2024 is quickly becoming the year of people “waking up”. Whether it be on mass immigration, the pride agenda, or even the recent presidential debate, people are being forced to acknowledge uncomfortable realities. I’d say they’re at least four years late to the party, but I guess late is better than never. And if you are still in shock after learning the US president has severe dementia, I guess all I can say to you is this: buckle up.
But even among those who are awake, there’s an unsettling tendency to slip back into the old frames of thinking. I suspect it’s just the way of culture. The river pulls you downstream, and if you don’t constantly struggle against it, then you’ll find yourself regressing to comfortable beliefs.
And so, from time to time, I think it’s good for people to give themselves a cold splash of water. You need to sit up and remind yourself of where you are and the times you live in. In that spirit, this essay is much more for my sake than anyone else’s. This is an organization of my thoughts and ideas into a coherent format, a laying out of terms. So if you’re interested, come along with me, and together we’ll explore what it means to be a consumer in 2024.
I think the first thing to internalize is that we are in a state of war. People might find that to be hyperbole, but hold on. I’m not saying I’m a gung-ho hero fighting a war or you are fighting a war. But you don’t have to fight to be in a war. Because when someone declares war on you, it doesn’t matter if you choose to timidly raise your hands and say you don’t want to be involved.
Hollywood has declared war. It marches for anti-whiteness, gay sex, and whatever will kill Christianity the fastest. If you think gay sex is a ridiculous reason to fight a war, then too bad. The pride parade is marching down your city streets, and your kids better be attending.
But let’s back up because I can hear some skepticism. Just because Hollywood is releasing woke movies doesn’t mean they’re at war. Right? They can’t be serious about this. After all, you should never attribute malice to incompetence. If the fans are unhappy, eventually studio execs and directors will get the message. We’ll vote with our wallets. Go woke go broke!
Firstly, I hate that quote about malice. Incompetence may not be as morally reprehensible as malice, but the outcome is the same. And so if someone is incompetent, they ought to be removed just as equally as you would a malicious person. Perhaps not punished, but certainly kept from doing more harm. Anything else is an excuse. And to keep the obviously incompetent people in charge is just another form of malice anyway.
It’s reasonable to forgive bad or mediocre movies. But it’s cope when every new movie is bad. Shall we go down the list? Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Marvel, DC, Alien, Ghostbusters, Doctor Who, every live action Disney film, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Matrix, Mad Max, Dune, tell me, what popular legacy media hasn’t been touched by the woke rot? Do any still remain? And if I were to extend the list to original IPs, we would be here for the next few months.
Wokeness isn’t some niche fad. It’s system wide. What was that famous quote about systems? The purpose of a system is what it does. Hollywood makes woke movies. This is what they do. This is what they are. They were willing to (and did) burn down every single mainstream IP. They have sunk billions into these projects, and you still think they aren’t at war?
Hollywood is at war. The only question is our response to it.
I think the first thing people need to put behind them is that fan outrage will not get us out of this one. The purpose of Hollywood is no longer to entertain you. It’s to humiliate you. When it’s not for spreading propaganda, it’s intended to demoralize and make you feel ashamed of yourself. You may think headbutting lightsabers is silly, but you are even more so for paying attention to it.
Shad may do a brilliant takedown of The Acolyte, but the jokes on him. The joke is that this is Star Wars now, and he himself admits that in the first sentence. This scene wasn’t created for his entertainment. It was made to spite him and fans like him. And he’s not a true Star Wars fan now, not really. The real Star Wars fans are the people who liked the lesbian space witches. They’re the ones being catered to. They’re the ones Disney will make future content for. And neither Shad nor Critical Drinker nor anyone else can do a thing about it.
This kind of criticism is cope, and it’s the wrong criticism to make. Shad and others are making accusations of incompetence where they should be making accusations of malice. They shouldn’t be laughing at the absurdity of headbutting lightsabers. This assumes the problem is one of technique and execution. Rather, they should be calling Disney and Lucasfilm evil.
Hollywood willfully and enthusiastically creates content antithetical to healthy human behavior. Their activism of LBTQ+ causes has real consequences on real people, and it is not for the better. Their deconstructionist narratives are intended to tear down the good and the beautiful, not promote it. And while it’s always touchy to bring up racial discrimination against whites, I do hope one day we can discuss the blatant anti-white hatred without it being labeled as “too extreme” by hand-wringing Conservatives. I don’t know. Maybe that day will never come. I’m just noticing that it’s increasingly becoming a bad thing to be white.
I don’t expect the YouTube critic crowd to stop making videos slamming modern media. I think we are well past that opportunity now. But we must adopt a frame of fundamental disgust. Star Wars in its current iteration is to be spat upon. The thing you loved is long gone, and it’s been turned against you. I’m not suggesting feeding into outrage, but rather adopting an apathetic contempt. And that applies to everything mediocre or “good” Star Wars produces going forward.
To reiterate, Hollywood is at war. And their overtures to old fans are nothing more than ploys whenever they need a project to succeed slightly better than the rest of their slop. Their “good” products are meant to feed the projects they actually care about: the ones spreading the message.
As I have said before, every good movie released by Hollywood is a net loss for the Rightwing. Every bad movie is a net win. This is a difficult perspective to hold—to actually root for bad entertainment. It requires a total disinvestment of yourself towards the franchise as what it was. It means giving up the possibility of good Star Wars or Star Trek or even Stargate ever again. But it is also liberating.
Whenever Hollywood releases a new product, they act upon and influence the discourse. And that power has a real effect on those people who, for whatever reason, cannot bring themselves to disavow said product. It is in the ability to not engage with something that you go from a consumer to a customer. To refuse a product is to exercise your small control over it.
I’m not saying go full blackout on media discussion. I think that’s a poor idea for many reasons, but mainly that you still need to engage with the discourse as a whole, and the discourse is communicated with and in these products. Try having a discussion of movies without referencing a mainstream IP, and it suddenly becomes very difficult to hold anyone’s interest.
I only advocate for being selective with what you choose to talk about. Whenever you cross into Hollywood’s territory, you should hold yourself as in a hostile foreign land. And you should always take care not to be ensnared by it.
It is an obvious answer that we should be creating our own media. I myself am doing my own part with Gigaheroes and The Domes of Calrathia. The problem, among other things, is that the Right has a critical lack of funding, organization, and marketing. The work being done today is mostly made by hobbyists paying out of their own pockets. And putting aside the incredible difficulty of arriving at a high-quality product, the harder question is marketing.
We can address these issues, but save for a very talented and well-connected few, most are not going to make significant money off of their art. And of those few, they will always be disadvantaged because they are working with less popular mediums. It is much harder to convince someone to read a book than it is a TV series with an awesome trailer.
The fact is, on a dopamine per second scale, the Right will lose to the Left every single time. But the good news is that the Left have been reduced to only selling dopamine. Their stories and entertainment have long departed from actual meaning. Their trash sends people looking farther and farther afield for better entertainment.
I don’t think we can win this war on scale, but we can certainly try with quality. The future of the Right’s art is in a small, highly focused group of people. The only question is whether we can grow this group to such a critical mass that it can generate discussions spontaneously outside of its influence. Then we’ll know we have something real on our hands.
And if there is ever a mainstream art movement to be built on the Right, I think it must be cultivated with the implicit understanding that Leftwing art is low status. To bring up Star Wars at the table should earn the same looks as people had during the Bud Light boycott. And it should stay that way.
Our contemporary political war is a war of belief, core beliefs, religious beliefs. And religious beliefs don't have limiting principles. If they did then they would not be religious beliefs. As long as political struggle crosses these critical lines of foundational moral principle, there can be no shelter for those looking for ordinary conversation and safe discourse. There is only war, in one form or another. That's just a reality. -Dave Greene
This may sound extreme, but it’s the only way out of the quagmire we find ourselves in. As long as Hollywood produces entertainment, it must be disavowed. If there was a button that erased all Hollywood entertainment, the good and the bad, you should be prepared to push it. That was the mindset with which Hollywood put to torch every profitable franchise. That is the mindset we must cultivate in ourselves if we are to have any hope of victory.
And to think of it, we really have nothing to lose anyway. What is Star Wars really worth nowadays if Luke Skywalker is a coward? What is Indiana Jones if our beloved archeologist only cares about espousing feminism? Hollywood did us a favor by ruining all their money-making franchises. We only need to step away from the ash heap.
Conservatives often exasperatedly cry out for when wokeness will end. To put it bluntly, it won’t. Not until the whole organization is rooted out, not until every director, screenwriter, and producer are fired. Not until every last studio and company are hollowed out and abolished. Not until every franchise and IP in its purview are released to public domain. The thing needs to be razed to the ground, and the earth underneath needs to be salted so it can never rise again.
Only then can something better be built in its place.
(Substack angrily told me "Please type a shorter comment", so I suppose I have to split this in two pieces.)
"And if there is ever a mainstream art movement to be built on the Right, I think it must be cultivated with the implicit understanding that Leftwing art is low status. To bring up Star Wars at the table should earn the same looks as people had during the Bud Light boycott. And it should stay that way. "
I don't think this is a winning proposition, because it can only mean one of two things:
- Talking about Star Wars, as it currently is and in its modern incarnations, is cringe.
- Talking about Star Wars of any variety, including the original and best stories, is cringe.
I'd wager that the majority of Critical Drinker's and Shadiversity's regular watchers - and I'm one of them - are only interested in modern Star Wars for the purposes of mocking it. I just opened up Critical Drinker's video about The Acolyte Episode 5, sorted the comments by 'new', and filtered out spam, gibberish, and off-topic discussions; roughly 2 comments in 10 are praising the show (whether sincerely or trolling, hard to say), 5 out of 10 are arguing that the lightsaber headbutt isn't a 'plot hole' so much as an act of plagiarism from far-superior source material in the Thrawn Trilogy, and the remaining 3 out of 10 are attributing the downfall of Star Wars to feminism, anti-white racism, incompetence, or a combination thereof. Those 8 out of 10 would probably describe modern Star Wars as low-status and would probably agree that *enjoying* it, or even watching it (aside from the one person a million taking one for the team and writing reviews) is cringe.
Disney+ subscriptions are packaged in with various Verizon and Xfinity internet / cable TV plans, along with various other bundles for other entertainment. It reaches a LOT of people. As of the latest Disney investor report (don't know if the spam filter will block the link, but if you search '2023 Annual Report Disney filetype:pdf' it'll be the first result), the two branches of Disney+ had a combined total of 141 million subscribers worldwide. If Critical Drinker and Shadiversity et al. stopped talking about Star Wars entirely, along with 100% of their audiences, those 141 million subscribers would still have advertisements for The Acolyte broadcast on their TVs as screensavers and recommended to them whenever they sit on the couch and try to find something to watch. A decent number would probably watch it.
And if that kind of garbage is all you're watching, your standards for what's good and what isn't will get lower and lower. I don't know a single person who decided to watch The Acolyte after seeing a scathing review of it online. I know several who decided to watch it because it was the first available option on the TV, and who kept watching because it was marginally better than burning out their dopamine receptors on TikTok. They're not being persuaded to watch TV. They were already going to watch TV.
I heard more people mentioning (and mocking) Bud Light during the boycott than I ever had before the boycott, even with Bud Light's legendary ad campaigns like "Real Men of Genius". You can't get to "Talking about modern Star Wars is cringe" without first passing through "Enjoying modern Star Wars is cringe, and let's make fun of modern Star Wars and its enjoyers". You might be past both stages, but the average Disney+ subscriber is not yet at either stage. If you mean the first interpretation, then your proposition is that you want the effect without the cause. That's a hard sell.
The second interpretation, obviously, is going to be an even harder sell. Most of the people attacking modern Star Wars online hate the feeling of helplessness against the seven deadly sins that seem to be swallowing up the world. They write scathing reviews and comments because feeling cathartic rage lets them feel like they're fighting back. If, in addition to the other problems, you tell them that they have to cede further ground and declare that the Left can not only ruin things that are but things that have been...well, you're telling them to embrace the teddy bear from an infamous Critical Drinker review of Doctor Who a few years back. You're telling them to give the Left exactly what it wants in the one area where they think they can fight back.
The Left wants to rewrite history, and your pitch is that we should let history be rewritten. Star Wars isn't just about intersectional feminism now - Star Wars has *always* about intersectional feminism, just as Great Britain has always been full of black royalty.
You might understand why people could object to this.
"The fact is, on a dopamine per second scale, the Right will lose to the Left every single time. But the good news is that the Left have been reduced to only selling dopamine. Their stories and entertainment have long departed from actual meaning. Their trash sends people looking farther and farther afield for better entertainment.
I don’t think we can win this war on scale, but we can certainly try with quality. The future of the Right’s art is in a small, highly focused group of people. The only question is whether we can grow this group to such a critical mass that it can generate discussions spontaneously outside of its influence. Then we’ll know we have something real on our hands."
I'm burying this comment in a locked post that a single-digit number of people will ever read, because it's the only way not to seem like an attack:
Your writing isn't good. The Left is significantly better at dopamine than you are at quality.
You're aware of this already; it takes a tremendous amount of work to write high-quality stories. You've mentioned being in your early 20s. There's a number of Internet artists / writers I know of (Randall Munroe, Sam Hughes, Zach Weiner, the Abstruse Goose guy, Jon Bois, Allie Brosh, Karl Jobst, and Scott Alexander, among many others), and who were all born within a couple years of each other, in 1984±2. All of them were already very active online at 20 years old circa ~2004, when they'd have been (I'm guessing) roughly your age, but not a single one had taken off yet, nor produced anything they'd currently be proud of. It takes years of practice to get good. You know this. You're working on it. I hope to see you get there. I wouldn't be subscribed if I didn't.
But worrying about marketing does not make sense, because right now you're writing fiction for practice, to hone your skills, not to reach an audience or change minds. Jesse Abraham Lucas put it best, a couple weeks ago, on Twitter:
- One reason people talk more about left wing art even in right wing circles is you can criticize left wing art as much as you want without hurting the feelings of someone you care about or "punching right," you can even praise its virtues (showing you to be rational)
- I read something one of us puts out - the skill, the diplomacy required to talk about it objectively, praise and criticize it appropriately, is beyond me. Many creators are simultaneously "examples of great RW art" and "just starting out don't be so harsh." No incentive to growth
- And so I don't talk about it, or perhaps I help to shill it without any grasp of its content, and RW art remains, in this space, a totem, something people are definitely doing because they should be doing it, but not anything people talk about.
- I write poetry, it's all right, I've gotten very little criticism of it, no one's analyzed a JAL poem that I know of. When I have gotten hints of something I could improve, my critics vanish at my response, unwilling to enter the necessary kind of arguments.
- I want critics to be angry at me, I want feuds splitting GCs apart, I want embarrassing poems written in my style mocking me from behind anon accounts, that would mean energy in the system, but there's no energy in the system because it's a totem
- [Separate tweet, not part of the same thread] Also powerful, and useful, are poetry haters, acidic critics who can find something to tear apart about any poem. Some of the finest poets were driven to new heights by their haters.
Lucas puts the absurdity of the situation in sharp relief at the end of his thread. Kipling and Chesterton and Belloc and Frost and Swinburne and Shakespeare all had loads of people in their audiences who cared about poetry, who'd read them if they were good but stop reading them if they were bad (and viciously attack them if they were *really* bad; you should see the gallons of ink spilled about Swinburne in the 1850s). They had market forces to stop their heads from being in the clouds, to give them instant reality checks if they screwed up, and to teach them what actually appeals to people and what doesn't. Lucas doesn't. Neither he nor anyone else writes poetry to reach a wide audience; Sam Garland, as /u/PoemForYourSprog on Reddit, has written multiple poems a day for a decade and a half, gets thousands of sincere upvotes on every one, has more practice and instant feedback than probably any other contemporary poet in the English language, and cannot crack the top million best-sellers on Amazon for either of his anthology books. Poetry is dead.
In the same way, you can't writing novels to reach a wide audience, because if you were trying to reach a wide audience, you wouldn't be writing novels. The novel, as an artform, is almost as dead as poetry. If you wanted to be popular and gain an audience for the purpose of slowly turning them right-wing, you'd be doing the kinds of things that make you popular and gain you an audience. You'd make speedrunning videos, earn five thousand dollars for a 90-second Manscaped advertisement, get acquired by Clover Talent, and (popularity mission accomplished) start slowly edging your audience rightward by refusing to take the Lord's name in vain, declaring "This is a Christian Minecraft server!" as a running gag enough times that your viewers start pretending to act Christian (as a joke), making analogies to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun when grinding for a Doom world record, and spending two and a half hours a day ruthlessly purging your Discord server of transvestite would-be moderators. And that's assuming that you don't just become The Catholic Thinker and review TV shows instead.
You're not in this for the popularity or the money. You have the option of trying to be a 'content creator' and honing your skills at appealing to a huge audience, and the option of trying to be an author and honing your skills at quality fiction-writing, and you've chosen the latter. This isn't a bad thing! But it becomes counterproductive to your goals if you mistake one for the other.
A decent number of people on the Right have reposted your stories on Twitter. Searching for 'Gigaheroes' on Twitter, I see dozens of people recommending your story, linking to it, and praising it. By contrast, I only see a couple people talking about specific story elements (one of whom was egged on by you to read it, and read it for the same reason Critical Drinker watches The Acolyte), and I see a grand total of one person on the Internet quoting any specific line from it. It's not that there are no discussions happening outside 'our' influence - it's that there's no discussions happening *inside* either. That's because 'we' - the small, highly focused group of people that are the future of Right art - are not focused on reading your work.
We don't want to punch right. We don't want to blow out your sparks before they have a chance to catch. We're focused on circling the wagons around our creators the same way the Left circles the wagons around theirs. You want the Right to stand by its authors the way the Left does; this is our best attempt at it. The Left promotes books that it doesn't actually read. So do we.
RW art is a totem, like Lucas says. Use the totem to your advantage. Pour your heart and soul into writing a novel, post about it, and get just enough encouragement from retweets and likes to keep going for the next novel. The speedrunner Wirtual said once that he spent ten thousand hours playing Trackmania because "Trackmania is the outlet for me to experience mastery". Make novel-writing *your* outlet for experiencing mastery. Become intimately familiar with the process. Learn *how* to master a craft. Get so good that occasional lines get shared without attribution, like screencaps of deleted Twitter accounts or 2013-era /pol/, in those occasional 'discussions outside our influence'. Write books that satisfy you, that you really think are first-class work, that let you experience the pride of workmanship and a job well done.
And if, after that, you still want popularity, then quit novel-writing and use what you've learned to do something else.