Kickstarter Suspends Effort to Fund Schantz Comic About “Defying Transgenderism”

Author Hans G. Schantz, shortlisted for the Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance’s Book of the Year in 2018, and a guest at the first BasedCon in 2021, made Fox News when Kickstarter suspended his appeal to fund a comic project about the fictional prosecution of a high school teacher for “defying transgenderism”.

Schantz described his plans for The Wise of Heart, a satirical inversion of the Scopes Monkey Trial, in his newsletter:

…One evening in the early summer of 2022, I settled in to watch Inherit the Wind on YouTube. Not the 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy, but rather the 1988 television movie version starring Jason Robards and Kirk Douglas. I got a few minutes into watching it, and I had a sudden epiphany. This would make a great story set in the present day, featuring a high school biology teacher caught up in the transgender craze arrested for teaching the facts of biological science in defiance of a state law requiring unquestioning gender affirmation. I turned off the movie, and instead, I hunted down the transcript for the Scopes Monkey Trial….

He ran segments of the illustrated story through his newsletter, which Vox Day also published on his Arkhaven comics website (Internet Archive link).

Then in May 2023 Schantz launched a Kickstarter to fund publication of a book containing all the installments. The initial $3,000 goal was fully funded and Schantz was closing in on a stretch goal of $6,000 to pay for an audiobook version when on May 24 Kickstarter suspended the project and refunded all the pledges. A notice from the Kickstarter Trust & Safety (see screencap below) gave these reasons for the action:

A thorough review of your project uncovered one or more of the following violations: Inappropriate content, including but not limited to explicit or pornographic material [or] Hateful or offensive content that fails to meet Kickstarter’s spirit of inclusivity by promoting discrimination, bigotry or intolerance towards marginalized groups.

Fox News picked up the story on May 25: “Kickstarter abruptly suspends comic project for ‘defying transgenderism’”. Although their coverage is little more than a rehash of Schantz’ newsletter articles they did devote 500 words to it, and he says the major media attention has given a financial push to his replacement campaign at a different crowdfunding site.

We’ve all heard of the “Streisand Effect.” That’s where an attempt to suppress information online backfires spectacularly and only serves to increase awareness of the information. That “psychological reactance” occurs because once people are aware that information is being kept from them, they are more highly motivated to seek it….

At FundMyComic he has already raised more than $8,000 with a week to go.

9 thoughts on “Kickstarter Suspends Effort to Fund Schantz Comic About “Defying Transgenderism”

  1. Meanwhile, in the real world, teachers and librarians are being driven out of the profession by bigots who don’t want queer people – gay or trans – so much as mentioned.

    Sigh.

    The pretend-victimhood of the bigot is so tiresome.

  2. I poked around on the Arkhaven website and that thing’s not even a comic, it’s a text story with illustrations.

    Also on that substack they have an ai-generated image with what I assume is supposed to be a Nordicized Gigachad.

  3. Always so happy when boycotts and actual attacks, as at Target, on displays on merchandise displays and workers, are effective, and always so outraged at “violation of their rights” when someone just doesn’t want to do business with them because it’s really bad for their business reputation.

  4. That imaginary Biology teacher doesn’t know very much Biology, does he? Androgen insensitivity, 5?-Reductase 2 deficiency, XXY, XYY, and on, and on, and on. I cannot imagine someone graduating from my college with a Biology degree who hadn’t learned about this in their Human Bio course. His school should send him back for continuing education.

  5. Recycled hatred finds no place in democracy.

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    Where does it say, “White, Male, Born Again Only need apply?”

    IT DOESN’T!

  6. At some point the author/artist is going to realize that the only reason anyone is interested, and kicking in to fund this, is because of political alignment. There is zero interest in the artistic content, zero interest in his message as an author. The only point to it is that it aligns with the politics of people seeking material to help them be nasty.

    And that realization is either going to make them lean into it, as we see with so many ‘political’ authors who get involved in movements like the puppies purely out of that, and who get incredibly frustrated when everyone ignores their artistic efforts, and start building huge paranoid fantasies to explain why they’re being ignored because they refuse to see that their work only held value as a commodified ‘this helps me perform my political action’, or it’s going to make them quit.

    Sad, really.

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