Tag: politics

The thing about Minneapolis that scares me

I learned four things by living through covid. They are:

  1. Whatever the mainstream narrative tells you to believe (or not to believe), you should probably believe the opposite.
  2. Whatever the government tells you to do (or not to do), you should probably do the opposite.
  3. Accusation is projection is confession.
  4. At any given time, the most important story is the one that no one is talking about.

As the situation in Minneapolis continues to escalate, it’s not just the action on the ground that has me worried, but the rhetoric itself. Specifically, the one that has me worried is the accusation that ICE is somehow Trump’s Gestapo.

Obviously, this is ludicrous on its face—a wildly false accusation meant to rile up the useful idiots, many of whom received a public school education and thus know almost nothing about the actual Nazi Gestapo. But because accusation is projection is confession, it’s actually much more than that.

If there’s one thing that’s consistent about the left, it’s that they always accuse their enemies of doing the things that they are actually doing, or that they want to do. So when they say that Trump has some sort of Gestapo, that’s a very strong signal about their future plans, if they ever get power again.

The key question is this: by accusing Trump of setting up his own secret police force, are they confessing to something they hope to do, or to something that they are actually setting up right now? In other words, are they projecting something that’s purely aspirational, or do they already have the databases and surveillance infrastructure set up so that they can have a secret police force up and running the moment they come back to power in Washington again?

Did I predict it?

On July 24th, 2024, eleven days after the Butler Pennsylvania assassination attempt on President Trump’s life, I posted the following prediction:

9. In the first year of Trump’s second term in office, at least one of the following three things will happen: A second global pandemic,

Nope.

A domestic terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, or

No, thank goodness.

A major banking collapse and/or sovereign debt crisis that destroys the global economy.

No, though not for lack of trying. Seriously, I think this was one of the biggest unspoken goals of the Schumer shutdown earlier this year: to crash Trump’s economy in a way that benefits Democrats in the 2026 midterms. Thankfully, it seems to have failed.

So it looks like this prediction was a swing and a miss—though it could just be that the timing is off. After all, the day after the 2020 elections, I predicted in my personal journal that we were about to experience a rash of major political assassinations, but that didn’t start to play out until after the 2024 elections. The hardest part about making predictions is the timing, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if one (or all) of these things happen by the end of 2028.

Where do we go from here?

So the alleged shooter has been found, and it appears that he acted alone. He wasn’t from our local community here in Orem, but he was a fellow Utahan, I am ashamed to say. Still, his arrest does bring a degree of closure to this heinous act, at least in the immediate future, though I suspect we will be experiencing the fallout of this violent assassination for some time to come.

Where do we go from here? I don’t know. A lot of it depends on what happens in the coming days. The tensions are escalating dramatically between the right and the left, so if that escalation leads to physical violence, it could be catastrophic. I hope and pray that that isn’t the case.

On the other hand, I can see a lot of good coming from this tragedy as well. People are comparing Charlie Kirk to Martin Luther King, and saying that this is a turning point for our nation. A lot of people are turning to God because of this, which is gratifying to see. A lot of other people are turning away from the radical left, whose evil is now bare for all to see.

I do think there is a lot of truth in these statements. Decades from now, I think we will look back on this event as the moment when the Great American Revival went mainstream. And just as we look at MLK’s assassination as the moment when segregation lost to the civil rights movement, we will look at this as the moment when the transgender movement and the woke intersectional left decisively lost the culture wars. In the long-term, their voices will fade into irrelevancy until they are little more than a curious footnote to this turbulent period of our history.

But the short-term is much less certain, and it really does feel like our country is poised on the edge of a knife. And when I think of what the future may bring, I can’t help but think of what the prophets and apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been preaching for the last several months—specifically, the need for peacemakers in today’s world. There’s a lot of anger on my side of the political divide, some of it righteous, some of it otherwise. But if more good than evil comes of this tragedy, I sincerely believe it will be because of the peacemakers.

In many ways, Charlie Kirk was a peacemaker. He stood up boldly for what he believed, even to the point of controversy, but he was never violent about it. And though he was a passionate debater, he also listened to his opponents, and did his best to understand them and address them in their own terms. It was that quality—his ability to listen—that kept him from crossing the line from debate into contention.

Of course, his opponents hated that, and tried to paint him as a hateful and contentious figure, but all of that was just a projection of their own faults onto him. Everyone who knew him personally—including many of the people who differed with his beliefs—say that he was nothing but gracious to them personally, and went out of his way to reach out to them in their own moments of personal struggle. That is the mark of a peacemaker.

Charlie Kirk showed us how to stand up for our values with words instead of violence. He never compromised his values, but he also treated everyone—including his opponents—as a child of God. That fact made him truly a peacemaker. I can think of no better way to honor his legacy than by following his example.

Thoughts on the Charlie Kirk assassination

I heard the news shortly after dropping off my daughter at BYU kindergarten. The shooting apparently happened while we were on the road. Utah Valley University is only a couple of miles from our house, and the hospital where he died is only a mile from us.

I saw the videos of the assassination, including the now-censored one that showed it up close. I also saw the videos of the alleged shooter being hauled off in police custody, though now it appears that the University is saying that he wasn’t the shooter. This is such a fast-moving story that we probably won’t know exactly what happened until at least 24 hours from now, and there may be some things that we never know. And since I wasn’t there when it happened, I can’t comment on the shooting itself.

I just have to say, this is not who we are here in Utah. The shooter may turn out to be a Utah man, but that is not who we are—the rest of us. And I don’t just mean right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal. Most of us here in Utah swing MAGA (in fact, I’ve got a couple of neighbors who are still proudly flying their Trump flags), but we’ve also got some neighbors with rainbow flags and decals, and I’m sure that the vast majority of them are just as horrified that this assassination happened in our community. In fact, they’re probably afraid of how the rest of us will react.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Charlie Kirk’s family. I can’t imagine how horrible that must be, not just to lose your husband and father, but to have the footage of his violent death plastered all over the internet. I hope that more good than evil ultimately comes of this national tragedy, and that Charlie Kirk’s work will live on for many years to come.

Fantasy from A to Z: X is for eXpectations

What sort of books are fantasy readers looking for today? What are the expectations that readers have for the genre?

Overall, the fantasy genre is growing. Sales are up, both in traditional and indie publishing, and the big names in the field (like Brandon Sanderson) are doing quite well. It’s clear that the fantasy genre as a whole is robust and healthy.

When you break it down by publishers and subgenres, however, things start to look a little different. Romantasy is dominating the traditional publishing world, but most of it is little more than pornography for women, dressed up with fantasy trappings. And because of how traditional publishing now relies on a few big blockbusters to make most of their earnings, romantasy is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, making it much more difficult for debut and midlist authors in the other fantasy subgenres.

In the world of indie publishing, litRPG has begun to demonstrate some staying power. It was the new hot thing back in the early 2020s, but it’s attracted enough attention and developed enough of a following that it has become a major subgenre that is likely to endure for some time. I could be wrong about that, but from what I see, that’s where most of the innovative authors and whale readers (ie >1 book per week) are focusing their attention these days.

But because of the way that the algorithms tend to govern the indie publishing cycle (and the way that indie publishing has unfortunately turned into a zero-sum, pay-to-play game with online advertising), the rise of litRPG in the indie publishing world may very well be sucking all of the oxygen out of the room in the same way that romantasy is sucking it out of the traditional publishing world. 

Both subgenres are also very gender-biased, with women gravitating toward romantasy and men gravitating toward litRPG. This reflects the broader social and political trend of men and women going separate ways, across a whole host of different metrics. So as the gender divide continues to widen in society generally, that will probably reinforce the divide between romantasy and litRPG, creating a positive feedback loop (or death spiral, depending on how you look at it).

Sword and sorcery continues to do okay, and has probably been given a boost by the recent release of Conan the Barbarian into the public domain. But most of sword and sorcery got siphoned off into grimdark back in the 00s—in fact, you could say that sword and sorcery reinvented itself as grimdark. And while grimdark has resisted the feminization of literature, standing as one of the few remaining bastions where male readers continue to feel at home, I think grimdark has already passed its peak. In a post-pandemic, post-Trump world, I think most readers are hungry for books that are less nihilistic and more uplifting.

Which brings us to epic fantasy. While Brandon Sanderson continues to dominate this subgenre, with his massive kickstarters and huge book releases, it’s debatable whether his readers are hungry for more epic fantasy, or just for more Brandon Sanderson. He’s kind of a subgenre all to himself. Recent streaming adaptations like Wheel of Time and Rings of Power have failed miserably, and Game of Thrones has fallen almost totally out of cultural significance, with George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish the last book (and Patrick Rothfuss’s failure to finish his own series) becoming something of a meme.

In fact, the failure of these two big-name authors to finish writing their books may have struck epic fantasy a mortal wound. Because of how they have been burned, a large number of epic fantasy readers are now unwilling to commit to a series until after it is complete. But very few authors can afford to write a truly epic series and release the whole thing at once. It takes several years to write a series like that—and what are authors supposed to do if the first one flops? 

In other words, debut epic fantasy authors are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. If they release the first book by itself, it will probably sink into obscurity before they can write and release the next book. And if by some measure of hard work and tenacity they manage to write a whole series and hold back from publishing until they’re ready to release it all at once, if the first book still fails to sell, they’re SOL and all that hard work was for nothing. 

This is also why traditional publishers are so unwilling to publish a new epic fantasy series from a debut or a midlist author. A bestseller like Larry Correia might be able to dip his feet in that pond (and do quite well—I highly recommend his Sons of the Black Sword series), they won’t do that for anyone else. Which is fine, except that indie publishing epic fantasy is just as hard—arguably more so.

For these reasons, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin have done more to kill epic fantasy than they have to grow it.

But this may actually have created an opportunity for those authors who are willing to drive into the smoke. After all, there’s much less competition if you can manage to break in and build a decent following. But how much hunger is there for epic fantasy, compared to other fantasy subgenres? And how can a newer/midlist author reach them, without a big push from a publisher or the algorithms?

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

Fantasy from A to Z: P is for Prayer

What would fantasy be without religion? Probably much the same as us, when we don’t have religion: aimless, drifting, and lost.

Religion is more than just a useful aspect of worldbuilding. It’s something that lies at the very core of what makes us human—and thus, it’s something that any story needs to at least touch on if it is to be meaningful or important. Most likely, it won’t be meaningful at all unless the religious aspect is incorporated deeply within its bones.

But what is religion? For our purposes, religion is how we, as humans, relate to the powers that are higher than ourselves. It’s not about painting a cross on your cover, or a star of David, or a crescent, or an omh, or whatever else. It’s about how we act in regards to the cosmic and the transcendent. It’s about how we understand how to orient ourselves in this vast and terrifying universe, and find our own place within it.

I grew up in a time when religion was one of those taboo subjects that you never brought up in polite society. Politics, religion, and sex were all taboo like that. Granted, those taboos were already beginning to fray by the time I was old enough to hold an uninformed opinion on any of that, but even in the 90s, the post-war liberal consensus still held.

What was the post-war liberal consensus? It was the set of rules and norms that we all (or those of us in polite society, at least) agreed to live by, after the tumultuous catastrophe of the World Wars. From 1914 to 1945, more than a hundred Europeans died from political causes—and that was just in Europe. For thirty long years, the whole world was drowned in blood.

The wars ended with the invention of the world’s most devastating superweapon, which for the first time in the history of this planet gave us the power to literally annihilate our own species. So at the end of all that, our grandparents felt a very strong need to keep those weapons from ever being used again. Hence, they developed the post-war liberal consensus.

The greatest value of the post-war liberal consensus was tolerance—but they didn’t think of that as a value in itself. The idea was that instead of elevating the values of any one group over another, they would create a world where everyone tolerated each other. Everyone could keep their own culture and religion, along with their own unique (and often contradictory) cultural and religious values, so long as they didn’t try to impose those values on anyone else.

The trouble with that, of course, is that tolerance itself is a value. Which means that in order to maintain the post-war consensus, they had to be intolerant toward any culture or religion that threatened it. Which meant that they had to push their globalism and multiculturalism on everyone, superseding all of their own cultural and religious values. This gave rise to the global urban monoculture, which ultimately gave us the clown world we now live in. Which is currently falling apart.

Religion should not be off-limits, especially for good storytelling. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that stories should bash you over the head and try to convert you to whatever church the author happens to belong to. Indeed, some of the most religious stories aren’t about any particular church or creed at all. 

An example of this is Epic: The Musical. Beyond the old Greek mythology that runs through the story, the religious view is that the universe is utterly unpredictable, the gods (or higher powers) are arbitrary and capricious, and that the ends (getting home to Penelope) always justify the means. Indeed, any means that aren’t justified by the ends are immoral and wrong. Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves. How do we sleep? Next to our wives.

Those aren’t the religious views that I subscribe to, but those are deeply religious views. How? Because they show us how we stand in relation to powers that are higher than ourselves. In the 19th century, it became fashionable to throw out religion, and reverence man himself as the highest power in the universe. Where did that get us? It gave us the 31 years that killed 100 million Europeans and drowned the whole world in blood.

G.K. Chesterton said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Now, more than ever, the world needs religion. 

Of course, one of the nice things about writing fiction is that you can explore all sorts of religious ideas that may or may not have a direct counterpart in our world. Indeed, that’s part of what makes fantasy so rich. Tolkien created a whole race (the elves) that is bound by magic and immortality to this earth, contrasting with us humans, who are “strangers in a strange land.” In fact, Tolkien’s entire oeuvre is rich with religious elements, not just in the worldbuilding and the mythology, but in the Christian symbology—and he does it so subtly and so deeply that it draws you into his world, rather than kicking you out. It’s all in service to the story.

There’s a reason why the best stories in the world are in the Bible (and most of those are in the Book of Genesis). Which is one of the reasons why I’m drawing on the life of King David for the fantasy epic that I’m currently writing (The Soulbound King). But I’m also drawing on symbology and mythology as well, to make sure the religious elements aren’t just skin-deep. There is so much fascinating tree-related symbolism within the Jewish/Christian tradition. So much rich and wonderful stuff to draw on for creating a fantasy world.

Don’t be afraid to play with religion in your own fantasy stories. After all, on the deepest level, creativity itself is something of a religious act.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

Fantasy from A to Z: K is for Kings

Why are kings and kingdoms so common in fantasy?

Part of it has to do with the genre’s nostalgic yearning for a distant past. One way of understanding the modern era is to see it as an unending series of political revolutions that have spread like a slow-moving contagion from one part of the world to another. 

It started with the English Civil War, then died down for a while until it manifested in the American Revolutionary War, which resulted in the creation of the United States. After that, it spread to France, leading to the French Revolution and a very messy tug-of-war between the Republicans and the Monarchists, ultimately leading to the permanent end of the French monarchy. 

Then we had the aborted revolutions of 1848, which ultimately gave us Karl Marx and Socialism, the Bolivarian revolutions in Latin America, the American Civil War, which culturally was something of an echo of the old English Civil War (with the Cavaliers in the south and the Puritan Roundheads in the north), and ultimately the Bolshevik Revolution which gave us global communism, etc etc.

I won’t belabor the point (though if you want to hear a good podcast that covers all this stuff, check out Revolutions by Mike Duncan). The point is that the modern era has basically been one long series of very messy wars to depose the old medieval kings and emperors. Today, the only monarchies that survive are either constitutional monarchies that no longer exercise direct political power (for example, King Charles of the United Kingdom), or else they are strange aberrations that only exist because of unique regional history and economic circumstances (for example, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose dynasty depends almost entirely on the country’s oil reserves).

Fantasy is all about hearkening back to a romantic view of the premodern past, even if that past never existed. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most fantasy—especially classic fantasy—tends to feature kings and kingdoms. Never mind that historically, many medieval kings were almost totally beholden to their dukes, especially in the time before gunpowder, when the dukes could just hole up in their castles and openly defy their kings. That’s why Europe has so many medieval castles.

Of course, some fantasy like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire does a really good job of capturing the complex dynamics of feudal politics. A lot of the old sword & sorcery also plays around with those kinds of medieval political tensions, balancing the nostalgic aspect of fantasy with the savagery of backstabbing courtiers and brutal hand-to-hand combat. Robert E. Howard’s classic Conan the Barbarian stories are a great example of this, with Conan ultimately rising to become King of Aquilonia.

Both grimdark and sword & sorcery embrace the medieval savagery—indeed, it’s a large part of the nostalgic yearning. Other subgenres play down the savagery, either by making the king a distant power, or by making the world out to be a lightly-populated wilderness. Lord of the Rings is a good example of both, though it still defaults to feudal monarchy as the majority political system.

Is there a subconscious yearning for old-fashioned monarchy that fantasy quietly fulfills? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. If kings and kingdoms are the default system of government in most fantasy novels, I think that’s because it was the default for much of the medieval era. In books like Game of Thrones where the political intrigue is a key aspect of the story, you get into the more complicated aspects of feudal politics, but that’s not necessarily a requirement.

Personally, I enjoy fantasy with a little bit of medieval-style political intrigue, though most grimdark tends to overdo it. I did really enjoy Larry Correia’s Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, though (no spoilers please—I haven’t yet read the last book!) Robert E. Howard hits the sweet spot, I think, with a world so wild and savage that no king has managed to subdue it, and even a barbarian can rise to become a king.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

Fantasy from A to Z: F is for Female

We live in a time of deepening division—not just between political parties or social classes, but between the sexes as well. Of course, men and women have always been different, but those differences have grown increasingly stark in recent years, even as it becomes more politically incorrect to say so.

Across the Western world, men are drifting one way, women another. In politics, men are turning more conservative, while women—especially young, unmarried women—are growing more liberal. We can see this gap not only in US voting patterns, but in voting patterns across the world. In matters of faith, men are turning toward traditional, even ancient forms of religious expression: high liturgy, orthodoxy, duty, and structure. Meanwhile, women are leaving organized religion altogether in record numbers. Some are embracing a kind of therapeutic spirituality—mindfulness, astrology, crystals—but many are simply checking out.

It’s not hard to see this growing rift playing out in other areas of life: marriage, dating, education, employment. But it’s also playing out in fantasy literature, not just among readers, but also among writers and publishers.

Instead of sharing a common ground, men and women are building parallel worlds. Many male readers are flocking to grimdark, with its blood-soaked realism and morally gray protagonists, or to litRPG, which merges game mechanics with fantasy worldbuilding in a system-focused power fantasy. Meanwhile, women are turning increasingly to romantasy, a subgenre that often verges on outright pornography and has virtually no appeal to men.

A lot of this is downstream from the gender divide in publishing. Traditional publishing—especially in the U.S.—has become overwhelmingly female, especially in the editorial departments. Some of that is demographic; some of it is cultural. But the result is that the gatekeepers of traditional fantasy publishing are mostly women. Their tastes, sensibilities, and values shape what gets acquired, marketed, and celebrated.

This divide wouldn’t be so troubling if it were merely about preferences or taste. But it runs deeper than that. Increasingly it seems that men and women no longer understand each other—or worse, no longer even try to. And when even our fiction reflects that fracture, it becomes that much harder to bridge the growing divide.

That’s what makes the current state of fantasy so toxic. Not because romantasy or grimdark are inherently bad—every subgenre has its place—but because they have become echo chambers that silo the sexes off from each other.

Men and women were not made to live in separate worlds. We need each other—not just to perpetuate the species, but to challenge, balance, and refine one another. I know this from personal experience. Without my wife, I’d be a lesser man. She often drives me crazy (to be fair, I return the favor), but we have each grown so much since marrying each other that I think I would hardly recognize the man I once was. Together, we are far more than the sum of our two parts.

Our stories should reflect that truth. We don’t need more genre ghettos. We need shared myths. Stories where masculine and feminine virtues don’t clash with each other, but come together in harmony.

That’s what I’m hoping to accomplish with my epic fantasy series, The Soulbound King. When building out the fantasy world, I deliberately designed the magic system so that latent magical powers can only be unlocked through marriage—the “soulbond”—between a man and a woman. I did that largely in response to the growing gender divide, because I wanted to write a story that shows how men and women can overcome it. Hopefully it works.

Fantasy, perhaps more than any other genre, gives us the space to reimagine what’s possible. It allows us to explore not just what the world is, but what it could be. And right now, what the world needs is for the young men and women of the rising generation to come together and reinvent the world.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts