June 22, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:50:25
3326 How SJWs Destroy Everything | Vox Day and Stefan Molyneux
What is more important to entrepreneurs: making money or virtue signaling? Vox Day joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the way Social Justice Warriors have infected the publishing industry and other artistic/entertainment mediums. With many companies, running a successful business has become secondary to promoting a leftist political ideology at the expense of producing quality products and satisfying an existing customer base. SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Policehttp://www.fdrurl.com/SJW-Always-LieCuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed Americahttp://www.fdrurl.com/cuckservativeMultiple-time Hugo Award nominee Vox Day writes epic fantasy as well as non-fiction about religion, philosophy, and economics. He is a professional game designer who speaks four languages and a three-time Billboard Top 40 Club Play recording artist.Vox Day maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Popoli and Alpha Game, which between them average over 2.2 million pageviews per month.Vox Day's Books: http://www.fdrurl.com/vox-dayVox Day's Blog: http://voxday.blogspot.comFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
We're back with a good friend, Vox Dey.
He is a multiple-time Hugo Award nominee, a professional game designer, writer of epic fantasy novels, and is the author of a book I highly recommend, Social Justice Warriors Always Lie, Taking Down the Thought Police, as well as Cuxervative.
How Conservatives Betrayed America.
Now, if you don't know what the word cuckservative means, you really, really just need to read that book.
Vox maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Populi and Alpha Game, which between them average millions of page views per month.
You better get that right, or Mike Cernovich got to check your math.
And you can find him at voxday.blogspot.com, and we'll put his other links below.
Vox, great to chat with you again.
Good to see you again, Stefan.
So we have, I mean, we both have had experience, you certainly more than me, in trying to battle some of the collectivisty, lefty, social justice warrior aspect of the art world.
I went to the National Theatre School in Canada for a couple of years studying playwriting and acting.
And I worked with agents trying to get published and so on.
And it's an exciting journey, to put it mildly, if you're not in the general, here's some pretty words describing ugly incidents that seems to be the modern form of storytelling.
Now, of course, you have publishing companies, you have worked extensively in I think that it has permeated it entirely.
The entire...
Publishing infrastructure is completely converged, so much so that they don't even have any serious interest in selling books.
They're much more concerned about gatekeeping.
They're much more concerned about selling the political narrative, whatever that happens to be at the moment.
If you wanted to get published in the science fiction and fantasy world right now, You would be much better off to be a black, lesbian, transgender individual writing about some sort of exotic sexual perversions than you would if you were a white male scientist writing about actual science fiction of the sort that you and I would
tend to think of as science fiction.
Well, this is the stuff that I grew up with.
I was a huge science fiction fan, and it was just great storytelling.
You know, there was the occasional dips into quasi-mysticism with Arthur C. Clarke and childhood's ends and stuff like that.
But as far as fantasy and science went, I didn't care.
And I never particularly cared whether it's a man or a woman writing.
I actually...
I grew up on Enid Blyton books in England, and I didn't even find out for many years that it was a woman.
It just never really crossed my mind who wrote.
I just wanted great stories, and that aspect that it's not the quality of the stories, and you're aiming at delivering the best stories to the audience, but rather you are attempting to gain some political agenda, to gain some political end of That is something that never really crossed my mind growing up because, of course, I grew up in a time when this kind of stuff wasn't sort of meat and bone marrow of the entire industry.
And it took me quite a while to realize what a headwind I was sailing against.
Yeah, it's really remarkable to see how things have changed.
I mean, what began happening, the thing that really kicked it all off was around the time that...
The Science Fiction Writers of America changed their name to Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America because there was an active debate that took place at that time and Anne McCaffrey actually threatened to leave unless they changed the rules and endorsed fantasy writers because basically there just weren't very many women writing actual science fiction.
And so, for whatever reason, female writers have always tended to gravitate more towards fantasy rather than to science fiction.
And there's a lot of theories as to why, but regardless, that's what the facts have been.
It's humanities versus STEM, I guess, right?
Exactly.
But in any event, what happened is the same type of thing that we've discussed before.
You had the entryism.
You had the people who were much more interested in the organization and running the organization.
The other critical change that happened around the same time was in order to belong to the SFWA, you needed to re-qualify.
So basically, if you did not maintain your qualifications, which essentially involved publishing a novel I think every two or every three years, I can't remember which...
You know, you were not considered a professional writer and therefore you couldn't be a voting member of it.
Well, you know, it was decided that, well, this isn't fair.
You know, what if Robert Heinlein didn't write a book for four years?
Then how ridiculous would it be that he wouldn't qualify as a professional writer?
But instead of, you know, coming up with some practical things related to, you know, how many books you're selling or something like that, they changed it so that just once you were in, you were in.
As far as I understand it, social justice warriors got in there, began to lower the standards of the organization, and things went to hell in a handbasket after that.
Hmm.
Hello, academia.
But anyway, we'll get to that another time.
It's a totally new concept.
And it's so ridiculous now that, for the most part, the organization is entirely run by so-called science fiction writers, Who, number one, don't write science fiction, and number two, have never published a novel.
Most of the people who are heavily involved in it have managed to qualify by virtue of somehow getting three short stories published.
So they get three short stories published in some marginal publication.
Like Lightspeed or something that most people have never heard of.
And then they join because it's a huge badge of distinction for them.
They feel like they're part of the club now and so they end up getting very involved and they end up running it.
And that's why you basically have the amateurs and the wannabes I'm sorry,
for those who don't know, that's the pile of unsolicited manuscripts that, you know, you kind of sift through looking for the diamond in the rough, so to speak, right?
Right, so every publisher, including ours, I'm the lead editor of Castalia House, we have a number of volunteers who Kindly take their time to go through all the submissions and then weed out most of them, just pass on the best ones to the editors.
And so these people work their way up over time.
So you used to have editors like Campbell, who was a very strong editor, definitely had his idea about how things should be written and that sort of thing.
And you also had strong female editors, like the woman who I think it was for Putnam.
You know, all the juveniles, the classic, you know, tunnel in the sky and space cadet and that sort of thing.
And so, but regardless, you had these strong editors who were not apolitical, but they were mainstream.
And so what happened is, over time, those strong editors got replaced by weaker editors, most of whom were male.
The David Hartwells, the Gardner Dozois, the Patrick Nielsen Haydens.
And those guys, because they were much weaker individuals, they ended up surrounding themselves with people who couldn't challenge them.
And so, in the case of weak men, weak men usually surround themselves with women because they find other men threatening.
And so now we're in a situation where A ridiculous percentage of the people in the publishing industry are women.
I think it's on the order of 80% women.
Now, a lot of the male editors are...
Much older.
I mean, Hartwell died this year.
Bain is dead.
Tom Doherty, who started TOR, he's in his 80s and essentially retired.
And so what you're seeing is that they've been replaced by these SJW oriented women who are very aggressively embracing every aspect of identity politics, of left wing politics, really of left wing politics, really pushing the various gender narratives and that sort of thing.
And that's why you're seeing things like writers like N.K. Jemisin being elevated and given high profile columns in the New York Times and that sort of thing.
And these are not even second rate writers.
I mean, these are third and fourth rate writers at best.
And so the rot has not only infected the publishing companies, it's not only affected the magazines, but it's also affected the awards processes, the professional organizations and organizations.
What's funny about it is that you've basically got a rotten tree.
It looks big.
It looks impressive.
You've got these New York companies with their offices in New York and all that sort of thing.
But their sales are plunging like you would not believe.
And then at the same time, Amazon and the world of self-publishing and indie publishing has created this situation where the best sellers on Amazon are people that you've never heard of.
There are people like B.V. Larson and Von Heppner and David Van Dyke and that girl who wrote the vampire novels and Hugh Howey.
These people are all selling far more books than the quote-unquote big-name science fiction authors.
And you can see this if you go to the Amazon listings.
You'll see that almost all the top...
30 writers, with the exception of J.K. Rowling and George Martin, are people that the average person might not necessarily recognize, whereas the names that you would be more familiar with, the names that you think of as being the big science fiction writers, I think our good friend John Scalzi, I think he's number 50.
You would think that he was top 10, based on the way that The science fiction community talks about them.
They never talk about B.V. Larson or Von Heppner, but those guys sell far more books than anyone that Tor is publishing.
Well, that's a strange thing.
You know, one fundamental aspect of storytelling has to be surprise.
There has to be something that gives you goosebumps.
I remember reading years ago the Thomas Covenant series, and there were like twists and turns, and the same thing was true, of course, with the Harry Potter stuff.
Gives you goosebumps, keeps you alert.
One of the things that drives me insane about the left is the degree to which I know what's coming.
Like, I know if there's a white guy, he's going to be a bad guy.
It's all so predictable.
And that, I think, is one of the things that is hopefully going to be the death of identity politics, is not even so much that it's sort of corrupt and manipulative and We're good to go.
Well, I was watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones tonight, and it was kind of funny because my wife at one point told me just to be quiet because I correctly anticipated practically everything that happened.
I mean, the whole thing with the good guys looking surrounded and then the reinforcements come in just at the nick of time.
And, of course, the bad guy who's behaved very intelligently and rationally – well, not rationally entirely, but he's behaved intelligently and even brilliantly at times.
Shrewd.
Yeah, maybe.
Shrewdly, yes.
That's a better way to put it.
But, of course, promptly, in the interest of the plot, turns into a complete idiot and doesn't withdraw his army but just lets it get slaughtered when he had plenty of opportunity to go, oh, reinforcements for the other side are coming.
Maybe we should withdraw.
The whole thing is just so utterly predictable and it's partly predictable because it is aimed at an increasingly low common denominator.
The Western countries are literally less intelligent than they were in the golden age of science fiction.
We're talking a decline in Anywhere from 6 to 10 points on average, which is massive.
It's something we talk about in Cuxervative, as you know.
But it's not just that.
It's also because SJWs always have to serve the narrative.
And so they can't go too far off the reservation.
Or they're going to be lambasted and attacked for that.
So, you know, SJW fiction is almost by definition boring, because it's not just a case of archetypes and tropes, you know?
I mean, yes, you could say that, well, look, if, you know, you've got the poor farm boy, he's probably going to turn out to be either a magician or a prince, and then, you know, the whole coming of age...
You know, tail and that sort of thing.
But it goes beyond that.
I mean, it goes to the level of detail where you can tell exactly what is going to happen in almost any given scene.
And that's why I find it very difficult to read that sort of fiction.
I've found over time...
I'm reading more and more classic fiction.
I just finished reading Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, and he was writing in the Meiji era in Japan.
It sounds bizarre, but in some ways I can relate to the characters and what's going on in...
A long gone period of Japan than I can with this ridiculous SJW stuff where apparently the issues in 3500 AD are going to be exactly the same as they are in 2016 New York City when they're debating who can use what bathroom.
Well, so when I was, I guess, my late teens, I went to college and I started acting and really liked it and had a good feel for it and was willing to work very hard at it.
And after a couple of years of an English literature degree, I applied for the National Theatre School.
And that's a crazy process to get in.
They take, like, there were 1,600 applicants.
They take 16 people.
And I... I had to submit writing samples, and I did auditions, and I had to take my favorite play and shorten it, or a play that I liked a lot, and shorten it into two minutes, and I did The Zoo Story by Albie.
And eventually got in, and I went for a while, but I remember the very first day I was there, Vox, very first day, we go into the head of the National Theatre School, and he basically gives us one of these, you know, like there's seaweed dripping from our faces, glances of aristocratic contempt, and says, well, you're all very white, young, and bougie.
Which I guess meant white, young, and bourgeois.
You know, that we weren't the correct mix of rainbow hues and so on.
And that was sort of my first inkling as to the degree to which leftism was all over the place in the arts.
And it became somewhat exhausting because the stories are so relentlessly ugly.
You know, that is, you know, and again, I don't mind darkness in stories.
It has its place.
And, you know, I don't even mind like looking at negative stories and so on.
But there's no – there doesn't seem to be a lot of diversity in the stories.
They're sort of relentlessly dark.
The language is often quite beautiful.
But there is this relentless ugliness and smallness and darkness and meanness and the general sapping of nobility and human hope.
And it generally seems to be that they want to take, you know, all the unicorns and sand them down into really sad old – Dray horses.
They want to take all of the nobility and capacity of the human spirit to achieve greatness, to achieve virtue, to inspire the world and turn it into just smallness and meanness and give everyone a sort of third eye that is like this cold, tiny, shrinking ray eye of Sauron diminishing.
Of human potential and that relentless shrinking of the soul ray that I sort of experienced in theater school at the time was pretty rough.
And then I ended up leaving that, went into the business world for a while, quite a while, actually became an entrepreneur.
And then I was involved in the sale of the company that I co-founded and took some time off and I was writing novels, wanted to get back into that.
I started off, I wrote about 30 plays, wrote a bunch of poems, but novels were sort of my favorite place to be.
I got involved in the Canadian writing program and through that met a good writer and very, very poetic writer and got involved with an agent and so on.
And I wrote this book called The God of Atheists, which I labored over night and day for like a year.
And like when it went out to a reader, it got like This review that came back was like, this is finally, we have the great Canadian novel.
Finally, we have a novel of passion and virtue and depth and humor and clarity.
Like, this is a guy with a PhD in literature who was reviewing it.
And I was like, wow, that's it, you know?
And every day I'd go to work and the phone would ring and I'd be like, okay, well, there's got to be somebody with, like, here's, we're going to publish and so on.
And my agent said, oh, I've never seen anything like this, you know.
And yet, the reviews continually came back from the publishing houses.
Beautiful writing, great writing, great characters.
Not interested.
And that was just really, like, how could this be?
You know, reading books, stuff gets published.
It's all over the bookstore.
It's not that great.
And here, you know, here's something of great depth and power.
And everyone, they recognize, oh, that's a wonderful diamond lying there.
I'm just going to walk past it.
It's a wonderful diamond lying there on the beach, just gonna keep walking.
I remember just being like, wow, what don't I understand?
But this is in my eternal experience box.
It's like, what is going on in the planet that I don't understand when this is the outcome of this particular process?
Now, I mean, it seems to make a little bit more sense to me, but at the time, it was really bewildering.
Well, we're publishing a book on Monday that is brilliant.
Our production editor said that he thought it was not only the best thing that we'd ever published, but had the potential to be the best thing that we publish in the near future.
Which is actually kind of remarkable when you consider the fact that we publish John Wright's Awake in the Nightland, which is phenomenal.
And the interesting thing about it is that it was written mostly in the 70s.
And it's written by a guy who, I can't divulge his identity, but the name that we're using is Owen Stanley.
And this is a gentleman who knows more about science, has forgotten more about science than you, I, and 30 other people would know.
I mean, this guy, he's done the groundwork, he's lived with the primitive tribes, you name it.
The best way I can describe it, and I think you'll appreciate this being a student of literature yourself, is if you can imagine W. Somerset Maugham meets Douglas Adams.
That's a pretty good combo.
You know, the guy sent me the book and he said, you know, I wrote this 40 years ago.
You know, I have no idea whether, you know, he said it's, my friends tell me that it's great, but it's totally unpublishable.
And I was thinking, okay, I don't know what that means.
And by the second page, I understood why there was no chance it would ever get published by a conventional publisher today.
And the reason is, it's a novel set in Papua New Guinea, and it's all about the UN mission going in in order to civilize the cannibal tribes there.
And Let's just say that things go very, very, very wrong, and they don't improve.
And, you know, it's hilarious.
I mean, I started laughing on the second page.
So if there's no noble savage, if there's no Rousseauian noble savage, in other words, if there's an accurate portrayal of primitive cultures, then it is radioactive.
Like, it is kryptonite to social justice warriors, right?
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Just to give you one hint about it, there's this sort of old colonial style.
The previous governor is an old colonial hand, and the UN is getting all excited because the tribesmen have really gotten enthusiastic about these toy cars that they're selling.
And all the adult tribesmen are buying them, and they have no idea what they're doing with them, but they're just, you know, hey, look, they finally value some of the stuff that we're offering them.
And the old colonial hand, he says, knowing that the tribesmen have an...
Unerring ability to put one and one together and come up with 17, he decides to go and investigate what they're doing with the cars.
And there's this character in the book who is just absolutely hilarious because he's the tribal philosopher.
And so throughout the book he's trying to interpret what I could see that.
I mean, this is just one little thing in passing, but the entire book is like that, and it's fantastic.
But that kind of book, we can publish that because we're a right-wing, blue science fiction, anti-PC independent publisher.
But, you know, is Macmillan going to publish that?
Is HarperCollins going to publish that?
They would rather burn the author at the stake.
Well, and of course, if this kind of book were to get out to the mainstream reviewers, which of course are necessary to drive a lot of book sales, the mainstream reviewers would recoil with horror because you portray the noble savage in order to bludgeon the values of Western civilization.
They don't care about the noble savage at all, and they know it's not true.
All these people in air-conditioned offices riding their Ubers around Talking about the value of sleeping in dirt in the jungle is ridiculous.
But they like to elevate the noble savage to bludgeon the values of Western civilization.
And if there's no noble savage, if the primitive cultures are portrayed as primitive, then the reviewers will be absolutely appalled, horrified, will try to get people fired, will call it racist, colonialist, imperialistic, the usual garbage that comes out when people are confronted by basic facts of reality about human cultures and civilizations.
So even if they could sell a billion copies, individual careers and lives and reputations and entire social circles would be detonated.
Oh, exactly.
And the thing about this particular book, it's called The Missionaries, and it's by Owen Stanley.
And the particular thing about this book is that the primitives, their way of life is, without question, savage.
I mean, just brutal beyond belief.
the SJWs in the UN.
At least they're honest about it.
But that's what renders this book so completely unpublishable in the mainstream because the values of the gatekeepers in the mainstream publishing industry are precisely the values that are being expressed by not so much the bad guys as
the helpless incompletely over their head would be self-identified heroes of the book who are just so fundamentally unable to deal with the real world as they find it.
At one point, I was talking to the cover artist, and he usually reads a little bit of the book, just enough to get the cover right.
And he said, I gotta tell you, I couldn't put it down.
I read the whole thing.
He said he got me at the point where the head of the mission...
He recoils at the terrible racialist attitudes being expressed by the old colonials and thinks he had never actually heard these views before, although he had read about them in the Journal of Race Relations.
You know, so, I mean, it's just, it is possibly, you know, in modern terms, given what the status quo is now, given what the power structures are now, I mean, this is like an insanely subversive work.
I mean, this is what the work, this is what they want their works to be, except they can't be subversive anymore because they've taken over the institutions.
And so, you know, One of the things that you talked to me about once is, how do we address this?
And it's very clear, there is no saving these institutions.
They need to be burned to the ground, hollowed out, and we need to declare no quarter and take no prisoners.
We need to build new institutions, better institutions, and most importantly, we need to fortify them and keep out the SJWs so they don't do the same damn thing all over again.
Yeah, no, I hear you.
And this is the strange thing, Vox, about this crazy Wild West, modern, new media kind of life, is that I was very excited about the potential of the books I've written, I think seven or eight novels over the time.
I was very excited about the possibility of being published and going to bookstores and signing things and giving speeches and that kind of stuff.
And I thought, ooh, that's going to be great because that traditional jigsaw puzzle is how you assembled a career back in the day.
Right.
Now in Canada, if I remember rightly, a bestseller is 5,000 copies.
5,000 copies.
Man, you're moving a lot of tree.
You're pumping out a lot of wood chip onto the general population.
And having been blocked from that by, I would assume, a bunch of lefties who recognize the quality of the writing and found the content or the themes all the more dangerous because of the quality of the writing.
You know, if it's crappy writing, you don't care about the themes.
But if it's great writing and themes that you find offensive, that's a not good combination.
So having been blocked from that avenue of getting...
My work out to the public.
Well, I ended up taking the route that I've taken and talking and podcasting and videos.
And now, instead of having a bestseller, which is 5,000 books, over 100,000 of my books are downloaded every single month.
100,000 every single month and more.
And this is the weird thing where you say, oh, you know, I'm blocked this way.
I've mentioned this story before, but there's this old story about...
A guy, maybe you know it, a guy who's fired from being a butler because he doesn't know how to read and write.
He's been his butler forever but didn't know how.
And so the guy ends up, he's really sad, he walks down the street and he wants a smoke but he can't find a smoke shop.
So he ends up opening a smoke shop and then he ends up opening more and more and more.
Eventually, he's a really rich guy and he goes to his accountant finally and his accountant says, I need you to read this.
The guy says, well, I actually still can't read and write.
He's like, wow, you've become this rich, famous entrepreneur when you don't even know how to read and write.
Imagine how amazing you'd have been if you did know how to read and write.
Imagine where you'd be.
He said, I know exactly where I'd be.
I'd be a butler to that guy who fired me at the beginning.
So there's this weird thing where we have this, I don't know if it's a case-selected impulse to look at barriers as obstacles, but if you have the will and you have the wherewithal and you have the passion and the drive and the commitment to do good in the world, because art I think is one of the great ways in which good can be done in the world.
The obstacles which you think are kind of blocking you turn out to be this giant catapult that leaps you to a place that is unforeseen.
And so, you know, oh, 5,000 books, boy, that'd be fantastic, you know, or maybe a movie which comes and goes.
And now, you know, we're cooking at over 200 million downloads, 100,000 books a month because I was blocked.
And that's something that I still shake my head from time to time and just realize just what an amazing world it is that we live in now with the potential to communicate directly to people.
Well, one of the things that I said, it was kind of funny.
The SFWA board voted to expel me a couple years ago.
It was kind of a charade, but we'll just take it at face value for now.
They were upset, though, two years later when the rabid puppies and I ended up taking over the Hugo Awards.
Sorry, just because I want people to understand, if you can break that story out a little bit for people, I'd appreciate it.
Okay, it's pretty simple.
Larry Correa is a very popular writer of gun porn, urban fantasy, etc., for Bain Books.
And he's quite good.
And he was getting mocked by some SJWs, and they were basically saying, you know, you're not a real writer, you're not a good writer, you don't have any awards.
Yes, you sell a lot of books, but you don't have any awards.
And so he said, look, that's ridiculous.
It's just a popularity contest.
It's a small popularity contest among a small incestuous group of left-wingers.
And they said, oh, that's not true.
So he said, oh, yeah, and declared his Sad Puppies campaign.
And he picked a couple, you know, just a couple stories that he liked.
And one of them was one of mine, a novelette called Opera Vita Eterna.
And it got nominated and This, of course, vastly offended the SJWs.
They have indicated their disapproval.
I'm supposed to go away.
Here, suddenly, I've got a Hugo nomination.
They duly made sure that I didn't win it, which was fine.
The mistake that they made was that they accused me of having gamed the award system So that I could get this one nomination for a novelette.
Because, and I can't remember who said this, Vox, social justice warriors always project.
Who was it?
That wise young man who said that somewhere.
Social justice, that's you actually.
But of course, you games the system.
It's our job to game the system.
What do you do in gaming it?
To me, it still boggles my mind.
I know they project.
I literally wrote the law.
And yet, I still can't believe sometimes that they think I give a damn about this sort of thing.
So anyhow, but one thing I do give a damn about is I'm a game designer and I'm a good one.
I'm not a great one, but I'm a good one.
And so to have somebody say that I gamed a system in order to get one nomination in a minor category and lose, that was directly offensive to me.
So I thought, well, if they think I gamed it, the best way for me to demonstrate that I didn't game it is to actually game it.
Once they see what me gaming it looks like, then my innocence will be obvious.
Anyhow, I looked at the rules, I figured out how to do it, and we ended up taking something like 57 of the 81 nominations.
Of course, this was...
The world was coming to an end.
There were stories in National Public Radio, the New Zealand Herald, the Guardian was running articles about once a week, without ever talking to me, of course.
We want to cloud it with facts.
George R.R. Martin...
I know you're busy not writing your next book, but could you talk to us again about what Vox is doing?
Seriously, they talked to him about what I'm doing more than they talked to me.
So anyhow, they were upset.
They ended up giving out no awards in five of the categories.
It was terrible, whatever.
And then they all decided that they're going to stop me.
They ran a year-long campaign to stop me.
That first one was kind of an alliance between me and some others.
The sad puppies.
The behavior of the SJWs in science fiction was so obnoxious that they ended up driving a lot of the sad puppies into my rabid puppies camp.
So after all this, you know, they passed some rules changes that will take effect the following year.
I mean, they pulled out all the stops.
They exhibited mass disapproval in dozens of media stories.
They called us every name in the book.
You name it, they did it.
And The end result of their big campaign to demonstrate how lacking in support I was was that we ended up taking 69 of the nominations this year.
Excellent.
They're good at intimidation, but they're very bad at combat.
They're good at scaring people, but they're very bad at actually showing up to the conflict in a successful kind of way.
And the other thing, too, is that...
I mean, I can't believe I'm saying this kind of stuff, Fox, but it's like...
Right-wing culture is, to me, the only subversive culture that's going on in the world at the moment, and particularly alt-right culture.
But the left has just become this giant, boring monolith.
Ooh, you're so edgy, you know?
But it's the right-wing culture that, to me, is conservative culture that, to me, is the most subversive to the dominant order, because, you know, there's been this Meet the boss, the new boss, same as the old boss stuff going on with the left where they felt all, you know, proud and chest-thumpy to have taken over these institutions.
But now they've just become the same boring power mongers, people with too much time on their hands, all status symbol oriented and all virtue signaling empty bullshit.
And now the people who are challenging that narrative are the people who are the real subversives.
And that's really tough for the left because the left do pride themselves on their edginess.
And to me, Writing another horrible story about horrible people doing horrible things.
Sorry, Orange is the New Black, you're just not that edgy anymore.
The real edginess to me is occurring when basic facts of reality are being reasserted, like Papua New Guinea savages and how they behave, like the stuff that Ann Coulter writes about in terms of immigration, like the stuff that the alt-right is talking about in terms of race realism.
That is the real subversive.
Now, I don't know that it's made it much to art, as you point out, this guy was writing Owen was writing in the 70s and he's kind of kept this literary body behind him for quite some time.
It's like a mattress girl penance.
But the real subversiveness to me is coming out not of the left these days.
Very, very boring.
Very predictable.
Very cliched.
And to me, anybody who can stand cliches is not an artist.
To me, the whole point of art is to dig so deep into your original and lived experience that cliches become impossible.
That's fully embodied.
By the left.
All they do is animate these zombie cliches and think that they're being edgy.
Well, the other thing that's important to keep in mind is that we're the ones who are having fun.
It's always funny when they try to say, frequently, you'll probably see it on Twitter, that you'll see people saying that, well, you're a bad person.
And my response is always, What part of Supreme Dark Lord do you not understand?
They don't really know what to do when they're like, well, but you're evil.
Yes, I'm the supreme dark lord of the evil legion of evil.
We are far more evil than you understand in your worst nightmares.
Practically every week, there's somebody writing a comment on...
There's this guy, I don't know who it is, but he writes these little vignettes about the tortures that are being performed in my dark dungeons and all this sort of thing.
And they're always totally over the top and they're always topical and they're always funny.
And even people who are on the other side, people who are absolutely directly opposed to me, they'll write to me and say, okay, I hate you and everything you do, but that was pretty damn funny.
And after the Hugo nominations this year, I put out a press release and I sent it to the Wall Street Journal, to New York Times, all the people that had written about the Hugo Awards the year before.
And the whole thing was written in character as the Supreme Dark Lord.
And basically talking about how we were taking a kinder, gentler approach this year.
And that instead of flaying people and rolling them in salt, we were only going to flay them.
And then talking about how I was hurt that we were accused of homophobia.
And so that's why I was pleased that we were able to help Chuck Tingle's Space Raptor butt invasion.
The first erotic gay dino porn show Story to win a Hugo Award.
We were proud to demonstrate our complete lack of homophobia.
In fact, we argued that if it didn't win the award, that would prove how homophobic science fiction was.
They couldn't even talk about it.
They were so upset.
That subversion that you're talking about, that mocking of Those in the positions of power and that sort of thing is definitely in and of the alt-right at this time.
Well, you know, professional organizations, I've always had a bit of trouble with.
It seems to me that they lay kibble to sort of send you in the wrong direction.
You know, like, because, you know, a communicator, a writer, an artist should be concerned with the marketplace, should be concerned with how many thoughts, visions, ideas, and paradoxes you can jam into people's brains voluntarily.
That's your measure.
And it seems to me that whenever you're doing a really great job of, you know, slapping people on the face with the wet fish of curiosity that waking them up...
That the powers that be, and these days tends to be the social justice warriors, they kind of freak out.
Oh my God, he's talking directly to the people, he's waking them up, whatever.
And then what they do is they say, well, what you're doing is base and ignoble and common, you know, as they talked about with this other writer.
And so what they do is they say, well, what you really need is our approval, which is refined and elevated and very, very sophisticated, don't you know?
And so they'll put these pellets, these little pellets called awards.
And they're designed to lead you away from the market into the approval of people who are bad at the market.
Because if you're good at the market, you're out there facing the market, not doing all this political machinations behind the scenes.
And so it's like they're just trying to draw you away.
And I've always been really suspicious about these...
These awards, these things, like people say to me, oh, Steph, you know, you should go become a professor of philosophy or something like that.
It's like, are you kidding me?
So what?
I mean, I'm 49 years old, so you're saying what I should do is spend the remainder of my life attempting to influence a couple of hundred people who are going to pass through my graduate school program as opposed to millions of people around the world with what I'm doing now.
How could that possibly be a step up?
And being able to bring things to the market and avoid the sort of kibble lure off the cliff Of infinite approval.
It's a form of paralysis.
They're trying to paralyze you by having you focus on awards rather than connecting with your readers and the audience.
And I think many a great soul has been taken down by being led in that direction towards the approval of people who are only offering you approval if you don't do the right thing anymore.
Well, if you look At the numbers, I mean, it's really kind of striking.
You can see it on Amazon.
You look up the books that won the awards.
It doesn't matter which award.
The big literary awards or the science fiction awards, whatever.
For the most part, what you'll see is that the recent winners, like in the last, I don't know, 15 years, most of them Have Amazon sales ranks that are at least one order of magnitude lower than books that were winning awards 30 years ago.
You know, 30, 40 years ago, you had books like Frank Herbert's Dune.
You had books like Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.
They were selling very well and they were winning awards because they were memorable books and they were good books.
Now they either give out awards to books that nobody's ever read, like Joe Walton's Among Others is just this...
This incestuous ode to books that she liked when she was a kid.
I mean, the whole thing is entirely self-referential.
It's of no appeal to anyone who doesn't like exactly the same books that she did as a kid.
How is this...
This is not only something that is not going to be read in the future, it's something that's not read in the present.
And...
And so I think that, but at the same time, there's this tremendous opportunity that is now being presented to the alt-right in the culture wars, especially in the area of book publishing,
because Amazon has completely destroyed the power of the gatekeepers, and then compounding that Is the fact that the gatekeepers made some very serious blunders in the last year.
And the percentage of sales that they provide now, both e-books and print, have dropped by about 50% in the last 14 months.
Wow.
Really?
That big?
Yeah, if you look at it, there's a report called Author Earnings that's done by Hugh Howey.
And he was one of the first big Amazon successes.
And he does this fantastic job of data analysis with a partner of his.
And they go through and they basically break down something like the top 200,000 selling authors on Amazon.
So they cover practically everybody that matters.
And it's really remarkable because you can see from the charts that they do that the big five's share of revenue is As well as units sold have dropped precipitously.
I mean, dropped by more than 50%.
And that's in the past just a little bit more than a year.
And I think what happened is that Amazon allowed...
Remember that battle between Amazon and Hatchet?
Amazon was actually trying to save the major publishers from themselves.
They knew what price points would sell.
And of course, the major publishers were overly concerned about protecting their print sales versus their e-book sales.
And so, they wanted to keep their e-book sales high.
And so, Amazon finally just gave up and said, okay, fine.
We're not going to discount your books for you.
You just price them however you want.
And what they've done, you know your economics.
They price their books way too high, both the e-books and the print books.
But here's where it gets really interesting, and this is something that you and I should talk about with regards to your books, because I just signed four authors to book contracts in the past three days.
And what's interesting about them is that these are authors that we, as a small independent publisher, have no business Normally being able to publish, because these guys sell a truckload of books on Amazon.
E-books.
Now what's happened is that the distribution channel, the print distribution channel, is collapsing.
The retail sales, Barnes& Noble, who knows how much longer they'll even be around.
I expect them to go out of business within 18 months.
Or do a bankruptcy thing.
And so what's happened is that instead of buying print books at the bookstores, people are buying print books on Amazon.
But on Amazon, nobody knows you're a dog.
On Amazon, nobody knows that you're a little publisher.
And here's where it gets really interesting, is that the big publishers have a very limited capacity for producing print books, especially hardcovers.
They have a limited number of slots per year.
So even fairly successful authors, even authors like Orson Scott Card, they're not guaranteed a hardcover.
But because of the new way that technology has come around...
Because publishers like ours, we can produce hardcovers as easily as we can produce paperbacks, and we can get them distributed through the same channels that they do, and we can even do higher quality because we don't accept returns.
The reason they do dust covers, I don't know if you knew this, but the reason that they stick to doing dust covers rather than that nice case-bound stuff is Is because they want to make it easy for the bookstores to return the books to them.
So when the bookstore takes off the dust cover and sends it back to them, they can ship it back more cheaply and then they just throw the book away.
But because we're small and we don't accept returns, we do these nice, beautiful case-bound things that look like it's the same quality as those big, expensive textbooks.
So what's interesting is that we're now seeing There's an opportunity in the market where we are able to do hardcovers and paperbacks that the big guys can't do.
We can come out with 12 hardcovers in a month.
They can't do that because they can't get that into the channel.
And so I think that we're about to see a shakeup in the publishing industry of the sort that we haven't seen since Amazon first came onto the scene.
And lordy lordy, isn't that not somewhat slightly overdue?
Because I think people don't understand.
That's an arrogant way of putting it, but I'm going to stick with it anyway.
People don't understand the degree to which Political narratives, the social justice warrior leftist narrative, not only is it an immense overhead, in other words, you're paying a bunch of people who aren't focused on the market but are focusing on pushing a particular political agenda.
Not only is that excessive overhead, which is going to cut into your profits, But they are willing to burn your audience to the ground to promote their narrative.
The narrative is the ide fix.
It's, you know, asking the social justice warriors to stop pushing the narrative is like asking an OCD guy to stop washing his hands.
He may interrupt it very briefly, but he's going to write.
It's a compulsion.
It's an obsessive compulsion.
And businesses, and again, to go back to Mike Sonovic's excellent tweets, you know, he points out that, you know, Apple and Twitter and so on, a lot of them are kind of pushing this political agenda.
And that means that they can't really do great business because they've got this distraction, this let's try and manipulate people into pursuing what we consider to be the good rather than just delivering great products or great stories or great services.
That is catastrophic.
You know, there's investors out there who say, ah, social justice warriors hit the board.
I'm now shorting the stock because it's only a matter of time until it all blows up.
And the social justice warriors, allowing them to take control of foundational decisions in your organization, man, the countdown clock is set from there.
Well, I can give you two examples.
That are relevant just to things that happen today.
One of those authors that we signed to a contract, we just signed two of his books today.
His name is Nick Cole.
He was dropped by HarperCollins.
He wasn't dropped.
His book was cancelled by HarperCollins because an editor was so offended by a small plot point in his science fiction novel Wherein the aliens thought less of the humans because of abortion.
They were an alien race that was very fixated on their young, and they couldn't believe that humans aborted their young.
And what a great way to explore the issue.
It's great.
But the bizarre thing was, this wasn't even a major plot point.
This was just one of the things fleshing out the differences between the races.
And the SJW editor at HarperCollins was so offended by this, and so angered by this, that they cancelled the book.
And his books sell well.
He wasn't one of their top authors, but he was definitely one of their up-and-coming authors.
And so it was interesting because on the blog, we kind of supported him a bit.
And there was no way.
It didn't make any sense.
He sells plenty of e-books on his own.
He self-published it.
But we talked about it and I said, hey, why don't you let us handle your print?
You keep your e-book.
We'll do the hardcover.
We'll do the paperback.
And he said, yeah, absolutely.
And so because they cut him over...
Minor political point that the editor didn't like.
Now we've got him and we've got several of his books.
We actually signed a third book that we're publishing the whole shebang, the e-book, the hardcover and the paperback.
The other issue that happened today or recently was someone at Stanford came out and was demanding...
I wanted to know why games could not also include socially beneficial messages inside them.
In the middle of Doom 2016, we're supposed to stop and get a message about recycling.
After you've literally ripped an alien in half and then blown 10 of them to shreds and shot the head off another one, You know, then apparently you should sit down and get a lecture on not raping college girls.
Or gun control.
Or gun control.
Yeah, better yet.
So, you know, I mean, the thing is, is that nothing is going to stop them.
And that's why all we need to do to win is show up.
Well, economics are going to stop them, isn't it?
I mean, these companies tend to perform relatively badly over the long run, right?
Yeah, over time.
But the thing is, is that they've got a lot of, because they took over fairly, you know, reasonably solid structures, it takes a while to run them down.
You know, I mean, for example, you look at Tor books.
Okay.
Doherty is out of the picture.
Hartwell's dead.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a Stalinist lunatic.
His big successful signing is John Scalzi.
He handed him $3.4 million, and Scalzi promptly got writer's block, isn't publishing a book this year, and we'll see if he publishes one next year.
Frankly, sorry to interrupt, Vox, I can see $3.4 million staring down at you as a little bit of performance anxiety.
That's public lovemaking on the Jumbotron.
So anyway, go on.
Exactly.
But the point is that Tor Books is the biggest publisher in science fiction and fantasy.
Now think about all the big science fiction and fantasy franchises that have come out in the past 15 years.
Harry Potter, Hunger Games, a bunch of other YA-related things.
What's the one thing all of them have in common?
Absolutely none of them were published by Tor Books, the biggest publisher in science fiction and fantasy.
That's because the stuff that they're looking to do is all SJW oriented, and that's why they're going downhill rapidly.
Our production editor, in fact, he just commented today, he's a Gene Wolfe fan, they published Gene Wolfe, and he noticed that they have changed the quality of the paper and the margins.
They've shrunk the margins so they can use less paper because obviously they're trying to cut their costs.
Now, but they do have an advantage is because they have the rights to publish the Frank Herbert books from Dune.
They have the rights to publish the Orson Scott card stuff.
So they have an ability to Basically, they're supporting their SJW efforts on the basis of work that was done on the past.
It's like all the lefts.
They just pillage the past and pretend they're contributing to the present.
Precisely.
But that's also what allows them to stick around longer than we would normally think they could.
But that doesn't matter.
What is exciting to me is that we have the ability to Now we have the ability to create and build anew.
Just two weeks, three weeks ago, we published a book called Brings the Lightning by a former South African Defense Forces soldier named Peter Grant.
Very interesting guy.
He was a There's a lot of white males in Westerns, just for those who don't know.
Right, exactly.
So he called me up and said, hey, Vox, I'm really interested in writing a Western.
And I said, I'm a big Louis L'Amour fan.
Send me what you got.
Give me some of that good Zane Grey action, right?
Right.
Well, I have to say, I was impressed because he was the first guy...
I think, to out-gun porn Larry Correa.
I mean, at one point I said, I don't want to be critical.
I mean, you know I'm pro-gun and all that sort of thing, but do you think maybe five pages on...
On how best to oil your cult, your Navy.
And everything is absolutely historically precise, right down to the distinction between the cult that was used by the Army at the time and the cult that was used by the Navy at the time.
And so it's fantastic.
It's about a Confederate Civil War veteran who...
He goes home and realizes that there's no place for him at home anymore because most of where he was from, it was mostly pro-union.
And his sister is going to marry a union guy and take over the farm, and so he just realizes there's no place for me here.
And so he goes west.
And there's all sorts of stuff that I didn't know about the historical west because Louis L'Amour covered some things, but he didn't really do the post-Civil War stuff much.
It was really fascinating learning about the way that the Union, pro-Union people used to bushwhack the Confederate veterans going home after the war because they knew they could get away with it.
There's this whole sort of...
Tension to it that I wasn't used to reading in some of the Lou Lamour.
It was a little bit more like Zane Grey in that way.
But, you know, it's heroic.
It's a white man learning to survive the challenges of the West and those terrible, scary Indians and triumphing.
Through his own wits and through his own courage.
And then it's, of course, like I said, full of guns.
I mean, again, there's no way that Brings the Lightning was ever going to get published by any mainstream publisher.
Because not only is it a moribund genre as far as they're concerned, but there's guns in it, there's heroism, and There's love, and there's perseverance.
All stuff that they absolutely hate.
But now, it doesn't matter that they hate it.
It's out.
It's not only out, but it's selling very well.
The hardcover just came out.
The paperback's going to be out in two days.
And we don't need...
To concern ourselves with what the gatekeepers think, what the reviewers think.
Well, this is a strange thing, and I'm adjusting to this as I sort of peruse what's going on online these days.
Fox, but it's a strange thing now, and this is probably old news to you, but not to me, which is the degree to which, and it's so recent, it's blowing my mind.
Social justice warrior attacks used to be something that people really dreaded, really feared.
And you talk about this in your book.
Because it reveals as much about your supposed friends and allies sometimes as it does about everything else.
Right.
But I don't know what's happened.
If I had to put a time frame, it seems to be in the last six to eight months.
Maybe it coincided with not just the rise of Donald Trump, but the obviously overwhelming success of Donald Trump relative to expectations.
But now...
Being shot at in the past meant you were a bad guy.
You know, the cops were shooting at you.
You were a bad guy.
Now, it's like a badge of honor.
Social justice warriors are attacking me and everyone's like, good for you!
That means they're only shooting you because you're over the target kind of thing.
That's just been weird in Versal.
We're now to be attacked.
By sort of mainstream media.
It's now viewed as a sort of necessary badge of honor.
It's like a hazing ritual to get to the next level.
It's the boss fight, you know, that doesn't end the game but at least gets you to the next level.
That is a remarkable reversal, and the degree to which that not only has defanged the monster, but has rendered the monster the opposite of what it intends, right?
They intend to get conformity by attacking you and isolating you and all that.
But now, this is how people meet each other.
This is how people get their tribe, their clan, their friends, their allies.
The attack draws people in to circle the wagons to defend, to protect, to fight back.
I'm telling you, like, I mean, you know, a student of history, I should know, right?
The pendulum swings, but man, it has swung fast over the last half year or a little bit more.
Well, it's really heartening.
You know, for me, it was...
I mean, I didn't care about being an SFWA. I didn't have anything to do with the social stuff and wasn't involved in it.
But for me, it was really significant.
Excuse me.
It was really significant when...
I contacted John Wright.
We had just started Castalia House.
We originally started it to publish my books.
But then we started thinking, well, we should really publish some other folk stuff too.
So I really like John Wright's books.
Excuse me.
And I called him up.
And he was kind of like, who are you?
And you're calling from where?
And I have no idea who you are.
And then I gave him a little more...
And I said, wait a minute.
Are you the guy who was kicked out of SFWA? I said, yeah, that's me.
He said, I will happily work with you.
What do you want?
What can I do for you?
And now he's our most significant writer.
And in the same way, Chernovich has been on here.
Chernovich is like my brother.
I mean...
I go to him for advice.
Castelli is publishing his new book on Trump, which is going to be coming out soon.
He really had a major effect on how I approached the different projects that we're doing.
He has this very, as you know, upbeat, aggressive, entrepreneurial spirit that And he really helped me address some of the, you know, sort of bourgeois upper middle class hangups that I had that were getting in my way.
Yeah, Sunovich, just for those who don't know, he doesn't have bowls.
He has portable beanbags.
I assume he just never needs a place to sit.
So that's just my particular take.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just funny.
He's just so energetic all the time.
It feels like when you have dinner with him or something, afterwards you feel like you're at a Tony Robbins seminar or something.
Contact high from testosterone.
But by the same token, Roosh just came out with a new book.
I don't know if you have come across yet, but it's called Free Speech Isn't Free.
And it's not what you would expect from the guy who wrote Bang and 60 Lays in 30 Days or whatever.
I mean, he's really moved beyond the pickup artistry.
But what's astonishing about the book, aside from the fact that it's like, oh my gosh, Roosh is actually sounding wise here, but...
But what was really astonishing about it was that he chronicles in very, very close detail the extreme extent that the SJWs in the media and in politics went to try to destroy them.
I mean, here's a guy, he just called a meetup of 40 people.
And the Canadian media and the governor of Toronto and members of parliament were angrily denouncing him.
English newspapers and German newspapers were sending camera crews to his parents' home.
I mean, it was the worst case of unjustified media overkill I've ever seen or heard of.
You know, and some people were telling me, okay, look, you know, I mean, you're an evangelical Christian.
You know, he's a sort of notoriously hedonistic pagan, etc., etc.
But, you know, how can you support him?
And a lot of people were trying to drive a wedge in between the two of us because they wanted him isolated.
They didn't want him being supported and stuff.
So I just looked at it and said, okay, he's my guy, they're attacking him, and you rally to the colors.
And it's not just me, but it's the 537 vile faceless minions, it's the dread ilk, it's the whole social media army.
Because now, the SJWs have learned that If you mess with one of us, we're all coming after you.
It's kind of funny.
I very much doubt that Cernovich has any idea what Scalzi has written.
I don't think he has ever read a single word that Scaltzy's written, but he pounds on him so mercilessly that I sometimes feel bad for Scaltzy.
I'm supposed to be the main target, but...
And then you've got Milo, and then there's a few others as well.
And the SJWs, I think they're beginning to realize that their whole divide and conquer, isolate and discredit and disemploy and all that sort of thing.
I think they're beginning to realize that we've figured that out.
We have successfully not only come up with a defensive strategy...
But we're counter-attacking.
That's why you're seeing the SJW list that one of my readers put up after I had suggested the idea.
It's got hits that are in the millions now.
It's only been around for like a month.
I think that what you're talking about is just the beginning of a groundswell that is going to take the pendulum back and it's going to swing the pendulum back very hard because But I think that we need to continue to build on that because art is an aspect of culture.
And culture underlies politics.
Culture drives politics.
And that's the problem that the political right has never understood.
They've focused on the politics and they've left the culture to, you know, essentially they've abandoned it to dry up and die.
Yes, people get their emotional reactions to particular political proposals based upon, you know, the endless waves of emotional programming that art is capable of.
And certainly, you know, in the absence of philosophy, which of course, you know, you need art to even build up a respect for philosophy.
In the absence of philosophy, people make their decisions emotionally.
And what better way is there to program people's emotions to a particular reaction than to Give them endless scenarios of moral goodness and moral badness and punishment and reward and put all the pretty people in the social justice warrior row and all the evil smokers with sallow skin and red eyes and, you know, the other role.
You program people emotionally and that's what art is fantastic at doing because art is more than just the books that you read.
Art...
Art is involved in religion.
Art is involved in nationalism.
Art is involved in all in-group preferences.
And it is much more than, you know, the TV and the books and so on that people read.
It is the foundational way by which people navigate the world and make decisions.
And I think it was Gavin McInnes I saw on a TV show.
A study came out recently that pointed out that women who stay home To raise families and be house homemakers and so on.
A very noble profession, if not the most noble profession in my opinion.
But a study came out that showed that these women were far happier than women who went out to work.
Like crazy margins.
Like it was more than 50% of the women who stayed home said their lives were very satisfying.
And it was like one-seventh of the women who went out to work.
And so Gavin McInnes was pointing out this basic fact.
This woman was sort of shredding him about his...
And he's like, but there's the fact that statistically you're much more likely to be happy if you stay home.
And, you know, you can see the audience is like, well, why are they reacting in this kind of way?
They're reacting in this kind of way because of decades of programming of, you know, the career woman being the good person and the stay-at-home mom being neurotic or a frustrated lesbian or like whatever it's going to be, you know?
And they're reacting in an emotional way to facts and erasing, blowing away the facts because of their programmed emotional reactions.
And yeah, I mean, definitely the high ground of art needs to be taken back I think that because the left is so monomaniacal and OCD on their political message, people escape tyranny eventually, I think, through boredom, particularly artistic tyranny.
The very argument that used to be very common in art, the argument that the naive idealist, Was going to be squashed by reality and the grizzled veteran who would try to impart his wisdom to the naive idealist was racing against the clock.
The naive idealist would be doing stupid things, putting himself in danger, and the grizzled man eventually would try and find a way to transfer the knowledge or not.
And the result would be...
And now, it seems to me the social justice warriors, they've become that sort of like what artistically used to be portrayed as the naive fantasist, the idealist.
You know, always the guy who's...
The guys in the First World War movies who were the most enthusiastic to combat the Bosch, you know, you know that their clock was going down pretty quick.
Whereas the more cunning and wise warriors...
This goes back to George Bernard Shaw...
Arms on the man, the chocolate cream soldier, the man who's like, it's just a job.
You try and stay alive.
It's the guys who are like, I'm fighting for this, that, and the other.
This naive idealist who was a figure of mockery from the ancient world seems to have kind of vanished from the world as a whole.
And I think that's the result of the social justice warriors not wanting to put themselves in the lead role of an ancient tale.
Well, I think that's part of it.
I think that also part of it is that...
One of the artifacts of Christianity's influence on Western art is hope.
You know, there's that verse, these three things remain, faith, hope, and love, the greatest is love, etc., etc.
Well, I mean, love is something that is universal.
And...
I read a fair amount of Japanese literature.
That was one of my areas of study in college.
It's interesting to me that one thing that you'll notice if you read Japanese literature is, number one, it's incredibly fatalistic.
And number two, it is more likely to end with a suicide than with a marriage, which is kind of startling for a Westerner.
It's just like With 33,000 people a year in Japan offing themselves every year, it's not surprising that it's part of the literature.
What kind of cracked me up about reading Kokoro is that it's considered one of the classics and it's read in schools the way that Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye or Giants in the Earth are read.
And practically everybody in the book, pretty much everybody except for the protagonist, kills himself.
After long, pensive discussions about why it's the right thing to do, and I'm just thinking, even the most lunatic Western SJW would not allow that book to be taught to 14-year-olds.
The different cultures have their different traditions, and one of the traditions of the West is hope.
And in addition to that, I mean, obviously faith, specifically the Christian faith, is something that's been part of our art tradition for a long time.
And also beauty.
You know, Umberto Eco has a great book.
I've got a big hardcover.
It's on beauty, and then on the flip side is on ugliness.
And one thing that you notice about the...
Counter art.
I mean, you know, because what they're doing isn't really, I mean, we call it art.
It fits in that category.
But it's really, there's nothing of the conventional, traditional spirit of art about it because it's intentionally ugly.
You know, these are literally ugly people.
I don't know if you've ever seen the SJWs in science fiction.
I mean, they look like Mutants out of some sort of radioactive waste pit.
What they produce is a wrecking ball to a beautiful building.
An architect adjusts the building and so does the wrecking ball, but they're not the same thing.
Right, exactly.
Whether you're talking about the whole Bauhaus architecture, I remember we were visiting a city in Europe and it was supposed to be a very pretty city.
And it was very green.
There's a lot of vegetation and stuff.
But everything that had been built in the post-war period looked like a pillbox.
Brutalism is not a very kind word to name your movement, but it's accurate.
I mean, everything was concrete.
Unpainted concrete.
And...
Apparently, I went on a rant for about 15 minutes about it.
My dad said he wished I had recorded it because he's like, I've never heard...
It's soul-crushing.
Soul-crushing stuff.
It is.
But that's why art matters.
And that's why it's important for us on the right, whether we're on the Christian right, whether we're on the atheist right, whatever...
We still have the capacity to recognize beauty.
We still have the capacity to hope.
We still have the capacity to love.
And one thing that I've noticed about a lot of the SJWs is that very, very few of them have children.
Mm-hmm.
Now, part of that's because they're unattractive.
But part of it is because they are...
Even the turkey baster runs away, or hops away, I guess.
But sorry, go on.
But, I mean, it's really remarkable when you look at it and you realize how few children they have.
And what you realize is that they're hopeless, soul-destroying, ugly works of counter-art people.
Are reflections of their own self-image.
When you...
When you write, I mean, here's one thing that's interesting.
You know I have the Alpha Game blog where we talk about sociosexual rank and hierarchy.
One thing that's really remarkable, and a friend of mine and I have been talking about doing a book on it, is that if you know the sociosexual rank of the author, you can quite often predict what is going to happen in the book down to the color of the hair that Of the female love interest.
The lower the socio-sexual rank, the more bizarre the hair color, I would assume.
No, no.
What it is, is a gamma male will, if she's the girl who, without warning, and with no signs of any interest previously, and for no real reason that the reader can figure out, suddenly jumps in bed with the guy, she will have red hair.
Ah, interesting.
Always.
The vixen, the sort of evil seductress who tries to tempt but can't, almost invariably has black hair and slightly dark skin.
Hmm.
And the scary girl who rejects him but gets his comeuppance later is almost always blonde.
I mean, we tested this.
We came up with this theory because I've just been thinking.
And then we started looking it up in different books.
And it was amazing because the more that the author was a fat little bald guy who quite clearly had not received much attention from women in his life...
Basically, the worse off he was, the more accurately this picture became.
It's really remarkable.
Even if you apply it to your own books, what's funny is that you and I are not immune to this.
This is something that affects all of us.
Somebody said, if you want to improve your books, you need to learn how to write less intelligent characters.
Because in A Throne of Bones, they pointed out quite accurately that in A Throne of Bones, almost all of the perspective characters are highly intelligent, self-confident, Um, many of them are leaders and, uh, they, you know, they're, they're in that way.
They're too similar.
They're very different personalities, but all of them are the same type of male figure.
And if you look at, at some of my other books, you can see that, that, that's something that I do because that's what I know.
And so, um, you know, we, we can even apply this, this sort of, uh, social sexual theory of literature and use it to improve our own writing.
I'm using it now in the book that I'm working on because I realize that this is a deficiency and if I want to cover the whole range of human experience then I need to also figure out how to address the gamma.
I need to figure out how to represent the delta.
And so it's an interesting way to approach it.
But that's the kind of stuff that we can do.
And this gets back to that cultural programming area that you talked about.
As we incorporate that thinking into our art, it is going to become more and more important.
common and more and more implicitly understood, even if people don't understand it explicitly.
Well, yeah, because there's a kind of art that is propagandistic in nature that attempts to persuade you of a particular worldview that is actually counter to your lived and empirical experience.
And that is very tricky stuff because people who have, I mean, to me, that's, it basically, it's categorized insanity.
You know, it goes under the eye in the bookstore because we call people who reject the lived empirical, rational, sensual experience, people who reject that, we call them crazy.
And there are people whose craziness is so deep and so pervasive that they can't stand to see sane people around them.
So what they do is they spew out all of this manipulative stuff designed to disorient and cut people off from the basic lived empirical evidence of their senses.
And it's very powerful.
You know, crazy people can be extraordinarily convincing because...
The only way they can survive is to make other people crazy, otherwise they get that they're all crazy and they have a sort of, I think, personality collapse or mental breakdown or nervous breakdown or whatever you'd want to call it.
So they're very insistent in projecting their craziness out into the world.
A lot of what seems to be coming out of the right, or the alt-right in particular these days, is like, to hell with that, go back to your simple, lived, sense data experience.
What are the actual facts of reality that you have lived and processed, and I am going to reflect those back to you.
Now, it happens in memes, and it happens in tweets, and it happens in blog posts.
I think it's starting to happen in art.
I mean, the book that I wrote, the novel, I guess now, 15 years ago, The God of Atheists, Yeah, it was skeptical of feminism.
It was, I guess, now I know why it was never published.
Just even in this conversation, it sort of clicked to me.
I read a speech from it recently, which was, you know, there was a relativistic social justice warrior as one of the main characters.
And what happened to him in the novel might have been a bit of a clue as to why it didn't work.
But to me, it is really a pushback against madness.
Like literal, not just like, oh, it's kind of crazy, but like this insistent, you have to view the world this way, despite the fact that your empirical evidence goes completely against it.
That is a very compulsive, there's almost no people more compulsive than crazy people, which is why they tend to win.
Because they're heavily invested in this manipulated worldview, this craziness.
And other people are like, yeah, yeah, I'm busy.
I can get by without having to project because I'm sane.
And that level of insistence, I think what's pushing back now is this...
Get out of this florid Mobius strip of all this crazy stuff that's been set up and repeatedly hammered into you.
Get back to your simple lived experience.
And if art can find a way to facilitate that and remind people of the reptile brain, of the senses...
Without losing, you know, the higher, the elevation, the virtue, the hope, the desire for improvement, I think it's really very, very powerful because it's no longer – when you have that level of perspective and that level of – Sinking into the base evidence of your senses and what you've actually lived through in life.
It's not even like you're an icebreaker anymore.
You're sailing through fog.
And that is a very powerful thing.
And I don't know any particular way to fight back against that, except by the rage and manipulation that exposes the crazy to everyone else, which is what I think is happening now and discredits the people who deploy that kind of stuff.
Oh, without question.
Hey, if you don't mind an aside, did you ever publish that?
I self-published, and I read it actually as an audiobook.
It's been through Lulu Press, but it's never, I mean, so it's available for sort of donors in a PDF format, but no, it's not been published.
You should send it to me.
We'll put it out in the hardcover.
Well, have a read.
I think it'll be up your alley, but have a read and let me know what you think.
I suspect it might be.
I think it will be.
And it's a great book.
So I think that there is a real market for not what do people really, really need you to believe to validate their worldview.
But what have you actually lived?
What have you lived in your life?
And can that be reflected back to you without this hysterical manipulation that comes from these crazy people?
Right.
Well, one of the things that is bizarre to me, and it was something that I attempted to sort of implicitly address in A Throne of Bones, which I described to people as a response to George Martin's A Game of Thrones.
One of the things that really bothered me about A Game of Thrones, the series, the books, is that people described it as being extremely realistic.
You know, they're saying, oh, but this isn't like Tolkien.
This isn't high fantasy.
This is very realistic.
And I was thinking as I was reading it that throughout almost the entire book, there's only one married couple that has what you could consider to be even a remotely normal love life.
Yeah.
Everyone else, it's either incest or rape or homosexuality or practically everything except for the most normal form of human relations.
Now, Again, if you look at the identity of the author, you can understand he's this weird, fat little dwarf guy.
It's not too hard to figure out why he has a warped sense of human sexuality.
But that's exactly what you're talking about.
Somebody once calculated it that there is a rape or a rape reference every 15 pages In these books that are up to 1,100 pages long, there's literally over 100 of them in these books.
But what's remarkable about that is that there are something like maybe less than 10 references to male-female husband-wife relations.
Now, I'm not an expert on rape statistics, and I've never heard of anyone keeping track of domestic married relations, but I'm pretty sure there's not more rape than there is marital sex.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure that that's the case.
In fact, a bunch of social justice warriors recently are very upset because a significant proportion of US campuses are reporting no rape whatsoever.
So it is incredibly rare.
I mean, the sort of stranger rape, you know, the sort of regret rape and drug and alcohol-fueled stuff.
I mean, that's the different matter.
But this is what I mean by people's lived experience.
You know, the people I know...
Are nice, normal people who have good relationships and love their kids and married and staying married and not having an affair.
They're like nice, normal, healthy.
It's like there are a lot of people out there like that.
I mean, this idea of all this twisted, creepy, gargoyle humanity stuff is like, maybe that's what you see when you look in the mirror, but that's not what I see when I look across the dinner table.
No, not at all.
And, you know, I remember being puzzled.
I went to Bucknell University where Philip Roth also graduated from.
And so I thought, when I was there, I thought, you know, I should read Philip Roth.
I mean, I might like to write one day myself.
And ironically, I'm probably actually the university's second most famous writer now already.
But I'm sure...
I'm sure they're not proud of that, but hey, it's what it is.
Not yet.
Next generation will be.
You always got to be patient when you're breaking ice.
But what's funny is that I'm reading the book, and this is supposed to be a great writer.
I mean, it's not the great American novel, but it's supposed to be one of the modern classics and all that sort of thing.
Which novel was it?
Portnoy's Complaint.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's dreadful.
Basically, the entire book is about a Jewish guy who is obsessed with the idea of being able to have sex with a blonde girl.
Yeah.
It's a great description.
One of the great things, I can't remember, it's like describing her ass like, was it two oranges in a sock or something like that?
I mean, it's vivid, it's vivid, but creepy as all hell, which is the same thing I get from Nabokov and all that.
But yeah, it's very vivid, and it really paints a picture, but the picture that it paints is like, that is a very accurate painting of a horrible body.
Yeah, exactly.
The thing is that people have now figured out that Philip Roth sucks.
Nobody outside of the New York Times book reviewer and people who take the New York Times book reviewer seriously have read anything the guy has written in the past 25 years.
You know, it's terrible.
Sorry to interrupt, but it's put forward, as you know, to push other writers out of the way.
It's not push forward, because they don't, I don't think they think he's like, you compare him to some of the greats, but he's there to push, to make sure other writers don't get in.
That may well be.
I have no idea.
All I know is that I was so deeply and profoundly underwhelmed when I read that.
If the most distinctive thing about your great piece of literature...
Is, um, sexually satisfying yourself with a piece of meat from the refrigerator?
Um, this is parody.
You know, this is, this is, this is not great literature.
This is a parody of literature and it's a vulgar parody at that.
And, you know, while there is a place for that sort of thing, you know, I mean, certainly, um, you know, there's no shortage of, Of vulgarity and Ray Belay and Dante and so forth.
But when there's nothing else, there's no hope, there's no beauty, there's nothing timeless, there's no ambition.
I mean, I'm sorry.
I grew up in Minnesota and I mean, while I suppose having sex with a blonde girl is an ambition of sorts, it's a fairly easily realized one.
So the whole thing is just ridiculous that it's elevated and supposed to be some form of greatness when it's not.
Even if you look at it in the most non-judgmental way possible, It's a triviality.
It is not going to speak anything to people 100, let alone 500 years in the future.
Whereas you can read something like Kokoro and, okay, you might look at it as depressing considering how things go.
But it's about the human spirit and it's about the human heart.
And even though you and I are separated...
by a vast gulf of understanding from the Meiji era Japanese, you know, we can, um, understand and respect and relate to the philosophical struggles and the questions.
And, you know, do I, do I postpone my, you know, my father is dying.
Uh, do I postpone my trip back to school or not?
Um, you know, you could say, Oh, that, well, that's trivial.
That's not important.
And blah, blah, blah.
Well, it's important that this guy bangs a blonde.
Well, I would hope that it's a bit more like trying to figure out how to gain closure with the death of a parent.
I'd hope it's a little bit more of a universal human experience than banging a piece of meat you found in the fridge and hoping it hasn't gone off.
Well, like when I, I remember, you know, when I went through my sort of, I think as most people who are interested in literature do, let's go through the classics, let's go through the stuff that is considered to be great.
And I picked up Lolita and I picked it up like with oven mitts of like, oh no, how much do I want to know about what a pedophile thinks?
You know, I don't know that I want to know that much.
And I remember when I first started reading it, there's a great description at the beginning of Lolita, where he's talking about how the tongue starts, you know, in the middle of the roof of the mouth, goes a little forward, then hits the teeth to make the name Lolita.
And it's like, I remember reading that.
And I tried it.
Lolita.
Hey, that's actually really accurate.
What a nice little detail, right?
And that was the last nice little detail.
It's in the first paragraph.
It's the last nice little detail in Lolita afterwards.
I did manage to make it through to the end, but boy, spoiler alert.
It's really, really...
It's repulsive.
It's like, you know, face-planting yourself into open surgery and think you've learned something about the human soul.
You know, when it starts to say, here's my description of endless photographs of African penises.
And it's just like...
Why?
Why?
Why would you spend so much time and effort on this?
Is there nothing better or higher or more noble or more exciting or more inspiring that you can spend your time with, wallowing in this dysfunctional muck?
And not only that, but broadcasting it and thinking this says something about humanity rather than just opening your own mind so people can see the maggots feasting on your brain.
Yeah, speaking of bad writers, I did a debate with an SJW, and he was attempting to argue that...
What was the name of that book?
It was the Scottish writer.
He died recently.
Ian M. Banks.
And his first big book.
And it's just, like you said, he actually has a scene that is literally maggots crawling out of somebody's head.
And, you know, I remember thinking at the time, what an apt metaphor for this book.
You know, I mean, it was like he was confessing to you, this is what I am, and this is what I do.
And, you know, it was kind of funny because when he died...
A lot of SJWs were trying to be respectful and talk about what a great loss.
I just openly mocked them for it.
They were all trying to be offended.
I said, look, I'm the only one who is honoring this author by respecting the approach that he took to life.
His entire perspective is In the end, revolved around things like maggots and dog shit.
That's the stuff that they're attracted to.
That's the stuff that they wallow in.
That's why it has to be just utterly rejected.
We have to point out that no, this is not greatness.
This is not even mediocrity.
This is trash.
Even if They manage to put a few coherent words together and make it look pretty.
It isn't.
You can put lipstick on the pig, but it's still a pig.
And if you compare it to things like Tolstoy, where you not only have profound statements on the human spirit, but you even have some very significant ideas about...
Do you remember the part in War and Peace where he breaks down who won the battle at Waterloo?
I think it was Waterloo, but it might have been one of the Russian battles.
Anyhow, he goes through it and he demonstrates that at no point in time was it possible for Napoleon or anyone else to know what was going on.
At no point in time, he completely explodes the whole great man theory of history in one great section, demonstrating that these phenomenons of history have an energy of their own.
And this is long before chaos theory came around, and To me, that's greatness because you're not only talking about philosophical depth, you're not only talking about technical skill and craftsmanship and that sort of thing, but you're also talking about genuinely significant new ideas that open our minds to things that we hadn't considered before.
I very much remember that from, I mean, there's a couple of Russian writers that I absolutely adore.
Turgenev is one.
I adapted his play, Fathers and Sons.
I adapted the novel as a play and directed it in Toronto.
But in particular, of course, Crime and Punishment.
An incredible book on so many different levels.
But in it, he brushes up at one point against the question of why private murder is so heinous, but public murder in the service of the state is so good.
And, of course, every kid with any brains goes through that question at some point.
Okay, so if I kill a guy privately, I go to jail.
If I kill a guy publicly within the service of the state, I get a medal and a pension and a parade and ticker tape and all that kind of stuff.
And those questions, when you come right down to the heart of lived empirical experience as opposed to narratives, that to me is where art has its really powerful connection to that base of the brain originality.
Because even to brush up against those questions, you know, I mean, Shakespeare, of course, was writing under some pretty extreme social justice warrior censorship of the king and the monarchy.
But, you know, even in—I played Macbeth in a production in Montreal, and, you know, the question I had, which I talked about with the director for quite some time, is, you know, at the beginning of the play, Macbeth wades in from killing all of the king's enemies, and it's fine.
He's got no problem with it, and he doesn't lose any sleep over it.
Then he kills the king, and it's like, river of blood.
It's terrible.
I'll never sleep again, and so on.
Those kinds of questions are very foundational, and I think that is where— Thought is stimulated when you brush up against these foundational questions of what is life and death?
What is murder?
What is service to a narrative versus service to morality?
What is your lived experience versus what is told to you your lived experience should be?
What are your genuine feelings As opposed to what you're supposed to feel in the service of others' narratives.
Those are very, very powerful questions.
And this is why social justice warrior fiction for me is not only boring, but in general quite repulsive.
And I've had a tough time reading modern novels for quite some time.
I sat down to read...
After I saw a play by a Canadian author, it was very funny, called Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet by Anne-Marie MacDonald, I sat down to read...
The fall on your knees.
And you know, she's got a poetic style of writing and it's very vivid and so on.
But what it's vivid about is just like an endless series of unbelievably horrible catastrophes.
And this is an old idea from Ayn Rand, that it matters what you paint.
Like if you're an artist and you paint a hero, Then that is one thing.
And if you paint a guy throwing up in a dumpster, you know, the skill of the art is important.
The content of the art is even more important.
And I think that people are recoiling from the combination of high skill and low art that seems to be coming out of the left.
And to what degree the right can replace it with high skill and high art, I think is an open question.
But I certainly do urge people out there listening to this that if you have a storytelling bone in your body, That this would be of great service to the future of humanity to find a way to synthesize these things.
Well, I think it's getting easier because more and more, as we've talked about, the skill is being sacrificed to the content.
And even more to the identity.
At this point in time, in fact, I know for a fact, talking to a gentleman who is on the inside, that most of the big five publishers...
They don't even care about reading the stuff that they're submitted now.
Basically, they want to get people who have big Twitter followers, big Twitter accounts, and social media following and that sort of thing, as long as, of course, they check all the boxes.
Not me, Lowe.
No, and not you.
Not me, no.
Absolutely not.
I couldn't survive in that.
That's like, I don't know, do you feel like living underwater?
I don't have those gills, man.
I can't breathe that stuff.
No, and, you know, it's the same for me.
I mean, I have easily the most trafficked blog in science fiction.
And yet, you know, it's not like they're going to come running to me saying, it wouldn't make sense anyhow, since, you know, I prefer to publish with Castalia.
But...
But even before we had Castalia, they weren't coming to me saying, oh, you have a big social media following.
We should publish you.
Instead, they were talking about the big social media followings of people who had one-tenth my traffic.
But it's all about politics because they believe that the personal is political.
The political is personal.
Like you said, it's in the air they breathe.
It's in the water in which they swim.
And that's just the way it is.
Sorry to interrupt, but they also have the fragility of living in an echo chamber.
You know, the people from the right I view as just more muscular and grisly because they've risen through significant opposition.
If you've got any kind of cultural or artistic presence, then you have gone through the ringer, right?
I mean, you've fought your way through to something.
And the problem with, you know, the fragility of the people on the left, you know, oh, we love diversity.
How about hiring some conservatives?
They don't like diversity at all.
So they're flaccid because they live in an echo chamber, and that is something that the ferocity is because of the echo chamber, but that's also the weakness if people push back.
Oh, no question.
One of the things I write about in SJW's Always Lie is that they're all attack.
They have no ability to defend.
They don't expect it.
They don't know what to do when they are attacked.
Their usual defense is start a Patreon account and cry.
It's not difficult.
It's quite a business plan.
But it's not difficult to deal with.
I would encourage people to pursue their dreams, whether it is developing games or writing books or painting or whatever.
but do so without seeking their approval.
Don't seek their approval.
Try to be better and pursue the alternative lines because they are growing and they're growing fast.
Castelli is a small independent house, but we already sell more books on the average than the average mainstream science fiction house sells.
We don't have the big hits yet, but if you look at the size of the advances that they're giving out, we know, and also we also have a couple authors who are mixed, and so we know that we are selling more books.
Our average author probably sells more books than the genre authors who are not published by Torin Del Rey, you know, the smaller ones.
You can just look at the Amazon rankings and you can see, you know, when we come out with a book, it's usually a category bestseller.
And now is the time.
I mean, there is a convergence, and this is why I'm so happy to have these kinds of chats, particularly with you, Vox, because, you know, we care about culture a little bit more than some of the people who are more into the political and economic side of the libertarians.
We know the power of art.
And there are times when You know, there is an alignment of the planets and that is when you need to get out of your chair and go.
Like just run and sprint and create and publish and get attention because right now there is an opening.
The opening is that everyone's bored of the same old, same old.
Everyone's bored of the ridiculously predictable leftist, you know, white guy's bad and everyone else fantastic and women are empowered and everyone's bored of that stuff.
And there is an opening now.
And not only is there an opening, but the gatekeepers are gone.
And that is like a wild thing.
You know, if the guards have fallen asleep, and now is your chance, now is the time you need to jailbreak out of historical anti-culture and really start to create something new.
You know, go sit down right tomorrow, right the day after, create something the next day, and you will get better at it.
Because the more people we have, the quicker we can turn this thing around.
And dear God, we're heading for a big cliff, so we need everyone on board.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, we're putting the pedal to the metal in our production schedule like you wouldn't believe.
I mean, we're a small house, and I believe...
We put out four print books.
This month, we will put out four print books and two e-books.
Now, that doesn't sound like much, but if you add it up over the course of the year, that's actually...
It's a lot of work in the editing.
A lot of work in the writing and editing, for sure.
But that's actually a lot.
What is the website for that?
Sorry to interrupt.
What is the website for that place?
Just castaliahouse.com.
We have a blog.
We will put that in.
Listen, I hate to cut it short.
I'm trying to try and get us in under two hours because otherwise I have a feeling people might look at two hours plus and say, right?
So, but a great chat as always.
I really, really appreciate that.
I mean, I don't get to uncork my artistic side quite as much as I'd like to in the great world of politics, current events and philosophy, but it's a meat and drink to me and it's sort of where I started.
And who knows, maybe I'll boomerang back at some point.
But we'll put all the links to your stuff below.
I mean, Vox is a great writer and a great thinker.
And that's a great combination.
Sorry, as a writer, I should not keep using the word great.
I'm aware.
But people should, you know, go read his stuff.
We'll link to it below.
Go check out his blog and check out the writers he's promoting because there's some really great stuff coming out of what you do.
And I really, really appreciate your time today.
You're more than welcome.
And I'm going to hold you to it because I'm very interested in reading that book.
I'll send you a couple.
I've got one that never got published, so I will send them over.
