All posts by Machine Trooper

Doom River: The Sergeant #5 – a Review

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Well, this is embarrassing. I began posting reviews of Len Levinson’s (writing as Gordon Davis) magnificent WWII series The Sergeant in chronological order after starting out of sequence with my first couple reviews back on The Two-Fisted Blog…and somehow, I skipped right over this book despite posting an Amazon review back on May 9 of 2017. So here it is, finally:

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Master Sergeant Mahoney and Corporal Cranepool have just returned from their attachment to a French unit liberating Paris. It was supposed to be cushy duty, but only the end of it was cushy–in the arms of some French floozies in a fancy hotel.

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The Sergeant and his sidekick are back just in time to meet Charlie Company’s new C.O. Captain Anderson is a young, inexperienced officer, but one of the good ones (a rare combo, in my day). They’re also just in time for one of Patton’s “recon in force” missions, to push across the Moselle and keep the pressure on the Germans.

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This installment in the series could launch a character study on the sort of men who populate the officer corps of an army. Whether a commander wants to make a name for himself, or simply doesn’t want a sub-par evaluation, it is their troops who are used like cannon fodder to enhance or maintain their egos.

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Mahoney himself has some moments in this book in which hedemonstrates more humanity than is normal for him. (Also, in this one we are introduced to PFC Butsko. I can’t help but notice the similarities between him and the platoon sergeant of The RatBastards–also named Butsko.)

I’m not sure when I’ll complete reviews for the final three books in the series…but I plan to. Meanwhile, you can read the remaining reviews of this series so far here and here.

Why Are the Democrats Afraid of Bernie Sanders?

In 2016 the DNC rigged the primary against Bernie, in favor of Hillary. This year, it appears they rigged the Iowa Caucus against him, and maybe even the New Hampshire primary was rigged to make his victory there look less decisive than it was in reality.

The charismatic puppets on TV and the relentless Deep State shills writing online “news” articles insist that the big Democrat Party donors are opposed to Bernie because he’s a socialist, and his dangerous policy proposals scare them. Half of that has some truth to it, but the other half is disinformation.

Democrats (and Establishment RINOs) have been ramming socialist policies down our collective throat since the New Deal. They have denied that they are socialist/communist and demonized everyone who made effective arguments proving such. They’ve enjoyed plausible deniability because, as they were transforming the USA from an industrial powerhouse and the most prosperous country in history into an economic trainwreck up to its ears in debt that can never be repaid; they also reduced a huge proportion of the electorate into ignorant, illiterate parasites who wouldn’t know a communist from a commuter train, a lemon from a Leninist, or a Trotskyite from a trolley car.

While the socialists (semantically disguising themselves with flattering labels like “liberal”) have systematically poisoned our economy, making themselves richer while working Americans became poorer, they’ve been able to avoid the ultimate financial collapse via unlimited deficit spending and manipulation of interest rates through some of the subversive tools they have institutionalized. They’ve been able to kick the can down the road for generations, ratcheting the noose around Uncle Sam’s neck, blaming the consequences of their socialist policies on the free market, which justifies even more socialist policies to the gullible electorate addicted to their propaganda outlets–all while denying that they, or their policies, are socialist.

Along comes Bernie (and the Squad), who openly admits his socialist ideology and intentions, and the deniability becomes less plausible. The dumbed-down TV/social media junkies in the suburbs are confused, because some of their svengalis are now admitting  what most of them deny. Not only that, but Bernie is talking about tightening the noose so much, so fast, that even some of the corporate grifters of woke capital (big Democrat Party donors) would probably have to suffer consequences right along with their middle class victims.

And that’s a bridge too far.

Denise McAllister Speaks Truth in an Age of Lies

You mean we shouldn’t have revamped the American Armed Forces based on what Hollywood taught us?

The problem is that we allow fiction to be “proofs” of reality. I can’t tell you how many times when I’ve talked about women being physically weaker than men and that this is why they shouldn’t be in combat, I get the response, “But just look at Brianne of Tarth” (from “Game of Thrones”) or even the fictionalized accounts of Joan of Arc, whose combat role has been highly exaggerated.

Fiction can be a great vehicle to change how we think, and this has happened when it comes to equalizing men and women through the preponderance of female superheroes and “strong” women in film. We have been brainwashed into actually believing women can be just like men in the physical arena.

This is simply not the case, and it’s dangerous to think otherwise.

The USA has not had to face an enemy with comparable technology in a shooting war since WWII. The next time it does, it will probably suffer tactical catastrophes worse than any battle since the Little Bighorn. The combat arms are being packed with (and led by) women, foreigners, and sexual deviants, standards are plummeting, and the field grade officers who command them are fickle opportunists much more competent at backstabbing political games than at war fighting.

Nobody with the ability to prevent this scenario made any effort to do so. The public at large had been pre-programmed to accept it. And Hollywood is getting even more pozzed by the day. It will take a disaster like we’ve never seen to make Joe Public question The Narrative and demand a return to sanity. Can America survive such a disaster?

Denise McAllister’s book covers more than just Warrior Womyn in pop culture.  If a lot of people read it, and realize how Homowood is mind-screwing us, they could strive to make this a better world. Read her interview with David Dubrow.

 

Midway – a Review

The Japanese could have taken Midway almost unopposed on their way to attack Pearl Harbor. That oversight fit into a larger pattern of miscalculations that spelled doom for the Japanese Empire.

But America’s victory was far from a foregone conclusion by the time the Japanese got serious about capturing the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was Midway Atoll. The “sleeping giant” Admiral Yamamoto feared was just awakening and the limping American Pacific Fleet was outmatched going into the battle. It was rather miraculous that we even had three carriers to throw against the Jap Navy. What happened once the forces squared off might be even more miraculous.

 

What’s nice about this film is that it builds a fairly thorough picture of the early phase of the Pacific War. It’s not just about the battle of Midway, but goes back to cover Pearl Harbor, and even ranges as far as Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo. It spends time on junior and mid-level officers I don’t remember seeing portrayed in any other movie, including a couple pilots who were instrumental in winning the statistically unlikely victory.

My apologies for writing this review too late for you to see this film in the theaters–because it was worth the ticket price. If you’re sick of most the garbage Hollywood spews out, and would like to see more good flicks like this one, then I encourage you to spend some voting dollars on your own copy of Midway as soon as possible.

Audio Book Follies

Followers may have noticed I haven’t been all that productive for a while. Aside from my contribution to Appalling Stories 4, I haven’t had anything published for years. Seems like all the bloggers at Virtual Pulp have stopped blogging, too. There are several reviews we’ve been meaning to write and post for months, and just haven’t been able to find the time.

I can only speak for myself. I’ve been going through a process of change in my professional life that has contributed to my decreased production. I’ve got a job that I really like now, probably my best civilian job ever, but I’m still running like crazy to keep up with it and might still be for a while. I’ve got creative irons in the fire, but can’t make predictions about when they’ll be done. And one of those projects, sucking up a good portion of my life outside work, is an audio version of False Flag.

The audio versions of Tomato Can Comeback, Hell & Gone and Tier Zero were all produced via royalty share using Amazon Audible’s ACX partner. For a few reasons, I plan to go a different route with the third book in the series. A fellow writer suggested I record it myself. I don’t have a great voice, but that voice comes at exactly the right price: free. So I hired myself.

The recording phase of the project was bad enough. I guess most people hate the sound of their own voice played back on a recording. I was no exception, but have come to be able to live with the embarrassment. What is worse, though, is the editing.

I like watching rants by Razorfist on topics that interest me. He’s pretty funny, but what impresses me the most is his ability to rapid-fire monologues for minutes on end without getting tongue-tied. I trip over my words constantly, mispronouncing things I know damn well how to pronounce; adding extra syllables for some unknown reason; and stopping because I thought I read something wrong but actually hadn’t. So there’s a lot of editing just to get rid of that. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

While recording, one of my dogs will invariably walk into my “studio,” loudly flop on the floor, start licking himself, and/or bang his tail or leg against the desk. Cut! Quiet on the set! Take Two… The microphone I’m using now usually doesn’t pick up the loud traffic going by on the road, but a dog’s ears sure do, and Rover wants the world to know about it. Cut! Take Three… Sometimes my voice just stops while my mouth keeps moving. Maybe that’s from not enough water. Take Four… I’m hydrated now. I could go for 72 hours without any gastro-intestinal anomalies whatsoever, but try to record something, and I have to belch every few sentences. Take Five… Some days my sinuses act up and I’m really nasal. It’s okay! Keep rolling! Just keep rolling… I do my best at setting up the mike and the shield, but still wind up popping my “P”s most of the time. Being especially talented, I can also pop “B”s and some other letters that just make no sense. Take Six… Speaking of pops, my lips and tongue are prolific at producing pops, clicks, clucks, and all kinds of annoying sounds, sometimes in the middle of a word.

You get the idea. All of that makes editing a chapter take about 3X longer than recording it did. And it’s tedious work. I’m oblivious to some mistakes until I’m in the middle of editing, so I didn’t repeat the line during a recording session. I’ll have to go back and re-record when the wife and kids are gone again, to reduce the ambient noise levels in the house.

So currently, I am less than halfway to having False Flag ready for publishing.

Why am I bothering to make an audiobook? Well, the publishing gurus out there will tell you it’s a promising new market for indy authors. I guess I’ll see. But I got into this corner of the publishing biz because I personally found audiobooks to be a godsend. I haven’t had time to sit down and read recreationally for a long time, but my previous jobs usually involved a lot of travelling. Audiobooks made it possible to read by proxy.

I bought and listened to quite a few Audible books. But for a couple different reasons, I cancelled my subscription. Kobo’s got a cool app that will let you read ebooks AND listen to audiobooks on your phone…but it looks like their selection is even more pozzed than Audible’s.

Which brings me to Castalia House. They’ve built their own platform, and have audio books for sale. While I don’t agree with all their authors or their founder on several issues, I was stoked about the idea of using my “voting dollars” on products from a company that is not full-commie WOKE.

So I bought The Law Dog Files to listen to on an eight hour trip. Got through about half of it and my wife called me. After hanging up, the player went back to the very beginning of the audio file (the whole book is one huge honkin’ track). I could not fast forward. No matter what I did, it started me at the very beginning so I’d have to listen to the same several hours all over again before moving on. Same thing if I try to rewind (move the slider on the progress bar) and listen to a word or phrase again (I have pretty bad hearing loss and parts of human speech fall right into the frequencies I have trouble picking up). Nope, can’t do that. No matter where I put the slider on the progress bar, it ignores my input and resets all the way back to the beginning so I’ll listen to the same six hours of recording first.

I tried a couple different audio players and had the same exact problem.

Now, it seems logical that these players have sliders on their progress bars for the very reason that a listener will want to navigate to different parts of the recording. It does not seem logical that every single one of them has a progress bar/slider that doesn’t work and that 1. I’m the only listener to ever have noticed, or 2. these tools don’t work for anybody, but listeners continue using these apps anyway.  Therefore, it is entirely possible that there is something wrong with the file I bought.

I never had this problem with Audible Books. And if I had, at least their books are broken up into chapter-length files, so at worst I would have to listen to a whole chapter again. But I never had any trouble going back to the part I didn’t catch.

I guess I could sideload the file onto my computer and listen to it with a desktop version of Windows Media Player…but that defeats the purpose. I got the book to listen to while traveling. If I had the time to sit around the house or my job listening to a multi-hour recording, I’d just read the print or e-book version.

Since I ran into the same problem with different players on my phone, I contacted Castalia House and explained the issue, asking for advice. Maybe they knew of a player that wouldn’t force me all the way back to the beginning. Maybe they knew of a setting in a player I could tweak. Maybe the file they sold me was jacked up somehow.

Never got a reply.

Time passed. Still no reply, so I contacted them and explained the situation again.

No reply.

Was their “Contact Us” form malfunctioning? (I’ve had problems with some versions of those forms on this blog before.) But the trip was over, life went on, and I forgot about it.

The other day I was reading the comment section of a post on Castalia’s owner’s blog. While writing a comment, something jogged my memory about Law Dog.

Here’s what I tacked onto the end of my comment:

“…I bought the audio version of the Law Dog Files and have been having trouble with it. There might be an easy solution, but I’ve sent a couple requests for help or advice through Castalia’s help/contact us form, and never got a reply back.”

Here is the response to what I said:

“We don’t provide tech support for how to use basic file formats. We don’t have the time or the manpower to educate everyone on these things.

I’m not trying to sound sarcastic here, but would you contact Sony to ask them how to use the mp3 file that you bought from them?”

Translation:

“We don’t want or need your business. Don’t ever buy audiobooks from us again.”

Check. Anyway, below are the links to the Audible books I have out. The  exclusivity contract with Audible should be ending in a year or two. I don’t remember everything from the agreement and their policy changes since then. I’ll have to look up the info again and see if the existing recordings can then be released to the broad market, or if I’ll have to re-record those. Either way, False Flag should be available by then.

Virginia: Heads They Win; Tails We Lose

I’d love to be proven wrong this time somehow, but Virginians and all other Americans need to be ready for a major false flag and media blitzkrieg. Politicians in Virginia and DC have a message for the American people: “We are going to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. What are you gonna do about it?”

If Americans don’t show up to the scheduled protest in Virginia, then our domestic enemies win by default…as usual. Just as in every battle for the soul of our culture, evil wins without firing a shot when people on our side don’t even put up a fight.

Signs indicate that people on our side might not surrender as easily this time. But the globohomo Swamp no doubt has a number of contingencies to turn this into an excuse for more orchestrated infringements. Watch this video before it’s purged by CommieTube:

Here’s some important points to keep in mind, for any patriot planning to attend the event:

  • The Swamp is going to herd the Americans into a fenced area where they will be trapped.
  • Any patriots who park at the nearby, designated parking garages, will possibly be trapped in the area.
  • Antifa, disguised as patriots, intend to infiltrate the protest and create incidents that the Swamp Police can exploit. No matter who does what, patriots will be the villains in the official Narrative.
  • The Swamp has the ability not only to hack your smartphones, but jam any attempt  by you to video record what actually happens. So not only can they prevent you from posting any footage that challenges their Narrative, they can prevent you from recording it in the first place. In other words, what ever lie they choose to tell the population, you will have no opportunity to prove it is a lie. There is a reason they’ve been securing a monopoly on the flow of information.
  • There will probably be drones flying over the area with facial recognition software. So even if you’re smart and only bring a burner phone; even if by some miracle no pre-manufactured “hate crime” doesn’t take place…they will have a list of every American who attends. This will be recon-by-fire. They can arrest potential “domestic terrorists” in the dead of night, later on, at their convenience with no-knock warrants and terminate the resistance piecemeal.
  • In addition to the covert Antifa infiltrators, there will be the typical federal informants and other agents provacateur on hand, not to mention the usual lineup of tribalist alt-retards screaming racial slurs to make sure sheep watching their idiot box will believe that this is all about “white supremacy.”

I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I’m afraid it will be ugly. I’d feel a lot better if some significant swamp-draining could have been accomplished by this point, but that isn’t the case. Trump is still surrounded by avowed enemies of your freedom, who hate him for interfering with their plan. Neither Sessions, Horowitz, or Barr have proven to me that the Swamp faces any serious challenges. I have no worldly advice to offer, because technologically (and in every other worldly aspect) the enemy holds every possible advantage. The only worthwhile advice I can offer is to trust in, and pray to, the God who is more powerful than everybody involved.

My Lai by David Dubrow – a Review

Back in the postwar years, there were several science fiction movies with a theme that involved powerful aliens using mind control on humanity. If you grew up watching reruns of old TV shows (before there were a zillion 24-hour cable channels), then you may have noticed the old “invisible alien entity takes over the ship via mind control of the crew” plot used a few times in the original Star Trek and nearly every episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

My Lai has no concrete connection to the atrocity in Vietnam, so far as I can tell. It’s got a similar theme to those old science fiction dramas, but with a twist: the sinister force taking over Planet Earth is neither alien nor invisible. In fact, most of us have probably encountered this villain at least once. I can tell you that a young, bored boy growing up in the backwoods with time on his hands and a rock or other potential projectile within reach is very well acquainted with this particular villain.

(That’s right: bees. Throw something into a beehive and find out how fast you can run…or how many bee stings you can tolerate.)

Bees have decided that it’s time to take the planet back from humanity. Much like a demonic entity, they start by possessing the body of a human, and can then control it from within. The method of possession is rather grotesque, but is similar to how parasites perform mind control in the animal kingdom. Using one human host, the bees can entrap and infiltrate others. The human hosts then become drones, nurses, or queens, just like their tiny insect puppetmasters.

When the story opens, the bees’ plot for world domination has been wildly successful, but there is organized human resistance. One particular guerrilla band uses guns, flamethrowers, and Molotov cocktails to bring smoke on a hybrid colony of bees and their human thralls. Hoowah! The mayhem is quite gratifying. Their destruction of a hive/village would no doubt be considered equivalent to the My Lai massacre by the bees and those controlled by them.

I haven’t asked author David Dubrow anything about this story, but I’d be astounded if he denied that it is a parable–probably on more than one level.

The way the bees spread their control smacks of “the domino theory,” for starters. For regular readers of this blog who have seen me refer to our collective enemy as “the Hive Mind” (when I write about the left wing, the SJWs; or the institutions they dominate like Hollywood, academia, Big Tech, the DNC, etc.), you might see this for the perfect metaphor that it is. Once a person is melded into the Hive Mind, any potential or capability they once might have had for independent thought is subsumed by whatever The Narrative is during the Current Year.

(For instance: the Leftist Hive Mind once vehemently defended the First Amendment, in order to push pornography, junk science, and Marxist propaganda. But now that they’ve transformed the culture, brainwashed the masses, and secured power for themselves, they are trying to eradicate the First Amendment [with “hate speech” legislation, selective application of “separation of Church and State” arguments, etc.] so that no thoughtcriminals can challenge any aspect of their Narrative.)

This is an overtly politically-focused review (shocker, eh?). But My Lai doesn’t sledgehammer the politics at readers the way I often do on this blog. The political message is there if you want to notice it, but it’s not overbearing and there are possibly many readers who would miss it altogether…just like how the last few generations have been unaware of the underlying messages in mainstream entertainment.

My Lai is one thought-provoking story in Appalling Stories 4–an anthology that is well off the beaten path.

Civil War II: What Side Will You Be On?

What will the sides even look like? If you haven’t thought about it much (after careful observation), you’re likely to assume it will be “liberals against conservatives;” “Democrats against Republicans;” “left against right;” or “traitors against patriots.”

If you made one of those assumptions, chances are you’re half-correct.  Democrats, leftists, and traitors (but I repeat myself) will be involved at the highest levels in the coming war. What about folks like me (patriots/right-wingers)? Will we be on the other side, fighting against the globalists (whether you call them Communists, Democrats, or “liberals”)?

Frankly, that depends on the timetable. The boomers on the right are dying off, and probably not much help in a fight anymore, anyway. Generation X is over-the-hill, and won’t be very adept at moving, shooting, and communicating , even if CW2 touches off in the next few years. It’s looking like the bulk of the combatants on both sides will be Millennials and younger…and that means the paradigm is going to be different from how we’ve been looking at it.

Again: Marxism will be the major ideological impetus behind this struggle. The poster children for this new wave of Communists are the likes of Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This 5th column has been in the USA for over a century and their goal hasn’t changed; it’s just that the mask has now slipped so far that even some of the normalcy-biased “It Can’t Happen Here” crowd is starting to recognize them for what they are. Right now the Marxists control pretty much everything except the White House. The military is no exception–the Communist long march through the institutions has captured the officer corps and poisoned the minds of the enlisted as well.

Who will the opposition be? The bulk of them will not be patriots, true right-wingers, and certainly not constitutionalists.

Oh, some of us will be be there, but we’ll be outnumbered, even on our own “side” (and well past our fighting prime, too). The opposition to the overt Marxists, again, will be millennials and younger. For lack of a catchy name for this group (which is not also deceptive, like “alt-right”), I will call them the Cult of Western Civilization, or CWC for short.

Brief history quiz:

Q: What is the primary difference between Nazis and Communists?

A: Nazis are nationalist; Communists are globalist. Also, they have different labels for their scapegoats: “Jews” and “capitalists,” respectively.

Both are socialist and have negligible differences beyond the above  despite nearly a century of brainwashing to convince you that Nazis are “right wing.”

In much the same way, there are few substantial differences between the CWC and the rabid Marxists they are temporarily opposed to. They both have contempt for our constitutional republic and for the Bill of Rights. (For instance: Both have paid lip service to freedom of speech when it suits them. After the left secured control over all the mediums of information, freedom of speech became a thorn in their side they are actively working to crush. Likewise, even while the CWC spews platitudes about speaking freely, behind the scenes they regard free speech–and, increasingly, all freedom–as dangerous. They would also turn against it if they were to prevail in this struggle.)

Both sides are promoting identity politics uber alles. The difference in the demographics they identify with is what makes their few differences seem irreconcilable.

 

The CWC is predicting a civil war split along racial lines, and they could be right. Jesus did prophesy that ethnos would rise against ethnos (ethnos was translated “nation” in the English), and it appears that we are just one major crisis away from seeing violent fulfillment in the USA.

As polarized as the overt left and the CWC are along racial lines, they are nearly in lockstep when it comes to moral issues like sodomy. The fact that both sides embrace it is a clue what spiritual force drives them both.

That they so proudly place a self-proclaimed dangerous faggot on a pedestal pretty much speaks for itself.

For different stated reasons, both sides loathe the Judas Goats commonly referred to as “conservatives.” Most patriots are still hoodwinked by the collection of cowards, turncoats and sleeper agents who speak for this ever-retreating “movement” that has never conserved anything of worth, though the NeoCons, RINOs, and Deep State useful idiots under various disguises (libertarians, moderates, centrists, etc.) are finally being exposed (too little, too late).

There are some voices in the CWC who claim to be Christian, and at first glance their doctrine seems more sound than the Churchians on the left. But the god they serve is usually Racial Purity. The typical WC cultist feels a spiritual imperative to hate Jews and blame Jews for every single problem that faces us in our world. It would be comical if it weren’t so sad how predictably one of these CWC bots will show up on a comment thread to unveil a Jewish conspiracy behind anything from the impeachment  circus to suspicious officiating at a ballgame.

I’ve still never heard or read a coherent argument from any of them explaining how someone ostensibly following the Lion of Judah/King of the Jews (with an extensively documented Jewish lineage) can be consumed by such irrational hatred for “da Jooz.” The rare WC cultist who is honest enough to acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew will simply argue that “Jew” doesn’t really mean “Jew,” with word games and cognitive dissonance that would make Louis Farrakhan proud.

The overt left is also consumed with an irrational hatred for the offspring of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, though the shrieking members of “the Squad” have no doubt revealed this fact too soon for their globalist masters who hope to squeeze some more mileage out of their Race Card. All that said, the overt left hates Christianity more than any other belief or faith. The leftards who pretend to be Christian spend less time studying the Bible than they do attacking what (they’ve heard that) it says.

Both sides want to be ruled by a charismatic dictator. The overt left wants Big Brother/Big Sister to be Diverse and sexually deviant. The CWC wants their “god-emperor” to be Caucasian and “alpha.”

For now.

It’s tempting to decide that you simply won’t take a side, if those are the choices. But you may not have a choice. However, assuming you can sit on the fence unscathed until one side prevails…and assuming the “lesser evil” of the CWC is victorious…what does that mean for you?

Once they’ve destroyed the representative government that they abhor, who is going to look after your interests? You can’t, because you won’t be able to speak freely or publish anything their authoritarian regime disapproves of.  You won’t be able to worship God according to your convictions either, unless your convictions line up with the dogma of their state-controlled religion.

Don’t assume you’ll have the ability to overthrow the new boss, either. Like all the Bill of Rights, once the right to keep and bear arms has served its purpose for the CWC and their overt left sparring partners (Antifa is gunning up), it will be scrapped for “law and order” and “the greater good,” too. Freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures? Gone. Right to a jury trial? Gone. Innocent until proven guilty? Not any more. And your “based” brethren will celebrate the death of freedom because, much like the Germans of the 1930s, they just can’t imagine what could possibly go wrong by surrendering all to a strong central authority.

Appalling Stories IV is Imminent!

It may seem like I’ve been idle since releasing False Flag a few years ago. I haven’t, though my writing productivity has fallen off quite a bit. And I did manage to get one work of fiction finished.

David Dubrow gave me an opportunity to submit a story for his latest anthology. I was perfectly willing to write some short science fiction, which is what Appalling Stories 2 featured. But two factors led me to submit outside of that genre. One was, as I understood it, the editors were looking to diversify and include some action-adventure in Appalling Stories 4. Two was, I’d been playing around with an idea inspired by “the Battle of Portland” between Antifa and the Proud Boys, and other political violence taking place around the States within the last few years.

The anthology has stories from other authors too, of course, including fellow Virtual Pulp blogger Paul Hair. I know almost nothing about the other fiction in it as of yet, but I’m pretty stoked about getting my chance to read it in December.

Read more about it at David Dubrow’s blog.

You’re On Your Own, Kid.

There’s no back-up.

You’re surrounded. There’s no artillery or air support, nobody guarding your flank, no supply line and you’re gonna have to figure out your own exfil.

That’s your situation if you’re an author or other content creator who hasn’t sold his soul to the globohomo agenda.

The early bloggers, possessing a relative monopoly on readers hungry for free content, linked most frequently to their friends. Qualitative considerations were not a factor. Like in everything, it wasn’t what you knew, but who you knew. The most popular bloggers weren’t necessarily the best writers or thinkers: they simply succeeded in networking. You’ve no doubt followed a link from a popular blogger who claimed that the piece linked to was amazingly insightful, only to be disappointed. If you’ve been around for a few years, you’ve no doubt followed hundreds of such links. That’s the power of networking.

This turned out to be a gigantic boon for conservative media, which until then was comprised of two things: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

This still holds true: the most popular WHATEVER are rarely all that talented at anything but networking and self-promotion. And they were the beneficiaries of good timing.

Then social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter popped up, and with this new form of communication, many blogs shut down. Why go through the rigmarole of logging into your blog and writing a post about what made you angry when you could do it on Facebook, with the benefit of a captive audience of your friends, family, and former high school classmates? Facebook’s free, too. You get the same dopamine hits from Likes and Shares and comments as you did with your blog, but with less hassle.

This made many blogs go under. Some got bought by millionaires and became part of Conservative, Inc.: the network of opinion sites that operate much like blogs, but aren’t blogs, because they’re a little more professionally coded.

Why indeed? Especially if you’re so normalcy-biased that you can’t imagine that the people who hate you, and control those platforms, would press their advantage at the critical moment. And speaking of timing: at the very moment in history that this was happening, I became a rookie blogger with a brand new, unknown blog. I sure can call ’em.

The quality is inconsistent. Some columnists have been grinding out the same piece week after week for years, but still have fans. Others are there simply because they’re networked from the early days and got grandfathered in. There are a few sites that are consistently quality, in both content and writing, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

David Dubrow has dropped so many truth bombs in this post, I just can’t quit excerpting it. Here he perfectly summarizes my experience trying to follow conventional wisdom using social media as a marketing tool:

Why should I buy your book when I can just read your columns and Tweets gratis? I Shared your latest piece on my Facebook wall: I’ve done my part to support you. I’ve given you exposure. Now you want me to pry open my wallet, blow out the dust, and give you my hard-earned cash for something I might not even like? Are you crazy? You’ve got thousands of Twitter followers and write for a big site anyway; aren’t they paying you the big bucks?

Yup. So much for conventional wisdom. And here Dubrow touches on the every-man-for-himself attitude on the creative right:

…almost none of the big names in conservative media take risks, particularly to help other conservative content creators. Money trumps ideology. Money trumps culture. If you’re outside the network, you don’t exist. The thinking is if you’re any good, you’ll earn those fans, and when you’ve made it up here with us big boys, then we’ll notice you. That so many of them are there because of networking instead of quality isn’t something they consider, and for good reason. Who wants to think of himself as a recipient of internet nepotism?

…This ossification isn’t limited to conservative media: the conservative audience also suffers from the same condition. What’s easier, endlessly whining about the rot in our media culture, or doing something about it? If you can’t be bothered to shell out five bucks for a book that doesn’t spread its cheeks and spray woke agitprop all over your bad-attitude face, what will you do to change your culture? If you don’t support the content you want to see, it will go away. What will it take to move you? You’ll keep paying Hollywood degenerates and SJW book publishers to produce content specifically crafted to advance a social agenda that’s destructive to your ethics, but you won’t invest in alternative media?

You have choices. And choices have consequences.

Vladymir Lenin may have been correct that when International Communism has wiped out all but the very last capitalist on Earth “he will sell us the rope with which to hang him.”

But it’s actually worse than that. He will buy the rope himself, and even put his head in the noose, then ask Alexa to send an Uber driver over to kick the chair out from under him.