SJWs Always Double Down: Anticipating the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 2)

by Vox Day

  The Narrative can be anything that SJWs believe to be in the interest of furthering social justice, large or small. It can be as big as the national anthem protests that have invited commentary from NFL owners and players to the league commissioner and President Trump, and it can be as small as a single image announcing the intention to crowdfund a new comic. In either case, the SJW response is almost invariably the same: to mischaracterize the nature of the dispute in a manner designed to discredit and disqualify the individual who has somehow caused the Narrative to be questioned.

  Take the national anthem protests that have swept across the country and now have SJWs and other sympathizers taking a knee everywhere from concert stages and athletic fields to the floor of the House of Representatives. Although they began as a protest of black oppression and lethal police brutality by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, a gesture punctuated by his decision to wear socks portraying policemen as pigs and a t-shirt celebrating a 1960 meeting of Malcolm X and Fidel Castro, they are now portrayed by SJWs as demonstrations of unity and opposition to President Trump. But there is no question that the protests, which have ranged from sitting or kneeling during the national anthem to refusing to take the field until after it has been played, are a demonstration of cultural war by blacks against the white American social order and its symbols. Colin Kaepernick explained as much to NFL Media in an interview after a preseason game between the 49ers and the Green Bay Packers on August 26, 2016.

  “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

  Since he opted out of his contract before being cut after the 2016 season, Kaepernick’s protest probably would have been entirely forgotten by the time the 2017 season rolled around were it not for SJWs in the sports media creating a second false narrative. ESPN and other outlets such as ProFootballTalk spent most of the summer, and the entire preseason, complaining that the quarterback, who remained unsigned by all of the NFL’s 32 teams, was only unable to find another job as a backup quarterback due to his willingness to speak out about his political views. The media pushed this second narrative hard all summer, claiming that Kaepernick was being blackballed even though his performance had observably declined since his appearance in Super Bowl XLVII in 2013. While it wasn’t Kaepernick’s fault that the 49ers finished 2-14 in 2016, second-worst in the league, the truth was that Kaepernick never really recovered from a disastrous 2015 season where he was injured, threw nearly as many interceptions as touchdowns, and saw his QB rating drop from 98.3 in his NFC Championship season to an abysmal 78.3, fifth-worst in the league.

  For the purposes of comparison, it is worth noting that there were six quarterbacks with ratings over 100 that season. So, it was hardly surprising that in a sport where the quarterback is the most important player on the field by far, no quarterback-needy teams were willing to sign a player who not only appeared to be in decline but was clearly inclined to put himself and his political views ahead of the team and its interests. Moreover, Kaepernick, like Tim Tebow and Robert Griffin III, was more of an athlete than a proper quarterback and required an offense designed to support his strengths and to conceal his limitations, which no professional team will ever do for a backup quarterback. Given that neither Tebow nor Griffin, both of whom were also playoff quarterbacks in 2011 and 2013, respectively, are still playing in the NFL, the media’s narrative that Kaepernick was being denied employment solely, or even primarily, due to his views simply is not credible.

  This did not prevent the SJW-converged sports media from fostering the Kaepernick-as-martyr-for-free-speech narrative by publishing gushing profiles with titles such as “Colin Kaepernick was the start of what can be a better NFL”, “We need more from white athletes than gestures”, “Aaron Rodgers believes Colin Kaepernick’s protests are the reason he’s unsigned”, and “The NFL can no longer hide from the Colin Kaepernick movement.”

  But if the second narrative was unable to shame any NFL coaching staff into signing the controversial player, it did suffice to inspire two more players into action on Kaepernick’s behalf. In Week One, five players protested, including the three who had been protesting the previous season, Michael Bennett of the Seahawks, Robert Quinn of the Rams, and Eric Reid of the 49ers, who had been kneeling beside Kaepernick from the start. The five players had a modicum of visible support from a handful of their teammates, particularly Reid, who was flanked by four of his standing teammates laying their hands on him.

  The media did its best to build up public support for the protest, as SB Nation provided a roundup of all the protests throughout the league, complete with pictures, Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk complained that Kaepernick still did not have a job while Scott Tolzein, the second-string quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts, did. Sports Illustrated devoted an entire story to a reporter wearing a Kaepernick jersey to a game while Fox Sports gave anthem protester Michael Bennett a platform to lecture NFL fans about social justice on its Sunday pre-game show as well as helping him launch a podcast called Head 2 Head.

  A few days later, the media was equally busy denying the possibility that all of this political activity in lieu of actual football had anything to do with the fact that the Week One television ratings declined from 12 to 28 percent. Even the fact that the worst decline was on the most conservative network, Fox, wasn’t sufficient to convince them that defending the false narrative of Colin Kaepernick’s victimhood was at least partially responsible for turning away viewers.

  Enter Donald Trump. As a few more players, cheered on by the media, joined the initial protesters in Week Two, the President, never slow to sense when his opposition had planted its flag on shaky rhetorical ground, struck hard and fast with comments at a political rally in Alabama that shook the football world. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’ You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it, they’ll be the most popular person in this country.”

  As the President no doubt anticipated, the media and the players immediately doubled down. As the media uniformly shrieked in outrage and denounced Trump’s comments as unpresidential, the players sported black shirts with #IMWITHKAP on them in their pregame warmups, 180 players kneeled during the national anthem, three whole teams (less one Steelers tackle) remained in their locker rooms until after the anthem was over, and two-thirds of the owners issued statements that either condemned the President or expressed support for the players’ protest, which was now increasingly directed at the President as well as the anthem and the flag. The NFL even ignored its own game operations manual in favor of releasing a mealy-mouthed statement condemning the President’s comments for being divisive.

  The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem. During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking. The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition. It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country. Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.

  —NFL Game Operations Manual, NFL Game Operations Department

  In a beautiful example of defending the Narrative through sophistry and deception, the media rushed to debunk reports that emerged on social media claiming the NFL rules required the players to
be on the field and stand for the anthem because, as it turned out, it was actually just the NFL policies laid out in the operations manual instead of the rulebook. Either way, the NFL promptly declared that regardless of whether it was a rule or a policy that had been so publicly violated, the NFL had no intention of disciplining anyone for disrespecting the flag, the anthem, the military, the veterans, the fallen, the nation, and the President, and on a day that had been decreed Gold Star Mother’s Day in 1936. The NFL’s halfhearted appeal to free expression might have been more convincing had it not prevented the Dallas Cowboys from honoring five Dallas police officers murdered at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2016, and threatened to fine six players who wore cleats on September 11 in remembrance of the victims of the terror attacks 16 years before. As it was, literally no one even pretended to buy it, despite heroic efforts on the part of the media SJWs to sell the NFL and its commissioner, Roger Goodell, as unlikely champions of free speech.

  It was no surprise to me, or anyone else who paid attention to Trump’s electoral campaign, to observe that the President had clearly anticipated the firestorm of criticism he provoked. Indeed, I believe he was expecting the media, the players, and the league to aggressively double down in the way that they did because, as I witnessed in the case of the Rabid Puppies and the Hugo Award, the immediate reaction of SJWs called out in public is to cry foul, to summon reinforcements, and to try to intimidate the opposition by a public show of apparent mass support. And while the response by the players, the media, and the NFL was impressive, it was overwhelmed by the massive demonstration of disapproval by NFL spectators, who are not only disproportionately made up of Trump voters but are arguably the most patriotic, flag-waving Americans this side of NASCAR. The NFL’s rhetoric about unity, racial harmony, and free expression was about as effective as the defense of the winless 2008 Detroit Lions, as an explosion of outrage among NFL fans led to a rapid drop in game attendance, television viewers, approval ratings, and merchandise sails.

  Consider the immediate short-term consequences:

  NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” down 15 percent.

  Fox’s Sunday afternoon game down 19 percent.

  34 percent of Americans say they are less likely to watch an NFL game.

  President Trump’s approval ratings rose.

  The Ravens stadium immediately erupted in boos when the team kneeled before the national anthem.

  “Atlanta, 10 minutes into 3rd quarter in a 14–10 game. Most seats empty.”

  “The Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers, in particular, each had received significant blowback from their fan bases and sponsors.”

  In other words, this was an absolutely devastating trap set for the SJWs in the media and the league office by an expert rhetorician who knew that SJWs are always predisposed to aggressively defend their Narrative. It was rather like watching an army allowed to dangerously extend itself on a strategic map, then hit hard in the flank, cut off, and surrounded by a brilliant enemy general. The entire episode was a veritable master class in rhetorical strategy. By the next week, the number of protesting players had fallen dramatically, the National Basketball Association announced that any attempt to protest the national anthem would be met with discipline from the league office, and it only appears to be a matter of time before the NFL itself is going to be forced to publicly retreat from its unpopular position.

  At least one member of the sports media, Jason Whitlock, understood how the President played the media, the NFL, and the players perfectly due to his ability to predict their actions. On the MMQB podcast with Peter King, Whitlock said, “He baited us, and they fell for it unbelievably. Oh my god, he says we shouldn’t kneel, so let’s everybody kneel together. Let’s show Donald Trump! These guys are involved in a business where they make millions of dollars, and Trump just baited them into being adversarial with their customer base.”

  One of the most remarkable things about the determination, or rather, the psychological need, of SJWs to defend their Narrative at all costs is the way in which they will do so without hesitation even as the Narrative itself mutates in real time. I witnessed literally hundreds of examples of this personally when in late September 2017, the publishing house for which I am the Lead Editor, Castalia House, announced a crowdfunding campaign for its new graphic novel series called Alt*Hero. I created the series in response to many requests from comics fans who were in despair at the complete convergence of the comics industry, which is addressed later in this book. The plan was to foxnews Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, and the various lesser players in the industry just like Roger Ailes did when he founded Fox News and rapidly became the top news channel due to having 50 percent of the American TV-viewing public to himself while ABC, CNN, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and PBS all battled among themselves for the other 50 percent.

  The difference is that Marvel, the industry leader, has pulled the comics industry so far to the Left as a result of a complete takeover by SJWs that their various series no longer hold any appeal to about three-quarters of the potential comics-reading audience. As always, the challenge is in the execution, but there can be no denying that the opportunity is an incredible one.

  And somewhat to my surprise, I discovered the SJWs in the industry even appear to be dimly aware of their extreme vulnerability now. But that didn’t prevent them from defending the Narrative and doing what SJWs always do—lie, double down, and project—when they became aware of the unlikely challenge being posed to their dominance of the comics industry.

  Unlike video games and science fiction, SJWs consider the comics to have been their turf from the start. They particularly revere Jack Kirby, an influential artist who worked closely with Stan Lee at Marvel and helped create some of the most famous superheroes and supervillains, including the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the original X-Men, Doctor Doom, Magneto, and the Black Panther. They regard Kirby, a World War II veteran with a penchant for unlikely tall tales, as a proto-SJW; science-fiction SJW turned Marvel writer Saladin Ahmed even described Kirby as “the original comic book social justice warrior” and praised him for being the first comic book artist to draw black and Asian characters.

  I didn’t know much about comics, but due to the success of Castalia House in both fiction and nonfiction, I’d been hearing more and more from comic book fans in despair over the increasing convergence of the industry and the way in which their favorite characters were being disappeared and replaced by perverse SJW versions. So, in April 2017, I announced that Castalia House was working on a new comic which I named Alt-Hero, to reflect the fact that the heroic values of the past were now deemed an alternative by the converged mainstream. I also mentioned that while we planned to crowdfund the comic, we would not be using Kickstarter, due to the probability that Kickstarter would respond to complaints by SJWs by shutting down the campaign.

  This announcement was greeted with promises of support by my readership and was almost entirely ignored by everyone else. But one SJW trolling the blog provided a highly accurate preview of the eventual reaction by the social justice masses when he declared, “You are afraid of KS because you know that you can’t earn much money there and that your lack of popular support would then be revealed. That is why they don’t fear you, there is nothing to fear. You trying to run a KS campaign would be your defeat.”

  I figured that receiving a response clearly intended to demoralize and dissuade me only one hour and 56 minutes after posting the announcement was an excellent sign that we were over the target and mentioned as much on my blog. But that was pretty much it for the next five months, as the artists and I prepared for the campaign while waiting for Freestartr, the free-speech friendly crowdfunding site, to come online. While we considered using Indie-Go-Go, which has proven less amenable to SJW pressure, the chance to support a genuine Alt-Tech site struck me as being the wiser option, even though I knew that the new platform would mean a considerably less visible crowdfunding campaign for us.


  Fortunately, we had the SJW need to Defend the Narrative working in our favor. Only days before the launch, I finally got back to an artist who was interested in working on what was now named Alt*Hero, and signed him to provide the art for our third book. I had him revise the artwork for a character I’d created called Rebel, who was a freckled, auburn-haired Southron belle wearing a Confederate flag top with a white-starred blue mask. I liked his take on her so much so that we worked her into the launch video on the final revision and created a simple graphic with Rebel, the Alt*Hero logo, and the words “COMING SOON” on a red background.

  Now, I knew the image would trigger the SJWs on social media. Their counterparts in the comics industry have been working hard in recent years to make female figures less attractive, methodically chopping off their hair, thickening their waists, reducing the size of their breasts, and, in some cases, turning them into sexually ambiguous figures that resemble men. So, a hot chick with long hair wearing a push-up bustier was always going to set them off, particularly one who was also wearing Daisy Dukes and cowboy boots.

  But it was the Confederate flag that was like waving a red flag in front of a particularly short-tempered bull. Coming only a few months after the Charlottesville protests in which the media whipped up the less educated SJWs into an anti-historical frenzy that had them beheading and defacing statues of everyone from Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson to Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Columbus, and, for some reason, the mayor of Philadelphia from 1972 to 1980, Frank Rizzo, the idea that the Confederate flag could be worn by a superheroine in the current year turned out to be massively triggering. The image sparked literally thousands of tweets, three-quarters of them from furious SJWs, and for an as-yet-nonexistent comic, the engagement was off the charts, with 191,149 impressions, 59,806 engagements, and an engagement rate of 31.3 percent, which was 11.6 times higher than my average rate.