There’s no back-up.

You’re surrounded. There’s no artillery or air support, nobody guarding your flank, no supply line and you’re gonna have to figure out your own exfil.

That’s your situation if you’re an author or other content creator who hasn’t sold his soul to the globohomo agenda.

The early bloggers, possessing a relative monopoly on readers hungry for free content, linked most frequently to their friends. Qualitative considerations were not a factor. Like in everything, it wasn’t what you knew, but who you knew. The most popular bloggers weren’t necessarily the best writers or thinkers: they simply succeeded in networking. You’ve no doubt followed a link from a popular blogger who claimed that the piece linked to was amazingly insightful, only to be disappointed. If you’ve been around for a few years, you’ve no doubt followed hundreds of such links. That’s the power of networking.

This turned out to be a gigantic boon for conservative media, which until then was comprised of two things: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

This still holds true: the most popular WHATEVER are rarely all that talented at anything but networking and self-promotion. And they were the beneficiaries of good timing.

Then social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter popped up, and with this new form of communication, many blogs shut down. Why go through the rigmarole of logging into your blog and writing a post about what made you angry when you could do it on Facebook, with the benefit of a captive audience of your friends, family, and former high school classmates? Facebook’s free, too. You get the same dopamine hits from Likes and Shares and comments as you did with your blog, but with less hassle.

This made many blogs go under. Some got bought by millionaires and became part of Conservative, Inc.: the network of opinion sites that operate much like blogs, but aren’t blogs, because they’re a little more professionally coded.

Why indeed? Especially if you’re so normalcy-biased that you can’t imagine that the people who hate you, and control those platforms, would press their advantage at the critical moment. And speaking of timing: at the very moment in history that this was happening, I became a rookie blogger with a brand new, unknown blog. I sure can call ’em.

The quality is inconsistent. Some columnists have been grinding out the same piece week after week for years, but still have fans. Others are there simply because they’re networked from the early days and got grandfathered in. There are a few sites that are consistently quality, in both content and writing, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

David Dubrow has dropped so many truth bombs in this post, I just can’t quit excerpting it. Here he perfectly summarizes my experience trying to follow conventional wisdom using social media as a marketing tool:

Why should I buy your book when I can just read your columns and Tweets gratis? I Shared your latest piece on my Facebook wall: I’ve done my part to support you. I’ve given you exposure. Now you want me to pry open my wallet, blow out the dust, and give you my hard-earned cash for something I might not even like? Are you crazy? You’ve got thousands of Twitter followers and write for a big site anyway; aren’t they paying you the big bucks?

Yup. So much for conventional wisdom. And here Dubrow touches on the every-man-for-himself attitude on the creative right:

…almost none of the big names in conservative media take risks, particularly to help other conservative content creators. Money trumps ideology. Money trumps culture. If you’re outside the network, you don’t exist. The thinking is if you’re any good, you’ll earn those fans, and when you’ve made it up here with us big boys, then we’ll notice you. That so many of them are there because of networking instead of quality isn’t something they consider, and for good reason. Who wants to think of himself as a recipient of internet nepotism?

…This ossification isn’t limited to conservative media: the conservative audience also suffers from the same condition. What’s easier, endlessly whining about the rot in our media culture, or doing something about it? If you can’t be bothered to shell out five bucks for a book that doesn’t spread its cheeks and spray woke agitprop all over your bad-attitude face, what will you do to change your culture? If you don’t support the content you want to see, it will go away. What will it take to move you? You’ll keep paying Hollywood degenerates and SJW book publishers to produce content specifically crafted to advance a social agenda that’s destructive to your ethics, but you won’t invest in alternative media?

You have choices. And choices have consequences.

Vladymir Lenin may have been correct that when International Communism has wiped out all but the very last capitalist on Earth “he will sell us the rope with which to hang him.”

But it’s actually worse than that. He will buy the rope himself, and even put his head in the noose, then ask Alexa to send an Uber driver over to kick the chair out from under him.