Everyone can sense a healthy cultural vibe shift in 2024, but the institutional damage done to publishing by the decade of the Great Awokening is far from over.
My wife is a successful novelist and we are usually knee-deep in galleys so I have some ideas here: the publishing business is so very female (the few men are mostly gay) and so uniformly devoted to Social Justice in all ways that any man who does not come with the NYT/NPR seal of approval or who does not check any of the major victim-identity categories will either be rejected outright or will give up before even trying to navigate the political minefield—we have 2 friends who are previously published white-male novelists who were told in so many words to not even bother submitting a manuscript, they would not be considered; also, we know a few Latino or Asian guys who are half-white or who were raised in almost entirely upscale white worlds who gained literary success by mastering the victim game and positioning themselves as both victims of white oppression and allies of the Soc Just cause, thus opening all doors for books and awards; and probably most importantly, the publishing business (much like all liberal culture) has become so blinkered, so neurotic and sclerotic, that they might be the last people to know where are the new good books—they have very little interest in literature, but an intense need to be constantly broadcasting the proper political opinions.
Samizdat is the way to go, and in 10 or so years we'll learn about the real best books of say 2020-2024 once they get reissued or made into movies.
Just like with "minority-owned" businesses, when selection depends on identity, people unfairly excluded for having the wrong identity simply pretend to have one of the right ones, usually by partnering up with someone who checks the right boxes and is happy to play along a cut. This is obviously easier in business than with anything involving public appearances like literary parties, book tours and speeches. But the answer there is probably not to just play ghostwriter and employ some total faker but to find someone above the minimum threshold of actual talent and then actually work on the book together. The Ferrante semi-psuedonymous husband-wife team may be the ultimate example of this strategy paying off, at least, for a while.
Recently had a friend visit who is a woke female YA author and she was describing the editorial review process for her next book complete with sensitivity readers, etc. I failed to keep my feelings on this in check.
I don't know much about YA but it seems like a large rubber room patrolled by Social Justice Church Ladies.
I told my wife that if she ever submits to a "sensitivity reader" I'm calling a divorce atty, but we seem to be safe for now. Her editor and proofreader occasional try to PCify her prose, but she mostly ignores them.
Whoever ran the Index of Forbidden Books for the Vatican had nothing on these people.
I would imagine the fiction writers are concentrating on screenwriting. John Swartzwelder, who was credited with writing 59 episodes of The Simpsons, made the transition to writing novels 20 years ago, although since he is self-published it is unclear how successful he is. My local library system doesn't carry any of his novels but that isn't dispositive in any direction.
There is a saying in the Middle East: after the Saturday people, we come for the Sunday people. It seems, from my perspective, to have been vindicated.
And we wonder why adult fiction is dying and why classical education (which stress the non-diverse classics) is all the rage in k-12 education. Do these lists even matter any more besides giving pretentious lefties something to namedrop? Seems like a total lack of self awareness.
I noticed that several in nonfiction (like the appropriately named Max Boot) are suitably Interested in promoting foreign wars and/or insulting native born white Americans who dare to oppose their enlightened views. May we also notice that among these names, a good one-third are Jewish?
Actually, Bush family did trade with 3rd Reich. Moreover, lots of funding pre-1933 came from Aryan people from the USA. People like Henry Ford and so on. Because of the 1923 inflation, German capital stock was cheap, so lots of it was taken over by US Companies. In a second step, those same companies wanted to make sure that the political environment stayed friendly so they supported AH takeover of power. They thought Mussolini was a good investment, so why not try AH?
It's harder to find good new books to read than movies and TV shows. Too much content and the people who have taken over the old gatekeepers and curators are trying to coast and run on the fumes left by their betters.
> "When the Clock Broke" - For this account of America in the 1990s, John Ganz [writes] a disturbing tale of populists, nativists and demagogues who, acting on the margins of U.S. politics, helped shatter the post-Cold War consensus and usher in antidemocratic forces that plague the country today.
A Top 100 book for sure, though better filed in "Progressive Yells At Cloud" than in "History." I can't wait to read John's novel insights on this endlessly fascinating topic.
Oh, wait. I was just referred to Heather Cox Richardson. She's a Boston College Professor of History, whose million-plus readership nets her a few million dollars a year. Two paragraphs that explain the politics of the Seventies from her 11/30/24 Substack:
"As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of 'Movement Conservatives'... Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.
"In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished... The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans."
.
Even though he is a white male, John Ganz might possibly strawman as well as Dr. Richardson, who is female. Though it would be hard to top her "In their telling" lead-in. I suggest striking Ganz from the list, and re-headlining the NYT article "99 Notable Books of 2024."
I've come full circle on immigration. If forced to choose, I'd let in 10,000 Meso-Americans who at least have a realistic view of human affairs and capacity for hard work over a single high-G Yiddish Eastern European like Max Boot. They are effete, myopic ideologues, they don't actually like the US or its founding history or founding Anglo-American stock, and they are obsessed with settling historical scores back in their homelands. Boot of course is married to a similarly out-of-place, deracinated grifter who came here for the excellent shopping.
> "Boot of course is married to a similarly out-of-place, deracinated grifter who came here for the excellent shopping."
Mrs. Boot, the amusingly named Sue Mi Terry, seems to have arrived in the US as a 12-year-old, so it may be unfair to ascribe her immigration to aspirant shopping, though her mother may be guilty, and as hereditarians know, the apple something something . . .
Wikipedia says Sue Mi's Korean name is Kim Sumi, so Sue Mi's Anglo surname, Terry, implies a previous marriage. No mention of kids. Overall, Max appears to command as little devotion from his wife as from anyone else. His wife is even under indictment for being a double-agent while working at the CIA. But then Max himself is a double-agent of sorts, though one not likely to be indicted.
The Sue Mi Terry case is full of signs of narcissistic self-promotion, a systematically enabled ethnonarcissism by a Korean operating all her adult life tied to U.S. institutions. That she eventually married a man (Max Boot) she assumed was a major power-broker in her world fits the story well. It's an interesting study in the way the "foreign-policy elite" of the early-21st century operated, and I'll try to give it here:
Sue Mi Terry was born to two Korean parents in Seoul in 1969. So little was known about her -- she promoted herself in a highly curated way -- that most Internet info vaguely has "born ca.1972," although she was born in September 1969. (She has allowed false impressions about her age, I think; she wanted to sneak in a few more years of being in her forties, and benefitted much from being seen as a charming-but-smart "Girl-Boss" type in a world heavily male. And most of the news stories when she was arrested, in July 2024, quoted the wrong, younger age.)
Sue Mi's mother married a White American, a Mr. Terry, in 1981 in Hawaii. This was said to have been after the death of Sue Mi's Korean father in Korea. Sue Mi was then raised for a time in Hawaii. By sometime around mid-teenage she is in Northern Virginia, where by the 1980s a Korean community was strong on the ground.
Sue Mi Terry's ties to the mainland U.S. may have been considerably weak before around 1986. Between the start of her mother's relationship with Mr. Terry and her graduation from a U.S. high school in Virginia, her status between Korea, Hawaii, and Virginia was in some flux. This floating status makes the line "she came here" into not such a simple thing: is Hawaii a "here"? I'd say not. But she was "here" by mid-late teenage.
Sue Mi Terry graduated from a high school in Northern Virginia in, I think, 1988, with at least the last two full years of high school in Virginia. She was psychologically quite more Korean than 'American' after this series of life-changes, anyway. What effect on her came from her mother marrying a White-male in her mid-childhood and later emigrating, is uncertain. Her later "acting as an unregistered foreign agent" fits that perfectly: She was always a strange figure on the scene and got away with it for being a charming and young-presenting 'Asian' woman.
To come back to the surname question: "Sue Mi Terry" came to use her White adoptive father's surname. She discarded her own birth-name. I assume this was at the urging of her Korean mother: after all, when she changed her name to "Sue Mi Terry" (from birth name Su-Mi Kim) she'd have been a young teenager or so, highly liable to influence or diktats from her mom.
Sue Mi Terry spends the 1990s floating through academia, talking her way into stints in Korea here and there, and after a PhD in 2001 she soon enters the CIA: why they accepted her is a little baffling, because she is obviously a risk for being liable to foreign influence and so forth. She was terminated about 2008, at the CIA, over suspicions of disloyalty (in effect) and was traded around different other agencies before entering academia and charming her way through milking connections. In the 2010s she was quite successful promoting herself as a "Korea expert" and had in fact been closely collaborating with South Korean intelligence most of that time.
Sue Mi Tery was an obvious 'recruitment' target, needless to say. But officially this collaboration only happened in the 2010s, not formally during her ca. 8 years at the CIA and ca. 3 years at other U.S. fed-gov agencies. But she was still the same person. She was obviously of questionable loyalty, but she charmed the White males around and so they gave her a pass. Some "spies" and influence agents are quite good at this, of course.
Sue Mi Terry, like her mother, was one of that type of Asian woman in the West solely interested in snagging a White male and laughing all the way to the bank (or whatever they're thinking). In the early 2000s she enters into a marriage-like relationship with White male named Guy Vidra, give years or so her junior. They met in graduate school. Guy Vidra ran "The New Republic" for a time. Sue Mi Terry has two mixed-race "hapa" sons by him. She got rid of Guy Vidra when it became clear that Max Boot was available starting about 2013 or 2014.
Max Boot is a foreign-origin Jew, as we all know. He has three Jewish children, but divorced his wife ca.2013. By 2013 he and Sue Mi Terry are professionally collaborating and evidently in a relationship by 2015. They jointly buy an expensive Manhattan apartment in 2016, and Max Boot takes to promoting the early (teenage) career of one of Sue Mi Terry's "hapa" sons (the first son turned 15 ca.2020). But more importantly, Max Boot used his network to promote Sue Mi Terry's work, and her profile rose and rose. They frequently co-published in Max Boot's usual venues including The Washington Post, starting in 2014 or 2015.
In this story we see three direct White-man, Asian-woman relationships that deliver Sue Mi Terry into a kind of prominence: Her mother's marriage to Mr. Terry in 1981, and Sue Mi's own two marriages to White men (and two half-White sons). But not any White men: the two marriages we know about were to men prominent in the world in which she wanted to make a name for herself, the world of the foreign-policy elite and publishing. It's not a coincidence that she chose such men, any more than it's a coincidence that South Korean intelligence recruited her.
By the 2010s when Sue Mi Terry is coasting as a kind of major celebrity, soaking in the fame and glamour and meanwhile being hitched to prominent pundit Max Boot, she lets her ego and basic ethnonarcissism take over into instinctual cruise-control. South Korean intelligence agents recruit her, and close ties begin by 2013 or 2014, and develop over the next few years to the point of her becoming a full-fledged asset placed prominently in major foreign-policy institutions and with the ear of prominent Washington people.
In Max Boot's world, of course, NONE of what she was doing was outrageous itself. In Max Boot's world of dual-loyalty and quasi- or actual dual citizenship, it'd hardly any major scandal. Sue Mi insists that she never did anything wrong despite knowingly working with South Korean intelligence for so many years. As she awaits her trial and sentencing, she is probably raging in private that they targeted her for being Asian, whereas people like Max Boot do much the same as what she did on behalf of Israel and are not punished.
The life and career of Sue Mi Terry is a fascinating study in the elite of our time. A woman like this, is a kind of "adventuress" (a Sailer word).
Sue Mi Terry is of a type rather common among Asians even when in conditions in which overt economic disparities are minimal, or even nonexistent. What their game is, exactly, is hard to say. But roughly it looks like this: they aspire to grab power from a "sucker" society (NW-European-normed "White America"), and often do successfully do so.
In Sue Mi Terry's case, probably before affiliation with Max Boot already but very certainly after intimate involvement therewith, she easily observed how successful Jews were in doing what they do. She felt she could do it too. She worked her charm on people and it all worked, until the FBI arrested her.
A big question, an uncomfortable one, is how did an "adventuress" like Sue Mi Terry ever get promoted up the ranks of anything as important as the U.S. national-security establishment, and so on, at all?
Her connection to Max Boot and his type, looks to have been both an effect and a cause. She already headed that way in the 1990s and 2000s in relatively younger years. Her marriage to Max Boot ca.2016 was partly just a product of being IN such circles, not the cause of being in them.
While we're at it, Max Boot, too, is a kind of victim here. Sue Mi Terry was (IMO) using him to promote her own career and to gain attention for herself. Indeed after they linked up in the mid-2010s her career as a Washington influencer really picked up. She "sensed" it would, apparently.
If Max Boot were a semi-employed welder instead of a well-connected cosmopolitan dual-citizen, she'd never have married him, naturally, nor even run across him in any circumstance. So she married a symbol and not a person. This is regrettable but fits the pattern: It might be a superpower for her (giving her "hapa" sons a leg-up through elite-networking) but also had an Achilles Heel in that the same tendency allowed foreign intelligence agents to recruit her. It's all more than a little sordid
---
I'd stress this: the Sue Mi Terry case is not pigeon-hole'able in the way Anti-Gnostic jokingly suggests above, i.e., as some ditzy foreign-bride idiot on Max Boot's puppet-string who was bought off by foreign intelligence agents who dangled name-brand handbags in front of her.
The info on the gifts of luxury items in the FBI indictment was quite secondary, almost like clickbait and a placeholder for the main story: that she became unable to distinguish the concepts of loyalty to the United States and to her ethno-nation, and favored the one at the expense of the other. In other words, she is not an American but somehow represented America. She parroted some talking points and went far, but this is not the same as being a thoughtful member of the nation. It was all a kind of fraud.
The Sue Mi Terry case is that of a foreign agent who is a product of immigration policy, feminism, and racial policy. The latter two in that she she was probably affirmative-actioned up a number of ladders all throughout life, and charmed men who were under pressure to advance feminist Girl-Boss social goals.
Sue Mi's specific motivations were "Ego" and "Ideology" (ethnonarcissism), and less so the "Money" and "Coercion" wings of the "M.I.C.E." acronym they talk about regarding why people become spies.
But I do find myself coming back towards the Max Boot angle to this story. The "story" is not just that she was an asset for a foreign intelligence agency, but that she was arrested. After pairing up with Max Boot, Sue Mi Terry was able to observe closely the Jewish network in which Max Boot operated, and how they all do "influence operations," how they effectively hold veto-power over U.S. political culture.
Now, hardcore Korean ethnonarcissists believe Koreans could, or should, be able to replicate Jewish successes; and/or (more commonly) that dual-loyalty is permissible and natural. When someone from the South-Korean media tracked down Sue Mi's mother for an interview after her arrest, her mother actually said this (amazingly, and obliviously): "She is a true Korean American, equally dedicated to both countries." Nothing in Max Boot's brand of dual loyalty disproved the sense that it was right and proper "to be equally dedicated to both countries," an instinct which evidently pre-exists in Sue Mi's psyche through maternal inheritance here, filtered through a series of marryings-up in which the Asian woman married a White male.
On Israel and its cruel wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Ever since the Sue Mi Terry arrest, about the end of July 2024, I've wondered to what extent it was a Biden-admin message to the "Max Boots" out there: a kind of indirect move against Israel to stop killing Palestinians.
Netanyahu and his many cheerleaders, down to the line-agents of the lowliest AIPAC handler of the loweliest freshman Congressman, ignore Biden's entreaties to stop the killing, and laugh at Biden as they bomb the latest school or hospital. So what can Biden and the anti-war side in the Biden camp do?
We're unable to arrest any of the many dual-citizens with Israel who manipulate U.S. affairs, but we can send a MESSAGE that maybe we MIGHT do it. A "shot across the bow." How? By picking off a few marginals who are already under long-term observation. What better than the very wife of one of the top dual-citizen influencers of all, Max Boot? The arrest and trial discredit Max Boot himself by making him look ridiculous, without actually violating the enforced taboo against cracking down on these people.
> "The Sue Mi Terry case is that of a foreign agent who is a product of immigration policy, feminism, and racial policy. The latter two in that she she was probably affirmative-actioned up a number of ladders all throughout life, and charmed men who were under pressure to advance feminist Girl-Boss social goals."
Right.
To be fair to the CIA, in the intel world, you often have the most to gain from people who have feet in more than one nation/religion/movement/whatever, and who therefore are of ambiguous loyalty. Unfortunately the CIA's brain is DEI-scrambled so rather than operating with a highly loyal inner core who in turn handle the ambiguous-loyalty people as 'assets', as a competent intel agency would, instead the incompetent CIA invites the ambiguous-loyalty people into the inner sanctum to appease the perverse DEI gods. Sue Mi is the inevitable—but actually one of the milder—results.
If anyone wonders how the CIA got this way, it might not be a coincidence that the more egregious results of the situation remain unprosecuted.
> "Sue Mi Terry graduated from a high school in Northern Virginia"
Just as the suburbs of Southern Maryland are full of employees/orbiters of the domestic/HHS deep state, the suburbs of Northern Virginia are full of the employees/orbiters of the foreign-policy/intel/military deep state. Thus the parents of high schoolers in N Virginia are themselves frequently foreign-policy/intel/military deep staters or hangers-on thereof. Likewise, just as the high schools near, say, Detroit have programs/extracurriculars/career clubs/parental contacts that are auto industry-related, and high schools near Silicon Valley have programs/extracurriculars/career clubs/parental contacts that are tech industry-related, and high schools near Houston have programs/extracurriculars/career clubs/parental contacts that are oil industry-related, high schools near DC typically have programs/extracurriculars/career clubs/parental contacts that are deep state-related. If Sue Mi had NOT gone into some kind of deep state career track, it would have been perhaps more remarkable.
> "in 2001 she soon enters the CIA: why they accepted her is a little baffling, because she is obviously a risk for being liable to foreign influence and so forth."
Not too baffling: the CIA is famously captive to an ideology that blinkers it from screening out obvious risks for foreign influence and so forth. Even if it weren't such an ideological captive, it is not very competent, a deficit it tries to compensate for by being randomly vicious.
To be fair to the CIA, and all other US employers, they are under tremendous pressure from the 'Civil Rights'[sic]/anti-'discrimination'[sic] lobby/bar/industrial complex to hire all kinds of people they would have better left by the curbside, but they are trying to meet 'diversity' quotas. A bright, charming Korean-American young lady is an obvious hiring choice who would be higher IQ and more pleasant than the median diversity compulsion-hire. Yeah, you might have to put a thumb on the scale for her security clearance, but that is easier and less fraught than tangling with the 'Civil Rights'[sic]/anti-'discrimination'[sic] lobby/bar/industrial complex.
tl;dr: The entire institutional structure of the United States is now configured for anti-optimal outcomes.
By the way, thank you for these analyses. I marvel at how much more informative than Wikipedia and the mainstream press your work is.
Can I ask how you accomplish this? Is it simply that you read the results of Google searches more diligently and without DEI-blinders, or do you have different techniques and better sources than what system-constrained journalists have?
You obviously don’t interact much with meso Americans. It’s not that they’re realistic - it’s that they don’t understand, don’t care to understand, and don’t respect those who do understand. Both cohorts are a problem but with proper awareness you can counter the Max Boots. Within a generation being coddled by a high trust society they lose any meaningful commitment to hard work (go visit the skid rows of Fresno or Phoenix for proof). You can look to places like New Mexico for a future with those meso Americans - and even that state is composed of Hispanics who are mostly Spanish. Good luck with the newer waves who are 90% Amerindian or black, won’t intermarry, and have a median IQ below 90. They’ll vote to take everything you own and leave this country looking like Venezuela. That you think they have any more respect for our founding and civic fabric is laughable. They think we’re successful because we stole from them and are racists. That’s hardly a something I’d define as respectful.
There's been some discussion about this on the right, in the various contexts of left-wing capture of the media, devaluation of masculinity, the boy crisis, and the decline of literacy among young men.
I think it ought to be better noticed. The arts are often powerful shapers of public mood over the medium to long term, and literature tends to draw on the sort of people who can write well enough to shape elite opinion. If young men don't read, while pictures are powerful at communication, there is a certain complexity of thought that's hard to carry over visually. I also think a generation of young men who don't read may have more trouble with complex ideas.
There's actually a sort of underground self-publishing scene that appeals to men, but it works heavily in genres like litRPG (fantasy novels with in-universe statistics) that have, as of yet, little cultural influence (and usually not great literary quality). Of course, you could have said the same about comic books in the 1930s, and movies were considered trash before they were considered high art.
There's a small right-wing literary movement, but not very powerful. I think there are real problems with building one, including (a) general anti-intellectualism and disdain for the arts on the right and in particular among MAGA, which tends heavily working-class (b) a general preference of men for visual over print media, including competition from video games (c) artistic personalities tending to lean left in general (d) artists not making much money and therefore being attracted to the left (e) and, of course, the stranglehold of the left on traditional publishing.
Samizdat is of course the obvious strategy, but of course if some of these people start doing well they will try to get Amazon to ban them, making it impossible to earn any kind of a living. Though I think young men can probably find a way around that.
Some names I can come up with off the top of my head include Delicious Tacos, Zero HP Lovecraft, Dan Baltic, Bad Billy Pratt, ARX-Han, Mike Ma.
There's a podcast but they seem to have stopped recently:
A right-wing writer could in theory write a book with enough woke appeal, from a sufficiently unwoke perspective, that it generates ccrossover interest. Much more so than a sincerely woke writer, given that any acceptance of the tenets enough to where the authress feels it must shape her fiction can't help but lead to the creation of worlds that feels preposterous and unreflective. An unwoke writer, meanwhile, will be under no such restrictions. He can make men who feel like men and women who feel like women.
So half the fiction by white male authors is about suitably woke subjects anyway.
If you're a white guy who's not self-flagellating, good luck making this New York Times list!
Wallace Stegner nodded.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221015035131/https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/stegners-complaint/
I sure hope a larger proportion of the non-white-males wrote about something current and important, but I doubt it.
"then punch you in the gut with their full force once you decipher their meanings."
In the reverse of popular Victorian paintings, the illustrations will contain helpful hints to explain the text.
My wife is a successful novelist and we are usually knee-deep in galleys so I have some ideas here: the publishing business is so very female (the few men are mostly gay) and so uniformly devoted to Social Justice in all ways that any man who does not come with the NYT/NPR seal of approval or who does not check any of the major victim-identity categories will either be rejected outright or will give up before even trying to navigate the political minefield—we have 2 friends who are previously published white-male novelists who were told in so many words to not even bother submitting a manuscript, they would not be considered; also, we know a few Latino or Asian guys who are half-white or who were raised in almost entirely upscale white worlds who gained literary success by mastering the victim game and positioning themselves as both victims of white oppression and allies of the Soc Just cause, thus opening all doors for books and awards; and probably most importantly, the publishing business (much like all liberal culture) has become so blinkered, so neurotic and sclerotic, that they might be the last people to know where are the new good books—they have very little interest in literature, but an intense need to be constantly broadcasting the proper political opinions.
Samizdat is the way to go, and in 10 or so years we'll learn about the real best books of say 2020-2024 once they get reissued or made into movies.
Self-publishing may be the way to go.
Just like with "minority-owned" businesses, when selection depends on identity, people unfairly excluded for having the wrong identity simply pretend to have one of the right ones, usually by partnering up with someone who checks the right boxes and is happy to play along a cut. This is obviously easier in business than with anything involving public appearances like literary parties, book tours and speeches. But the answer there is probably not to just play ghostwriter and employ some total faker but to find someone above the minimum threshold of actual talent and then actually work on the book together. The Ferrante semi-psuedonymous husband-wife team may be the ultimate example of this strategy paying off, at least, for a while.
Recently had a friend visit who is a woke female YA author and she was describing the editorial review process for her next book complete with sensitivity readers, etc. I failed to keep my feelings on this in check.
I don't know much about YA but it seems like a large rubber room patrolled by Social Justice Church Ladies.
I told my wife that if she ever submits to a "sensitivity reader" I'm calling a divorce atty, but we seem to be safe for now. Her editor and proofreader occasional try to PCify her prose, but she mostly ignores them.
Whoever ran the Index of Forbidden Books for the Vatican had nothing on these people.
This is why I rarely read NYT book reviews. They only review stereotypical woke crap.
The Wall Street Journal is a lot better. It reviews mostly nonfiction, though.
U r zogslop. U blocked me on twitter lol
Cool, I learned a new antisemitic theory today. Thanks!
I would imagine the fiction writers are concentrating on screenwriting. John Swartzwelder, who was credited with writing 59 episodes of The Simpsons, made the transition to writing novels 20 years ago, although since he is self-published it is unclear how successful he is. My local library system doesn't carry any of his novels but that isn't dispositive in any direction.
There was a great discussion about the downfall of American publishing a couple of days ago between literary scion Adam Bellow and editor-at-large of Tablet Magazine on Rootless, covering the shift in attitude and the narrowing of tastes among our guilded gatekeepers: https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/rootless/rootless-publishing-adam-bellow-bernard-henri-levy-wicked-son
There is a saying in the Middle East: after the Saturday people, we come for the Sunday people. It seems, from my perspective, to have been vindicated.
And we wonder why adult fiction is dying and why classical education (which stress the non-diverse classics) is all the rage in k-12 education. Do these lists even matter any more besides giving pretentious lefties something to namedrop? Seems like a total lack of self awareness.
I noticed that several in nonfiction (like the appropriately named Max Boot) are suitably Interested in promoting foreign wars and/or insulting native born white Americans who dare to oppose their enlightened views. May we also notice that among these names, a good one-third are Jewish?
I bet if you go back over the last 70 years at leat one third of the authors on lists like this would be Jewish.
However, I do agree that Max Boot is scum.
Yes, because founding stock Americans have never, ever promoted foreign wars… did the Cheney and Bush families drop the “stein” at Ellis island?
Actually, Bush family did trade with 3rd Reich. Moreover, lots of funding pre-1933 came from Aryan people from the USA. People like Henry Ford and so on. Because of the 1923 inflation, German capital stock was cheap, so lots of it was taken over by US Companies. In a second step, those same companies wanted to make sure that the political environment stayed friendly so they supported AH takeover of power. They thought Mussolini was a good investment, so why not try AH?
I was being sarcastic. Doesn’t sound very Jewish of them to do what you describe.
Yep. In fact, Hitler copy-pasted a lot of Henry Ford into Mein Kampf, and Henry Ford was proud of it.
It's harder to find good new books to read than movies and TV shows. Too much content and the people who have taken over the old gatekeepers and curators are trying to coast and run on the fumes left by their betters.
> "When the Clock Broke" - For this account of America in the 1990s, John Ganz [writes] a disturbing tale of populists, nativists and demagogues who, acting on the margins of U.S. politics, helped shatter the post-Cold War consensus and usher in antidemocratic forces that plague the country today.
A Top 100 book for sure, though better filed in "Progressive Yells At Cloud" than in "History." I can't wait to read John's novel insights on this endlessly fascinating topic.
Oh, wait. I was just referred to Heather Cox Richardson. She's a Boston College Professor of History, whose million-plus readership nets her a few million dollars a year. Two paragraphs that explain the politics of the Seventies from her 11/30/24 Substack:
"As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of 'Movement Conservatives'... Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.
"In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished... The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans."
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Even though he is a white male, John Ganz might possibly strawman as well as Dr. Richardson, who is female. Though it would be hard to top her "In their telling" lead-in. I suggest striking Ganz from the list, and re-headlining the NYT article "99 Notable Books of 2024."
I've come full circle on immigration. If forced to choose, I'd let in 10,000 Meso-Americans who at least have a realistic view of human affairs and capacity for hard work over a single high-G Yiddish Eastern European like Max Boot. They are effete, myopic ideologues, they don't actually like the US or its founding history or founding Anglo-American stock, and they are obsessed with settling historical scores back in their homelands. Boot of course is married to a similarly out-of-place, deracinated grifter who came here for the excellent shopping.
> "Boot of course is married to a similarly out-of-place, deracinated grifter who came here for the excellent shopping."
Mrs. Boot, the amusingly named Sue Mi Terry, seems to have arrived in the US as a 12-year-old, so it may be unfair to ascribe her immigration to aspirant shopping, though her mother may be guilty, and as hereditarians know, the apple something something . . .
Wikipedia says Sue Mi's Korean name is Kim Sumi, so Sue Mi's Anglo surname, Terry, implies a previous marriage. No mention of kids. Overall, Max appears to command as little devotion from his wife as from anyone else. His wife is even under indictment for being a double-agent while working at the CIA. But then Max himself is a double-agent of sorts, though one not likely to be indicted.
The Sue Mi Terry case is full of signs of narcissistic self-promotion, a systematically enabled ethnonarcissism by a Korean operating all her adult life tied to U.S. institutions. That she eventually married a man (Max Boot) she assumed was a major power-broker in her world fits the story well. It's an interesting study in the way the "foreign-policy elite" of the early-21st century operated, and I'll try to give it here:
Sue Mi Terry was born to two Korean parents in Seoul in 1969. So little was known about her -- she promoted herself in a highly curated way -- that most Internet info vaguely has "born ca.1972," although she was born in September 1969. (She has allowed false impressions about her age, I think; she wanted to sneak in a few more years of being in her forties, and benefitted much from being seen as a charming-but-smart "Girl-Boss" type in a world heavily male. And most of the news stories when she was arrested, in July 2024, quoted the wrong, younger age.)
Sue Mi's mother married a White American, a Mr. Terry, in 1981 in Hawaii. This was said to have been after the death of Sue Mi's Korean father in Korea. Sue Mi was then raised for a time in Hawaii. By sometime around mid-teenage she is in Northern Virginia, where by the 1980s a Korean community was strong on the ground.
Sue Mi Terry's ties to the mainland U.S. may have been considerably weak before around 1986. Between the start of her mother's relationship with Mr. Terry and her graduation from a U.S. high school in Virginia, her status between Korea, Hawaii, and Virginia was in some flux. This floating status makes the line "she came here" into not such a simple thing: is Hawaii a "here"? I'd say not. But she was "here" by mid-late teenage.
Sue Mi Terry graduated from a high school in Northern Virginia in, I think, 1988, with at least the last two full years of high school in Virginia. She was psychologically quite more Korean than 'American' after this series of life-changes, anyway. What effect on her came from her mother marrying a White-male in her mid-childhood and later emigrating, is uncertain. Her later "acting as an unregistered foreign agent" fits that perfectly: She was always a strange figure on the scene and got away with it for being a charming and young-presenting 'Asian' woman.
To come back to the surname question: "Sue Mi Terry" came to use her White adoptive father's surname. She discarded her own birth-name. I assume this was at the urging of her Korean mother: after all, when she changed her name to "Sue Mi Terry" (from birth name Su-Mi Kim) she'd have been a young teenager or so, highly liable to influence or diktats from her mom.
Sue Mi Terry spends the 1990s floating through academia, talking her way into stints in Korea here and there, and after a PhD in 2001 she soon enters the CIA: why they accepted her is a little baffling, because she is obviously a risk for being liable to foreign influence and so forth. She was terminated about 2008, at the CIA, over suspicions of disloyalty (in effect) and was traded around different other agencies before entering academia and charming her way through milking connections. In the 2010s she was quite successful promoting herself as a "Korea expert" and had in fact been closely collaborating with South Korean intelligence most of that time.
Sue Mi Tery was an obvious 'recruitment' target, needless to say. But officially this collaboration only happened in the 2010s, not formally during her ca. 8 years at the CIA and ca. 3 years at other U.S. fed-gov agencies. But she was still the same person. She was obviously of questionable loyalty, but she charmed the White males around and so they gave her a pass. Some "spies" and influence agents are quite good at this, of course.
Sue Mi Terry, like her mother, was one of that type of Asian woman in the West solely interested in snagging a White male and laughing all the way to the bank (or whatever they're thinking). In the early 2000s she enters into a marriage-like relationship with White male named Guy Vidra, give years or so her junior. They met in graduate school. Guy Vidra ran "The New Republic" for a time. Sue Mi Terry has two mixed-race "hapa" sons by him. She got rid of Guy Vidra when it became clear that Max Boot was available starting about 2013 or 2014.
Max Boot is a foreign-origin Jew, as we all know. He has three Jewish children, but divorced his wife ca.2013. By 2013 he and Sue Mi Terry are professionally collaborating and evidently in a relationship by 2015. They jointly buy an expensive Manhattan apartment in 2016, and Max Boot takes to promoting the early (teenage) career of one of Sue Mi Terry's "hapa" sons (the first son turned 15 ca.2020). But more importantly, Max Boot used his network to promote Sue Mi Terry's work, and her profile rose and rose. They frequently co-published in Max Boot's usual venues including The Washington Post, starting in 2014 or 2015.
In this story we see three direct White-man, Asian-woman relationships that deliver Sue Mi Terry into a kind of prominence: Her mother's marriage to Mr. Terry in 1981, and Sue Mi's own two marriages to White men (and two half-White sons). But not any White men: the two marriages we know about were to men prominent in the world in which she wanted to make a name for herself, the world of the foreign-policy elite and publishing. It's not a coincidence that she chose such men, any more than it's a coincidence that South Korean intelligence recruited her.
By the 2010s when Sue Mi Terry is coasting as a kind of major celebrity, soaking in the fame and glamour and meanwhile being hitched to prominent pundit Max Boot, she lets her ego and basic ethnonarcissism take over into instinctual cruise-control. South Korean intelligence agents recruit her, and close ties begin by 2013 or 2014, and develop over the next few years to the point of her becoming a full-fledged asset placed prominently in major foreign-policy institutions and with the ear of prominent Washington people.
In Max Boot's world, of course, NONE of what she was doing was outrageous itself. In Max Boot's world of dual-loyalty and quasi- or actual dual citizenship, it'd hardly any major scandal. Sue Mi insists that she never did anything wrong despite knowingly working with South Korean intelligence for so many years. As she awaits her trial and sentencing, she is probably raging in private that they targeted her for being Asian, whereas people like Max Boot do much the same as what she did on behalf of Israel and are not punished.
( -- continued in a reply [https://www.stevesailer.net/p/where-did-all-the-white-male-authors/comment/79923847] just below)
(-- continued from earlier message [https://www.stevesailer.net/p/where-did-all-the-white-male-authors/comment/79921585] about the Sue Mi Terry case)
The life and career of Sue Mi Terry is a fascinating study in the elite of our time. A woman like this, is a kind of "adventuress" (a Sailer word).
Sue Mi Terry is of a type rather common among Asians even when in conditions in which overt economic disparities are minimal, or even nonexistent. What their game is, exactly, is hard to say. But roughly it looks like this: they aspire to grab power from a "sucker" society (NW-European-normed "White America"), and often do successfully do so.
In Sue Mi Terry's case, probably before affiliation with Max Boot already but very certainly after intimate involvement therewith, she easily observed how successful Jews were in doing what they do. She felt she could do it too. She worked her charm on people and it all worked, until the FBI arrested her.
A big question, an uncomfortable one, is how did an "adventuress" like Sue Mi Terry ever get promoted up the ranks of anything as important as the U.S. national-security establishment, and so on, at all?
Her connection to Max Boot and his type, looks to have been both an effect and a cause. She already headed that way in the 1990s and 2000s in relatively younger years. Her marriage to Max Boot ca.2016 was partly just a product of being IN such circles, not the cause of being in them.
While we're at it, Max Boot, too, is a kind of victim here. Sue Mi Terry was (IMO) using him to promote her own career and to gain attention for herself. Indeed after they linked up in the mid-2010s her career as a Washington influencer really picked up. She "sensed" it would, apparently.
If Max Boot were a semi-employed welder instead of a well-connected cosmopolitan dual-citizen, she'd never have married him, naturally, nor even run across him in any circumstance. So she married a symbol and not a person. This is regrettable but fits the pattern: It might be a superpower for her (giving her "hapa" sons a leg-up through elite-networking) but also had an Achilles Heel in that the same tendency allowed foreign intelligence agents to recruit her. It's all more than a little sordid
---
I'd stress this: the Sue Mi Terry case is not pigeon-hole'able in the way Anti-Gnostic jokingly suggests above, i.e., as some ditzy foreign-bride idiot on Max Boot's puppet-string who was bought off by foreign intelligence agents who dangled name-brand handbags in front of her.
The info on the gifts of luxury items in the FBI indictment was quite secondary, almost like clickbait and a placeholder for the main story: that she became unable to distinguish the concepts of loyalty to the United States and to her ethno-nation, and favored the one at the expense of the other. In other words, she is not an American but somehow represented America. She parroted some talking points and went far, but this is not the same as being a thoughtful member of the nation. It was all a kind of fraud.
The Sue Mi Terry case is that of a foreign agent who is a product of immigration policy, feminism, and racial policy. The latter two in that she she was probably affirmative-actioned up a number of ladders all throughout life, and charmed men who were under pressure to advance feminist Girl-Boss social goals.
Sue Mi's specific motivations were "Ego" and "Ideology" (ethnonarcissism), and less so the "Money" and "Coercion" wings of the "M.I.C.E." acronym they talk about regarding why people become spies.
But I do find myself coming back towards the Max Boot angle to this story. The "story" is not just that she was an asset for a foreign intelligence agency, but that she was arrested. After pairing up with Max Boot, Sue Mi Terry was able to observe closely the Jewish network in which Max Boot operated, and how they all do "influence operations," how they effectively hold veto-power over U.S. political culture.
Now, hardcore Korean ethnonarcissists believe Koreans could, or should, be able to replicate Jewish successes; and/or (more commonly) that dual-loyalty is permissible and natural. When someone from the South-Korean media tracked down Sue Mi's mother for an interview after her arrest, her mother actually said this (amazingly, and obliviously): "She is a true Korean American, equally dedicated to both countries." Nothing in Max Boot's brand of dual loyalty disproved the sense that it was right and proper "to be equally dedicated to both countries," an instinct which evidently pre-exists in Sue Mi's psyche through maternal inheritance here, filtered through a series of marryings-up in which the Asian woman married a White male.
On Israel and its cruel wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Ever since the Sue Mi Terry arrest, about the end of July 2024, I've wondered to what extent it was a Biden-admin message to the "Max Boots" out there: a kind of indirect move against Israel to stop killing Palestinians.
Netanyahu and his many cheerleaders, down to the line-agents of the lowliest AIPAC handler of the loweliest freshman Congressman, ignore Biden's entreaties to stop the killing, and laugh at Biden as they bomb the latest school or hospital. So what can Biden and the anti-war side in the Biden camp do?
We're unable to arrest any of the many dual-citizens with Israel who manipulate U.S. affairs, but we can send a MESSAGE that maybe we MIGHT do it. A "shot across the bow." How? By picking off a few marginals who are already under long-term observation. What better than the very wife of one of the top dual-citizen influencers of all, Max Boot? The arrest and trial discredit Max Boot himself by making him look ridiculous, without actually violating the enforced taboo against cracking down on these people.
> "The Sue Mi Terry case is that of a foreign agent who is a product of immigration policy, feminism, and racial policy. The latter two in that she she was probably affirmative-actioned up a number of ladders all throughout life, and charmed men who were under pressure to advance feminist Girl-Boss social goals."
Right.
To be fair to the CIA, in the intel world, you often have the most to gain from people who have feet in more than one nation/religion/movement/whatever, and who therefore are of ambiguous loyalty. Unfortunately the CIA's brain is DEI-scrambled so rather than operating with a highly loyal inner core who in turn handle the ambiguous-loyalty people as 'assets', as a competent intel agency would, instead the incompetent CIA invites the ambiguous-loyalty people into the inner sanctum to appease the perverse DEI gods. Sue Mi is the inevitable—but actually one of the milder—results.
If anyone wonders how the CIA got this way, it might not be a coincidence that the more egregious results of the situation remain unprosecuted.
> "Sue Mi Terry graduated from a high school in Northern Virginia"
Just as the suburbs of Southern Maryland are full of employees/orbiters of the domestic/HHS deep state, the suburbs of Northern Virginia are full of the employees/orbiters of the foreign-policy/intel/military deep state. Thus the parents of high schoolers in N Virginia are themselves frequently foreign-policy/intel/military deep staters or hangers-on thereof. Likewise, just as the high schools near, say, Detroit have programs/extracurriculars/career clubs/parental contacts that are auto industry-related, and high schools near Silicon Valley have programs/extracurriculars/career clubs/parental contacts that are tech industry-related, and high schools near Houston have programs/extracurriculars/career clubs/parental contacts that are oil industry-related, high schools near DC typically have programs/extracurriculars/career clubs/parental contacts that are deep state-related. If Sue Mi had NOT gone into some kind of deep state career track, it would have been perhaps more remarkable.
> "in 2001 she soon enters the CIA: why they accepted her is a little baffling, because she is obviously a risk for being liable to foreign influence and so forth."
Not too baffling: the CIA is famously captive to an ideology that blinkers it from screening out obvious risks for foreign influence and so forth. Even if it weren't such an ideological captive, it is not very competent, a deficit it tries to compensate for by being randomly vicious.
To be fair to the CIA, and all other US employers, they are under tremendous pressure from the 'Civil Rights'[sic]/anti-'discrimination'[sic] lobby/bar/industrial complex to hire all kinds of people they would have better left by the curbside, but they are trying to meet 'diversity' quotas. A bright, charming Korean-American young lady is an obvious hiring choice who would be higher IQ and more pleasant than the median diversity compulsion-hire. Yeah, you might have to put a thumb on the scale for her security clearance, but that is easier and less fraught than tangling with the 'Civil Rights'[sic]/anti-'discrimination'[sic] lobby/bar/industrial complex.
tl;dr: The entire institutional structure of the United States is now configured for anti-optimal outcomes.
By the way, thank you for these analyses. I marvel at how much more informative than Wikipedia and the mainstream press your work is.
Can I ask how you accomplish this? Is it simply that you read the results of Google searches more diligently and without DEI-blinders, or do you have different techniques and better sources than what system-constrained journalists have?
You obviously don’t interact much with meso Americans. It’s not that they’re realistic - it’s that they don’t understand, don’t care to understand, and don’t respect those who do understand. Both cohorts are a problem but with proper awareness you can counter the Max Boots. Within a generation being coddled by a high trust society they lose any meaningful commitment to hard work (go visit the skid rows of Fresno or Phoenix for proof). You can look to places like New Mexico for a future with those meso Americans - and even that state is composed of Hispanics who are mostly Spanish. Good luck with the newer waves who are 90% Amerindian or black, won’t intermarry, and have a median IQ below 90. They’ll vote to take everything you own and leave this country looking like Venezuela. That you think they have any more respect for our founding and civic fabric is laughable. They think we’re successful because we stole from them and are racists. That’s hardly a something I’d define as respectful.
Love it! "But surely nobody would put his memoir on their top 100 list if he didn’t announce he was now an elderly girl."
https://youtu.be/LkTXcwc3zvk?si=1f3VFI5E8w26HwzN
There's been some discussion about this on the right, in the various contexts of left-wing capture of the media, devaluation of masculinity, the boy crisis, and the decline of literacy among young men.
I think it ought to be better noticed. The arts are often powerful shapers of public mood over the medium to long term, and literature tends to draw on the sort of people who can write well enough to shape elite opinion. If young men don't read, while pictures are powerful at communication, there is a certain complexity of thought that's hard to carry over visually. I also think a generation of young men who don't read may have more trouble with complex ideas.
There's actually a sort of underground self-publishing scene that appeals to men, but it works heavily in genres like litRPG (fantasy novels with in-universe statistics) that have, as of yet, little cultural influence (and usually not great literary quality). Of course, you could have said the same about comic books in the 1930s, and movies were considered trash before they were considered high art.
There's a small right-wing literary movement, but not very powerful. I think there are real problems with building one, including (a) general anti-intellectualism and disdain for the arts on the right and in particular among MAGA, which tends heavily working-class (b) a general preference of men for visual over print media, including competition from video games (c) artistic personalities tending to lean left in general (d) artists not making much money and therefore being attracted to the left (e) and, of course, the stranglehold of the left on traditional publishing.
Samizdat is of course the obvious strategy, but of course if some of these people start doing well they will try to get Amazon to ban them, making it impossible to earn any kind of a living. Though I think young men can probably find a way around that.
Some names I can come up with off the top of my head include Delicious Tacos, Zero HP Lovecraft, Dan Baltic, Bad Billy Pratt, ARX-Han, Mike Ma.
There's a podcast but they seem to have stopped recently:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-write/id1618286988
A right-wing writer could in theory write a book with enough woke appeal, from a sufficiently unwoke perspective, that it generates ccrossover interest. Much more so than a sincerely woke writer, given that any acceptance of the tenets enough to where the authress feels it must shape her fiction can't help but lead to the creation of worlds that feels preposterous and unreflective. An unwoke writer, meanwhile, will be under no such restrictions. He can make men who feel like men and women who feel like women.