I’m often accused of being a geek. It’s a fair cop. I’ve been reading science fiction books for over 40 years, ever since I learned to read. But I’ve never been the kind of geek that goes to conventions. I’ve been perfectly happy just reading the books. But then along came the internet and with it new chances to join the community of science fiction fans. So I started participating in some message boards and getting to know some of my favorite authors online.

As with any group of people, there’s a great number of different worldviews in science fiction fandom and sometimes that leads to conflicts. That’s nothing new but in the past few years the fights have been more public and more intense. Social Justice Warriors have, well, declared war on anyone not “woke” enough to bow to their left-wing demands. Two of the authors at the top of their enemies list are John Ringo and Larry Correia. Both are outspoken conservatives and prolific writers. But what really upsets the SJW types is that both of them are very, very successful.

The most recent kerfuffle started about a month ago and was covered in a post here on Ricochet by @dbroussa. That post states that John Ringo was disinvited from ConCarolinas, but that turns out not to be quite right. David Weber, another very successful and talented author, has been working with John and Jada Hope from the ConCarolinas convention committee (concom) to get the true story out there. What happened is that several SJW types tried to get John disinvited by spreading a false rumor about him, and in order to not cause problems for the convention, John voluntarily withdrew. That didn’t work out the way they intended. In retrospect, they probably should have pushed back instead of folding. ConCarolinas also made the mistake of not making it clear what had happened and left the impression that they were ok with what happened to John.