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Building an Army - Essay by Aeneas Tacticus Minor
Right now there’s a glass ceiling for anons. We can’t break through it until we know that people with power, influence, authority and resources have our backs and are going to protect us if we say what we really think in public under our own names. In the meantime we have to sit and wait for...
mansworldmag.online
Pt.1: Building an Army
RUFO'S PROBLEM IS EVERYONE'S PROBLEM
On July 17th 2023, the great Chris Rufo did a Twitter space with L0m3z, Fischer King, Charles Haywood, William Wheelwright and a bunch of other bright people. Most of it was OK but the last ten minutes made me want to scream.
William Wheelwright asked the last question. It was about "culture". He started off talking about BAP and the BAP orbit and I can't remember what the point of that was except it somehow led into a question of how we on the right can start exploring low-budget options for a counter-revolution against the boring, poisonous low-quality art and culture made by Cathedral/Longhouse hags/fags/fag-hags/hag-fags, because we have no cultural prestige, no institutions, no funding, no support structures, no nothing. We're so far behind on culture in the "culture war" that we haven't really got a lot of options for art, literature or anything else.
For the first time in his life, Rufo didn't have a serious answer. It's not his fault. He's not really a "creativity" kind of guy. Like all good leaders, he stays in his lane. Let's not shit on Rufo.
Does anybody have an answer to Wheelwright's question?
Peachy Keenan sort of does. On her Substack on July 20th she posted an idea for the "Saint Genesius Fellowship", which is a grant for artists and writers on our side. It's brilliant except for one thing: she doesn't have any money to make grants with yet.
Again, it's not her fault. Cucked conservative donors are too dumb and constipated to pay for something like this "Saint Genesius Fellowship", and the rest of us don't have nearly enough money to make this plan work. Where's the money going to come from? Peachy's going to struggle to get conserva-fags, conserva-dorks and conserva-tards to pay for these grants in a way that matters.
These fucking idiots will literally spend two hundred thousand dollars on a "gala dinner reception" party in Washington, and award a fake prize to some bald, fat faggot who wrote an essay in The National Review, but they're not going pay for something that real people care about. They don't want to win the "culture war" because if they win they'll be out of a job.
L0m3z has had the best solution so far with the Passage Prize. He's found a way to reward right-wing artists and writers, and get them some publicity. Problem is, most of them are anons.
So far L0m3z hasn't come up with a way to solve the biggest problem: how do we support real-life artists and writers who are working under their own names, for audiences of normal people who live in the real world and aren't spending any time online? Because if we can't do that, we're never going to fully get through to the audiences that we need in order to decisively start winning the "culture war".
THE ANON PROBLEM
I don't like being an anon. I don't like using a fake name or made-up personality, because I know too many actresses in real life.
The Puritans were right about actresses. They really are all basically whores. That's not the problem. I don't mind whores. I just don't like personality disorders. And it's true about everyone who's an actor, or an actress, or a performer, period. There's something psychologically damaging about constantly playing role-playing games and taking on other people's characters and personalities. It fucks with your head.
Everybody I know in real life who has to play an online character just so he can speak his mind on Twitter complains about this. Being an anon is psychologically costly. It's important, and people should keep on doing it, but we can't go on like this forever.
Right now there's a glass ceiling for anons. We can't break through it until we know that people with power, influence, authority and resources have our backs and are going to protect us if we say what we really think in public under our own names. In the meantime we have to sit and wait for these people to steal our anonymous ideas. I'm cool with that. As far as I'm concerned they're not stealing our ideas fast enough.
THE TALENT PROBLEM
Why is the novel dead? Because nobody can sit down and tell the truth about the world around without losing their job and reputation because the entire Cathedral/Longhouse will make an example out of them to make sure nobody ever does anything like that ever again.
If you try to write the truth about what it was like to live in Chicago under Lori Lightfoot, or San Francisco after Chesa Boudin turned it into a filthy anarcho-tyranny, then you know and I know that there isn't a publisher, editor or literary agent of any quality or value who will have the balls to publish the truth and back you up against getting tarred and feathered and flayed alive. These cowards will always save their own skins and hang you out to dry.
I understand. The cowards are just people with jobs and families, and they're trying to feed themselves and pay the mortgage like everybody else. Even the ones who agree with us can't afford to be seen agreeing with us. Nobody, literally nobody, wants to be a martyr for no reason.
Right now we live in a world where Penguin Books can't even publish baby food for Boomers in adult diapers (e.g. Jordan Peterson's latest self-help book) without half of their Zoomer staff going apeshit and cutting themselves to emotionally blackmail their bosses into stopping publication. If someone as profitable and culturally useless as Jordan Peterson has problems getting published by Penguin, then there's probably no hope for you as a writer in the modern publishing world.
The people who have talent can't use it right now. And that means people like you and me have got nothing to read.
We have a chicken-and-egg problem with right-wing financial backers. They're all too chicken to give any long-term support to anything that's going to win the "culture war".
THE AUDIENCE PROBLEM
We have an audience problem too. Twitter and social media are good for conversation. In fact they're great for ideas. For literature, art and genuine culture, not so much.
For the real poets, prophets and geniuses who can lead a culture, social media is cancer. It's a waste of their time and talent. It's a distraction from the art and literature they're supposed to make. If they're not getting down and producing as much good work as possible, we're never going to win. We just have to leave them alone and let them do their work, and sometimes we have to yell at them to get the fuck off Twitter and go do their job.
The good news is, we now have a pretty good idea of how many people there are who will pay for self-published books, and Substack essays, and "Caribbean Rhythms" on Gumroad. The paying audience for right-wing writing is bigger than anybody expected.
People who are sort of in our orbit are also doing well. Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova from the "Red Scare" podcast pull in over $55,000 a month from Patreon alone. Part of the reason they have such a big audience is, they're not just disembodied voices. Anons simply can't get a paying audience that size (except maybe BAP).
Once mainstream public figures are borrowing or stealing ideas from our sphere, we know we're getting somewhere. But it's just not far enough yet.
"Everyday elites" like your doctor, your lawyer and your accountant don't have time for anons. Most people in the professional class still basically trust the same media they've always trusted, even if they know it's corrupt. They're not going to spend 3 hours on Twitter trying to find out which Ernst Jünger translations they should be looking for. They're just going to watch Netflix or HBO for half an hour and then go to bed.
Also, they can't afford to be seen in public with a copy of The Pussy by Delicious Tacos. In any white collar workplace, if you get seen with a book like that, someone's guaranteed to snitch and tattle on you to the HR department.
In a "culture war" the masses don't matter. It's four groups of elites:
The four groups sort of overlap obviously. We can argue about the details later. We need to strategize about how to reach a critical mass of all these people, including low-level elites like family doctors and high school principals. They don't matter to you, but to the bottom 60% of the population these low-level authorities are pretty much the highest elites anybody has regular exposure to. They have the highest-status jobs an immigrant striver can realistically dream of attaining.
- powerful elites
- influential elites
- elites with authority
- elites with resources.
THE PERSONNEL PROBLEM
Right now we don't have anybody in the driver's seat making the narratives that normal people watch on their screens. There's a whole ecosystem here where we have literally nobody of any importance doing anything right now.
In movies if you don't have someone in one of the three important power positions (writing, directing, producing), you don't have anything. It doesn't matter if your cameraman and your lighting technician are Trump supporters who love Tucker. The technicians aren't the ones signing the checks or calling the shots.
To make a TV pilot you need around $2,000,000. That's the lowest amount you can do it for without making a product that looks cheap and makes you, your team and our entire side look weak.
Even that two million dollars is stretching. You have to call in a lot of favours. That's before you even get to the distribution and publicity that you need to make that two million dollars back. And you need people who can do that work competently, aren't retards, and won't sell you out or stab you in the back.
To get something like this made, you need an army behind you, and we haven't got an army. We have literally nothing. We have no funding, no backing, no personnel. NOTHING.
You can sit around calling yourself a genius because you understand Heidegger and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer better than every other unemployed guy at the coffee shop. Your dreams are totally useless until you can make them into other people's dreams too.
We all make fun of poetry readings that six people go to at "independent" bookstores. But most of us can't really do better than that yet. You can't win a "culture war" until you learn how to make things that can appeal to an audience of normal people.
Normal people are fundamentally too lazy, tired or apathetic to go looking for quality entertainment. Right now we don't have a practical means of making anything that will reach them. We don't even have Tucker Carlson on Fox News anymore. We don't have an avenue for getting to the normies. The question is, do we really deserve one yet?
What do we have to do to deserve it?
Here Aeneas Tacitus Minor outlines the reality of our plight in the culture war: things are so bad for us, we've not even truly begun to fight, let alone have a clear path to victory. In which case, the first thing to do would be to build an army
Your thoughts?
