McKay Coppins reports that nobody wants to write anti-Biden books, because nobody wants to buy them. He’s too boring. Excerpt:
For now, the most successful conservative authors are training their f ire on more abstract targets, such as “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” A quick review of recent best sellers suggests that ignoring Biden can work just fine. According to BookScan, which tracks most hardcover sales, Andy Ngo’s book on antifa, Unmasked, has sold more than 77,000 copies (an unqualified success in political nonfiction), as has Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies, which bills itself as a “manual for Christian dissidents.” The talk-radio host Mark Levin’s forthcoming American Marxism—which will tackle, among other subjects, “the widespread brainwashing of students, the anti-American purposes of Critical Race Theory and the Green New Deal,” per its publisher—is expected to be a massive hit when it’s released in July.
Shapiro attributes this trend to a broader shift that he’s noticed in his audience. While conservatives may not care about Biden, he told me, they are petrified of the larger progressive forces they see at work in American politics. “What people are afraid of right now are not powerful public figures. What people are afraid of are their bosses, their neighbors, that they’re going to get mobbed on Twitter and get socially ostracized.” Shapiro is betting that’s where the focus will stay: His own book coming out this summer will cover what he describes as “the leftist takeover of every major institution.”
According to my most recent numbers, I’m closing in on 120,000 copies ofLive Not By Lies sold — this, with the only attention paid to it by major media my September 28 appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight. (Well, I was also on Morning Joe, in a contentious showdown with a woke Princeton prof, but unsurprisingly, that didn’t move the needle on sales; MSNBC’s audience is not mine.) I understand why Coppins said that conservatives like me are training our fire on “more abstract targets, such as ‘wokeness’ and ‘cancel culture,'” but I assure you that these aren’t abstract. My book, and I’m sure Ngo’s book too, are based on many concrete examples of what people are dealing with in their daily lives under the tyranny of wokeness. Ben Shapiro gets it exactly right: the biggest problem is not figures like Joe Biden (who is certainly problematic!), but the effects of wokeness having marched right to the top of institutions and planted the conqueror’s standard.
It has not been easy to get conservatives I’m trying to get interested in Live Not By Lies to understand that totalitarianism does not have to come from the state. In fact, one of the things that makes this new totalitarianism unique is that the state, at this point, is a lesser player. The soft totalitarians are exercising their illiberal tyranny, and remaking of society, through liberal institutions. For example, Amazon has every right not to sell books it doesn’t want to sell. It just so happens that its decision not to sell books “that frame LGBTQI+ identity as mental illness” [which Ryan T. Anderson’s book doesn’t do, but never mind] means that in effect, no books like that will be published going forward, because no publisher can take the risk of coming out with a book that Amazon won’t sell. Newspapers and news media entities have the right to decide what they will and won’t cover. They have turned themselves into woke Pravdas for the sake of creating narratives that lead them to power. And so forth.
In fact, while most conservatives were focused so heavily on Donald Trump’s presidency, the progressive march through the institutions became virtually a gallop. The mistaken belief by conservatives that Trump was somehow a serious obstacle to the progressives hid from their view the fact that they tightened their ideological grip on all major American institutions in the Trump era. This is not Trump’s fault, but it is nevertheless a fact. We Americans — not just conservatives — are so attuned by television to thinking of politics only in terms of personality that we miss the power of process.
For conservatives, Uncle Joe does not have our best interests at heart. But he is not really the one you have to worry about. Your boss is. Your kid’s school is. All these institutions that ought not to have been politicized now having become political — that’s what totalitarianism is: the politicization of everything. And it might be soft in its approach, by comparison with the hard totalitarianism of the Stalinists, but your butt lands just as painfully on the sidewalk when you’re thrown out of your workplace for being politically unreliable.
لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
