Safe Space Press began as a publication house providing a home for artists critical of the excesses of cancel culture, a illiberal movement—although always with us, always posing a threat to diversity—that around 2016 started putting McCarthyism to shame. All of us, but especially “vulnerable populations” considered to belong to “protected categories,” have been expected—incentivized by the rewards of social and career capital—to flout human conscience and surrender to the bloodthirsty saturnalia of censoring, silencing, and shaming anything—even art and university professors—that unsettle us. Safe Space Press believes, on the contrary, that radical care and kindness—as opposed to ruining lives without due process (which effectively serves to make a prison yard out of society, polarizing people and even alienating allies)—can be an effective tactic for social change.

At least that is the ideal.

It is an ideal that even Dr. Istvan (chief editor of Safe Space Press and chief lip-servicer of this ideal) has gradually slid away from in his own life. We can see the slide in his change of approach, for example, to pronouns. He used to balance himself, against the various pressures pushing him toward the dark margins, in the sane and healthy middle ground. He would conduct himself, that is to say, in accordance with the notion that, to paraphrase him, you would be (almost) as much an asshole if you refused to call someone by their preferred pronouns (assuming they asked nicely) as you would be if you tried to enact laws that would compel others to call you by your preferred pronouns. Much more bitter and paranoid from the career-ruinous muzzling and shadow-banning enacted against him in the name of “protecting the oppressed,” much more impatient with the incessant pandering to these “powerless populations” (a pandering, voiced by politicians and Disney alike, that shows how much power they really have), Dr. Istvan has fallen quite a bit out of balance: ready—almost itching (push dagger clutched in his hoodie pocket)—to refuse even someone who asks nicely “Can you please call me ‘they’?” with a “Fuck you faggot!”

One saving grace is that he knows this shadow lurks within, which makes it less likely to blindside him. He expresses the shadow—screams it out, more accurately—in writing and in conversation with loved ones, which (1) vents some of the emotions that otherwise would lead to violence and (2) serves as a call for extra help from them. Indeed, as he expresses these emotions (these fantasies of torture), he mixes in meta-editorials about how he knows it is wrong to take his angers out on others and about how directing his violence, say, to all trans people he participates in the same heavy-handed identity politics as those who caused him so much hurt. He warns all who will listen not to follow him in the human-all-too-human practice of emboldening back-and-forths of vengeance that his original call for radical care—his call when he first got canceled—was meant to put and end to.

Dr. Istvan still hears the inner voice of conscience, in short. That is why he has resisted the temptation to shift the middle-ground message of Safe Space Press to something more in line with his personal slide into darkness away from the light of nuance. He has become like a drug addict who warns people about the dangers of drugs even in his highs. However much the message now makes him look bad in the contrast, however much he has become like those the message calls out (namely, those unempathetic bastards hooked on the purpose-giving and pain-relieving bitterness toward people who merely look like those we think have victimized us), he has preserved that original message—presented below in full—as an externalization of his better angel.

Aware that we are all in this together as flawed beings (thrown into this wheel-of-fortune life, fashioned by primordial drives and environmental factors only to die in the end), Safe Space Press—holding the banner of our shared humanity higher than that of our anger—is not about shaming perpetrators of cancel culture. Even the most virulent perpetrators of this constitutional-rights-violating juggernaut of anti-diversity, whatever side of the political aisle to which they belong, are to be approached with empathy. Addiction to bitterness, an addiction that has a grip on most of us (scrambling to find security and purpose and identity-glue in a God-is-dead world of for-most-too-much-and-too-soon satellite footage of Earth, and of vital industries that fail to pay a livable wage, and of my-truth estrangement from hunting and frolicking in the trees with others who might challenge our self-identifications) but which so rages in these depression-besieged individuals that they form pitchfork lynch mobs, has made it normal to see our participation-trophied selves as victims (the more victimized the better, just like on the soccer field) and to set the bar on what is worthy of offense so low that we always have a pretense to feel that angst-numbing rush of bully-making bitterness.

Join with Safe Space Press to engender a diverse world in which termination is not a necessary consequence of heterodoxy—a world, in effect, that is genuinely diverse (not just diverse on surface-levels or “in the right way”).