Neil Gaiman turning out to be a potentially criminal creep doesn’t surprise me in the least; I read Sandman after the success of the Alt-Hero campaign made it clear we were getting into comics. But this news from Fandom Pulse was definitely eyebrow-raising:
Fandom has been rocked by a new scandal at San Diego Comic-Con involving a human trafficking sting set up by the California Attorney General. According to the California Department of Justice Website, Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a sting at San Diego Comic-Con, where police and other government agencies set honeytraps for men looking to pay for sex at the convention. Fourteen different men were arrested as sex buyers, though the task force didn’t mention that any of the actual traffickers had been brought to justice. The state also claims ten young women were liberated from their enslavers who had been forced into performing these acts.
“Unfortunately, sex traffickers capitalize on large-scale events such as Comic-Con to exploit their victims for profit,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said. “These arrests send a clear message to potential offenders that their criminal behavior will not be tolerated. We are grateful to all our dedicated partners involved in the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force, whose collaboration has been invaluable. We take great pride in our office’s commitment to uplifting vulnerable Californians by offering them assistance and guidance when they need it most.”
The joint task force included San Diego Sheriff Kelly Martinez, San Diego Police Chief Wahl, HSI special agents Christopher Davis, and NCIS special agent Nicholas Carter.
I understand that a lot of my readers are far more interested in US politics, war, economics, and religion than they are in what sometimes must appear to be a tempest in a fairly small teapot. But this reluctance to pay attention to the details of the high ground in the cultural war is one reason that Clown World has successfully managed to subvert Western civilization in general and the USA in particular.
I’ve never watched a Mr. Beast video. But tens of millions of children have, and they are influenced by the hedonistic, secular, and ultimately satanic philosophy being pushed by him. I don’t own a single Neil Gaiman book, comic, or movie, and few of you probably read him either, but he’s one of the best-selling, most highly-awarded authors of the last forty years.
If you don’t fight a cultural war, you will lose it, and then you will lose your culture. That’s why these things matter, even if you don’t happen to care very much about that particular battleground. Because they certainly do; here is but one of many similar examples.
NG’s work means so much to me that I’m existing like one big, walking sunk cost fallacy atm. There really are no other comparable authors to me personally when it comes to inspiration to write, learning to love reading, escapism… good quotes. And, until recently, belief that there are some genuinely good people of the celebrity kind still. The Netflix adaptation of my beloved comic Sandman has been, and continues to be, one of my most intense hyperfixations and sources of joy in an otherwise bleak world. And I know so well that the reason the series became a reality and is so good is precisely because of NG’s tight involvement.
The Sandman adaptation is terrible, by the way. Literally unwatchable. Spacebunny and I didn’t even make it to the second episode. The Gaiman cult is like a sad and twisted parody of the Tolkien cult, but that doesn’t mean they deserve their collective treatment at the hands of their contemptuous, contemptible idol.
