Baen hosts, or used to, a forum called Baen's Bar. Mostly it's a place for fans of various Baen authors to chat, but it also has a Politics section. And, well, it's the politics section on a web forum. More conservative-leaning than many, so the fruit loops tend to go on about the "stolen" election and how gun confiscation will trigger the second American civil war rather than about how white people are the root of all evil, but ultimately still just a bunch of blowhards letting off steam.
Then some woker-than-thou loser went in, collected the wildest comments he could find, and wrote a hit piece about how Baen was supporting incitement to violence and insurrection. And the SJ crowd went wild, of course, doing the usual shit like trying to get Baen's web host to deplatform them. Baen took the Bar down to avoid that. (Rumour has it they're looking for a better web host, but in the meantime, a publisher kinda needs to have a website.) Toni Weisskopf, the head of Baen, was "disinvited" as a GoH for this year's WorldCon.
What really burns my biscuits about the hit piece is that, even cherry-picked and taken out of context, the quotes he used don't actually prove what he's claiming they do. The legal standard for incitement to violence is very strict, and those... ain't it. But of course I'm looking at it in terms of logic and law, not as an opportunity for virtue-signalling.
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Date: 2021-Mar-01, Monday 06:51 pm (UTC)Then some woker-than-thou loser went in, collected the wildest comments he could find, and wrote a hit piece about how Baen was supporting incitement to violence and insurrection. And the SJ crowd went wild, of course, doing the usual shit like trying to get Baen's web host to deplatform them. Baen took the Bar down to avoid that. (Rumour has it they're looking for a better web host, but in the meantime, a publisher kinda needs to have a website.) Toni Weisskopf, the head of Baen, was "disinvited" as a GoH for this year's WorldCon.
Some links:
Larry Correia: Publishing House Baen Books Attacked by Cancel Culture - long and ranty, but it's where I first heard about the fuss, and includes good stuff like David Weber's response that I haven't been able to find a public link to.
Archive of the "expose", so you can read it without that loser getting clicks for it: Baen Books Forum Being Used to Advocate for Political Violence
Eric Flint: The Controversy About Baen's Bar - a somewhat more moderate rebuttal
Baen’s Bane: Jason Sanford of Ohio News Media Association (ONMA) and his Unethical “Journalism” - as a take-down of bad journalism, I wish this was better journalism; included here because it provides contact info for the expose-writer's bosses. Whatever one might wish to do with that.
Baen's official statement
What really burns my biscuits about the hit piece is that, even cherry-picked and taken out of context, the quotes he used don't actually prove what he's claiming they do. The legal standard for incitement to violence is very strict, and those... ain't it. But of course I'm looking at it in terms of logic and law, not as an opportunity for virtue-signalling.