He Won't Be The Last

Is it so hard to condemn pedophilia?

On November 30, NBC News’ Washington, D.C. affiliate reported on the arrest of Michael Everts, owner of FIT Personal Training and commissioner for the D.C. Mayor’s Council on Physical Fitness, Health and Nutrition. He was confronted outside of the Apple store on Dupont Circle after police were given evidence of his activity on the hookup app Sniffies in which he’d sought out underage males for sex.

An FBI member known as a Online Covert Employee (OCE) active on the encrypted app Telegram also had contact with Everts in which he talked about 9-12 year-olds being “the hottest age ever,” and that there were “a lot of hot kids in the Northwest area of D.C.” Everts would eventually send the OCE images and videos of children being abused, saying “Now it’s 1000% verified, I’m a pedophile. This is to protect us both.”

Everts is currently being held without bail and has been assigned a public defender.

Michael Everts is the adoptive father of two young boys, may God keep them both. Michel Everts is a monster. And, in the more than month since the story broke, another aspect of his life has come to light that was understandably overlooked given the sheer heinousness of his crime: Michael Everts was a big science fiction fan.

Everts ran the YouTube channel Fit2BRead, which he’d started a little under three years ago. He’d garnered a respectable subscriber base in a short time, sitting at just under eight thousand. The channel has 217 videos, most of them in the form of “top X” lists for various flavors of science fiction. One of his most popular videos is an over three-hour long “Top 210” list that features recommendations by himself interspersed with over one hundred book reviewer cameos who chimed in and added their own recommendations.

Everts seemed to be well liked by his BookTubing peers. While the production value of his videos was quite good and his upload schedule was consistent, his recommendations were always quite safe and his commentary hardly groundbreaking. His top pick for Cyberpunk novels was Snow Crash, but he “could have been just as comfortable” with it being William Gibson’s seminal work Neuromancer, his number two pick. His recent Top 10 Banned Books list is about as banal as one would expect; Clockwork Orange, Slaughterhouse Five, Brave New World, the greatest hits you’ll see at any Barnes and Nobles during Banned Books Week (yawn). Being gay, Everts was understandably not a fan of Orson Scott Card, calling him a “terrible person” on Twitter/X, but did enjoy Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. His work was akin to a saltine cracker of literary criticism; overcovered mainstream titles you’ve heard held forth upon a thousand times before by more talented people, always while attired in some “how-do-you-do-fellow-nerds?” graphic t-shirt. The blandness of it all wasn’t lost on J.D. Cowan, author of The Last Fanatics: How the Genre Wars Killed Wonder, who echoed the sentiments of many in the Superversive and Iron Age crowd in his thread on X:

Around the time of the arrest, a post on r/books on Reddit mentioned the news, but gained little traction. On December 30, identical posts made to two infamous internet forums , OnA Forums and Kiwi Farms, shined further light on this side of Everts’ life (link to relevant page is here. The site is not for the faint of heart. Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you). The posts contain over two dozen screenshots pointing to everything from Everts liking and commenting on pictures of other people’s kids to his great admiration for SFWA stalwarts Samuel Delany and Cat Rambo. He commiserated with Donald Ekpeki when he was having trouble re-entering the United States. He even chimed in on two separate videos about the Nebulas when they rolled around. In the eyes of the progressive, ‘inclusive’ and cancel-happy mainstream fandom, he did and said all the right things to gain acceptance. As shocking and disgusting as his crimes and statements were, the least surprising part of all this was that he was a poster boy for SFWA-friendly fandom. And that’s a problem.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

I’ve heard it said that politics doesn’t corrupt people, corrupt people are naturally drawn to politics. If that’s true, I think the same principal can by this point be applied to truly odious degenerates and mainstream science fiction and fantasy literature. Of course I’m not making a generalization here; the vast majority of writers, creators and artists in the fandom are perfectly productive members of society and decent individuals. Even the most obnoxious of the sex/race/gender-obsessed misandrist wokescolds who make up so much of the mainstream scene today manage to keep the debauchery that so delights them confined within their books.

Still, solely as a member-per-capita issue, the prevalence of criminal sexual predators (and more specifically pedophiles and pedophilia apologists) is hard not to notice. The reasons as to why are debated endlessly, with the prevailing theory seeming to be that wolves will drape themselves in whatever sheepskins necessary to get closer to their prey. While this is true for everything from the Roman Catholicism to Roblox, science fiction and fantasy are spheres of creativity that invite one to imagine in the extreme: as such, for certain authors, even the most bedrock laws of society are liable to be bent, broken and ignored as much as the laws of physics. Worlds that do not contain the societal safeguards and social attitudes we know now can be done away with, something that holds an powerful allure to those with disordered sexual interests. In a 2005 article for HuffPost that explored the correlation between Star Trek fandom and pedophilia, clinical psychologist and dating expert Ellen Ladowsky writes:

“There is another aspect of Star Trek that likely makes it irresistible to perverts. It is utopian, in the sense that all the differences and distinctions which create tensions here on earth have been eradicated. Despite their exaggerated sexual characteristics, for example, the crew members are citizens of a utopian interracial and interplanetary world where the usual conflicts associated with gender do not apply.”

A Los Angeles Times article from the same time cited in the HuffPost piece profiled the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit. When asked for his own theory on the seeming connection, Detective Constable Warren Bulmer said: “It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and monsters have power and where the usual rules don't apply."

The Cruelty of Limitless Tolerance

As disturbing as all of this is however, what continues to dumbfound me is the all but expected sound of crickets that comes forth whenever it’s discovered someone on the mainstream side of things turns out to be a truly reprehensible human being. Consider the wildfire-like speed with which the Cait Corrain scandal spread just a few weeks ago: Corrain was a first-time author with a modest just-over-5,000 strong following on X, probably a decent parallel to Evers’ similarly modest YouTube channel. Corrain’s offenses, however, had as much to do with her unforgivable insensitivities towards the marginalized as they did her actual sabotage, maybe moreso. That constitutes the ultimate sin amongst the Cult of Woke, especially given that she was white. Shortly after, BookTube was positively awash in videos about her.

By contrast, it took Everts’ story more than a month to gain even modest traction. Thomas Wagner of SFF180, who has a YouTube subscriber base nearly one third larger than Everts’ and a popular book review website where he also posts his videos, broke the news shortly after the NBC segment aired. Trying to search for reactions to Everts’ arrest on YouTube returns three videos counting Wagner’s.

What kind of inverted morality produces these disparate reactions? The excuse that Everts is innocent until proven guilty may be technically correct but tissue paper weak, considering there’s evidence of him admitting to his deeds and calling himself a pedophile. Are people that afraid to condemn his actions simply because they don’t wish to risk being called homophobic? Sure, they might have endorsed/attempted/actually molested a kid, but hey, it’s not like they called someone “colored”. Mainstream (which is to say progressive) sci-fi and fantasy fandom knows it has a problem. It’s high time The Cancel Crew grew a damn spine and said something about it when it crops up.

Fandom has ever had this odd propensity to twiddle its thumbs in the face of evil being committed in its midst; As far back as The Breendoggle, once the Pacificon II Committee finally decided to ban Walter Breen, it was, as stated in its own report, more concerned with potential legal backlash to keeping him around than out of concern that Breen was a known sex pest who openly lusted after children, and frequently regaled people at parties with tales of his exploits with minors. The more recent crimes of DragonCon co-founder and SFWA member Ed Kramer were wholly ignored by then-acting president John Scalzi even as Kramer was arrested, tried and convicted for being caught attempting to molest a 14-year old boy in a hotel room. While Scalzi expressed lukewarm sorrow about MZB’s abuse of her daughter Moira Greyland once her memoir The Last Closet was published, the once-prolific tweeter had nothing to say about the scandal occurring on his watch. A search for Kramer’s name on Scalzi’s timeline yields exactly one result:

Scalzi has since abandoned his account in an indignant huff because Elon makes him sad.

Search Marion Zimmer Bradley’s name in SFWA’s website right now and the most relevant article you’ll get connected to her is her 1999 obituary; search Ed Kramer’s name and one article that isn’t about him comes back. Run Samuel Delany’s name through and you’d never know anyone had anything but effusive praise for the man’s literary genius. What happens when you search the term “whiteness”? One goodbye article to former blog editor C.L. Clarke and three posts about how to make sure your fiction doesn’t have too many honkeys in it. The scene at large needs to get its priorities straight.

Part of the reason we keep banging this drum, especially in regards to the names mentioned above and with SFWA in particular is the galling hypocrisy on display. The same SFWA that managed to investigate and expel Vox Day within sixty days somehow can’t find the time or doesn’t think it’s important to address far more egregious crimes—crimes! of past members that literally ruined innocent people’s lives. When this was brought up a few years ago on that battlefield of the id that is Twitter, how did then-president Cat Rambo respond? With deflection and TDS:

Cat would get bodied in the replies by none other than Based L.Jagi Lamplighter

Pat Tomlinson, who likes to remind us that “if a Nazi is sitting at a table with ten people, then there are eleven Nazis at the table,” has had three online and real world acquaintances arrested for various sex crimes against children. I say this not to suggest that Tomlinson should be considered guilty by association, but to point out that the knife conveniently doesn’t seem to cut both ways in his eyes. If I ever woke up one day and realized I was ever friends with three pedophilic sex criminals, I’d be taking a major reevaluation of my life. I certainly wouldn’t stay Facebook friends with one of them.

Be Not Afraid

If murder is a crime in which the blood of its victims cries out from the ground to God, the desecration of a child’s innocence is something that cries out for justice all the more loudly (for any SFWA members reading this, that was an allusion to biblical scripture, in case you were confused). Science fiction has always had its ideological divides and camps, since Wolheim v. Moskowitz. The writers, editors and creators I know in the Superversive and Iron Age indie space don’t just openly express our contempt for those who would harm a child, we meme about it. Progressive fandom’s poisonous tolerance is the same brand of tolerance that made the Berkley Bohemians so reluctant to kick Walter Breen from their midst. Mainstream fandom, this is your wake up call. These monsters that approach groups like ours, seeking to make a lair amongst them, will slither back into their shadows if there are consequences to be faced; silence or apathy when one predator is caught will only embolden the next one.

Michael Everts won’t be the last one. Let us all be ready.