Cochliomyia hominivorax delendum est.
How’s that for eliminationist rhetoric?
I feel vaguely guilty, making such a deal of accepting John C. Wright into my life. After all, what’s he done since then? A turgid apologia (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi) that in no way indicated he’d thought at all as promised on what the Elders of Sodom had wrote, and an all-but-unreadable screed against empiricism (I think): Neo cannot say why he chooses to fight, and thus homosex is wrong, quod erat dammit. Overall a disappointing performance I must say.
—And then John H. Richardson has to cast a chilly pall over the whole enterprise anyway by going and talking to Mike Austin, an eighth-grade teacher in Oklahoma who until recently was saving the world one essay at a time over at the Return of Scipio.
Yeah, that Return of Scipio. Took me a minute too.
And Richardson has a lovely conversation or two with Austin, who seems a much nicer person than the Scipio Resurgent, much I’m sure as John C. Wright is much nicer than 
johncwright; he seems a hale enough fellow, I suppose, who could essay a hearty laugh—but that’s just how it works. Most of us are better than our manifestos.
But still and all:
As we drive back to my hotel through the clean wide streets of Oklahoma City, I take a chance on some gentle teasing: “Everything’s so well-groomed, you got no garbage, no graffiti—I do not see the collapse of American civilization here.”
His answer comes out cold as a can from a Coke machine: “If you were to look at the streets of Nazi Germany in 1936, they would appear a lot like this. Probably cleaner.”
I’ve heard this exact argument before, from the Glenn Beck follower types, but I can’t believe they really mean to compare their fellow Americans to the most cold-blooded killers in human history. It must be rhetoric. They can’t be that alienated from the society that has given them, beyond any civilization in history, lives of such extraordinary privilege and comfort. My voice rises with my exasperation. “You could say that about any town anywhere!”
His answer comes back steady and patient, like he’s explaining history to one of his eighth graders. “The government in Washington, DC has encroached so much on states’ rights, it seems like we don’t have a federal system any more, rather an imperial one. And when the states lose their rights guaranteed in the Constitution, then what you have is tyranny.”
Obama is a fascist, he continues. Setting the limits of investment-bank incomes and claiming the right to seize General Motors are just two examples. Where in the Constitution does it grant him those powers? Are we a nation of laws, or is this a lawless regime that sends out its goons like Mussolini?
(And there it is, the voice of the blog: What has always stood against lawless men? Force. That is the only idiom understood by such men. To answer lawless men with force is to speak their language.)
[…]
“There are things worse than violence, John,” Austin tells me. “Slavery is worse than violence. The most peaceful place in the world is the cemetery.”
It is really a quite serious matter that the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back…
There’s a new outfit in town—
—whose name’s suggested perhaps by all the glittering potentates who came to do homage to the aforementioned Elders of Sodom on receipt of their open letter to Wright. The basic mission statement for members reads as follows:
As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.
This first of September, the Kalends of Sextilis, they’re asking for a show of hands. They suggest a link to fiction which is in any way on mission, and while there’s this or that I could point to, there’s also this or that game I don’t want to give away, and so instead I’ll highlight an old series of posts:
It’s how I started swatting at screwflies, anyway.
John C. Wright will of course forever be known for or at least in light of his hatred of homosex, but for all that he can’t bring himself to wish for the destruction of its practitioners, adherents, and supporters; at worst, we all get to sit in closets again, as Morality ever-so-passively just somehow returns. —Mike Austin, the (former) Scipio Resurgent, is at once more cosmopolitan and strict (then, Scipio was famously Græcophilic), but even he can’t bring himself to take the action he seems to think is vital; can’t help but laugh with the mainstream media man who’s come to talk to him; can only lash out at abstract ideas that have never set foot in Oklahoma or anywhere else. —They may have gone around the bend, but there’s enough shame yet to prevent them from actually advocating the clear, precise, destructive, eliminationist praxis needed to bring about the world they think they want.
And where there’s shame, there’s hope?
Room enough, anyway, for words: and enough of them, from stories told, from lives lived, from experiences actually had, will always outweigh an argument merely propounded.
We’ve always been better than our manifestos.
As long as we have something to lose we stand back from the brink. It’s those who feel they have nothing left that jump. Or let themselves be pushed.