The Most Award-Winning Science Fiction Author Alive Spent the Nation’s 250th Birthday Calling Trump a Nazi
Connie Willis has won eleven Hugo Awards, seven Nebula Awards, and the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Grand Master designation. She is the most decorated author in the history of the genre, more honored than Heinlein, Asimov, or Bradbury by the industry’s own accounting. She lives in Greeley, Colorado, about forty miles north of Denver.
On the Fourth of July, while the United States celebrated its 250th anniversary, she published a Facebook post that ran several hundred words, called the current administration a “Nazi regime,” catalogued her political grievances at length, announced that the “fever of divisiveness has broken,” and ended with a list of American heroes that included Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harvey Milk, and “the guy who threw a Subway sandwich at the border patrol.”
The full post, which Willis titled “A HOPEFUL AND HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY,” ran as follows:
“We went to the Greeley Stampede last night (our local fair and rodeo.) It can be kind of a rough crowd, but this year my husband and I both noticed something different about it — and not just that last year there was lots of MAGA stuff, and this year I saw hardly any red hats or in-your-face T-shirts. What we noticed was people’s attitudes — they were friendly and polite and smiling. Everyone talked to each other — the people at the table where we ate our corn dogs and cherry limeades were all talkative and cheerful, teenagers we were maneuvering around made way for us, and when I told a guy in the line waiting for tickets to get in that I liked his shirt, he gave us two free passes to the fair that he had. Everyone smiled. It was a sea change from last year’s tension and wariness, and it felt like the fever of divisiveness has broken, or at least is breaking.
A lot of people have been saying they’re despairing this Fourth of July, that they feel more like mourning than celebrating, but I find myself MUCH more hopeful than last year, when Trump and DOGE were running riot, colleges and businesses were caving, and watching 1776 on TV (which we do every Fourth of July), made me sick to my stomach. This year we’re in a much different place. The winds have shifted, and Trump is now struggling on multiple fronts, from his corruption (which was on the front page today) to the war he keeps losing over and over.”
She then followed up with a completely long and unhinged list what she described as evidence of Trump’s collapse, including health speculation: “His health is failing — he is NOT blinking in those meetings and he gets crazier by the minute, clinging to fake polls and claiming he can talk to the dead.” She celebrated an active-duty Air Force officer calling for impeachment at the Capitol. She quoted from Heather Cox Richardson, Daily Kos, The Bulwark, and Jack Smith. She called Trump’s cabinet corrupt. She called the administration a “Nazi regime.” She concluded with her list of American heroes.
The list is worth noting because it tells you what kind of July Fourth post this is. Alongside Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the soldiers who died at Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima, Willis included Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Mark Elias, and “the guy who threw a Subway sandwich at the border patrol.” The man who stormed the beaches at Normandy and the late-night comedian currently in contract negotiations at CBS occupy the same moral category in Willis’s pantheon of American heroes. Perhaps this is why these writers in the establishment fail at understanding how to make great characters and have lost so much of the reading audience.
This is what the science fiction establishment does with the Fourth of July. The convention circuit, the Hugo Awards, the SFWA infrastructure that has given Willis twelve Hugo nominations in the last decade, and this is the culture they produce. Not stories about what America can be. Not reflection on the tradition of liberty that made Western civilization’s great experiment possible. A Facebook post listing Jack Smith and Seth Meyers as heroes while calling the sitting president a Nazi on the nation’s 250th birthday.
Willis has been propped up because of politics, and because of her gender more than any kind of lasting talent that will be remarked about in stories. The most memorable thing about her is Harlan Ellison jokingly groping her at a Worldcon in which that same crowd then tried to cancel him for.
The post she wrote on July 4, 2026 is a part of the cancer of the system. It is the instinct of someone who has been in a bubble long enough to mistake the politics of SFWA conventions for the politics of Greeley, Colorado, and who interpreted a crowd of polite fair-goers as evidence that the national mood has shifted toward her preferred electoral outcome. The fever of divisiveness has not broken. She simply did not see any MAGA hats at the Stampede this year and concluded she had won. The group has pushed itself so insular they don’t know that anything else even exists.
The genre that produced Bradbury’s warnings about book-burning, Heinlein’s meditations on civic virtue, and Roddenberry’s vision of humanity bettering itself and pursuing excellence has an institution that regularly hands its highest honors to an author who spends the nation’s 250th birthday calling the other half of the country Nazis on Facebook.
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