-focused science education will -- an education that will be within reach for motivated folks of all backgrounds if we work to improve preparation in the primary and secondary grades.
• It would destroy art and creativity. Actually, in many ways, it has already destroyed such things. Movies and books have been canceled or substantially reworked to satisfy SJW activists, whose requirements have become ever more minute and multitudinous. Meanwhile, whatever has not been outright censored has been rendered anodyne by fear of these harpies. No one - aside from my scrappy indie friends - feels free to be honest or to push boundaries. Hell, we're not even allowed to tell a story about a racist who gradually changes her mind! (See also: the attacks on author Laurie Forest and her book The Black Witch.)
• It would destroy our ability to relate to each other as human beings. SJW's want to control how we banter with each other, how we show affection, how we flirt -- virtually everything that makes our lives in society enjoyable. I don't know if they're just pretending or if they're genuinely brain-damaged in some way, but these leftists act like they find context and non-verbal social cues completely incomprehensible. "N-word passes", for example, are a meme and clearly a joke - especially when distributed by a mixed-race group of students - but that doesn't stop SJW's from screeching as if someone just got lynched. Don't get me wrong: you're allowed to find jokes like that offensive. But the proportionate response is to say, "Dude, that's not funny" -- not to howl that these jokesters are terrible racists who need immediate correction. The upshot? The SJW's approach to humor is joyless and oppressive -- and her approach to sex is frankly inhuman. There's surely a better, less rigid way to negotiate the line between "fun" and "completely unacceptable".
• It would destroy trust. We can interact and do business with each other because we assume - usually correctly - that the guy across the way has essentially agreed to the same basic social rules. The SJW program attacks this trust in three ways. First, it claims that people are routinely dishonest about their intentions -- that we should search endlessly for "dog whistles" instead of accepting the plain meaning of people's words. Second, it openly teaches that truth is contingent and not universal. Third, it tells certain favored groups that the rules shouldn't apply to them -- that they are allowed to lie, cheat, or otherwise misbehave to right some cosmic scale.
• It would destroy norms of justice and mercy. Up until about five minutes ago, our culturally Judeo-Christian society embraced the possibility of redemption. Sure, among religious Christians, there was and is a belief that certain choices lead to ever-lasting hellfire in the afterlife, but that same religious tradition - at least in its orthodox forms - offers a pretty easy escape from such a fate. The Catholic Church in particular has murderer saints, for Christ's sake! But the SJW program has no Sacrament of Reconciliation. Make one mistake and you're done, no matter how much you apologize or attempt to make amends. This is just as inhuman as "affirmative consent," and if it's allowed to progress to its logical conclusion, the next thing we'll see is bodies stacked up like cordwood. 

Thank God many people on the liberal left see the same threat I see.  But we all need to intensify the pushback. If somebody felt justified trying to murder the Cuddly Puppy of Comics, that means there's still work to do to pull us back from the brink.