current events – Page 7 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Any predictions for Trump: Season 5?

First off, how are you enjoying Trump: Season 4 so far?

I have to admit, I was pretty skeptical at first. Seasons 1-3 were all building up to the impeachment, and when the writers threw in the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, I worried that the show was about to jump the shark. I mean come on—a global pandemic? Really? I thought this was 2020, not 1918. But the writers did a really good job of tying the pandemic into everything else: US-China tensions, the trade wars, the Trump economy, the Democrats’ desperate need for another scandal to pin on Trump, etc.

As the season wound on, it was really interesting to see how the pandemic drove the story arc—or rather, how all the systemic rot and political corruption from seasons 1-3 made the pandemic far, far worse than it would have been if the country weren’t so divided and the people were more resilient. Then Black Lives Matter made a huge comeback, Antifa took to the streets, riots and wildfires broke out everywhere, and I thought to myself: “wow, the season is only halfway over and the country is literally on fire. What are the writers going to throw at us next?”

Then Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and the biggest ticking time bomb from the start of the whole show went off at the worst—and also best—possible moment. The writers deserve an Emmy for that plot twist alone. It was so obvious in retrospect, and foreshadowed so perfectly, but it dropped when we were least expecting it—and yet, at the very moment when it would have the most impact. Very well played.

But we were still several episodes from the season finale, which made me wonder: what are the writers going to throw at us next? The Trump-Biden debate happened, and it was terrible, with Trump debating Chris Wallace more than Biden, and Wallace siding so obviously with Biden that it made you want to tear your eyeballs out. It was, without a doubt, the worst presidential debate in US history. And again, I began to wonder if perhaps the show had finally jumped the shark.

But then Trump himself came down with the covid.

And we’re still at least two episodes from the season finale.

And once again, I have to admit that the writers were absolutely brilliant. Because aside from RBG, Trump actually coming down with the virus was the biggest—and in retrospect, the most obvious—gun on the wall. And yet, it somehow managed to be both surprising and inevitable in all of the best ways. Brilliant.

So now that we’re all psyched up for the season finale, what are your predictions for season 5?

I know, I know—a lot of you are probably expecting the show to end with season 4, with Biden winning the election and Trump either conceding in a peaceful transfer of power or being forcibly removed from office—but come on. Does anyone really think that the writers will end this amazing show with such a boring and anticlimactic ending?

If there’s one theme that has run through every episode of this show from the very beginning, it’s the futility in relying on politics to solve the problems that were caused by politics in the first place. I really like how season 4 hammered that home with the impeachment, and how it all turned out to be utterly meaningless after the pandemic hit. All the people who suffer the most from Trump Derangement Syndrome are the ones who look to the government to solve all of their problems.

So is Biden going to ride in on the wings of a clear election victory that isn’t fraudulent? If he does, it will be even more disappointing than the finale of Game of Thrones.

But what if Trump gets sick enough that the race suddenly turns into a contest between Harris and Pence? If so, then I think Pence will come away in a landslide. Pence is everything that red state America has been yearning for that Trump cannot give them, and Harris is everything that blue state America has been taught to despise—aside from her gender and skin color, of course. But I just can’t see the Bernie bros and communists (but I repeat myself) pulling the lever for Copmala “let’s-enslave-nonviolent-drug-offenders” Harris. Besides, she has all of Clinton’s worst affectations.

Will Trump actually die from the covid? I doubt it. If anything, I expect he’ll be out of commission just long enough for Pence to carry the election for him, and then come back for season 5. But I can see Biden dying of covid during the season 4 finale. After all, Trump tested positive just days after that terrible debate. If he was presymptomatic during that time, there’s a significant chance that Biden could catch it from him—and I don’t think Biden is healthy enough to beat it. Certainly not healthier than Trump.

So if Trump pulls off an election landslide (ironically, by being out sick during the final weeks of the election), and the deep state / intelligence community’s plans to pull off a color revolution fail to launch, what comes next?

At some point, I think the Qanon folks who see Trump as the orange Jesus are going to have a major disappointment. That’s very much in keeping with the ongoing theme that when politics is the problem, you can’t solve it with more politics. I also think that the radical leftists pushing for a full-out communist uprising are going to suffer a major blow. That, or they actually are the blow to the establishment Democrats, and the DNC itself is going to collapse before the series is over.

A couple of episodes ago, I thought that season 5 would start with the civil war, but now I think the writers are going to thread that needle and leave that plot thread deliberately unresolved. Why? Because the other major theme of the show is that Trump isn’t actually the problem: we are. Trump is both a mirror to all the flaws of his many enemies, and an avatar to all the worst impulses of his friends. He’s a symptom of the fact that America has lost her Unum. That happened well before Trump took office, and I expect it will continue long after he leaves, peaceably or otherwise.

Then again, we could rediscover our Unum at the last moment and find a way to pull together again. That would make for a very American story. As Churchill said, “you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve done everything else.” Trump himself is a testament to that.

Blade Runner 2020

Saw this, couldn’t resist.

We’ve got smoke here in Utah, too, but nowhere near as bad as California (for the moment). A couple of new fires started here in Utah Valley over the past week, and it looks like they may have been human caused, but the firefighters put them out very quickly. But whenever California is on fire, the smoke finds its way over here.

Here’s another one:

White Science Fiction and Fantasy Doesn’t Matter

If you are white, and you write science fiction or fantasy, it is only a matter of time before you are cancelled.

This is the logical end of intersectional identity politics, which is really just the resurrected, zombified corpse of Marxism. White people are the oppressors. People of color are the oppressed. All white people are racist, and the only way to fight racism is with more racism. Black lives matter. White lives don’t.

The United States of America is currently engaged in a violent struggle that will determine whether this hyper-racist intersectional ideology will defeat the populist uprising that has its champion in Trump, or whether the country will reject this new form of Marxism and come back from the brink of insanity. But in science fiction and fantasy, the war is already over, and the intersectionalists have won. It is now only a matter of time before they purge the field of everything—and everyone—that is white.

The last chance for the SF&F community to come back from the brink was probably in 2015. The intersectionalists were ascendant, but they hadn’t yet taken over the field. (That happened in 2016, when N.K. Jemisin, an avowed social justice warrior and outspoken champion for anti-white identity politics, won the Hugo Award for best new novel for the next three consecutive years.) A populist uprising within fandom known as the Puppies attempted to push back, and were smeared as racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, and Nazis. Whatever your opinion of the Puppies (and there were some bad eggs among them, to be sure), they did not deserve to be silenced, ridiculed, shouted down, and threatened with all manner of violence and death threats for their grievances. After the Puppies were purged, the intersectionalists took over and began to reshape the field in their image.

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer wasn’t renamed the Astounding Award because Campbell was a racist (even though he was). His name was stripped from the award because the people who renamed it are racists—not in the bullshit way the intersectionalists have redefined it, but in the true sense of the word: discrimination based based on race.

Before I get smeared as a white supremacist for writing this post, I want to make it absolutely clear that I welcome racial diversity in science fiction and fantasy. I’ve been very pleased to read some excellent stories from people of color in Lightspeed Magazine recently, including “Miss Beulah’s Braiding and Life Change Salon,” and there have been several excellent stories from Chinese authors in Clarkesworld recently as well. I just don’t think it’s necessary to tear down white authors in order to make space for non-white ones. That’s the racism of intersectionality, and I reject it.

It is much easier for these intersectional racists to cancel you after you’re dead, but they’ll come after you while you’re still alive if they can. That’s what’s happening to George R.R. Martin right now. Frankly, I would have a lot more sympathy for him if he hadn’t made his bed with these people back during the Puppygate debacle. Behold your “true fans,” Mr. Martin. The fact that you’re the biggest name in epic fantasy right now isn’t going to save you.

But if the intersectionalists are all anti-white racists, why are so many of them white? Because for decades, crunchy liberal white folks have been taught that everything bad in the world is their fault, and the world would be better off without them. Climate change. Racism. Colonialism. It’s the white man’s burden 2.0. I know, because I was raised in this milieu. I was forced to read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in high school, and I know just how false and dangerous it really is. Besides, the revolution always eats its own. If you think you’re going to get a pass because you’ve read How to Be an Anti-Racist, you’ve posted a black square to your social media, and you’ve donated money to any of these social justice causes, you’re deluding yourself.

If you’re white, they’re coming for you. It’s not just your “whiteness” that they want to purge—that’s just a motte-and-bailey tactic to make their racism less overt and more palatable. The only thing they need to know about you is the color of your skin. If they know that, they think they know everything else about you, because they are the true racists—and in the world they’re trying to create, everything white must be purged.

The good news is that the cultural tides are turning, and the racist ideology that drives these folks is at or near its zenith. Marxism always fails, and cancel culture cancels itself in the end. If you play your cards right, getting cancelled can actually boost your career, rather than destroy it.

But the next ten years are going to be very tricky to navigate. Even if the intersectionalists lose on the national level, as I hope and pray that they do, they have already taken over the SF&F field so thoroughly and completely that the only way forward is to abandon all the old institutions and rebuild them from scratch. The indie publishing revolution has made this much more possible, but Amazon still dominates the indie publishing world, and they’ve already donated tens of millions of dollars to these Marxist causes. How much longer do we have before the intersectional ideologues within Amazon rewrite the algorithms according to their ideology? It’s only a matter of time.

Fortunately, if you are resilient enough, time is on your side.

Denial and moral cowardice

I got into an interesting argument on a message board forum for writers in the last couple of days. We were discussing whether or not it’s a good idea to give Amazon exclusivity in order to sign onto Kindle Unlimited, and I pointed out that Amazon has donated tens of millions of dollars to the groups and organizations that are promoting the violent riots currently sweeping the country. My point was that it’s important to take Amazon’s corporate values into account before giving them exclusive control over your ability to have a career.

Immediately, a bunch of left-leaning forum members jumped on me for having the audacity to attack Amazon for their support of social justice. No surprises there. But the next thing really surprised me. A member of the forum who claims to live in Portland said:

Joe I have yet to see any riots. If you mean demonstrations, those are the right of any American citizen.

When pressed about that, she responded:

Many people have drank the right-wing Kool-Aid, including Joe.
How bad do I think it is in Portland? Well I happen to live here and the violence and incitment to violence comes from the Fed troops, not from anyone donated to by Amazon. No demonstrator has ever kidnapped someone in an unmarked van off the street or gassed someone. Stop listening to the lies put out by propagandists like Andy Ngo and Tim Pool because I know exactly how false their gaslighting is.
In fact, the demonstrations (there have been NO ‘riots’ here) in Portland would have long stopped if his adored Donald Trump hadn’t decided to send in Federal agents from the Homeland Security Agency (actually the Homeland Oppression Agency) to kidnap and rought people up.

The forum moderator had previously asked us not to get into politics, and in a previous post, I had stated that this isn’t a question of politics, but of violence, corporate values, and narrative control. In fact, no one had even mentioned Trump until this particular post.

Needless to say, the thread was soon locked.

But one thing still bugged me: the fact that this person could so emphatically claim that there are no riots sweeping this country. Does she not have two eyes and a brain? I know that the left-wing echo chambers run deep, but to say that there are no riots is like staring at the sun at noon-day and claiming that it’s midnight. Hell—there was a riot not ten miles from where I live here in Utah, where a person was shot by a member of Antifa. In Utah. UTAH.

So I sent her a private message with pictures of Kenosha Wisconsin (this was more than 48 hours after the shooting of Jacob Blake, by the way), and that video of the guy driving down 5th Avenue in New York City days after the George Floyd protests (aka the 1619 riots). Here was her response:

A man was also murdered by the police in Kenosha, WI within the last 48 hours. So that demonstrations there may have turned into riots is no surprise. Now take your right-wing extremism elsewhere.

Oh really? The fact that there are riots in Wisconsin isn’t a surprise? I thought you said that there are no riots, only demonstrations?

Here was my response:

Jacob Blake was not “murdered by the police,” because he is still alive. But thank you for admitting (1) that riots are happening in this country, and (2) that fact is not surprising to you.

And hers:

You’re right. It was only attempted murder. When people are oppressed they have been known to riot. A pity that you support the oppressors. Now go away before I block your messages.

At this point, I probably should have just stopped engaging. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have sent the private message in the first place. After all, it’s not like anything I could say would change this person’s mind that Trump is the embodiment of all evil in this country, and that everyone who opposes him is either a martyr or a saint.

But the mental gymnastics I’d just seen this person jump through really fascinated me. In the space of less than a dozen posts, she’d gone from (1) emphatically denying that riots of any kind are happening in this country, to (2) admitting that riots may be happening, to (3) implying that the riots (which are indeed happening) are justified, because the rioters are oppressed.

Here’s the problem with all of that: if you believe that the riots are justified and you’re willing to admit in private that they are actually happening, why would you publicly deny them? Either you lack the strength of your own convictions to stand up and defend them, or you don’t want to examine your own belief system too closely for fear that it will fall apart.

Either way, that makes you a moral coward.

I would have had a lot more respect for this person if she’d just come out and say “yes, some of these demonstrations are violent, but it’s right and just because racisexislamohomofacisgenderonazi” or some other such garbage. At least then she would be sticking by what she truly believes. Instead, her moral cowardice DEMANDS that she do everything she can to deny reality, even when it is staring her in the face.

I think that’s where we are in this country. There are only two sides: those who are willing to acknowledge the reality of what is happening right now, and those who are still determined to deny reality. There may be some people in the first side who do not vote for Trump in November. But of the people who vote for Trump, I don’t think there will be any moral cowards.

A clear pattern

A clear pattern is emerging in the ongoing violent unrest that is currently sweeping the United States.

It starts with a police shooting incident of a black or minority person. So far, it’s all been police, but I suppose it could also happen with a white-on-black shooting as well. Before the facts of the incident come out, a victim narrative gets pushed across all media channels. Within hours, rioters and looters descend on the community where the incident took place and begin to spread chaos and destruction.

If the municipal leaders are Democrats, the police are restrained from defending the community from the riots, and the rioters are released without charges or bail. If the state leaders are Democrats, they do everything they can to obstruct federal law enforcement and refuse to accept federal help in putting down the riots, even as their cities and communities burn.

The mainstream, blue checkmark-verified news sources downplay or ignore the violence. When forced to acknowledge it, they blame it on Trump, whose hands are tied by the governors. But if the members of the local community push back against the rioters, either in self-defense or otherwise in reaction to the violence, it gets covered as an act of “white supremacy” against “mostly peaceful protests.”

If the local community doesn’t push back, and Trump honors the governor’s orders not to send in the feds, then the violence steadily escalates, with Democrats and the news media continuing to run cover for the rioters until the “mostly peaceful protests” narrative can no longer be sustained. But before that happens, a new incident happens somewhere else in the country, the news cycle shifts, and the pattern begins all over again.

Whether or not the shooting incidents that spark these riots are spontaneous (I personally believe that they are), the pattern of events that follows each shooting appears to be coordinated, with the goal of provoking a violent backlash. Once the backlash happens, it will be spun as conclusive evidence that Trump is a fascist and that white supremacy in the United States is widespread, deep, and intractable. That’s exactly what happened with Charlottesville in 2017. It’s a false narrative, of course, but that doesn’t matter to the partisands who are coordinating this violence. The narrative has already been written: they just need to fabricate the evidence to support it.

Thus far, there hasn’t been enough of a backlash to give them anything substantial to point to. Which is remarkable, given that this violence has been happening almost nonstop since the shooting of George Floyd in May. But last night in Kenosha Wisconsin, there was a shooting that gave these people exactly what they’ve been looking for.

I expect that all of the blue checkmark-verified news outlets will give this shooting wall-to-wall coverage until the news cycle shifts, and that the Democrats will play it up the way they played up Charlottesville until the November elections. I also expect that the violence will escalate, and that the pattern of incident-riots-backlash will continue into November, and possibly beyond.

The scary thing is that this pattern could repeat itself almost anywhere in the country at this point. It’s more likely to happen in places where Democrats are in power on the state or local level, but it could also happen in Republican strongholds if the local Republicans are squishy enough. That’s probably what happened here in Provo, where a demonstration organized by Salt Lake City Antifa resulted in a shooting. Thankfully, there was no violent backlash, and the response from the local community was strong enough that the riots did not spread here.

If this pattern continues, I see one of three scenarios playing out in November:

If Biden is elected with a clear majority, the United States will descend into a hot civil war. The Left sees political violence as a dial to be turned up; the Right sees political violence as a switch to be turned on. The only reason that switch has not been flipped is because Trump is still in power. If he were replaced by a moderate or a centrist, things would probably be all right, but the Democrats have moved so far to the Left in recent years that I don’t see a compromise candidate emerging until the DNC goes the way of the Whigs and the Federalists, and is replaced by a third party. But that isn’t going to happen between now and November, so a Democrat victory will trigger the Right to flip that switch and throw the country into a civil war.

If Trump is elected with a clear majority, the Left will double down and the rioting and violence will escalate, at least in the short-term and in Democrat-run areas. With that said, Trump will also have the mandate he needs to go after his political enemies who are coordinating this cycle of violence. The DNC will either go defunct or become the minority party in this country for the next twenty years. Regardless, it will probably take most of Trump’s second term for the violence to abate.

If there is no clear winner in November, there will be absolute chaos in Washington. The Democrats will attempt to take power, Trump will refuse to give it up, and the violence sweeping the country will escalate until it is indistinguishable from a hot civil war. There may also be a secession crisis and a high profile political assassination or two.

Regardless of what happens in November, I don’t see any scenario where this pattern of violence de-escalates anytime soon.

Marxism is the new Black

The 21st century disciples of Karl Marx have a problem: all of Marx’s theories have been debunked, and all of his predictions have failed.

The workers of the world never rose up.

Capitalism never gave way to communism.

The class wars ended because extreme poverty ceased to be a global issue.

The labor theory of value was slain by the free market.

Materialism, not religion, proved to be the opiate of the masses.

So what’s a Marxist gotta do?

In the 00s and 10s, the Marxists made a subtle but insidious change to their ideology. They created a bunch of victim groups, and invented a thing called “intersectionality” to determine who was the greatest victim based on how many victim groups they could claim. Anyone who ranked too low on the victimhood scale was deemed “priviledged” and an “oppressor.” In this way, the Marxists created a new opressor class, and transposed their whole ideology onto the framework of identity politics.

Their greatest success came on the issue of race. The Democratic Party—the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan—had, through government handouts and welfare programs, created a dependent black underclass. In 100 years, these policies had done what 250 years of slavery could not: destroy the black family. With their families thus shattered, their communities fell apart, and the members of this black underclass found themselves trapped in a multi-generational cycle of poverty and violence.

Marxist ideology depends on envy and resentment in order to survive. That’s why it found such fertile ground in this dependent black underclass. But there was a problem: race relations in the United States were getting better, racism was on the decline, and through hard work and self-reliance (both of which are anathema to Marxism) an increasing number of black Americans were escaping the Democrat plantations. In fact, things had gotten so good that the United States had just elected their first black president.

So the Marxists spun a new narrative, calculated to foster as much envy and resentment as possible. They told the black underclass that all of their problems are due to racism, that all white people are racist against them, and that no matter what they do, they will never be able to get ahead—because racism. They sowed fear and dischord between blacks and the police, proclaiming falsely that the police were killing blacks in disproportionately large numbers. And when blacks who had climbed out of the underclass rose up to challenge this new narrative, the Marxists derided them as “Uncle Toms” or “not black enough.”

At the same time, the Marxists told white Americans that they were all guilty of “privilege” and “systemic racism.” They turned white supremacy into a boogeyman that was under every bed. They used hate speech to silence free speech, and replaced real justice with social justice. They forced us to hire them as diversity directors, and used Maoist struggle sessions to force us to confess our “white fragility.” Those who dared to challenge the intersectional narrative were fired from their jobs, removed from the internet and social media, and otherwise driven into the wilderness. The ensuing fear of cancel culture kept everyone else in line.

Which brings us to the Coronapocalypse.

Marxists work on a four-step playbook to subvert the societies that they want to control. The first step is demoralization, and it takes about a generation. The second step is destabilization, and it takes about 10-15 years. However, the third and fourth steps—crisis and normalization—happen very quickly.

If there’s one good thing about this global pandemic, it’s that the ideological masks are coming off even as the n95 and face masks are coming on. Whether or not the virus itself was engineered, the Marxists certainly aren’t letting this crisis go to waste. They see an opportunity to get everything they want, and they are doing all they can to seize it, setting our cities on fire and leaving hundreds of dead black Americans in their wake.

At this point, I can only see one way to defeat the Marxists, and that is for black America to rise up and reject this new narrative. It has to be the blacks, because it is their story that has been hijacked by the toxic Marxist ideology, and they need to take it back. No one else can do it for them. In the 20th century, the rallying cry was “we shall overcome;” in the 21st century, it needs to be “we already overcame.” Otherwise, I think we may see the fall of the republic and the end of the American experiment, which is exactly what the Marxists want.

It would make me profoundly sad if the American story turned out to be a tragedy, but such could very well be the case. If the American Revolution was the beginning, then the seeds for America’s collapse were sown in the patriots’ failure to reject slavery. The first civil war was the end of the beginning, Woodrow Wilson was the beginning of the end, and if black America fails to stand up for the republic, the tragedy will come full circle and the Marxists will win.

But what makes this so insidious is that the new Marxism is far more racist than anything else this country has ever seen. Under segregation and Jim Crow, blacks still had a place in society. They were treated as second class citizens, but they still had a place. Even under slavery, blacks were generally praised for being loyal and hard-working. But within the intersectional narrative, there is no place for “whiteness.” If “people of color” are the new proletariat, then whites are the new capitalists and need to be purged for the crime of being white.

That is why, in true Orwellian fashion, they had to change the dictionary definition of “racism.” The most racist people in American history are now in the streets chanting “black lives matter!” and attacking—sometimes even killing—those who dare to say that all lives matter. And when you try to point out that all black lives matter, they reject that as well, because at the end of the day, it isn’t about black lives at all. It’s about ideology.

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.

Marxism is the new black.

What have we learned from the BLM riots?

The driving forces of Antifa, the BLM movement itself, and most of the violence on the ground are far-left Marxists who seek to bring a Bolshevik-style revolution to the United States. Having failed to start a class war in the most prosperous country in the world, they are now substituting race for class in their Marxist ideological framework and are seeking to divide the country along racial lines.
A majority of Americans are being exploited as useful idiots by these Marxist revolutionaries. We can see this from the popularity of the BLM movement and the fact that most of the public discourse revolves around racism, both real and perceived. These riots are not actually about racism; rather, they are exploiting the issue of racism to achieve their radical revolutionary ends.
The Democratic Party establishment still believes that they can control the far-left radicals within their party, and use them to achieve their political ends. They see political violence as a dial to be turned up and down, rather than a switch to be turned on and off.
The driving imperative of the Democratic Party establishment is the removal of President Trump, through any and all possible means. It is not an accident that all of the violence is happening in Democrat-controlled areas. They have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice the lives and property of the people they represent to achieve their political ends, and we must assume that they would destroy the United States itself rather than allow Trump to remain in power.
The mainstream legacy news media, including CNN, MSBNC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and NPR are nothing less than the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party establishment. We must assume that they are engaged in a massive psychological operation against the American people, and pay just as much attention to the news they refuse to cover as the way they cover the news.
The big tech companies of Silicon Valley have aligned themselves with the radical left wing of the Democratic Party, and are actively pushing the agenda of the Marxist revolutionaries. We must assume that no digital space controlled by big tech is safe for those who oppose this Marxist agenda, especially on social media.
At this point, the primary target of the Marxist revolutionaries is our history. The movement to tear down statues has nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with erasing our American history and heritage. We must assume that this will be followed up aggressively in the digital space by the Silicon Valley tech companies, as we are already witnessing the digital equivalent of book burning.
If we assume that the Marxist revolutionaries are operating according to the four-step subversion process described by Yuri Bezmenov, we have completed the demoralization and destabilization phases and have entered the crisis phase. This means that the violence will likely get worse between now and the November elections.
At this point, the primary battlegrounds in this uprising are the Democrat-controlled parts of the country. If you live in a blue state or city, now is the time for you to implement your bug-out plan.
As the revolution spreads across the country, violence will spread into purple and red areas as well. If you live in a red state or city, you should be prepared for a lengthy bug-in scenario.
The Millenial generation is lost. Once the demoralization and destabilization phases of subversion are complete, the only way to reverse it is to raise up the next generation outside of the subversive influence. Marxist ideology has infected every aspect of American society, and will take several decades to remove.
For this reason, it is absolutely imperative to preserve our history with physical documents and artifacts that cannot be digitally erased. If we lose our history, we lose our country.
Violence and chaos only plays into the Marxists’ hands. The only way to defeat them is through non-violence. We must push back against all of the forces seeking to divide us by uniting as Americans, regardless of color or race.
E Pluribus Unum. United we stand, divided we fall.

Do Black Lives Actually Matter?

Ever since the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, the Black Lives Matter movement has seen a dramatic resurgence, both on social media and on the American street. The movement’s titular message declares that America needs to place more value on the lives of its black citizens and no longer treat them as cheap or expendable.

On its face, the message is a good one. And the rejoinder “yes, but all lives matter” is not the correct response, because it implies that the challenges black Americans face are no different than the challenges that all Americans face. That is not true. Many of our nation’s black communities are in a state of crisis, with rampant crime, chronic poverty, and other systemic problems.

Do I believe that black lives matter? Yes, I certainly do. I also understand the need to emphasize that black lives matter, and applaud it.

But do black lives actually matter to the movement itself?

What about black police and law enforcement officers? They put their lives on the line every day to serve and protect their communities. Do their lives matter too?

What about black victims of black crime? In the last two weeks since the protests and riots began, the murder rate in cities like Chicago has skyrocketed. Because of the Ferguson Effect, more blacks are being murdered, not less. Do their lives matter too?

What about the tens of thousands of black lives that are aborted every year? The abortion rate among blacks is disproportionately high. In Manhattan, more black babies are aborted than born. Do those black lives matter?

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that the majority of supporters of Black Lives Matter genuinely have the best interests of black Americans at heart. But when you look at what the movement actually stands for, there are some glaring inconsistencies. For example, Black Lives Matter officially endorses the disruption of the traditional nuclear family. Yet according to black activists like Candace Owens and Larry Elder, the root cause of many of the problems in the black community is black fatherlessness:

If black fatherlessness is the root cause of so many of the problems in the black community, why does Black Lives Matter want to destroy the family?

If black-on-black crime is far too high, why does Black Lives Matter want to abolish the police?

If black babies are aborted at a disproportionately high rate, why is Black Lives Matter funneling donations to the party that advocates for abortion on demand up to (and even after) the point of birth?

Because black lives don’t actually matter to these people.

At best, Black Lives Matter is exploiting the issue of race to promote a far-left political agenda. At worst, it is a revolutionary Marxist front-group. Is it any wonder that they want to abolish the police? Why else would the movement be spreading internationally?

The message that black lives matter is a good one, and a lot of well-meaning people support it. Unfortunately, Black Lives Matter doesn’t believe their own message. They are manipulating us like useful idiots to achieve, through violence, their radical political ends.

And if they succeed, black Americans will be harmed the most.

Speaking Out Again

Hello there.

It’s been a very long time since I posted on this blog. I wonder if anyone is still following it. About a year ago, I pivoted from the blog to my newsletter, and while that’s going well, this blog has been mostly neglected.

And it would have continued that way, if not for recent events. I’m talking, of course, about the ~~peaceful protests~~ ~~race riots~~ ~~Marxist insurrection~~ ~~domestic color revolution~~ whatever the hell is happening in the United States right now. But the thing that really pushed me to action was Kris Rusch’s latest business post: Speaking Out.

Until that post, Kris was one of the people I admired most in the publishing industry. I’ve followed her business blog since 2010, and she was one of the most influential people in convincing me to take the plunge and self-publish. It’s been one of the best decisions of my life, not just from a career perspective, but from a personal perspective as well.

In her latest post, however, I feel that Kris went over the cliff with the rest of our fractured country. Here are the parts that got to me:

The letter [Jeff Bezos] posted on his Instagram page from some racist named “Dave” (last name redacted) told Bezos he would lose customers if he continued supporting Black Lives Matter. The letter is breathtaking in its racism…
…the people who bother me the most are the folks who, for economic or political reasons, can ignore the racism and hatred that spews daily from the White House…
I draw the line at hatred, racism, and bigotry in all its forms. I can’t respect a bigot. I don’t want to be near a racist…
If this post makes you feel the urge to write me a screed or tell me that I should tolerate the bigots for the sake of unity, please do me a favor and just leave.

What is a “racist”? What is a “bigot”? To the left-wing ideologues who control the cultural narrative right now, it’s anyone who dares to oppose their radical agenda. The mayor of Minneapolis is “racist” because he won’t abolish the police, in the midst of the most violent and destructive riots that city has ever seen. White people who refuse to literally kneel before people of color and denounce their white privilege in communist-style struggle sessions are now considered “bigots.” Anyone who dares to utter any sort of criticism or counter-argument to the narrative of Black Lives Matter is fired, canceled, humiliated, doxxed, and destroyed.

Does Kris not see this? When you are so ideologically possessed that a “bigot” is anyone who refuses to (literally) kowtow to your ideology, a tolerant and diverse society becomes impossible? When speech is violence and violence is speech, violence will be used to silence speech. Those who are kind to the cruel inevitably become cruel to the kind.

I tried to post a comment on her blog, explaining that some of these “bigots” who have unfollowed her or withdrawn their Patreon support aren’t doing it because they want to “silence” her, but because they feel she doesn’t recognize that they have legitimate reasons for disagreeing with her, and aren’t the bigots she thinks they are. Yes, Kris, it’s important to speak out, but it’s also important to listen.

What happened next was all too predictable. On a blog post about the importance of speaking up, Kris silenced me. The only comments that she has allowed are the ones that fawn over her and tell her she’s right. Typical.

I can endure a lot of bullshit, but two things I absolutely cannot abide: gaslighting and hypocrisy. So ultimately, it was this episode with Kris, a person I used to admire and respect, that spurred me into action.

This blog is going to become a lot more active in the coming weeks and months. The newsletter will still be my main vehicle for reaching out to readers and cultivating fans, but the blog will be a place to share my more controversial thoughts and opinions. That said, I intend to be very deliberate and conscientious about what I post here, and avoid shitposting, spewing outrage, or going off on political rants.

My working assumption is that the chaos engulfing our country will continue to escalate through the 20’s, and that things will get much, much worse before they get better. We may see an American holocaust. We may see American gulags. We are already experiencing the digital ghettoization of libertarian and conservative voices—or, more accurately, voices that refuse to conform to the cultural and ideological narrative of the progressive left.

That said, I am still optimistic about the future. I believe that after the chaos and violence plays itself out, we will return to the core values that make us Americans. The Republic will survive. Liberty will prevail. Enough of us will refuse to go over the cliff with everyone else that we will, when all of this is over, restore our country.

When that happens, the only people with any moral authority will be the ones who refused to bend the knee—the ones who had the courage to speak out at the risk of losing their careers, their livelihoods, and in some cases even their lives. People like Jordan Peterson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, and others who stand in the face of cancel culture to call out the lies—the gaslighting and hypocrisy—and serve the truth.

This is my mission statement for my writing career:

To serve the truth and empower my readers to be better people for reading my books.

I cannot remain silent and accomplish this mission. The forces that push us to bend the knee are the ones that compel us to speak out, because we must speak out if we refuse to go over the cliff with the rest of humanity.

I recognize that this is essentially the same argument that Kris was making. And on this point, I think she’s right. Where she goes off is in calling anyone a bigot who falls outside of her narrow echo chamber. I despise echo chambers and don’t intend to fall into any of them.

So I’m going to set some rules.

First, I’m going to assume that anyone who engages with this content is a reasonable person who has come in good faith, no matter their views. No matter how vociferously you disagree with me, I will always strive to see the best in you, and to be generous with the benefit of the doubt.

Second, I’m going to assume that most of my fans and readers are going to disagree, on some level, with the more controversial things that I post here. Some of them will agree and voice support, but others will roll their eyes and click away. I’m not going to fall into the trap of thinking that all good people see the world the way that I do, because that way lies madness.

Third, and most importantly, I’m going to bet that if I keep the first two assumptions on the forefront of my mind with everything that I post here, my readers and fans will stay with me even when I share an opinion with which they vociferously disagree. In today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere, that’s a very dangerous assumption to make, but I don’t think my readers are the kind of people who would jump off the cliff with the rest of humanity.

I think there’s still a majority in this country who see the insanity for what it is, but don’t know what to do about it. That’s the person I’m writing this blog for: the one who’s wondering if they’re the only sane one in a world gone mad. Until just a couple of years ago, that was who I was. But now, I believe that even with all the craziness right now, there are a lot more people like us than we realize.

So yeah, the blog is back, and it’s going to get spicy. I may lose a few readers because of it, though hopefully not too many as I keep to the three rules that I listed above.

And if you have any thoughts or reactions, I’m interested to hear from you! Like I said at the start of this post, I have no idea if anyone still follows this blog, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough. The newsletter will remain my main focus, but I’ll post to this blog as often as the spirit moves me, which may be sporadic but won’t be never. And I’ll try to keep it as timely and interesting as I can.

2020-02-06 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the February 6th edition of my email newsletter. To sign up for my newsletter, click here.

It has been an eventful week in American politics. Impeachment, State of the Union, Iowa Caucuses… don’t worry, I’m not going to go off on a rant about politics (much as I’m tempted to do so). I recognize that of the three main factions that exist in the United States—Team Red, Team Blue, and Team “I don’t want to talk about politics”—the vast majority of my readers belong to the latter. That probably includes you.

I wonder sometimes about the rest of the science fiction community, though. I read Locus Magazine each month, and while I think the editors generally do a good job of allowing all their contributors to offer their own views, you can hardly turn the page sometimes without an underhanded jab or a snide remark at the people on Team Red. Most of the time, they don’t seem to even realize that they’re doing it.

Does the science fiction genre rightly belong to the people who hold the “correct” political views? Should it? I don’t think so. If science fiction is truly the genre of ideas, then there needs to be a place in the genre for all ideas, even the really bad ones. Why? Because eventually, the people who decide which ideas are good or bad will be the absolute worst people to do so, if we give them that power.

That’s why I still read Locus Magazine, and why I’m still subscribed to all the SF&F short story podcasts (even if I don’t always listen to them). There was a real stinker of a story by N.K. Jemisin on Lightspeed last month: a barely disguised political screed arguing that tolerance is not enough, that free speech shouldn’t be a right, and that “some people are just fucking evil.” I didn’t finish that one. However, Lightspeed has put out some really tremendous stories in the past, and I’m sure they will again in the future.

Is this a frustration that you’ve had with some of the other authors you read? Do you ever feel that they, like many of our politicians, just aren’t listening to you? I think the main reason for all of the outrage in our politics these days is that everyone wants to talk and no one wants to listen. From what I can tell, that’s not just true in the United States, but in Europe, the United Kingdom, France, Hong Kong—pretty much everywhere else as well.

When I was in the Boy Scouts, I did a team-building ropes course during summer camp one year. One of the obstacles took us forever because everyone was screaming at everyone else, telling them what to do. For the next obstacle, our coach told us that the only people who could speak were the ones who had said nothing in the previous obstacle. I thought that we were going to fail. Instead, the quiet kids figured it out faster than any of the rest of us, and with their direction we were able to finish the course faster than I thought possible.

That experience taught me that it’s just as important to listen as it is to speak. Often, even more so. One of the reasons I deleted my social media was because I felt that I was becoming addicted to hearing myself speak, and consciously or not, surrounding myself with people who enabled that addiction.

If science fiction is truly the genre of ideas, then the best way to defeat the bad ideas isn’t to silence or cancel them, but to push them out with better ideas. As for the people who are “just fucking evil,” the best way to deal with that is to take a good, hard look in the mirror. That’s what I try to do. I just wish our politicians would do the same.