Tag: gatekeepers

Bad News – Good News

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So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Reactions to Yesterday’s Post (A Red-Pilled America)

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Yesterday’s post got a lot of new eyes because it got linked on several external sites.  Four of these folks left comments.  I’ve copied those comments below:

  • I enjoy your well written posts. Just for my education, you mentioned “FBI sponsored inner city crime”. Could you elaborate? Thanks.
  • I’ve said it before, and it is worth repeating: The salvation of the American people rests with the states and the state governments. Only these entities can protect and defend the people from the predators in DC. Only the states can marshal the resources necessary to prevent the federal government goons from harassing and harming citizens. Just as state governments have refused to cooperate with federal goons on various issues, it is time for states to utterly nullify the federal government. By no longer allowing collection of federal taxes within their jurisdictions, and also not allowing agents of the DC to operate within their borders, Americans can be freed of the criminality inflicted upon them by the unaccountable criminals at the US Capitol. It is time to take Federalism to the next level. A convention of states could, in a single day, invalidate the entire swamp and begin a new era of freedom and government accountability in this once great nation.
  • I think tribunals, and executions, will go a LOOONNNNNGGGGGGGG way to healing this country. The “great experiment” (i.e. the black man, women’s “rights”) is an ABJECT FAILURE!!!  We HAVE to move forward Or NO ONE DOES, and of course, NO ONE LIVES.
  • And you honestly think the R’s are the genuine answer?  You are a bigger fool and bigger part of the problem than originally calculated.

Well, I think this represents an interesting cross-section of people on the Right.  The first commentor didn’t explicitly provide his position on the topic I was discussing but he definitely read my words and had a specific question about one of my statements.  He also said polite things about my writing (which is always greatly appreciated) so I assume that we are at least not too far apart on basic beliefs on the American political situation (at least that could be the case).

The second and third commentors wanted to address specific actions that they hope some groups will take to force changes in the political situation.  These are actions that will not occur under the current political framework but would require some kind of rupture of the political structure, either through a civil war or a loosening of the federal arrangement that might involve some kind of implicit or explicit nullification of federal laws that are deemed harmful by various states.

The fourth commentor is especially interesting.  And not only because he recognized that I am, “a bigger fool and bigger part of the problem than originally calculated.”  He also seems to have gotten the impression that I think the Republicans are somehow the “genuine answer” to our problems.  What I find interesting is that not only didn’t I say or imply that the Republicans were part of any solution, but my post never mentioned the Republicans at all.  What this tells me is that many of us are already locked into points of view and ways of looking at things that almost preclude hearing what people with other points of view have to say.

And I see this in my own discussions with others.  I already have a narrative about what’s going on.  If someone has a different way of looking at things, often I attribute this different point of view to a lack of understanding or ignorance of the facts.  We develop tunnel vision to simplify the playing field.  We’re tuned into a few general indicators.  Maybe they’re key phrases or buzzwords that we use to size up whether someone is on “our side” or not.  And from these we extrapolate everything else about that person.  But the conversations between people even on the “same side” aren’t very helpful.

I’ve been of the opinion that people on the right have become more extreme because they’ve been shut out of the conversation by gatekeepers at places like National Review and the Weekly Standard (when it still existed).  Being silenced by the mainstream of your own side tends to radicalize those who are excluded.  And by the same token excluding dissident voices will weaken the reasoning abilities of those who are left.  They no longer have to defend their opinions against real opponents and so they descend into lazy idealism that is ungrounded in reality.  And so, we end up with echo chambers and silos where we preach to the choir.

There have been some positive steps taken.   In 2022 Marjorie Taylor Greene attended the America First Political Action Conference.  She became the first member of Congress to show she was not afraid of the white supremacist label associated with attending a dissident right event.  J.D. Vance refused to condemn her for it.  The Claremont Institute in California has taken small steps to have dialog with members of the dissident community.  There are the beginnings of dissident ideas being mainstreamed on national shows like Tucker Carlson’s broadcast.  These are small things but they are a beginning.

As for my humble part, I’m just glad when people leave comments; good, bad or confusing.  Any communication is better than none, I guess.  So, onward and upward.  Please leave your comments below.

Here is an Example of Confusion About What Conservatism Is

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In his essay titled, “Can Conservatism Be Conserved?” Spencer Klavan questions whether a new “conservative coalition” made up of actual conservatives together with various non-conservatives who have been alienated or even attacked by the “Woke” progressives can form a coherent movement.  But then he concedes that most of these “new conservatives” would reject the title.  Klavan explains,

“An inescapably important reason for this is that many members of the new conservative coalition (especially those who don’t identify as conservative) reject the label because they hold views, and practice ways of life, which the historic conservatism of only a generation ago deemed deeply distasteful, even unconscionable.  Weinstein and Boghossian are atheists. Murray, Doyle, and Straka are openly gay. White is transgendered, and Birchill and Bindel are lifelong feminists.”

Apparently, the only thing all these people have in common is they don’t want to be de-platformed by the “Woke” hall monitors.  Maybe that means they believe in free speech.  But maybe they only want it if it suits their speech.  After all, feminists and the various alphabet people seem plenty willing to call anything they don’t like hate speech and get these people de-platformed or worse.

At its core I think this outreach to non-conservatives is just the latest example of liberals trying to act as gatekeepers and redefine conservatism into something acceptable to their friends on the Left.  It’s kind of like the ecumenism that was supposed to let people of different faiths coexist but ends up by turning Christian Churches into cultural centers devoid of any connection at all to Christ because it might be offensive to the non-Christians.

In my opinion it is a mirage to think that embracing these various leftists as some kind of a partnership will do any good at all.  On the contrary, all it will involve is attempts to disavow any actual conservatives who won’t paper over their rejection of the various dysfunctional and dangerous lifestyles or worldviews that these so-called conservative allies espouse.  A similar thing was done to the paleocons by the neocons a few decades ago.  That was how we ended up in the mess we are in now.  Trump was able to, single-handedly, drag those deplorables back into the fold.  The last thing we want to do is give “new conservatives” another bite at the apple.

So, in answer to the title of Mr. Klavan’s article, yes conservatism can be conserved but not by accepting non-conservative ideas and the people who live by them.  Let the progressives, the liberals, the moral relativists, the feminists and the alphabet people battle with their even crazier “woke” brethren (or whatever gender bent category they prefer) on their own.  We have nothing in common with them and nothing to gain by engaging with them.  I would much prefer to engage with the fringe groups to the right of us and see if we can find some common ground with them.  Their ideas are more extreme than ours but they at least do not reject the values that we embrace.  In many cases I think they have let pessimism radicalize their thinking and pushed them to conclude that only radical solutions to our problems exist.  I think the last few years have shown that progress can be made if the right people get involved.  If actual conservatives have a part in running the country better outcomes are possible.