The Culture War Goes Nuclear

But fortunately, Sonny noticed the sudden death of Anthony Stokes that was, in addition to being a minor tragedy, also a telling story about where we are as a culture.

You probably don’t remember Anthony Stokes, but back in 2013, he was briefly famous. Stokes was a 15-year-old Georgia kid with a bad heart: Born with an enlarged heart, doctors gave him roughly six months to live if he didn’t get a transplant. The problem for Stokes-besides his terrible medical condition-was that the medical authorities wouldn’t put him on the transplant list because they deemed him to be a high risk for non-compliance. You see, Stokes had not just a history of bad grades but a criminal record, too. “We follow very specific criteria in determining eligibility for a transplant of any kind,” a flack from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta said at the time. “They said they don’t have any evidence that he would take his medicine or that he would go to his follow-ups,” said Stokes’ mother.

But this is America, so you can already guess how this story went. Stokes’ family went to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They cried racism. Then social media and “#BlackTwitter” (their term, not mine) kicked in. And the doctors at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta freaked out because there are few things as unsettling as being called a racist by hordes of people on the internet. So the doctors reversed course and put Stokes on the transplant list. And, by the grace of God, Stokes got a heart. (Which means that someone else, by necessity, did not.)

And then the left-from the Huffington Post to Think Progress to Gawker to Ebony-did a victory lap. To their mind, they had won another victory in the culture war, exposing racism, shaming the power structure, and making the world a more perfect place.

Last Tuesday, a little less than two years after Stokes was gifted a heart, he-allegedy-broke into an 81-year-old woman’s home and, upon being discovered, fired gunshots at her. He-allegedly-fled the scene in a car that police later determined had been stolen. Police pursued Stokes in a high-speed chase. After a few miles Stokes-allegedly!-hit a pedestrian, whereupon he crashed the stolen car and died. (We don’t have to cover ourselves on this last bit; he is indisputably dead.)

There’s a great parable wrapped up in this story. And yet in the public consciousness, the death of Anthony Stokes barely registers. He’s not even a footnote. But he should be. Because he got a heart that could have gone to someone else if not for the online mob and charges of racism. He got a heart-and someone else did not-because of the culture war. And he wasted it.

As the case of Anthony Stokes should make clear, a great deal of the culture war is taking place under the radar these days. For instance, the videogame world has spent almost a year embroiled in a fight known colloquially as #GamerGate. I don’t have the patience (and you don’t have the time) to fully explain the story, but if you want to get a flavor for it, you can read this and this . The micro-version is: The elite videogame press is dominated by a small clique of writers and game-makers with radical leftist politics. These folks have made a long practice of foisting their views on an audience-videogame players-which is not interested in radical leftist politics.

#GamerGate is basically an apolitical revolt against leftism in a context where politics shouldn’t exist, but does-because leftism necessitates that politics be ubiquitous. 

Over the weekend we saw another revolt of the masses against leftist elites in a sphere where you wouldn’t expect it: science-fiction writing. 

For reasons about as obscure to outsiders as #GamerGate, the sci-fi incident is known as “Sad Puppies.” And again, you don’t need to know the full history. (Unless you really want to; if so, start at the bottom and work up.) But here’s the short version.

The science-fiction trade has been dominated by a small group of publishers and writers who see themselves as social justice warriors and who go to great lengths to push leftist-ideology, reward fellow travelers, and punish dissenters. The locus of this group in the sci-fi world is the publisher Tor. 

In the literary science-fiction world, the “Hugo Awards” are the Oscars and Tor is Miramax: 

This year, a group of dissident authors and sci-fi fans decided to challenge Tor and its SJW cronies by taking a little collective action and pushing a slate of their own nominees for the Hugo awards. And when the ballots were counted this weekend, the anti-Tor campaign, known as “Sad Puppies,” dominated. Which suggests that the actual science-fiction reading public is not especially down with the line of politics they’ve been force-fed for the last few decades.

When you start looking around, you begin to see these little fights everywhere. For example, over the weekend, Honey Maid Snacks (the graham cracker people) decided to get involved in the gay-marriage wars by running a my-two-dads commercial and tweeting sanctimoniously that “Love is love.” (As Rick Santorum might ask, all love? Really? All love? Are you really sure you mean all love? You have to click these links to believe them.)

Pile Honey Maid on top of #GamerGate, and Anthony Stokes, and Brendan Eich, and the UVA rape epidemic-not to mention Indiana and the Little Sisters of the Poor-and eventually you understand that the culture war isn’t just about abortion anymore. Or even gay marriage. It’s about everybody and everything. It’s turtles all the way down.

Whatever happens in Iran, the culture war in America has gone nuclear. And I suspect that there’s no going back.