And so far all I am seeing is that people self voting are actually tolerated and I appear to be the scape goat.
Scapegoat? You are overestimating the importance of this. I know it feels like a big thing to get the attention, but on the grand scale of life - it isn't that important. And, when it comes to people self-voting, they can do it as they please - many will get downvoted for it, many will not get votes. As I see it, it is a frequency thing, and a size of the stake thing. In the background, I first defended you for self-voting due to you not posting much - but then you decided to make a thing out of it. That is fine - your prerogative. The responses are proportional. I think most people were pretty open and understanding, and even the people who you tagged without researching weren't too aggressive. Yet, the next post is that you call it a shitstorm. Perhaps you haven't really seen a shitstorm before.