What I realized is that the problem with the concern troll, and the reason that concern trolling should not be tolerated even among those who are friendly, even among people who are on your side, is that a concern troll is always perfectly happy to trade someone else’s demoralization for his own narcissistic rush. He’s putting his own narcissism ahead of the way that other people feel, it’s actually a very, very negative trait and it’s kind of related to the pessimists who invariably predict failure and really seem to get off on explaining why nothing’s going to change, why no one’s ever going to win, why no matter what you do it’s going to fail or it’s not going to make any difference anyway.
This is something that I no longer permit on the blog, in fact, I learned to stop permitting it during the 2016 campaign, and I think the Lord Humungus is correct when he said they’re emotionally hedging. But here’s the problem. There’s nothing wrong with emotionally hedging on your own behalf, there’s nothing wrong with protecting your own feelings because you have been disappointed before, but where it starts to become a problem, where it starts to become a negative action, is when in the interests of your own emotional hedging you actually attack the optimism and the hope of your own allies. I mean, think about it. Suppose that leading up to D-Day, Montgomery and other generals kept telling Eisenhower “oh you know this landing, it’s never gonna work, you know, look what look what happened at Anzio, look what happened when the Germans attacked Crete, it’s all gonna be a disaster, we shouldn’t do this.”
Now what good, from the Allied perspective, is going to come of that? These people don’t actually know what’s going to happen. If we listened to all of the pessimists who were talking about Trump, he never would have won, he never would have pulled off the victory, and he probably wouldn’t have even won the Republican nomination. It wasn’t just people who were against Trump who were making these predictions, it was people who said, “oh yeah, well, you know, Trump’s the only one who could possibly be any good, but he can never win, he can never beat 30 percent, he can’t beat 35 percent, he can’t win the nomination, he can’t win the general election.
What I would suggest you do if you’re tempted to concern troll, if you’re tempted to share your pessimism, or your lack of hope, or your despair or whatever, don’t share it. Keep it to yourself. I can’t tell you how many times concern trolls have told me stuff that they’ve been completely wrong about. I mean, these concern trolls who say this stuff so they can say “I told you so,” well, they’ve been wrong far more often than they’re right.
The Alt★Hero: Q campaign has begun. Please visit the campaign page for more information about the graphic novel and the various backing options.
UPDATE: After 12 hours, we have reached 250 backers and 39 percent of the green light goal. Thanks to everyone who is supporting this and making it possible. Spread the word!
Voxiversity is back with a vengeance. The production team and I are pleased to announce Voxiversity Episode 007, THE MADNESS OF JORDAN PETERSON.
The bestselling author of THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST and ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS exposes Dr. Jordan Peterson as an intellectual charlatan, an anti-Christian globalist, and a mentally unstable defender of the neo-liberal world order by extensively quoting Peterson’s own incoherencies and inconsistencies in context.
We’re also sending out an email today to all the Voxiversity backers to let them know it is possible to support Voxiversity again through direct monthly subscriptions. If you wish to join them, you can do so now via the Castalia House Store. Based on my improved understanding of how the video audience-building process works, we’ve integrated the Darkstream with the Voxiversity. By supporting one or the other, you will be supporting both. This is also more cost-efficient than going through a Patreon-style service. Please note these are all MONTHLY subscriptions.
Note that site registration is required for recurring subscriptions. We’ll put a site up on Oneway to keep track of the number of backers and so forth, but there is no need to sign up through that. The revised idea is to use the regular Darkstreams to address the various issues brought up by the backers faster and on a more regular basis, while utilizing the Voxiversity episodes to address the deeper issues more substantively.
Thanks to all the backers for your patience as we dealt with the various obstacles presented, and special thanks in particular to the Foundation members, who stepped in and maintained their support for the program even through the two-month hiatus.
Scott Adams was talking about how the whole Q thing was bad for MAGA. Now that sounds very cryptic, but what he’s talking about is how he is concerned, like a lot of middle-of-the-road folks and moderates, he is concerned that talking about conspiracy theory is going to turn off, confuse, and disenchant people who might otherwise be inclined to support making America great again. Now this is the conventional moderate talk, all right, moderates always think that the secret to success is appealing to the moderates. You know, they always always do this. Back when Ronald Reagan was a candidate, before he won the nomination, we heard the same sort of reasoning, if you’re going to win you need to move to the center. Okay that is the conventional wisdom, and again and again and again, political history proves that to be wrong.
Chasing the moderates is actually the way to ensure that you, number one, will probably lose, and, number two, if you do win you’re not going to be able to do anything. Moderates above all fear change, all moderates want is to stick with the status quo, and so you know running to the center, it’s exactly what the elder George Bush did and that was part of why he managed to lose. So when you look at any advice about politics that worries excessively about marketing, about brand, about turning people off and all that sort of thing, you need to look at it with this very skeptical eye, because most of the time it is not coming from a rational point of political analysis, it’s not coming from an observation and application of political history, it’s simply coming from the moderate’s distaste for anything that normal people might look at with a skeptical eye.
Now, the reality is people follow strength. People follow truth as long as it is fearlessly and forcefully spoken. We see this all around the world and we’ve seen this all through history. Those who stand up and speak the truth tend to meet with very positive reactions because people have a tendency to recognize the truth when they hear it.
If you think about it, what has Q accomplished? What is the primary consequence of Q, has it resulted in more or less confidence in the system? Has it caused people to embrace or reject the FBI, the CIA. and the professional Deep State. Has it appealed to the mainstream media or has it frightened the mainstream media? Okay, those are the questions that are relevant. Who Q happens to be and whether everything that Q says is 100 percent accurate or not, you know, these things are not even relevant points, they’re not even relevant questions.
How Arkhaven is going to shake up the comics industry. We’ve been talking about this a fair amount today on the blog and this was really sparked by discussion of someone saying, “well, you know, what the right-wing needs to do is we need to band together, you know, we need all the creators to team up to create a new Marvel.” But the problem is that creators teaming up is not creating a new Marvel, creators teaming up is creating a new Image Comics. And that’s not going to work because Image Comics has not been successful overall as a organization. It’s not going to work and the reason it’s not going to work is three-fold as far as I can tell.
Number one, people on the right are pretty individualistic. They have a tendency to want to pursue what is of maximum interest and value to them at the moment. They don’t tend to think in terms of building organizations and institutions, and they definitely don’t think in terms of taking over existing organizations and institutions and modifying them to their liking. So that’s the first reason. If you look at what is happening already, look at what has happened since we launched the Alt-Hero campaign and set off this whole comics Kickstarter thing, if you look at what has happened, the guy from Diversity & Comics has had a lot of success, Ethan van Sciver has had a tremendous amount of success, you’ve got folks like Tim Lin and Chuck Dixon doing Trump Space Force, Will Caligan has been doing some other stuff, Jon Del Arroz has done Flying Sparks and he’s got another, bigger, project in the works.
If these people were all thinking in terms of institutions and infrastructure, then they would all be working with Arkhaven or Dark Legion, but most of them aren’t. Some of them are, yeah, we’re going to be publishing Jon Del Arroz’s stuff at retail, we’re going to be publishing Will Caligan’s stuff too, but everyone else wants to do their own thing.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that! Please understand, I am not criticizing! But what is going to happen is the same thing that has happened in the world of independent publishing, which is that you’re going to have a few really big winners, and they’re going to do very well, and almost everyone else is going to pretty much go by the wayside and be unable to really do anything at all. And in comics, it’s just that more difficult because it’s a lot easier to just write a book and put out an ebook on Amazon than it is to put together the various moving pieces that involve the writing, the illustrating, the coloring, the publishing, and the selling. You know, there are people who can do all that – Ethan van Sciver is very clearly one of them – but you’re not going to be able to build a publishing company off that. We’ve already seen this in the world of independent publishing.
Castelli House was supposed to publish Milo’s Dangerous. Four times we were told “yeah yeah yeah we want you to publish this,” but then they got all excited about the fact that they had a number one Amazon bestseller in pre-order and all that sort of thing, and thought, “well, you know, we will start a publishing house around it.” The problem is that a publishing house involves a considerable amount of infrastructure and a lot of strategic relationships and that sort of thing, and what most people don’t understand is that we had this infrastructure assembled since 2014. We did the Alt-Hero kickstarter in October 2017, so we already had everything in place for more than three years. The kickstarter was just the thing that allowed us to take it to the market, but we already had all the infrastructure in place.
It’s also very different publishing other people’s stuff than just doing your own thing. Now, I’m not saying that people are not going to be successful. Quite to the contrary, you know some people are going to be very successful, just not most of them. If you look at independent publishing, you look at how well people like Nick Cole and Jason Anspach are doing with Galaxy’s Edge, you look at how well a writer like Richard Fox is doing with TheEmber War, but that is one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of all the people who are tempted to play there, and the Amazon marketplace only exacerbates that “win big if you’re lucky, most of you lose” situation.
The other reason, the second reason, is that most illustrators can’t write. We had this discussion when we first started Arkhaven and I told people not to worry about the art. We had the writing, we had the stories, we had the characters, and as for the art, we were going to improve. People have already seen how we are improving the art and yet those first issues are still selling very well. Why? Because it’s the stories that matter. Art is great, the art attracts a lot of attention, I’m not denigrating the art, I’m simply saying that the art is one part of the puzzle, it’s one ingredient in the cake, and it’s not the most important one, it’s just the most obvious.
I think there might be a way for us to add some value at Dark Legion by putting together writers and illustrators and bringing them together to start you know working on new IP, new creator IP, that Dark Legion could publish. Now, I just started thinking about this today, I haven’t figured out exactly how the model is going to work. There’s always the problem because the artist has more work and it takes him more time, but the story created by the writer is actually more important in the long run, so how do you balance that? You know, what’s a fair division of labor there and so forth? I don’t know, maybe some of you will have ideas if you’re at all involved in that sort of thing.
And then the third problem is that you have to be willing to follow the leader. You don’t have to like the leader, you don’t have to agree with everything they do. Do you really think that everybody who joneses to get published by Marvel agrees with everything that Marvel’s editor-in-chief thinks? Of course not, you probably don’t even know who he is or what he thinks! Oh speak of the devil… Ethan’s here!
Look at what is happening in Hollywood. It’s very typical. You’ve got a small tight group, they’re corrupted by their own power, they’re enslaved to their own desires, and they have turned their back on God, they’ve turned their back on Christian morality, and it’s not an accident that you’ve got a lot of the people there who are not merely not Christian, but they are openly and avowedly anti-Christian. They’re afraid of Christians, they hate Christians, but more importantly, they hate God and they hate Jesus Christ. And that will be their downfall.
A backer wants to know how he can support Voxiversity:
Is it possible to support Voxiversity other than Freestartr? It appears to be down.
Freestartr is down, apparently thanks to Stripe’s shenigans, and they have not been able to get anything up and running in the time period I discussed with them. Nor have any of the backers been able to contribute anything since May. So, after consulting with several backers, I’ve arranged to get the campaign up on a new site which I will announce as soon as it is ready later this week. I hope most of the backers will be able to make the transition to the new site.
We will have two Voxiversity videos out in August. I’ve been focusing on building up the Darkstream subscriber base in the meantime. While they are two different channels, from my perspective, it’s a single video front, so supporting one is supporting the other. There is a lot of room for improvement, of course, but we are making steady progress, these occasional setbacks and delays notwithstanding. I’ve also been working on something that will have a major impact on everything from Castalia to Voxiversity, and I hope to be able to announce something about that before the end of October.
In not-entirely-unrelated news, I will be appearing on the Alex Jones show today at 1 PM Central today to discuss comics and culture war, among other things.
And for those of you who have been repeatedly asking me for essential book recommendations, I’ve put together short book lists for what I consider to be the best in literature, history, science fiction, and fantasy at the Castalia Direct Store. I’ll be adding to these in the future, this is just a bare-bones beginning.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that pan nationalism is simply a form of ethnic imperialism. It is a category error to mistake the broader racial category for the national or ethnic category, so for example, when you look at the continent of Europe there are literally dozens of nations in there. You have the Russian nation which is distinct from the Swedish nation which is distinct from the Finnish nation which is distinct from the Scottish nation which is distinct from the English and the Welsh nations, and you could also theoretically argue that there is a Cornish nation. So when you start talking about white nationalism and you try to lump all of these nations into a single category and call them white, that’s where you get into nonsensical imperialism. Which nation is the dominant culture?
I speak some German, I speak some Italian, I speak some French, I even speak a bit of Japanese, and I can assure you that all of those races, all of those nations which have been considered to be white in some way shape or form, all of those nations are very, very different. All of those nations have different cultural values, they have different historical traditions, most of them have different languages, and many of them have different religious focuses. They might all be Christian, but they are fundamentally different, so how do you build a nation around all these nations?
Well, you do it the same way that the Romans did it, you do it the same way that the Chinese did it and that is constructing an empire. Now what you have to understand is that this has been done before, for example in the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s the biggest pan-national movement was actually in the Middle East. Gamal Abdel Nasser was the president, leader, I don’t know exactly what his title was, but he was the leader of Egypt and he was the center of what was called the pan-Arab nationalist movement and they actually went so far as to merge several different countries. It was called the United Arab Republic I think it was Egypt and Syria, and it was a complete failure.
It was an absolutely complete failure, and so the the idea that different European nations are going to band together and ignore all their differences in a manner that is even more tightly and intimately bound than the present European Union presently is an utter absurdity. It is not going to happen. Pan African nationalism failed, pan-Arabian nationalism failed, the European Union was so aware that this was going to fail that they didn’t even dare attempt to do it openly; they denied that they were even going to create a political entity much less tried to merge the nations.
White nationalism is a complete non-starter. White nationalism does not exist; the only place that any form of it exists is in the United States and that’s why you see a lot of very stupid things being said by Americans trying to talk about Europe and trying to talk about European nations. What people tend to forget is that the only reason that the United States has been held together is by military force.
You see people like Shapiro, you see people like Peterson who have been elevated, and the reason that they have been elevated is because their whole job is to prevent young men especially from moving to nationalism. Everything that you see come out of their mouths is anti-nationalist. Now, it’s not always directly anti-nationalist, you know Peterson is more clever than Shapiro. What Peterson does is he criticizes things like the European Union, he criticizes the United Nations because he thinks that they are moving too fast, too far, but his goals are exactly the same as George Soros.
What was really interesting was I read an interview with George Soros, it’s on my blog, and one of the things that he said which was really striking was how he is non-ideological. Sound familiar? Jordan Peterson considers himself post-ideological. And Soros’s big concern is that the left has gotten too extreme, just like Peterson talking about how he wants the reasonable left to replace the SJWs because they go too far.
So what the conservatives constantly do is they see these guys saying, well the absolute hardcore extreme left is going too far, so they must be on our side. No, they’re not! They’re totally opposed to everything you stand for! Jordan Peterson is not a Christian. Ben Shapiro is not a Christian. They are absolutely against Christian rule, they are absolutely against American nationalism, they’re totally against the closed borders nationalism of Viktor Orban, of the Sweden Democrats, of Matteo Salvini and the Lega! They are world revolutionaries….
Now here’s the way that I can prove to you what I’m asserting. A lot of these people say that, well you know, they’re gateway drugs, you know, first young men encounter them, and then after that they’re able to move on to Steve Sailer, and after that they’re able to move on to Mike Cernovich and Milo, but that’s not true. I’m not saying it never happens but I can mathematically prove to you, I can logically prove to you, that this is not happening.
If they were gateways, then as they increase in media attention and popularity, and as they expand their fan bases, then if they were gateways we should be seeing an ever-expanding number of people coming into the right, coming into the nationalist right, coming into the Christian nationalist right, from Jordan Peterson and from Ben Shapiro, but that’s exactly what we don’t see! We actually see people who follow these guys coming out directly against any criticism of them.
