John Carter points out that the mainstream narrative that claims men don’t read is false. It’s just that men don’t read what the converged and feminized mainstream publishers re publishing.
There is a close connection between the untruths that “men don’t read” and that “the right can’t create”. The left does not have some lock on literary creativity – HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Robert A Heinlein, Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, and numerous other genre-defining titans would have been very amused to hear that “the right can’t create”.
What actually happens is that the left takes over production, distribution, and promotion channels, and then ensures that only their books are published, stocked, marketed, and given awards. There is no creativity whatsoever involved in this strategy. It is simply low animal cunning and venal social power games.
As with every other instance of the left murdering an institution and wearing it as a skinsuit, the result is the precipitous collapse of the ability of that institution to fulfill its social function, followed in short order by the collapse of its prestige as the general public starts tuning the corrupted institution out.
“Men don’t read” the insipid sermons the big publishers are selling, and “the right doesn’t create” anything the left will consider publishing. Meanwhile there is a quiet literary Renaissance happening in independent publishing, and men are reading it in droves.
He’s correct. I’m absolutely astonished how many men subscribe to the Castalia Library substack and read the serialized excerpts from THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY every single day. We usually average over 1,000 post views, which is around 50 percent of our total subscriber base, and this is not dumbed-down modern drivel either, but serious history published by the leading academics at Cambridge University in the early 20th Century.
Today’s selection, the 127th from Volume One, concerned the defeat of the barbarian usurper Maximus by the rightful Augustus, Theodosius. Just a single paragraph is much more interesting than the entire fall-winter line from Tor Books.
It would seem that emissaries of Maximus had spread disaffection among the Germans in the eastern army, but a plot to murder Theodosius was disclosed in time and the traitors were cut down in the swamps to which they had fled for refuge. The Emperor advanced to Siscia on the Save; here, despite their inferiority in numbers, his troops swam the river and charged and routed the enemy.
Furthermore, the modern descendants of yesteryear’s right-wing greats are anathema to the mainstream publishing industry. For example, I am almost certainly the closest thing the entire publishing industry has to JRR Tolkien’s landmark work in epic fantasy, and yet you will not find a single mainstream reference to Summa Elvetica, A Throne of Bones, or A Sea of Skulls in any mainstream publication devoted to modern fiction. Brandon Sanderson, Larry Correia, and George R.R. Martin are the best that they can do, and the former two have more than one foot out of the mainstream industry already.
So how do they expect men to read when they deny men what they have always enjoyed reading?