Who they are and how to beat them. Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie: Taking down the Thought Police, Castalia House, 2015, 200 pp., $4.99 (available only on Kindle) “SJW” stands for “social justice warrior,” which is approximately synonymous with: militant, politically correct ideologue. Or perhaps stridently leftist cultural Marxist. Or, as some of the whimsically inclined might say: noisome progtard.
The expression sprang from the blogosphere in recent years, as a way of describing “progressive” activists and keyboard crusaders. SJWs thrive on the internet, often in obscure and fetid corners–Reddit, 4chan, tumblr.com blogs–where disturbed youngsters share their taste for Japanese anime, sexual perversity, and science fiction/fantasy. SJWs also swarm in social media. They specialize in mass Twitter attacks and in filling the comments sections of Salon and Huffington Post and the Guardian with lurid, foul- mouthed smackdowns (“Teabagger! GFY!”) of anyone who expresses an opinion that is not left-of-left-of-center. At least they did until recently. HuffPo and other sites have ramped up their comment-screening because online advertisers don’t like filth.
For an excellent dissection of the whole SJW phenomenon, there’s now a handy field guide called SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. The pseudonymous author, Vox Day (real name: Theodore Beale) is a game designer and science-fiction writer who’s had some head-on collisions with this crowd, while acquiring a thorny reputation as the sci-fi author the leftists most love to hate. (See, for example, Jeet Heer’s treatment of him in The New Republic.) In this volume, Beale/Day not only tells us how to identify SJWs, he gives us an extensive self-defense guide explaining how to survive when SJWs attack.
In Chapter One, “An Introduction to the Social Justice Warrior,” Mr. Beale describes what SJWs are all about:
In the universities, in the churches, in the corporations . . . free speech and free thought are under siege by a group of fanatics as self-righteous as Savonarola, as ruthless as Stalin, as ambitious as Napoleon, and as crazy as Caligula.
They are the Social Justice Warriors, the SJWs, the self-appointed thought police who have been running amok throughout the West since the dawn of the politically correct era in the 1990s. Their defining characteristics:
a philosophy of activism for activism’s sake a dedication to rooting out behavior they deem problematic, offensive, or unacceptable in others a custom of primarily identifying individuals by their sex, race, and sexual orientation a hierarchy of intrinsic morality based on the identity politics of sex, race, and sexual orientation a quasi religious belief in equality, diversity, and the inevitably of progress . . . Mr. Beale also breaks down the SJW modus operandi into its stages and rationales. He analyzes some of the subtle peculiarities about SJW behavior, for example the tendency to plead grievances to weak, unprepared bystanders when they want to attack you.
Thus, when John Derbyshire wrote his famous Takimag column of April 2012 (“The Talk: Non-black Version“), the SJWs complained not to the freewheeling Taki Theodoracopulos who published the column–and who would have laughed them off–but to the sedate, limp Rich Lowry of National Review, who immediately buckled and put out a public statement that he was severing ties with Mr. Derbyshire, who had been a contributing writer to National Review Online.
Likewise, when JavaScript inventor Brendan Eich was the subject of a gay Twitter-swarm in 2014 (because six years earlier he had contributed to the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 in California), the homosexual activists didn’t go directly after the management of Mozilla, where CEO and co-founder Eich was widely supported by other executives. Instead, they got other companies, including OkCupid, to threaten a boycott of Mozilla’s Firefox web-browser. Meanwhile they whipped a number of low-level Mozilla employees into joining the Twitter protests, thereby giving the false impression that Mr. Eich was unpopular within his own company. According to Mr. Beale, Mozilla’s Twitter account received 47,491 messages about the CEO, “most of them negative.” Mr. Eich chose to step down just to silence the fuss.
Mr. Beale explains that this is typical of SJW tactics. They avoid hard targets and aim for the softies, the moderates, the ideologically unaffiliated:
[T]he truth is that although they certainly don’t like those they invariably label “right-wing extremists,” for the most part they leave us alone because we are impervious to their influence. Oh, they will certainly complain about us, take advantage of any tactical missteps on our part, and block us on Twitter, but they very seldom make the sort of concerted effort that one saw in the hounding of Brendan Eich or the metaphorical stoning of Dr. James Watson because they know their efforts will largely be futile . . . . Instead, they prey on the naive and the unsuspecting. They prey on the moderates, the middle-grounders, and the fence-sitters . . . [A] target who is psychologically unprepared for being attacked is much more likely to throw up his hands and run away.............
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