(This post was originally scheduled for a couple weeks ago, but stuff happened and it had to get shuffled around. Apologies if you were expecting it earlier.)
Why do we consistently lose, politically? (And even when we supposedly win, we still lose.)
You’ve probably already figured it out. If not, you likely will soon: the GOP always sells us out. They are controlled opposition. Or the “good cop” LARPing as our champion while the Uniparty they belong to commands them to continually betray us.
Nobody truly committed to liberty, national sovereignty, or even sanity will ever be allowed to rise to prominence in the Uniparty Machine. Real change (change for the better, I mean) is what the MSM and Establishment gatekeepers exist to prevent.
This post applies to the Dissident Right writ large, but I intend to specifically address the creative/artistic “community” within this faction.
There are plenty of squabbles on the Left: Should we commit infanticide only before birth, or is any time hunky-dory? Should we incessantly ram sodomy down people’s throats, or Islam? Who deserves our support more–macho chicks who think they’re as good or better than dudes, or dudes who pretend to be chicks and shatter those fantasies?
But whenever there’s a significant battle to be fought, the leftards put aside their differences, present a united front, and dogpile on anyone with the audacity to question their Big Tent Agenda.
On the Right, we are too busy backbiting each other to even entertain the idea of unity. Chances are (if you’re not a well-known influencer of some kind), you’ve been wounded more and deeper by potential allies than the enemy.
When I dusted off my Twatter account and began spending time there again, I couldn’t help but notice all the bickering about some “conservative calendar” with photos of attractive women in it. Most of the mudslinging and name-calling was between right-of-center folks. And that was just a blip compared to an ongoing feud between the respective supporters of Eric July and Ethan Van Sciver.
People supposedly on our end of the political spectrum will sabotage others’ marketing efforts, assassinate their character with flimsy or no evidence, copy stuff others have written and use it for their own purposes without giving credit…and that only scratches the surface.
A lot of you just won’t quit feeding the Beast, even when there are alternatives. You keep using Google, Wikipedia, Facebook; drinking Coke/Pepsi, eating at McDonalds/Burger King and buying Hersheys/Kellogs, etc. Same with Marvel/DC, Disney, Netflix, etc.
Unity comes natural to collectivists. They fear independent thought, so naturally fit the role of obedient drones in the Hive Mind. Their largest demographic is Millennial–one of the most cooperative and conformist generations alive today.
By our nature, liberty enthusiasts are independent thinkers. Getting us to unify for any cause is like herding cats. And the dominant demographic in the creative “community” on our side is Generation X. We don’t play well together. We are the most competitive of the living generations.
So, spoiler alert: extreme individualism and a hyper-competitive instinct don’t naturally gravitate toward unity, or even solidarity.
What is needed for us to build a parallel economy/culture that succeeds? I probably can’t provide a comprehensive list, but I know we’re gonna need an online bookstore. Arkhaven is already on its way to scooping up the audience that the pozzed comic sites are chasing away. We may see an online drop-shipper rise up out of the Gab Marketplace to compete with Amazon in the realm of all the other stuff they peddle, but we are gonna need a bookstore that will sell the books they ban, and design algorithms that allow readers to decide what succeeds, instead of woketard gatekeepers.
But no matter what platforms are built on our side, and how good the quality of the products, they can’t and won’t succeed if you keep using your voting dollars to enrich the businesses that hate you. Those woke, pozzed businesses have the deck stacked in their favor. While small (and non-woke) businesses have been targeted for destruction, anointed favorites like Amazon get special deals that make them immune to most of our totalitarian overlords’ poison.
This is one battlefield of many where we need solidarity to have any chance of success.
Back when I first published Hell and Gone (paid link), it got a good review. I say good because the reviewer was a combat veteran who appreciated what I had injected into the men’s fiction/action-adventure/military thriller genre(s). I spent a lot of time on a forum for Kindle authors in those days, and evidently he did, too. He sent me a DM there identifying himself as the reviewer, and went on to say he bought/read my book to check out the competition. This was Jack Murphy, a Mack Bolan fan and former Army Ranger, who was, at the time, writing his own first novel–also a paramilitary adventure.
I don’t have any copies of our first correspondence (or even remember the name of that forum), but my response was along these lines: “Nobody is writing this kind of stuff anymore, so there’s plenty of room for competition. In fact, it could use some good solid competition.”
We became online buddies after that, helping readers discover each others’ work, commenting on each others’ blogs, and giving signal boosts whenever possible. We gave each other crossover business, intentionally and unintentionally. He was one of the guys who convinced me to write a sequel (paid link) to what I had not myself considered more than a stand-alone novel. As it turned out, Jack made better choices than I did and had me beat on the right time/right place dynamic as well. His novels got hundreds of reviews. He was a founding member of SOFREP, became an investigative reporter, and went on to write some non-fiction, including a New York Times Bestseller.
Jack was a stand-up guy, but is not a member of the Dissident Right. He chose a different path than I did. And he is far more successful as an author than I am. But I don’t regret helping him out in those early days. I don’t resent his success. Not at all. Even if he goes back to writing men’s fiction, I still want him to succeed (continue succeeding, that is). There is room enough for both of us, and plenty more.
Like all the arts, literature is not a zero-sum game. When somebody buys Reflexive Fire or Target Deck, (paid links) odds are, they’re not going to stop reading books for the rest of their lives after reading those. Plenty of readers bought both my books and his.
I personally think it’s economically crazy for CVS to build a store at every single intersection where a Walgreens sits, as they seem to in every Florida city. Yet I’ve never seen one of them capture 100% of the customers and force the other one out of business by doing so. Both are doing fine, so far as I can tell.
I was a huge Batman fan as a boy, and bought his titles whenever I had money. But that didn’t stop me from buying Spiderman, too. Neither of them decreased in popularity just because the other was also popular.
It is not going to hurt you if somebody buys a book written by somebody else you consider competition. It is not going to hurt your blog or review site if an Internet user (or two, or 10, or 10,000) also visit a different blog. Same deal with comic buyers, social media followers, whatever. You should want them to succeed, if they are also in favor of liberty, Christianity, and the nuclear family–or even just not trying to help Globohomo destroy all of the above.
Will this turn out to become the Iron Age, or will it remain the Pozzed Age? Without a little bit of solidarity throughout the Right, and not-so-common sense, the enemy will win this battle, too.
Share your thoughts in the comments. And if you like what we’re doing at Virtual Pulp, share our posts on social media (those convenient buttons on the right sidebar are one way to do it).
UPDATE: I’m backing up the site now, will update the PHP afterwards, then see if I can get the subscription widget working. Thanks for your patience!
You make lots of good points.
Thanks, Sarah. I hope a lot of folks think so.
Interesting read.
I avoided social media almost entirely until I released my first book in Dec 22. Never had an interest, and joined purely on the realisation that my title wasn’t going to sell itself and some form of promotion would be needed. In many ways I am the proverbial frog thrown into slow heated water, watching my fellows being boiled alive.
I think much of the present infighting is promoted by our social media. Post something erudite and insightful, crickets (or worse, scorn). Post something inflammatory, likes, hearts, adulation. The algorithm has trained us away from debate into conflict, away from civility to discord, from harmony to harm.
Drama farming, the euphemism goes. The harvest is short term adulation at long term cost. What those costs are, as yet undecided.
I have no solutions. Retire from social media and avenues for promotion vanish. Stay in social media and contribute to the spiral. Not sure. No answers, just my tuppence of thought on the matter.
“Drama farming.” Sad, but that does seem to be the strategy. Your other points are spot-on. It does seem like a catch-22. We (authors) can’t really find fans of our genre without social media, because ‘Zon hides our books from their shoppers if we are to the right of Karl Marx and don’t promote sexual degeneracy. So we get on social media and…just what you said.
And God help you if you post an honest opinion about the work of somebody in a clique, if it’s not sufficiently glowing praise. Then the group will swarm. Block you, mute you, downvote your content, talk trash behind your back, give your book drive-by one star ratings, etc.
It can be discouraging.
I should specify here that I’m NOT suggesting that solidarity means we have to like everything from EVERY other indie creative associated with a hashtag (Iron Age, Comicsgate, or whatever). It’s okay to not like something, and be honest about it. What I write is not everybody’s cup of tea. And there are a lot of indie creatives I wish well whose work is not my cup of tea. Are we not adults who can get along despite our differences? It would be great if we all spent more time promoting each other than sabotaging each other, but that does NOT mean we have to blindly promote everything. If you don’t think it’s good, don’t pretend you do. Shoot straight.
BTW, this comment is not directed at any individual in particular–it’s more in response to some videos and X threads I’ve run across recently. If we are independent thinkers, we should NOT be in lockstep with each other about what is good or what’s not. But also, we should not be generating needless drama and bad blood amongst ourselves, either.
As usual, you make plenty of excellent points. I’m no political strategist or consultant, only a novelist and a history buff with a strong passion for cultural and spiritual revival, and as such I look primarily to the project of creating culture.
With America and the post-West beset by multiple levels of dysfunction and decline, I don’t have a lot of hope for national politics, media, academia, etc. I’m 38 (almost 39), and all of these things have been utterly contemptible failures for all of my adult life, if not for years, even decades before that.
However, I think we can create culture and community in ways that defy the trends of our time. We need to become a thriving, creative subculture in the midst of a decaying, nihilistic civilization.
I don’t have to tell any of you that our civilization is declining and falling apart. You all see it every time you peruse your X/Twitter timelines, the same as I do.
But take a moment to think about what this means: if we can flourish and create personal bubbles of meaning, purpose, community, and identity in our own lives and in our collective online activities, we will stand as a reproach to a decaying, degenerate culture.
I’m passionate about this because I’ve lived it. As a result of my dysfunctional upbringing, I spent years wallowing in self-pity and mental illness in my twenties before taking responsibility for myself.
Taking responsibility saved me: I embraced fitness, found emotional stability, met a nice girl, started my self-pub authorial career, married, and now have a beautiful baby girl.
My life is incredible because I did the opposite of what this disgusting culture describes. I pursued the true, the good, and the beautiful, and my art is an extension of the life I have created for myself.
The more we can help other people to do this–to embrace lives of responsibility *because* it makes life better and more worthwhile–the more we will create a thriving subculture with thriving art.
Of course, this is an inter-disciplinary thing: we need insights from fitness and self-improvement spaces, from philosophy (I never miss a chance to recommend Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men), and of course we need to promote a culture of historical and cultural literacy.
It’s a big task, but it’s also a profoundly worthwhile and endlessly joyful one.
I’ll add that like all of us, I sometimes allow my thoughts to get sucked into negative spaces.
What I have realized, though, is that it is *vital* for us to embrace lives that are full of joy even in the midst of the suppurating sore that our civilization has become: it is the only way we can show people a better path.
Let us bury our foes in a war of superior art, I say, and let us cultivate lives of personal excellence and community such that we don’t need to concern ourselves with drama. This is how we win.
“if we can flourish and create personal bubbles of meaning, purpose, community, and identity in our own lives and in our collective online activities, we will stand as a reproach to a decaying, degenerate culture.”
This right here–all day long
Yeah, not some big monolithic bubble like what the agents of Globohomo populate. Thousands, or perhaps millions, of individualistic bubbles, but in relatively close proximity. And not isolated from each other, but connected somehow, perhaps. Not through X, probably, but some sort of mutual stomping ground where we can interact with each other and commiserate, when necessary, similar to how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al used to run in the same circles.
I once thought Goodreads could be such a platform but was disabused of that notion. Not sure it could ever happen, or last, with the Cancel Cult on the loose. But I’d really like to see it.
Maybe this is the very place, right here.
Well, that could work, for starters. Why not?