(Sorry about the weird numbering — I realized this topic belonged here, and brother, it's a doozy.)

My first literary convention was in Evanston, Ind. A man I admired (and would one day marry) convinced me to come along with him and some friends. The guest of honor was Gary Gygax, the creator of the original Dungeons and Dragons. I still remember the thrill of that drive, the butterflies as we checked in, wandering wide-eyed through the huckster’s room (today they blandly call it the vendor’s hall), wishing I had enough money to buy everything in sight. I sat in on writing workshops and geeky panels, rolled dice in pickup D&D games with strangers, and soaked in the wonder of being surrounded by people who loved the same things I loved.

It was intoxicating. And as I began building a writing career, the layers of what conventions could offer only deepened. Later, I graduated to more professional gatherings. One of my favorites was the 2012 Romance Writers of America convention in Orlando. My family went to Disney World while I immersed myself in the business of writing. I casually chatted with Nora Roberts in a hallway. I sat in on marketing workshops that explained the power of long-tail sales and the different types of romance heroes. I hobnobbed with publishers, editors, and agents. It was a world where professional craft and fannish joy overlapped, where anyone, from an aspiring writer to the most established professional, could feel at home.

That’s what conventions and professional organizations once were: the living, breathing community of writers. Places where the walls between readers, writers, and publishers came down. A place of discovery, career building, and fellowship.

And then, slowly, the drift began.

The first clear sign that something had shifted came in 2010. WisCon — the long-running feminist science fiction convention — disinvited its Guest of Honor, Elizabeth Moon.

Her crime? A blog post. Moon had written about the proposed Islamic mosque just a block away from the 9/11 memorial site in New York. She questioned whether it was wise, in light of what had happened on September 11, to build something so provocative in that place. It wasn’t a rant: it wasn’t hate speech. It was her opinion.

I remember it because Moon was the first professional writer I’d ever seen “canceled.” And she wasn’t some firebrand conservative — she was a liberal’s liberal. But she had lived through 9/11 and didn’t believe in letting down our guard. That one blog post was enough to erase her honor and spark a furor. Fans and pros lined up on opposite sides and shouted at each other. Conservatives weren’t even part of the argument — this was a leftist civil war, a fight over ideological purity inside their own house.

Looking back, it feels like the first real indication of what was coming: a demand to bring everyone on the same page, not just politically but culturally and morally. What began as a fight over a convention guest turned into the prototype of something larger, a creeping insistence on ideological conformity. Call it what it was becoming: a populist totalitarianism that would brook no dissent.

What happened to Elizabeth Moon was only the beginning. Within a few years, the demand for ideological purity spread from conventions into the professional organizations themselves — the very groups that were supposed to support writers and safeguard careers.

The Romance Writers of America (RWA) was the first to collapse. Once the most powerful professional guild in American letters, with more than 10,000 members, RWA had built an empire around its national convention and the RITA Awards. Then came the Courtney Milan affair in 2019–2020. A disciplinary dispute inside the board spiraled into accusations of racism and mass resignations. The fallout was catastrophic. Membership didn’t just decline — it cratered, from 10,000 down to around 2,000. By 2024, the organization filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, unable to meet the hotel contracts for a convention that no longer had the bodies to fill it.

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) followed in a different but telling way. In 2023, the board expelled Tom Monteleone, a Lifetime Achievement Award winner with five decades in the field and a founding member, for “recent words and actions” that violated HWA’s “anti-harassment policies.” That was the official line: antiseptic, corporate, designed to sound like the rules had spoken, not people with an agenda.

Monteleone’s own account, published in Sonder Magazine, tells another story. The spark, he says, was a Facebook post where he nominated “a star, old white guy: Stu Schiff” and called out recent HWA awards as “obvious DEI projects.” Things escalated after a small podcast appearance where, fueled by bourbon and frustration, he refused to play along with compelled pronouns and vented about being made to feel like there was “something wrong with being a smart white guy.” The HWA board responded with the nuclear option: expulsion, a lifetime ban from events, and the stripping of his prior honors. 

Publishers followed suit. Cemetery Dance dropped his 40-year column. Crossroad Press canceled his contract. Colleagues he’d helped in earlier years cut ties or stayed silent. Monteleone told us: “What shocked me most was the absolute glee that some people had in trying to damage me. They can try to destroy me, but I don’t think they’re going to.”

The contrast says it all. HWA used the language of harassment policy to cover what was, in practice, an ideological purge. He wasn’t accused of mistreating colleagues, plagiarizing, or breaking contracts. His crime was opinion — bluntly stated, unwelcome to the new regime, but opinion nonetheless.

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), long prestigious as the guild behind the Nebula Awards, took the same cultural turn. Its forums and conferences became openly contemptuous of conservatives and even non-woke moderates. The Nebula Conference — once a professional showcase — turned into an ideological pep rally. SFWA likes to brag about 2,500 members today, but that’s after lowering its once-high bar to admit self-published and small-press authors. For a group that claims to represent the whole of science fiction and fantasy, that’s not strength. That’s stagnation.

These weren’t just skirmishes. They were professional purges. The organizations meant to protect writers had turned on their own members.

If the Elizabeth Moon affair was the warning shot, and the Monteleone expulsion showed the teeth of the purge, the collapse of the Romance Writers of America convention revealed just how much damage ideology could do when it took over the machinery of a professional guild.

For decades, the RWA’s national convention was the beating heart of commercial fiction. Imagine thousands of romance writers in one hotel, all the big publishers sponsoring lavish parties, agents and editors roaming the halls looking for fresh talent. Careers were made in those lobbies. Deals were inked in the bars. You could meet Nora Roberts in the elevator, pitch to an agent before lunch, and dance at a publisher’s party after dinner. It was electric, the kind of convention that made you believe the business was alive and thriving.

Then came the implosion. After the 2019–2020 “Courtney Milan affair,” the membership collapse was breathtaking: from more than 10,000 to barely 2,000 in just a few years. Publishers pulled sponsorships, authors stopped showing up, and the crown jewel convention lost its shine. Without the bodies to fill ballrooms, the RWA couldn’t even meet its hotel contracts. In 2024, the organization declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

It wasn’t readers who killed the RWA convention. Romance is still the biggest-selling genre in America. It wasn’t writers, either; there’s no shortage of talent. What killed it was the leadership’s decision to turn a professional guild into an ideological enforcement arm. Once the mission shifted from supporting writers to policing purity, the very thing that gave the convention its magic — the mix of people, ideas, and opportunities — evaporated.

What had once been the premier professional gathering in genre fiction didn’t just decline. It was obliterated, a casualty of the new totalitarianism in miniature.

Before long, it was clear that romance wasn’t the only battlefield. If RWA showed how an organization could implode from the inside, science fiction and fantasy showed how the purge could spill outward — into fandom itself. That battle came to be known as Sad Puppies.

Between 2013 and 2017, a group of science fiction and fantasy writers — spearheaded by Larry Correia and later joined by Sarah Hoyt, Brad Torgersen, and Vox Day — launched the Sad Puppies campaigns, which this series has mentioned earlier. Their complaint was simple: the Hugo Awards no longer honored the best stories. Insiders were gaming them.

Tor Books had discovered that the Hugos could be controlled by bloc voting. They bought voting memberships for people they knew would support their slate of nominees. That tactic turned the Hugos from a fan award into a company award, a marketing weapon. The Puppies pushed back by organizing their own slates, books, and stories chosen for adventure, craft, and popularity, the kinds of works readers actually loved.

And conveniently for Tor, the writers leading Sad Puppies were right of center. At a political moment when conservatives were already being demonized, it was easy to double down on the politicization that was already happening. Instead of addressing the substance of the Puppies’ critique, Tor and its allies painted the entire movement as extremist, proof that the “wrong kind” of people were trying to hijack the genre.

The reaction was ferocious. Though SFWA and Worldcon were technically separate, their memberships overlapped heavily. The same people running Nebula forums and SFWA committees were also shaping Hugo ballots. In 2015, when Sad Puppies succeeded in putting a wide range of books and creators on the Hugo shortlist, the establishment struck back with a coordinated “No Award” campaign. Entire categories went unawarded rather than allow any of the “wrong” authors, including names like John C. Wright and Kevin J. Anderson, and even the editor Toni Weisskopf, mentor to hundreds, to be recognized.

That moment crystallized what many writers had already suspected: it wasn’t just publishers narrowing access, or professional organizations turning on their own. Even fandom itself was being manipulated and weaponized. If your story didn’t fit their slate, you had no chance. And rapidly, their slate became politicized.

Conventions were supposed to be the place where writers met readers face to face. You could walk into a panel room, shake hands with strangers, and walk out with new friends or new fans. The whole point was openness: community built around the love of story.

But by the mid-2010s, even that space began to close. The same “codes of conduct” that had started as anti-harassment policies, intended to deal with sexual predators, an existing real threat for decades at conventions, hardened and transformed into loyalty tests. It wasn’t enough to behave. You had to believe.

I saw this play out with Jon Del Arroz, an author I know in passing. Jon never assaulted anyone, never caused the kinds of problems codes of conduct were designed to prevent. But he was still banned, blacklisted from multiple conventions, including BayCon and WorldCon, not for what he did but for who he was.

And it wasn’t just Jon. I experienced it myself. At a convention I had helped organize in its first years, I “came out” openly as a conservative on a panel. Afterward, a woman I had mentored for years, someone I thought of almost like family in the field, came up to tell me how very disappointed she was in me. I haven’t heard from her since.

That’s how quickly the air shifted. Whisper networks grew, not about predators or stalkers, but about political views. Writers who had once delighted in meeting their fans in the dealer’s room or at late-night parties were suddenly on edge, wondering if a stray Facebook post or casual remark would get them reported to a “safety committee.” Shades of Robespierre!

Conventions had gone from being wide-open community gatherings to gated spaces. The doors were still there, but only for people who spoke the right language and bowed to the right gods.

When the old spaces shut their doors, we built new ones. That's the phase we are in right now.

I wasn’t the only writer who lost friends or professional connections after admitting I was conservative. For many of us, the message was clear: the traditional organizations and conventions weren’t safe anymore. If you wanted to meet readers, trade stories, or even just relax with other writers, you needed to find — or build — spaces where you didn’t have to hide who you were.

That’s how parallel institutions began to grow. Some of them were grassroots communities, like the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance, which started with nothing more than a hand-built mailing list and quickly swelled to over a thousand members. Others were cons created from scratch, designed to recapture the joy of gathering without ideological gatekeepers at the door.

It’s not just conventions. The new “convention floor” has become digital. Kickstarter campaigns, Substack newsletters, Amazon launches — these are the new places where writers and readers meet directly, with no gatekeepers in between. What you lose in ballroom glitz, you gain in freedom.

And not every traditional convention has gone along quietly. MarsCon in Virginia Beach faced pressure to disinvite Larry Correia but refused, choosing inclusivity in the old sense — everyone welcome. P-Con in Texas has likewise kept its doors open to right-of-center writers without controversy. These moments are rare, but they prove the wall isn’t airtight. The purge may have closed many doors, but cracks of resistance are showing, and they let in light.

What began as community-building — writers’ organizations, professional guilds, conventions where fans and pros mixed freely — became machinery for ideological enforcement. Elizabeth Moon disinvited. RWA collapsing. Tom Monteleone expelled. Sad Puppies crushed. Conventions that once embodied openness and curiosity turned into gated compounds with loyalty tests at the door.

And yet, the story didn’t end there. Writers didn’t stop writing. Readers didn’t stop reading. Communities didn’t vanish; they simply re-formed elsewhere. BasedCon, ConFinement, LibertyCon, RiseUP Con. Grassroots networks. Substack newsletters. Kickstarter campaigns. Amazon launches. All proving the same point: people will always find a way to connect around the love of story.

Some of the old institutions even show signs of remembering their original purpose. MarsCon refusing to disinvite Larry Correia. P-Con holding the line for openness. Little cracks in the wall, reminders that not everyone in the mainstream wants to march to the tune of populist totalitarianism.

And there are surprising points of light. The Romance Writers of America, once at 10,000 members, has dwindled to only about 2,000. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association boasts about 2,500. Meanwhile, the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance, with nothing more than a Facebook presence, no infrastructure, no membership drive, no website beyond a landing page, still managed to peak at over a thousand members. If a grassroots group could achieve that with no real push, imagine what a professional organization built on the center-right could accomplish. Not an exclusionary club, but an open, serious guild for writers who believe in great story rather than political bean-counting.

The lesson is simple, but vital. Ideology narrows. Story expands. When gatekeepers choose purity over purpose, they burn down their own houses. And when they do, writers and readers will build new ones — better, freer, and more alive. Because story survives ideology.

Catch up on this series:

Part 1: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Gatekeepers

Part 2: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Awards Racket

Part 3: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Market Disconnect

Part 4: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Silencing of the Straight White Male

Part 5: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Writer’s Dilemma

Part 6: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Reader Rebellion

Next up: Part 7: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot:  The Way Forward

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