I expect Democrats and their allies to be unable to distinguish between right and wrong. But recent events show that we need to insist that some who are allegedly on our side do too. When you’re trying to be Sherlock Holmes over the shades of children’s blood, you need to stop and conduct a deep personal inventory.
Andrew Breitbart said we need to make our own conservative popular culture. I have tried to do that, and it has worked.
There Is Right and There Is Wrong and We Need to Tell the Difference
It’s pretty depressing how many people on the right are being idiots about this crisis in Israel. As I’ve explained before, America First does not mean America Inert. At some point, you have to understand and accept that there are bad people in the world, and that our oceans cannot be our sole defense if we want to keep them out. The idea that repeating clichés about forever wars – which I served in – is somehow a serious way to address developments in the world that are inconvenient and horrible has overtaken far too many people on our side. They need to get their heads right. Sometimes we’re in it whether we like it or not.
Now, some of them just insincere. You might’ve noticed how many allegedly right-wing accounts out there are now calling anybody who thinks that the proper answer to barbarians is the same one that civilization has been giving to them for 5000 years is a “Zionist.” But of course they don’t mean “Zionist.” They mean “Jew.” They don’t like Jewish people. The world’s oldest prejudice seems to be alive and well in certain sectors of society. Unfortunately, some of them pretend to be on our side in other matters. Don’t believe it. If you fail the moral test on this issue, you’re going to fail the moral test on every other issue too. Even if it’s a not enough to make you refuse to associate with them that these antisemites are disgusting, you should at least avoid them for self-preservation. The only reason they would have your back in a fight is to stick a knife in it.
And some people are just stupid, though many of them like to portray themselves as smart. There are a lot of midwit analysts out there who impress people who don’t know any better with a dumb podcast or Twitter threads of marginally-interesting insights in regular times. There are also the clowns who use their sleuthing skills to uncover vast conspiracies about how atrocities are slightly less atrocious than originally contending – though even that’s nonsense. But now that stuff has gotten really serious, their lack of seriousness is showing through. I get that some people don’t want to fight for Israel, or any other country. But too often that includes their own. Except no one’s asking them to. Their lame moral evenhandedness between seventh century butchers and the people who need to kill them is tiresome.
Others have been burned. We’ve all been burned. We had a ruling class that has engaged in foreign-policy adventures that got thousands of Americans, many of them the best of America, killed and maimed over the last couple decades. The idiocy of Iraq, the bungling of Afghanistan, and the constant military fiascoes around the globe, broken only by minor and equivocal victories at best, have had consequences. Normal and good Americans don’t trust our country or its leadership on foreign affairs, or any other affairs for that matter. So, when they are told that we need to take up arms again, naturally, they’re naturally suspicious. They look at the disgraceful abandonment of Afghanistan with 13 Americans dead and understand that their best interests are not being served by the elite. When our ruling class finds that it blows the trumpet and nobody comes, it has only itself to blame.
But we have only ourselves to blame when we refuse to act with our own moral agency. Yes, I know our leaders are garbage. That doesn’t change the fact that Hamas represents a group of barbarians who butchered 1400 people and who have to be destroyed. No, Iraq did not have WMDs. That doesn’t change the fact that these guys need to die in great heaps. At the end of the day, we can’t simply wave away our own personal responsibility to make a decision based upon the facts facing us. Our traumas, real as they are, do not excuse us from exercising moral clarity.
Yeah, we’ve taken punches. Yeah, we’ve been abused. But yeah, we need to support the ruthless destruction of Hamas anyway.
Making Conservative Pop Culture
Well, my eighth (!) Kelly Turnbull conservative action novel, Overlord, came out on October 1st and now a lot of people asking me via email (My super-secret VIP email is Kurt.Schlichter@townhall.com) about my writing process. Well, after eight novels about America split splitting into red and blue countries and the insanity and gunplay that follows, I do have kind of a process. I don’t know if my experience will help any aspiring writers, but I’m certainly happy to share what works for me.
And what works for me is pretty simple. I think about what I’m going to write, then I sit down and write it. I wish there was some special secret about writing that I could share where you could go from Step One, “I want to write a book,” and then reach Step Three and have a completed manuscript, and it would fill in Step Two with something easy. But the fact is that the way you write is to sit down and write. You just start typing. Now, I don’t necessarily make it up at the computer. I usually have a movie in my head of what’s going to happen. I literally copy down what I see in my mind. How do I get the ideas for all the elaborate shootouts and weird leftist insanity? They usually just sort of come to me and I put them in my mindfilm and then I watch it in my head and tweak it a little, and then I sit down and type out what I see.
Now, often while I’m sitting there, something will occur to me that’s really cool, and I will want to do that. There’s a big sequence at the end of Overlord that just sort of came to me and it fit perfectly. The way a plot falls into place is kind of amazing. It just sort of does. I look for things that my guy can do that move the plot forward and are cool and interesting, and then work to get to the end state that I want. I usually end up writing the end when I’m about halfway through the book. I just skip ahead and write the last few chapters. That gives me something to work toward. And I’ll go back and fix things. If I get a good idea later, I need to change stuff for consistency’s sake, but what I write on the first draft is about a 90% product. Yeah, I go over it about a dozen times, during the writing process and for a couple weeks after the manuscript is done, to edit it and revise it and try and purge of those miserable typos. But what you read in the book is in large part the movie I saw on my head transcribed.
One of my ground rules for the books is that everything has to be cool. No bad parts. It has to be exciting or funny or interesting. I’m not going to write about feelings. There’s not going to be anybody complaining that his daddy didn’t love him. That’s stupid and boring and I’m not going to do it. I want to write things that I want to read. I’m bored reading my own stuff then it’s crap, and if it’s crap I cut it out. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often. I’m pretty happy with the finished product. And a lot of you guys are too, and I hope you check it out.
So, what’s your take away if you want to be a writer? Sit down and write your book. And then make sure it’s good. You know what’s good. Do that. I wish I had an easier technique then to just write something that’s good, but there isn’t one. So get typing.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get his eighth book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, Overlord, out now!
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My super-secret email address is Kurt.Schlichter@townhall.com
