LRT: Not gonna hijack a tweet about TERFs by bringing in another issue, but the phenomenon reminds me how Courtney Milan's attackers tried to portray the situation in Romancelandia where she's a nobody everybody's afraid of, rather than a well-respected person people agree with.
And it's something that is far from limited to those two situations (and has broader impacts in the RWA implosion than just Courtney Milan... "nobody wants a plethora of diverse stories to be told, they're all just afraid to say so!" is basically the refrain.)
It's the "Silent Majority" that conservatives in the US have tried to claim for generations. Easier to write off angry phonecalls from constituents and damning polls when you assume that many of them secretly agree with you and you're working to free them from shackles of fear.
