The app called Threads. Have you been there?
They call me The Cryptkeeper. My visits there are an addition to my usual workload. Why my history there matters. It’s a useful preface to my main point this morning.
There is a huge hole in the Internet media world. Its ramifications include major impacts on the American publishing industry. Part of why I’m feeling so squeezed these days.
I’ve been tracking two Facebook stars who are more popular than I am. They write long for Facebook but not so long that they can’t acquire a fan club of sorts. Not in the millions but the many thousands, which is not to be sneezed at. It’s rather to be built on. But I don’t see that next step occurring out there. Michael Smith is an American who has been plying his trade as a confident for as long as I can remember in FB years. Daniel Jupp is a Brit with one foot in America and another in his homeland. They’re similar but different. They are both writers who work at writing well. Which is a good thing. When they post, there are dozens of comments, more than I ever get, usually endorsements of how good and necessary the author is. What I don’t see is conversations developing out of what the post has addressed. Which is what is missing from the Internet and the broader, loftier-than-FB world of the contributors to sites like the Federalist, American Thinker, American Spectator, American Greatness, etc. I used to read them pretty regularly but kept wondering why they made so little difference to the mass of Internet denizens who make up the Michael Smith and Daniel Jupp fan clubs. I even experimented with a different format that put selections from the high-toned conservative sites together on a daily basis. I called it the Instapunk Times and added a judicious element of humor to the framing of the linked essays. Here’s the usufruct that resulted:
I gave up on it finally after a few months because I didn’t think it was really going anywhere. It was just another drop in the bucket of smart people who share one crippling attribute. They think they can outsmart the opposition that’s destroying America. In general, they are outsmarting themselves instead.
I actually revived the Instapunk Times back in February 2025, almost exactly a year ago. Another flop:
The newer version is more frankly satirical and definitely lower rent in its style and approach. But conservatives have been well trained to get their news from a handful of well known and heavily patronized sites that are all deeply flawed, always falling clumsily between the two stools of right-leaning bias and contradictory efforts in the direction of objectivity. Still trying with varying degrees of competence and tactics to be ‘journalists,’ whatever that means anymore.
All of the mainstream news media organizations are presently dying from their own conviction that they can outsmart their opposition, different tactics but same failures of perception.
What is needed is actually pretty simple to describe. I’ve mentioned it to both Michael Smith and Daniel Jupp, but they are not interested enough even to dismiss what they prefer to ignore. We need a rebellious right-wing TikTok of our own.
The defining feature of such an enterprise is that it not be run by an editor or publisher but a producer. The purpose is to definitely to attract large numbers of daily visitors, based on one criterion clearly articulated in the Mission Statement: “If you’re a left-wing serf, go to TikTok. If you’re a rebellious bored but curious individual in search of fun, ammunition, and revolutionary mischief, come here.”
It has to be designed to be patient, in the way that Amazon was for years, about building an indispensable Internet presence that also deals in print spin-offs and becomes gigantic by means of inclusiveness. Its deep mission is to feed the heads of the coming generations, not to accumulate passive fans but creative participants of all kinds.
What should it include? High impact clickbait in the form of music, videos (even cat vids), humor, candid Playboy-style interviews with the Victor Davis Hansons and even counterculture creeps like the South Park boys, a visible ongoing search for new talent bolstered by a staff of professional copy editors and technical advisers for multimedia products leveraging the tricks of AI and the irreverence of early Woody Allen comedy. There should be generous Comment sections that are moderated to exclude pure snark and attention whoring but friendly to honest opinions and disagreement even from articulate liberals.
There’s a while garbage world of podcasters and derivative websites proliferating out there. Absorb the ones that have a real purpose beyond extending failing media careers but are hamstrung by egos shooting “Look at me!” all the time.
The biggest challenge is designing an architecture of user interfaces that are simple to switch between and clearly labeled as to content ratings. It should be possible to enjoy extended visits without encountering F-bombs every 10 seconds, although there’s a place for the in-your face crowd if there’s talent on display.
Most importantly, the universe I’m talking about should also be saturated with ways to discover and learn what the educational system has suffocated or perverted. Consider this the “How to get smarter” component, which doesn’t even have to be aimed strictly at the young ones. Almost everyone alive has some sizable holes in their fund of knowledge about all kinds of things: esoterica, American (and other) history, literature, art, architecture, science and its debates, theology, “This date in history” as entertainment, sports/fashion/books (old and new), movie reviews (behind the smug Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB crap), photography for its own sake, travel memoirs, agony columns (Dear Abby/Miss Manners/JamesThurber…), hobbies and collectibles, and weirdnesses like urban gardening, tiny houses, unexpectedly collectible old vehicles like milk trucks and AMC Gremlins, and on and on.
What for? Reintroduce the sense of wonder and inexhaustible opportunity for people of creative imagination, curiosity, and growth-oriented minds luxuriating in the riches of civilized consciousness.
Things Michael Smith, Daniel Jupp, Steve Bannon, and even Victor Davis Hanson can’t do by building niche followings of their own and daring anyone to find and admire them. It’s possibly true that everything has some political content these days, by that is by no means the whole of the vital content we’re missing. We need a place where people can feel alive again, or for the first time in their lives.
Yes, it’s a huge enterprise, that will take a lot of talent and effort to create, but it must be done if civilization is going to survive Meta and Apple@;$ Artificial Intelligence and Marshall McCluhan’s 15-minute death knell.
I’ve concentrated my own efforts on trying to serve the generations that will have to rebuild after the coming Dark Age of feminist hive serfdom, but the arrival of the Dark Age should be battled against. I’m old now. But the possibility of teaching people how to learn has always struck me as an achievable goal. I spent much of my business life trying to teach corporate employees with college degrees how to think and how to learn. With mixed results to be sure. Here’s a sad little run of extemporaneous musings on the enormous empty hole where knowledge of the literary canon used to feed imaginations and thoughts beyond next week’s Super Bowl. All these were recorded in one day. I was talking to myself really. Long gaps in the recordings are just me, pondering. Since then, I’ve even gone so far as to outline a manual for becoming passably literate, but it requires a serious effort not worth my while unless there’s somewhere to place it. As I said, these were offhand musings, and I got the name of one important book wrong besides. What I called the Mousetrap is actually Cat and Mouse. I was just thinking, not looking things up at the time. Anyhow…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jQfeucaCsBE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3AgO6kL3n2Q
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NHvescdm3r4
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RHsJRc8yq3U
Time for my nap now. Quick review. If you haven’t spent time in Threads, you should do it for the express purpose of scaring yourself half to death with the sheer amount of violently ignorant bile out there. We can’t fight it with precious essays showing off what we remember from psychology textbooks and the E. B. White Elements of Style.
We something, new, big, bigger than that. Something bigger than Facebook and atwitter, bigger than the whole American book publishing industry, and bigger than political giants like The Donald. We need it bad. And somebody somewhere ought to be interestedmin the idea. Tired of explaining to Lisa Schiffren why 5 million words of writing in mixed media does not translate anywhere into a book. If so, we have to redefine what a book is and then remake the whole damn publishing world to breathe new life back into decadent wordsmithing.
Enjoy your Hump Day.
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