I have been waiting for Nov. 5th to make this post. A thread about the movie "V for Vendetta" and my 2020 revelations--losing friends and losing faith in my longtime political cohort.

In 2020, I lost about half my closest friends to politics, which rose to a head around JK Rowling's essay, and the riots that beset my city following the death of George Floyd. I have been called a TERF, a right-wing ideologue, and more by people with whom

I thought I shared a worldview. Friends who attended my wedding, who played D&D with us every weekend. Friends I went to Pride with, friends I supported when they raised funds for charities and causes.

One of those friends loved the movie V for Vendetta. I don't know if he read the comic, but I have and realize that the ideological slant is a bit different there. But this is about the movie. Every Nov. 5th he would post the bit where Evey reads the letter from Valerie, a

lesbian imprisoned under a right-wing authoritarian government. Every year he would post that scene. It meant a lot to him. And I thought I understood and shared his understanding of the antagonists of that film, who were authoritarian conservatives. I thought I understood that

the problem was THE AUTHORITARIANISM. But in 2020, the scales fell from my eyes. He, and my other friends, had no objection to the authoritarianism, just the conservativism. It's fine to silence people and criminalize thought as long as it's done "for the right team."

It turns out what I thought was sacred--the liberal principles of free speech, free inquiry, free thought--was just "dogwhistles" for various kinds of -phobias and hatred. It's not just V for Vendetta. It's The Crucible, it's 1984, it's Brave New World, it's Solzhenitsyn...

All these friends who sympathized with the falsely-accused witches, the resistance, the tellers of unpopular truths... I find myself staring at them across a divide, in a REAL witch hunt, and they're the ones with torches. I think the message of these fictions is important, but

I think the most crucial aspect is rarely discussed: when it's your reality, you won't necessarily know what side you're on. The inquisitors grew up rooting for the witches. And here we are. We have to have epistemic humility. We have to consider that we might be wrong.

If you can say without any doubt that you are on "the right side of history," you are in the fine company of monsters and despots.