Chances are, you’re aware of the surveillance cameras at urban businesses, traffic lights, on doorbell devices, inside schools, courtrooms, government buildings, parking garages, hotels, prisons, etc. You know–the ones that always convenientlyTOTALLY BY COINCIDENCE quit working when a Jeffry Epstein needs Arkanciding, or a federal asset plants a bomb at a federal building in Oklahoma City, or a glowing wind-up-toy hauls a truckload of weapons and ammo up into a Las Vegas hotel.
Maybe you wonder if the built-in camera on your laptop can be remotely activated by bad actors. Maybe you know the microphone and camera in your smartphone definitely can be activated without your knowledge–even when you have it turned off. Maybe you know about geolocation, which can reveal your whereabouts through your smart device–even when you think you’ve turned off the “location” feature.
Google Earth revealed, in the ‘oughts, that at least one satellite is taking pictures of everybody’s home, yard, garage, driveway, etc. Maybe you know that means the FedGov had something 30-40 years more advanced than that at the time. Maybe you suspect that must mean that now, 20 years later, spy satellites must at least have some unconventional imaging tech which allows somebody to see whatever you’re doing, in high resolution, right through the roof and walls “in the privacy of your own home.”
If you’re savvy, you understand that the feds consider American citizens far more dangerous than any foreign enemy or legitimate threat to your life, liberty and property, and they deploy their assets accordingly.
The truth is, it’s much worse than you imagined.
Anonymous Conservative (author of The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics) has been tirelessly working to expose the domestic surveillance in the USA on his blog, which I consider the very best news aggregator ever, hands-down. And now he has armed us with a powerful weapon for the Information War going on all around you: The American Stasi.
AC is not afraid to say stuff that may sound crazy. He is an honest, courageous man fighting the good fight and not concerned much about what NPCs or trolls think of him. He wants to expose the surveillance to people who will arm themselves with the information he freely offers and take the Machine down. He believes there can be no saving our republic without exposure and dismantling of this lawless abomination.
While curating his must-read news aggregating blog for the last few years, he has compiled extensive data points on the panopticon we live in–the ruthless Machine watching you and your loved ones even (especially) when you assume you are acting in private.
I can’t do his work much justice here; you need to read it for yourself. I strongly recommend that you do.
Can you believe there are influencers out there claiming there’s no alternative to the woke agitprop vomited out on us by Homowood, the Big Diseased Two, and the New York Publishing Cartel? It goes something like this: “Blah blah blah right-wingers complain about woke movies, woke comics, woke novels, instead of producing any work of their own.”
Obviously this comes from ignorance, dishonesty, or some combination of the two–since there are alternatives out there already in comics and in prose books here and here.
And for those of you on the front lines, Gio has a message for you:
Keep creating. Convert the disgust at the Marxist agitprop all around you into energy to pour into your own contribution to the culture!
Recently I was searching the Internet for an image of a book cover. The book is Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes. I have owned this book since I was nine years old and still have it, but it is a little worse for wear. I wanted the image of a pristine, legible cover.
I found one fairly easily, but I also saw a “for sale” price with one of the images…for below $7!
What?!?
Yeah, I already had the book–but not in condition like that. And at that price? I’ve read all my life about guys who find optioned-out Hemi ‘Cudas sitting in barns for a couple hundred bucks, but I’ve never found such a deal. I would have been foolish not to buy it.
So I went to the store. The name of the site is “WOB” for “World of Books.” I ordered it and began getting emails just like when you buy anything online.
A week or so later, a package was delivered. I knew something was wrong before I even opened it. It was too thin to be Feiffer’s classic. Had the company advertised the complete, original book, but delivered the one with just the essay but the reprints removed? No, it was much worse. I would have been annoyed with that scenario, but just taken the “L.”
The Bait-&-Switch
Here is what they sent me.
Yup, with an incompetently-removed sticker on the back from some library in Virginia.
I contacted their customer service. Amazingly, they responded. I gave them all the info they requested, and somebody wrote me: “Blah blah blah I apologize blah blah blah I’d be happy to refund your order blah blah blah.”
To which I responded: “Thanks. Can you just send me the book I paid for, instead?”
Two days later I received the word: “This order has been refunded.”
And it was.
Pondering the Motive
So, what was the deal, here? Seems like it would be a disappointing prank, for a prankster. Some kind of grift? No–I got my $$ back. ID theft? I guess my info could be used by them for something–maybe forthcoming credit card fraud. Or maybe there’s some way this improves their SEO? I don’t know. I’m not interested in cheating anybody out of anything, never have been, and so never have wargamed out all the ways to take advantage of honest people online.
What I do know, beyond any reasonable doubt, is that nobody at WOB shipped me that children’s book thinking it was the same book they advertised and I ordered.
The Pervasion of Scam Culture
Scam culture is ubiquitous–and this has me thinking about it.
Know why this site is DOT NET and not DOT COM? Because a hosting company dropped the ball while supposedly transferring us over from a different host, let the domain name expire and never told me until it was too late. When our domain name became available, apparently, somebody in Ukraine bought/secured the rights to it/whatever and then wanted thousands for me to get it back. They didn’t have any content or products to sell that related to the name in any way. They just wanted the name because somebody else had used it so must have figured it was in demand, and they could demand money for it.
Right now the world is full of people who can’t produce or conceive of anything useful, so they seek fortune by stealing or hijacking the intellectual property of others. The entertainment industry is full of such people, which is why there are so many movies about heists, glamorizing thieves, grifters and other scum who have never experienced an independent thought, but are lifted up to young people as heroes and role models because they figure out how to screw people over.
Our government is controlled by such scum. Back when elections were real, the scum were voted into power because they promised lower-caste scum to redistribute wealth from those who earned it to the Official Victim Class. You can probably name several Corporations that have grifted their way to power, backstabbing their way to the top. And of course we have entire countries like Ukraine whose primary function is parasitic, doubling down on an idiotic war and destroying its own young male population in the process, just so it can help the parasites in Washington bleed their host dry.
Parasitism is everywhere, today. There’s no escape from it. The American Dream was: build a better mousetrap that meets a need, and sell it at a competitive price; then use the profits to make a good life for your family. It has been replaced with the American Nightmare: screw over whatever decent people still exist and skate through life without ever doing an honest day’s work.
(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.
Lucy: the GOP Establishment. Charlie Brown: Republican voters.
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 would have to be Boss Level oblivious right now to not be aware of the struggle taking place for the fate of our country, and our culture. Sane, decent people have not put up much of a fight in the former, but they finally are making their presence known in the latter.
In both struggles, the Establishment is fully on board with the other side’s agenda.
In the culture war, the Establishment is controlled by Homowood; the New York Publishing Cartel (“tradpub”); the Big Diseased Two (in comics); similar Globohomo tools in the music business; and of course all the MSM propagandists who publicize all the fake news about all the above.
The Dissident Right has been waging a guerrilla campaign on the culture front. Now, maybe-just-maybe, the guerrillas are ready to join forces and engage the enemy in decisive battle. Force-on-force action has begun to demonstrate that (at least to some extent) Globohomo is being outfought by the Resistance, whether it be Gab in social media, Infogalactic in web research, FundMyComic or GiveSendGo in crowdfunding, or Arkhaven in webcomics. Gabpay might soon be a match for Paypal. Let’s hope so.
However, two weapons we are sorely lacking is a non-woke search engine (some come along, but never stay non-woke for long), and a non-converged online bookstore.
Comicsgate and other phenomena are evidence that our side might be capable of concentrating force on the cultural battlefield. I recently shared some of my thoughts on this topic in a group on Gab. One of the commenters opined that the cultural epoch we’ve been stuck in so far could best be titled “the Pozzed Age.”
And right there in that comment is a simple, rhetorical indicator of what we are fighting for: Will this be the Iron Age, or the Pozzed Age?
Drop a comment to let us know what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe so you won’t miss any new content.
This post was originally written on June 5 of 2021 and sat unedited, unpublished, and forgotten until February of 2024. Several paragraphs are deleted, a couple added, and a couple sentences tweaked. Other than that, it’s a reflection of my mental state after an extremely bad year on multiple levels. More importantly, it represents a reevaluation and rededication of Virtual Pulp.
Neither this blog, nor the Two-Fisted Blog, were originally intended to be political. But I don’t subscribe to the typical center and center-right attitude of ignoring problems in hopes they will go away; and that the power of positive thinking will fix everything. (That’s probably a Boomer and Silent Generation subset of center-right, specifically.)
All that it takes for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing. My parents and grandparents, plus their peers, did nothing, and here we are.
“Cancel culture” isn’t new. It’s just at the point now where it can no longer be ignored. It was there when I was young. It was worse when I finally got into the book biz. I self-censored to an extent. When I did get political, I watered it down. Also, I was colorblind in those days and had an outlook on race that was more wishful-thinking than the cynical (brutally honest?) observations I now make.
But it became obvious that the dominant ideology was not even content to let people like me simply exist, harboring different opinions we avoided expressing. If we didn’t adopt their Narrative and Agenda, they intended to silence us. And since our parents and grandparents allowed them to hijack the reins of power, they have the means to silence us. If we didn’t become active sellers of their perversion; their disinformation; misinformation; deception ; and outright lies, they would take our voices away. They started doing it in a subtle fashion, with their thumb on the scale of algorithms to ensure nobody could stumble upon what we had to say. For those of us who outflanked them and found an audience anyway…well, they had to step up their efforts, to censorship, banishment, and beyond. And center/center right people, it turns out, don’t care about losing the culture, as long as as bread, circuses, and convenience are doled out on demand. Long-term oblivion for the culture and civilization as a whole is nothing to worry about, as long as their immediate gratification is catered to.
So anyway, the middle of the road was no viable option.
I could take the ticket and hope the Machine cut me some slack. Join the echo chamber about how racist America is; how we need more sexual degeneracy; how gender confusion, in all its forms, is psychologically healthy. Maybe if I put enough of that into a novel, they’d take their thumb off the scale and let it find an audience. Amazon reviews in the thousands! My book cover on the “also bought” lists! Parity with the talentless hacks who have “made it” because the thumb on the scale benefits them. Maybe, in fact, it would hit the NYT Bestseller list. A million-dollar book deal. Maybe it would get made into a movie. I could quit my day job and write for a living…
And then, overwhelmed with shame and disgust at myself, I’d probably look for some quick, painless means of death.
Obviously, none of that was gonna happen. So if I’m gonna get the raw end of the stick no matter what, other than bowing to Mammon, then why am I showing restraint? That’s when I started letting it all hang out–in my books, and on this blog.
The last however-many-posts I had written were all political–probably going back a year or two…or more. On the one hand, what’s happening to my country is too serious to ignore. On the other hand, all my ranting is just futile screaming into the void. Aside from the satisfaction of getting stuff off my chest, what good has it done? What good can it do?
Not that I’m done ranting about “politics.” My worldview has changed since I was a boy; but my Quixotic nature never has. But for now, I’m weary. I’m exhausted from having the Globohomo Narrative rammed down my throat whichever way I turn. I’m exhausted from scouring the alternative niche sources of information to find the truth, so that I can be outraged and infuriated by the extent of injustice, hypocrisy and downright evil that is encroaching on everything that was once good.
Over the years, there have been a few different contributors to this blog. Until Gio came on board, I was the only one still contributing with any modicum of consistency (sporadic consistency, you might call it). I don’t blame my fellow bloggers. I’ve considered closing up shop several times in the last few years.
Blogs were becoming passe` right about the time I got mine. I don’t know what the latest secret sauce format is now. The Internet gatekeepers make it nearly impossible to find any information not twisted or fabricated by Globohomo and its army of obedient useful idiots.
I can’t save the world. Can’t stop any of the idiocy or perversion going on around me. But I’m gonna do something for my remaining time in this world. And some of it I’ll do right here at Virtual Pulp. It’s not gonna be ranting about politics every time something infuriates me, or that’s all I’ll wind up doing…again.
God willing, I’m gonna write more books. And graphic novels. And, with Gio’s help, review some good books by other authors. And blog about other stuff, that will perhaps give me and you both some escape from the dystopian shitshow we live in.
And maybe (if I can find a payment processor that won’t eliminate my ability to buy or sell due to wrongthink) I will finally turn my “Books” page into that online bookstore I’ve long wanted to start.
Here’s my unilateral covenant with my readers & followers: I plan to speak the truth as I see it, judiciously, but I’m not gonna engage in the backbiting, pissing contests, and character assassination you may have noticed happening among non-woke creators, lately. In fact, I plan to write my next post on that very subject.
I hope to provide consistent, relevant content for my original audience, and grow that audience. I encourage you to post comments, ask questions, join discussions, and contend with us, if you feel it’s important. Use the comment form to suggest reviews, or inform us of relevant new developments on our side of the pop cultural divide.
If you like the sound of all this, subscribe to the blog. The subscribe widget is on the upper right of this site. If you like what we’re doing, why not click that button?
– Hank
UPDATE: The Subscribe widget is not functioning right now. My apologies to everybody frustrated by this. It will be repaired or replaced as soon as possible.
I heard that suggestion recently and have been pondering it since.
Let’s glance at the Current Year literary landscape:
The population in the USA is about 340 million. Despite the growth of our population, the fewer literate people we wind up with. (IOW, recreational reading is a pastime only for a shrinking demographic.) Not trying to imply one is a cause of the other–just pointing out that our customer base is not related to the total number of living bodies within our borders.
The community of readers is not tight-knit.
In fact, most have never met, and never will.
Since they don’t know each other, discussions don’t take place.
“Word of mouth,” regarding books, is effectively extinct.
The substitute for literate conversation readers are stuck with are:
Online spaces like Goodreads, where you can make recommendations to strangers.
The product-featuring algorithms of online bookstores.
Online book reviews.
Can you see how the deck is stacked against indie authors, just from that?
Word-of-mouth would be our secret weapon to level the playing field with our tradpub counterparts…if word-of-mouth had not effectively withered and died since the advent of the World Wide Web. For 95% of literate America, there is no “word-of-mouth.” You can bump into other literate folks on social media or whatever, but when you do, it’s likely they’ve got something else on their mind besides discussing literature.
In my current job, I am fortunate to have some colleagues who have read books, voluntarily, in their life post-college. Occasionally we discuss one, if it comes up somehow in conversation. Our tastes don’t overlap all that much, but this is nice. And rare.
So how do readers find a book that looks interesting?
I’ll tell you how I do it, now that my days of browsing the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores is ancient history: I pay attention to recommendations on social media (which I constantly curate, keeping SJWs and most NPCs off my feed), and, when it’s time for the Big Based Book Sale, I go shopping there. Recently discovered is the Alchemy for Art Indie Library–also a good place to look.
When I’m intrigued by a book, I’ll click the link, read the blurb on the product page, and click “Read Sample” to get a feel for the prose. Lastly, I’ll peruse some of the reviews–positive and negative.
In the Current Year, that’s usually the extent of the vetting I’m capable of (and boy, is it necessary to vet in the Current Year!).
You may be thinking it’s risky allowing strangers to influence my final decision to take a chance on a book–and you’re right. But a well-written review is usually the closest I can get to word-of-mouth.
And there are dangers beyond the mercurial opinions of strangers who write reviews. I don’t necessarily share their tastes and pet peeves, for instance. Worse are the legions of reviewers who are deliberately disingenuous.
There are at least two demographics behind drive-by one-star reviews. The first are Thought Cops for the Woketard Hive Mind, out to silence, cancel, or at least destroy sales of any book/author they disapprove of. Time was, their thought-policing often backfired. (If one of them reviewed a book I was already interested in, for instance, and complained that there was no sympathetic homosexual character or macho warrior womyn, that book was as good as sold.)
But now with ‘Zon’s “rating” option, the Hive Mind can sabotage a book’s overall rank without ever revealing the reason they don’t want you to buy it. (‘Zon abets the woke mob in many ways. One is, they sift through the books in their store every so often, and nuke reviews of books by the dissident right, without ever explaining why they did so. With my books, it’s always a five-star review they vaporize. I’ve quit tracking this because it’s too depressing.)
No less reprehensible than this leftist chicanery is similar behavior by who I suspect are fellow authors. I’ve met people like this, so my hypothesis is not entirely speculative: they assume they can build themselves up by tearing others down–unjustly in many cases. They, too, lack the courage to reveal their true motives. But that doesn’t hinder them from chopping down the rank of a book they feel competes too strongly with their own.
This brings to mind another hurdle facing indie authors I will hopefully address in another blog post.
I’m curious what others think:
Do you pay attention to book rankings?
Do you read customer reviews before making your decision to buy or not?
How much weight do you place on reviews?
Is there some other “word-of-mouth” substitute you trust better?
How is your opinion of an unread (by you) book affected when there’s only a handful of reviews (even if the reviews are all good…even if the book was a bestseller)?
How about when a book has a lot of ratings/reviews but most are negative?
Do you ever ponder the difference between ratings and reviews?
What if all the reviews are four and five stars, but most of the rankings are three stars and lower?
As always, I am grateful to all the readers who take the time to post honest reviews.
First of all, what is “Iron Age,” besides a hashtag and keyword?
Since (I think) it began after one of Razorfist’s rants, primarily among independent comics creators, let’s look at it through the lens of comics for a moment.
Action Comics #1, introducing the very first comic book superhero, is where I place the start of the Golden Age. I think all agree that it ended before 1956. I would place it more toward 1949, when all but a handful of superheroes disappeared from circulation. Because of the crude (sometimes downright childish) art and writing, few are as fascinated with it as I am. Still, that period is universally recognized as “The Golden Age.”
Experts identify the “reimagining” of the Flash, in 1956, as the beginning of the Silver Age. And though the Flash is a DC character, it was Marvel that made the biggest splash during this era.
The first comic book I ever laid my hands on. I think it’s from the Bronze Age.
Near as I can figure, the Bronze Age was when I first discovered comic books. It was the ’70s-80s, when comics could still be found on spinner racks in drug stores and gas stations, kids still read them, and the politics weren’t nearly as unbearable as they would become later. There were no cultural Marxist screeds yet–the writers usually conducted a Gene Roddenberry charade of balance, where those accursed right-wingers also had a right to their opinions.
Below is the Razorfist rant in which I believe the term “Iron Age” (as it applies to entertainment) may have been coined (as with all Razorfist rants, I apologize for the profanity but accept your gratitude for the humor):
Usually, “ages” of this, that, or the other are determined retroactively. If nothing else, The Iron Age is unique in that it has been named while it is ongoing.
In this video, Katie Roome gives an educational introduction to the Iron Age:
Even though there is a website called “Iron Age Media,” the Iron Age isn’t a publisher or an organization. It’s the age of entertainment we’re living through. More than that, according to many: it’s a movement by independent creators. The nature of the creations is outlined by Katie Roome fairly well.
Some of my readers might ask if I’m a part of this movement. Well, I started blogging, and published my first novel (independently) approximately a decade before the Wu Flu lockdowns. That alone might disqualify my work, depending on how rigidly one wants to define the Iron Age. My primary goal has always been to tell good stories and entertain, but I have offended many a leftist snowflake by pushing back against the woketard agendas and narratives that dominate pop culture so far. I do this increasingly in my bestselling Retreads series, for instance.
Along with the Detective Comics title above, this represents my very first comic book purchase–with change given me by whatever adult I lived with at the time. I can’t remember if there was added tax, so let’s say 50 cents for both.
However, my fantasy shorts and retro-pulpy boxing novella are exclusively entertainment, devoid of any contemporary politics.
So am I part of the movement? I am still publishing work, in the post-lockdown era, so maybe. In any case, I certainly sympathize with it (as I understand it) and applaud the intentions of the creators who are part of it. There is no single authority on, leader of, or governing body over Iron Age (setting it apart from “Comicsgate,” perhaps) so it’s academic, if not moot.
When I am finished with my current time travel series, I plan to shift my efforts from prose over to sequential art. My first graphic novel, a sort of pulpy space opera, will resume once I find a dependable artist with integrity. For now, a black & white “false start” (not intentionally such) is available for free on Arkhaven.
If the Iron Age is a movement, I’m looking forward to what is produced from within it.
Alan Moore’s Watchmen, along with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, are probably the most influential comic miniseries ever published so far. Both were published in the mid-1980s and were milestones for comic books as a medium, and for superhero comics in particular.
Comic books, which started as a medium for young boys, had already been drifting away from its original audience, and with these two series, fully embraced the new adult nerd audience. Some aficionados will tell you this marks the point at which comics became serious. Others might suggest this is when comic creators began taking themselves too seriously. Though not at the toxic levels of woketardery we see today, after the success of these titles, the creators at Marvel and DC were unleashed to inject their cultural Marxist opinions into commercial sequential art, in increasing doses.
For whatever reason, somebody on X brought up the character of Rorschach recently, and whatever comment was initially made, it ignited multiple threads of debate about the character.
Moore Fanbois Miss the Point
I analyzed Watchmen 13-14 years ago, including the ironies involved in Alan Moore’s Rorschach character. Others have also noticed the ironies, and have been pontificating about them on X for the last few days. Rather than revisit what I and others have already noted, let’s look first at something Moore said:
The fact that Moore chose to depict Rorschach as a smelly incel is the evidence de jour Woketards regurgitate in order to claim that Rorschach is not a hero, but a fascist, psychopath, murderer, etc.
Moore did indeed depict him as a smelly incel. Also a freeloader, socially awkward, an apologist for atrocities committed by the Comedian character, etc. One thing this proves is that Moore was fighting the culture war long before most of his enemies even knew a culture war was underway. (A lot of people are still amazingly oblivious to the culture war being waged against them.)
It’s quite simple. All Moore did was present a literary version of a debate strategy the leftists/SJWs/woketards have been employing for generations. They’re still using it today.
Ad-Hominem Revenge by a Gamma Writer Against a Fictional Stand-In for an Ideological Nemesis
Try criticizing the invasion in public (whether you call it “illegal immigration,” “crisis at the border,” or some more watered-down, sugar-coated term). You will be called “racist,” “white supremacist,” “xenophobe,” “conspiracy theorist,” etc.
You probably never even alluded to race, national origins, or any conspiracy. But leftists want others to believe you did. They couldn’t care less what is true or represents reality, but they know others do, and Marxists do care what those others believe. Left-wingers will always care what others believe, whether they are celebrating their 35th birthday in their mother’s basement or manning a machinegun in the guard tower of a gulag. It is precisely because they care what you believe that they will gleefully herd your family into a boxcar when the time comes.
They have no affinity for the truth.
They obsess about what others believe.
They want others to hate and fear you.
Others won’t hate you (or hate you enough) based on anything you’ve actually said or done.
They must provide reasons you should be hated and feared.
Name-calling, insults, and false accusations historically have instigated the hate and fear they desire.
Those whose beliefs can’t be controlled deserve humiliation and death.
Who did Alan Moore hate? I suggest you examine the characteristics which cause so many Watchmen readers to recognize Rorschach as the hero of the story: integrity, determination, conviction in his beliefs, and veneration for what is true.
Moore recognized these traits in the right-wingers he hates so much. These qualities probably made him hate them even worse. For his cultural Marxist, deconstructive narrative, he wanted a right-wing voodoo doll to stab. He took several superhero characters who he associated with the aforementioned right-wing ideals (Steve Ditko’s Charleton characters The Question and Mr. A in particular), blended them together, and formed that voodoo doll into who we know as Rorschach.
The Secret God-King Wins Again!
Since Moore is the writer, he has control over every character and what happens in the “grim, gritty” universe he fashioned for this narrative. His objective is to make you hate and fear those who believe in objective truth, who don’t compromise with evil, and who are willing to sacrifice themselves, if necessary, to speak the truth. Hence the passive-aggressive ad hominem attacks on this voodoo doll of his own making.
Joe McCarthy might be a great example of the archetype Moore loathes so deeply. It turns out that McCarthy was right all along, but hardly anybody will admit to it because they’re still so invested in a narrative with him in the villain role. That’s how effective the character assassination of McCarthy was–and the emotional reasoning everyone was lured into. This is why Moore wrote Rorschach as a smelly, freeloading incel whose commentary triggers normies and NPCs.
Rorschach is the only character who didn’t take the ticket. Nightowl, Silk Specter and even Dr. Manhattan compromised with evil. Moore, the manipulative god of that perverse world, allowed them to live because they sold their souls. Rorschach had to die for his “sin.”
Since it is so important to Moore and other authoritarian Marxists to control what others believe, it infuriates them when we recognize the ironies, and Rorschach’s heroic attributes, despite how angrily they keep stabbing the voodoo doll.
UPDATE: Looks like other bloggers also figured this drama was worth weighing in on. Dark Herald probably cross-posted this on Arkhaven, but here’s his take on Fandom Pulse. And here’s yet another article on the topic, possibly by the very person who ignited this row. Both are worth reading. However, I was blocked from commenting and flagged as spam. Interesting.
Did some major travelling over Christmas break, and saw some movies I hadn’t heard of and might never have watched otherwise. One of them was this sci-fi dystopian thriller.
You might have heard the term “predictive programming” in recent years. It’s a psyop strategy discussed by “conspiracy theorists.” There seem to be multiple explanations of what it is. One of them assumes that those in control of government, media, entertainment and all other institutions are somehow obligated or compelled to warn us peasants about what they plan to do to us in the future. They like doing this via entertainment, then snicker to each other about how stupid and gullible we are for failing to understand (and/or failing to resist).
I will analyze this movie using that explanation of predictive programming.
We have a future scenario which might remind you of the Terminator movies in that A.I. has become like Skynet. A.I. was taking over the world, and coming to see humans as pests, it nuked Los Angeles.
So the American military (which, evidently, is entirely comprised of Delta Force and Seal Team 6, judging by the shaggy hair, face armor, and optional adherence to uniformity) is tasked with destroying A.I.–which is based in China. The US has built a gargantuan hovering weapons platform called NOMAD which can locate and target A.I. assets, and is invincible, up until it’s time for the plot climax.
There are a lot of nits to pick, but I’m gonna try to stick to the metaphorical message of the narrative, here.
Spoilers are unavoidable, so let me give you the big plot twist first: A.I. didn’t nuke anybody. Los Angeles was a 9/11ish false flag. A.I. is not trying to wipe out humanity. A.I. is benevolent and has “more heart” than humanity. At least humans in America.
America is the root of all evil. Pretty standard worldview of anybody allowed to work in Homowood, Commiefornia, of course. Willfully blind to nuance, they make no distinction between the America that once existed and the Orwellian corporatist abomination that has replaced it in real life.
The important points:
With only one exception, Caucasians are all villains, or at best, part of the problem.
The only good guys are non-white.
America holds the world hostage, terrorizing people with its frightening technology–in order to eliminate other frightening technology.
The Chinese and robot victims of the American Bullies are just like the Viet Cong: wonderful people living in harmony who dindu nuffin until provoked by Yankee imperialists.
NOMAD is basically the USA itself–a huge, heartless machine using murder and intimidation to colonize the less fortunate and build empire. Maybe the similarity of “NOMAD” to “NORAD” is not coincidental. (Marxists love to conflate, and this would conflate America with the military-industrial complex and the globalist agents who have hijacked America.)
A.I. is a benevolent supervisor of humanity. It only wants the best for us. It’s like a protective parent or older sibling. You could call it “Big Brother,” I suppose.
Big Brother is trying to rescue the world from the diabolical running dog Americans who foolishly resist the Singularity. As part of this effort, A.I. has manufactured a child Messiah (complete with miraculous powers) who wants to set everyone “free.”
The Messiah Child is said to be developing a weapon that can destroy NOMAD. Not true, evidently, but the fear of such is used to justify an American military operation (shades of WMDs in Iraq, obviously) to destroy the Messiah Child.
In some convoluted twist of movie logic, the Messiah Child is somehow the offspring of the black hero’s Asian wife. Big Brother used the woman’s genes to manufacture the robot, or enhance its CPU or something. Anyway, this Messiah has a Current Year Diverse Mary and Joseph as parental figures.
The hero turns coat (his commanding officer labels him a traitor) and becomes the Messiah Child’s protector. They get aboard NOMAD and plant an explosive device.
The child escapes.
The hero finally reunites with his wife; they embrace and kiss as chain reaction explosions consume them and everything around them.
NOMAD is destroyed and falls from the heavens to crash and burn on Earth. The world celebrates.
To put it in more simple terms:
America is a hated terrorist country.
Big Brother (headquartered in China, apparently) begins to take over the world. For our own good, of course.
Big Brother even produces a lovable Messiah figure to set robots free.
Most humans outside the US have been replaced by bots.
The bots are more altruistic than humans–especially Americans.
The reactionary USA sees all this as a threat.
America goes to war with Big Brother.
There are foreign nations living within the USA fulfilling key roles–including in our military and espionage agencies.
Those (non-white) nations will decide that Big Brother is more righteous than the USA, and switch allegiance when the chips are down.
POC, anchor babies and A.I. technology will sabotage America from within, bringing down the USA in spectacular fashion while it is engaged in an unjust foreign conflict.
Big Brother and its manufactured Messiah will escape destruction.
The POC/Trojan Horse nations within the USA will enjoy carnal pleasure right up until their evil American hosts are consumed in apocalyptic fire.
The “good” humans of the world will now be joyous and free of American oppression. Ding-dong, the Yanks are dead.
Now the world can live in harmony under the compassionate guidance of Big Brother.
The long-form message is also in perfect alignment with the power behind Homowood. As members of the Hive Mind so often do, they use the catastrophes caused by its own mechanisms (in this case, the Globohomo Cabal controlling the US government–and its foreign policy in particular) as an argument for embracing more of its own mechanisms (in this case a global government under an A.I. Big Brother that will sweep away the last vestiges of the Old [American] Republic).
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
