Update 14:52 BST 18/05/23: John Carmack has since posted about the backlash to his attending the anti-woke convention, stating that it's "unfortunate Rob has made BasedCon so intentionally provocative. I told him as much after the event last year - I felt a little uncomfortable." He also claims that he is "not a culture warrior" and doesn't "follow activists on either side", adding that he went to the con simply because he liked the books.

'Woke' is a word thrown around a lot by angry bigots, and when pressed, they never have a concrete definition. What we do see is that whenever a new movie, game, or TV show includes anyone who isn't a cishet white man, angry comments about 'woke gone mad' flood the replies. I wonder what, or who, they're mad about. Cue Doom co-creator and former Oculus VR CTO John Carmack, who is proudly headlining 'BasedCon', an anti-woke sci-fi and fantasy convention.

"I'm going to be at basedcon.com again this year," Carmack tweeted (as reported by PC Gamer). "I had read books from and twitter-interacted with three of the authors (more since!), but I wasn't sure what to expect last year. It turned out fun, in a grass-roots con way that reminded me of the old Space Access days... I was just going to show up as a normal attendee / fan of the authors last year, but Rob nudged me into doing a talk and some panels, and I enjoyed it."

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The Rob in question is Robert Kroese, AKA the founder of BasedCon. As highlighted in the comments of Karmack's announcement, his 2022 tweets about the convention sum up what kind of event it is: "I want to assure you that #BasedCon is committed to creating a safe environment for everyone and we will not tolerate any sexist or disrespectful jokes unless they are at least twice as funny as they are disrespectful. And of course racist jokes have to be at least 3/5 as funny as they are racist".

The BasedCon website isn't much better than Kroese's tweets. It mentions Gamergate (a right-wing harassment campaign that primarily targeted women in the games industry, with perpetrators doxxing, sending rape and death threats, and decrying progressivism) and Gino Carano's firing from The Mandalorian after a string of offensive posts like comparing being a Republican today to being Jewish during the Holocaust.

However, it doesn't denounce GamerGate or Carano's actions, but says that each "starts the same way: a group of progressive malcontents move into a space, takes it over, molds it to suit the group's agenda, and then brands anyone who fights back as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc."

It also lists that "Men cannot give birth, Guns don't kill people; people kill people, a fetus is a human being, socialism has failed everywhere it's been tried, [and] discriminating against white people is racism". So, BasedCon appears to be a convention for bigots to proudly be bigots. And Carmack will be there.

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