Dan The Man 🦄💹🧲🍌🐱

Good point by @jcenters here. Money is a measure of fucks given. You get it because you did something someone gave a fuck about. You use it to make people give a fuck about something they otherwise wouldn't. Except the act of using money to make people give a fuck about something is called "spending". How many fucks people give about you is not proportional to how much money you have, it's proportional to how much money you spend, and how wisely you spend it. Many wealthy people, who self-describe as right-wing, expect to be influential because they have money, not because of how they use money. We have a fair handful of right wing billionaires, who want right-wing values to win, but they are fundamentally confused about what their role in that victory needs to be. I've often joked that the difference between a billionaire and an intellectual is that an intellectual doesn't think he's a billionaire. But unfortunately, I'm not much of a comedian, and this particular joke is only funny because it's true. Far too many of the right-wing billionaire class thinks that their role is thought leadership. But they are investors, not persuaders, and certainly not practical philosophers. The actual power they have isn't to inspire or lead, it's to provide resources to empower others and create organizations and networks. This means that when someone says "it would be good to have 100 million dollars to make a right-wing, non-subverted version of The Odyssey", the correct answer is not "rent computation time on my company's AI slop cannon, and make it at your own expense while working a day job". This means when someone says "we need to create some right-wing networks", the correct answer is not "buy a ticket to listen to me spitball abstract religious theory". The correct answer is "hey, you're good at networking, here's a middle class salary so you can devote your full-time efforts to recruit and building a team of full-time lobbyists, and here's some money to pay them with". The correct answer is "hey, you're writing kids' books about fighting monsters, instead of about exploring your unique gender identity, here's a middle class salary so you can do it full time". The correct answer is "hey, you're good at rooting out left wing corruption, and exposing it to sunlight, here's a middle class salary so you can do it full time without worrying about monetization, and a legal team on retainer for when they come after you". The correct answer is "oh, you got arrested for being rude to some foreigner invader in blatant left-wing lawfare? Well, here's a paid-off legal team to help you, and a guaranteed job for life at one of my companies so you don't care about what this does to your criminal record, and, hey, fuck it, I'll pay off your mortgage as well. Let's see how well they can use the system to intimidate people when being targeted by them is like hitting the lottery!" The correct answer is "oh, your fantasy novel series got cancelled because you refused the publisher's demand to put in a gay character? Here's 30K to cover self-publishing expenses, and I'll use my massive multibillion dollar social media platform to promote it for free." Why is @DataRepublican having to monetize on her own with {website I can't even mention because god forbid X.com doesn't get all the clicks}? Why does @monsterhunter45 not have a single movie deal {because god forbid the right make a movie that isn't about Jesus or Ayn Rand}? What are we even doing here? Right wing money is not being spent in a disciplined or intelligent way. We're all just noodling around. Our moneyed class spend on physical self-protection so someone doesn't shoot them, but very few of them spend much of anything on political self-protection except Musk. And none of them spend anything on cultural self-protection, because it hasn't sunk in that culture, art, and entertainment are upstream from politics. Buying Twitter protects the people who already agree with you from censorship (sometimes), but it doesn't move the needle with anyone else, because they show up to the conversation with their opinions already formed by Disney Star Wars and Harry Potter and Queers of War. Look, this isn't about what you "should" do. It's about what you have to do if you want to survive. Just because left can steal the money they spend doesn't mean they aren't getting something for that money. Which means you have to spend to fight them, even if you have to spend the actual money you earned. It doesn't matter if you "should" be safe from political prosecutions and confiscations just because that's morally right, or if broke right wing artists and commentators like me "should" pull ourselves up by our own well-worn bootstraps, because something something individualism self-reliance avocado toast. I'm not talking about what should be. I am talking about what is. Fighting wars costs money. The left is so corrupt and incompetent right now that their gay race communist trash costs ten times what it actually costs to make. And the left is so delusional and untalented right now that people would prefer literally any alternative to their art and entertainment. But books still cost money to write and publish. Movies still cost money to shoot. Culture wars still cost money to fight. You can't expect the left, however crippled, to lose a war with nothing and no one. And if they don't lose, they are going to gulag you and take all your stuff. 100% of it. They don't want to rob you because they hate you. They hate you because they want to rob you.