“Neckbeard? Check. Fedora? Double check.”

John C. Wright is a science fiction writer and right-wing Catholic who achieved infamy through vitriolic rants against right-to-die advocacy, LGBT people, feminism, environmentalism, and pretty much anything else that progressives approve of and the Vatican doesn’t. As for progressives themselves, it’s safe to say he has a fairly low opinion of them:

Leftism is hatred. Everything that is normal, sane, healthy, holy, rational, or good, they hate. They hate the death penalty for murderers and love suicide and euthanasia. They have daydreams about the human race being wiped off the globe, in order to preserve the Guatemalan water snake or the Puritan stink bug. They hate marriage and love sodomy. They hate wealth and success. They hate population; they hate people. They are fearless when it comes to Jihad and fearful when it comes to the weather. They love abortion most of all: nothing gives a Leftist hearts in his eyes faster than contemplating a score or a hundred dismembered dead babies piled up in a heap outside an abortion mill, and denied a Christian burial.

Or, for a more recent comment by him on the same subject:

[A] Liberal is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, speaking soft and pleasing words about kindheartedness and sharing and eliminating private property as he approaches a human being, hoping to lull the human being to sleep, so that he might fall upon him and devour him, suck out his brains, drink his blood, crack his bones.

His fiction and blog posts alike have been criticized for being pretentious, overwritten, and hyperbolic. Readers are encouraged to look at the examples in this article and decide for themselves:

• Ranting against the idea of the right to die. This post is notable for a comment in which he expresses regret for not having punched Terry Pratchett for daring to support the concept:

I sat and listened to pure evil being uttered in charming accents accentuated by droll witticism, and I did not stand up, and I did not strike the old man who uttered them across the mouth: and when he departed, everyone stood and gave him an ovation, even though he had done nothing in his life aside from entertain their idle afternoons.

• Arguing against the idea of strong female characters, claiming it is unrealistic to depict non-superpowered women as being able to perform physical tasks as well as men, because Nature:

[…] So the standard of trying to warp little girls to be jealous of little boys, and telling them that they can be better than little boys at the very things nature and upbringing conspire to make little boys better at. It is unnatural and unnecessary and its drives the women who grow up trying to live up to this warped standard bat-guano crazy […] It drives them to hate being wives and mothers. It makes even such unthinkable atrocities as killing your own child in the womb seem normal, even seem like a right that no one can deny.

• Suggesting the staff of DC Comics be lynched after Superman renounced his U.S. citizenship:

No, to avoid the legal implications, I suggest we, the comicbook-loving community, merely appear at the offices of DC comics, and stage a riot, have the level of violence spiral out of control, drag the editors and owners bodily out of the building, and hang them from lampposts, and laugh and tell Monty Python jokes while their legs kick, dancing with spasms, in the air, inches from the ground.

• Complaining about a paragraph in a Dungeons & Dragons manual that tells players they can play gay or trans characters. When a commenter asked if he was maybe overreacting to a single paragraph in a massive book, he gave a typically hyperbolic response:

When a man calmly flicks a very tiny ember from the end of his cigarette into your infant daughter’s eye, think of how many skins cells and internal organs he leave undisturbed.

• Supporting Gamergate:

The spark that started it all was some harlot [Zoe Quinn] copulating energetically with gaming-review writers in return for favorable reviews and publicity. When the corruption and harlotry was made public, the Leftwing media immediately closed ranks, as they did with President Clinton under similar circumstances, and, unable to defend the adultery-for-favors, merely accused all and sundry of witchcraft, consorting with demons, sodomy, causing storms, and blighting crops and cattle, poisoning wells, and kidnapping children to grind their bones into their bread in their impious and dark rites to glorify Moloch. […] No, I am sorry, the Left is in favor of all of those things, and, like the Witches, think they can control the weather with politics. At the moment, it is only unborn children they murder for the greater glory of Moloch.

• Claiming that Robert A. Heinlein couldn't win a Hugo today and that Orson Scott Card has all but been dragged away by the secret police because he “publicly expressed the mildest imaginable opposition to having judges overrule popular votes defining marriage in the traditional way”:

A darker time followed [that of Robert Heinlein]. The lamps of the intellect were put out one by one, first in society at large, then in literature, then in our little corner called science fiction. What we have now instead is a smothering fog of caution, of silence, of an unwillingness to speak for fear of offending the perpetually hypersensitive. […] Science fiction is under the control of the thought police. The chains are invisible, but real.

• And, of course, his epic rant about how Legend of Korra is awful because it included a lesbian relationship in the last episode. In the comments he went on to argue that progressives are incapable of being fans of anything, because being a fan requires judgement and progressives have none. Jim C. Hines ripped this apart on his own blog. (Note: Wright deleted or hid this post sometime around April 10, 2015, after the Hugo Awards blew up online).

Though Wright had been around for many years on LJ and occasionally surfaced to the wider attention of fandom (James C. Nicoll, for example, has posted about him quite a few times), he truly arrived when he began publishing his books through Castalia House, the Finland-based publishing company owned by fellow reactionary bigot and shitty sf/f writer Vox Day. Wright signed onto VD's “Rabid Puppies” campaign, which along with the “Sad Puppies” campaign attempted to logroll the 2015 Hugo Awards by jamming the ballot full of right-leaning works and authors (see Hugopocalypse). The success of the Rabid Puppies campaign netted Wright a record-setting six nominations. Unfortunately for him, one of those nominations was canceled due to eligibility concerns, and all 5 of his remaining works finished below 'No Award' in the final slate. Rather than think about why this might be, of course, he ranted on his blog about how the evil 'Morlocks' had denied him the awards that he was allegedly 'due.'

Meme has discussed Wright several times:

• One of its longest threads on him was about his having “achieved maximum flounce velocity” with his indignant resignation from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) on the grounds that the organization had become too “politically correct.” Notable for a nonnie giving a list of some of Wright's greatest hits:

He came to my attention when he posted that “anti-homosex" screed and has since then posted billions of words comparing Terry Pratchett to Hitler, rambling about how homosexuality destroys civilization, that the Girl Scouts teach lesbianism, all scientific discoveries came from Christians, “Christian cutie-pies are sexier than sterile pagan dames (because our women are fertile, their rounded breasts engorged with milk, their nubile & callipygious hips able to bear children, whereas pagan women are mannequins, female in name only, barren” etc. To this day I find it hard to believe he's not trolling, because the shit he writes is so nonsensical and off the wall.

Meme did a readalong (Part I, Part II, Part III) of his novella One Bright Star to Guide Them, which was nominated for a Hugo as part of the Rabid Puppies ballot. Hilarity ensued.

Meme later did a readalong (Part I, Part II) of his collection of essays titled Transhuman and Subhuman, similarly nominated thanks to the Puppies. The content was alternately hilarious and revolting.

Wright offended meme by claiming that all men (read: all straight men) find m/m couples “gross and unsightly” — “even Socrates and Alcibiades.”

Wright gave some writing advice in the grossest manner possible. Meme was bitterly amused.

After the Puppies began an ill-conceived boycott of Tor books, Wright (who is published by Tor) offered to send free copies of his books to anyone who asked so they could read his works without giving money to Tor and thus violating the boycott–though of course they were welcome to send money directly to him via his blog's donation button. Meme discussed how scummy this behavior was and how it likely violates his contract.

• Wright subsequently said he would not write any more books for Tor. Rather than attribute the damage in their relationship to his breech of contract or his increasingly vitriolic and erratic attacks on senior Tor employees such as editors Patrick and Theresa Nielsen-Hayden, he blamed PNH for being mean to his wife:

I am, in all modesty, a skilled author, one of the finest writing today. I intend to write no more books for Tor, until, at the very least, I am ameliorated for the unprofessional behavior shown in public toward that other loyal Tor author, L Jagi Lamplighter, my wife.

• Meme was not impressed by his ranting, or his own estimation of his abilities.

Wright detailed how he thought the Dark Ages were actually much better than any other society before or since since Europe in the Middle Ages had a culture which understood that everyone was spiritually equal. Meme mocked this nonsense at length.

Wright has been slashed on meme with his ideological cohort Vox Day.