Contact across the Solar System

Backlash

The anti-espionagers did not learn about Ilmuth helping Sheila, but they had plenty of other things to feel outraged over.

Though even most paranormal enthusiasts had written off the "Adamski Grave Card" as a hoax, someone remembered the names on it. He then compared its writing to the writing shown numerous places in the two travelers' video. It matched fairly well, even if it was difficult to interpret. The anti-espionagers soon learned of that, and they got worked up over how wrong it supposedly was. "So the mall rats' 'contact committee' spied on us only a few years ago?"

Then Alicia Washington, that Amtrak train attendant, a middle-aged black woman, came forward. When she learned about all the vegetarian cuisine that the SSC fed to the two travelers, that brought to mind a passenger who once bought a lot of veggie burgers and salads. A passenger who looked suspiciously like Kalna. She told of that, and the anti-espionagers mocked it mercilessly.

"Why do the mall rats need a train when they can ride their flying saucers?"

"The mall rats envy us for our open spaces and our freedom, and their train ride shows it."

Alicia was put off by the anti-espionagers' tone, however. To her, it seemed almost endlessly hostile, as if there could be nothing good about the SSC.

This hostility reached a point where some CTIE forum members started talking about vigilante action against the resident "mall rats", even hinting at lynching. The CTIE had to issue a statement on that subject:

* We don't know who they are. Unless we can identify them with confidence, then we should not cause trouble for anyone who seems like one.

* They should not be lynched or harassed or otherwise mistreated, though you may make it clear to them that their presence and activities here are unwelcome. Instead, they ought to be turned over to the appropriate authorities. They would likely be guilty of identity fraud or similar crimes, so the authorities should be able to put them out of action rather easily.

* They may be good as hostages for getting concessions out of the Solar System Community.

* We should be careful about displeasing the SSC, because we've all seen what it is capable of. Their spacecraft have no observable means of propulsion, yet they can make a spacecraft the size of the USS Nimitz hang in the air and travel to other planets.

* On our site, we will not allow advocacy of activities like lynching. We don't want to be tainted by activities with questionable legality at best. We should at least try to hold the moral high ground. But we will try to uphold freedom of speech as much as is reasonable.

Some of the lynching advocates then made a big fuss about freedom of speech and about how the CTIE's policies take away their right to defend themselves and Planet Earth. The CTIE eventually banned the more obnoxious ones, but they then made a big fuss about what a bunch of Politically Correct cowards the CTIE is.

The anti-espionagers did agree that planetary sovereignty was an important issue, though they had a lot of controversy about how best to organize their fellow Earth people to enforce it. Even the CTIE's titular committee was split, with Paul Jenkins and some others favoring the United Nations, some favoring expanding existing blocs like NATO and BRICS, some favoring a new organization, and some thinking that existing nations ought to be enough. The UN supporters tended to win out, because the UN was already existing, and because most other solutions involved reinventing the UN under some other name. On the other side, some anti-UN conspiracy theorists came to believe in a new one: that the UN was a bunch of SSC quislings.

Someone in the CTIE then addressed the question "what is a quisling?" by posting an article with that name on the career of Vidkun Quisling, the infamous eponymous collaborator with Nazi Germany's occupation of Norway in World War II. Complete with some not-very-subtle hints that the SSC's supporters on the Earth are just like him and his followers.