Conservatives suck at art (2024)

One of the biggest things holding back conservatism in the West is that conservatives are terrible at art, don’t understand it, and behave in a way that artistic people find repulsive. This is a massive obstacle to success in the culture war, for obvious reasons.

This phenomenon is mostly caused by differences in personality and temperament. Quantitative studies show that liberals are usually creative thinkers with low conscientiousness, high openness, and high neuroticism. Meanwhile, conservatives are linear thinkers with high conscientiousness and low openness and neuroticism.

This means conservatives are better at making money than liberals, and are also happier and less likely to kill themselves or chop their dick / tiddies off. Sadly, it also makes them boring and uncreative people who lack a mythic vision for the world and are far too “sensible” to pursue the risky and precarious life of an artist. They also tend to simply lack the verbal intelligence to properly understand things like subtext and symbolism and irony, and without these tools it’s virtually impossible to create emotionally satisfying and sophisticated art.

These factors combine to make conservatives laughably inept at influencing popular culture in mainstream society. And this is the main reason conservatives always lose—the culture is always shifting beneath their feet and throwing them off balance. In this essay I’ll explore how this works and explain how conservatives can fix the problem.

First I need to dispel the fiction popular among Boomers that conservatives are deliberately driven out of popular culture or the world of art because of their beliefs.

This opinion is retarded. Hollywood is all about money, and artists like Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and RDJ are untouchable despite their conservative views because they’re actually talented and their creations print money.

The real issue is most conservatives are uncreative and untalented, and can only raise funding from expressly ideological entities interested in a “conservative movie”.

This always results in kitschy dogsh*t like God’s Not Dead:

This obviously isn’t art.

It isn’t even propaganda, because it sure as hell wasn’t made to convince anyone. If anything it serves the opposite purpose—the cultural equivalent of rollin’ coal.

Films like this are self-indulgent garbage, likely designed by a committee of fat guys with pink cheeks and glassy eyes. Nobody watches this dreck except for dissociating Sunday schoolers, homeless junkies looking for a free meal, Filipinas recently liberated from sex trafficking, and depressed housewives with a pill problem.

No intelligent person wants to watch a “conservative movie”—not even conservatives. Most of the time conservatives just watch liberal-coded movies and either complain about them or root for the bad guys. But even when a good conservative-coded movie does emerge, low openness conservative chuds always find something to bitch about.

I remember when Passion of the Christ was first released. My grandma and aunt kept complaining about all the blood and violence. They loved seeing Jesus in a major picture, but didn’t want to see their beloved savior tortured. They unironically thought the brutality and gore made Passion a bad movie.

I was only a little kid at the time, but this inspired a ferocious anger in me. Even then I recognized that Jesus’s suffering was the emotional centerpiece of Christianity. Depicting his sacrifice in gruesome and visceral detail is probably one of the very best ways to do “conservative art”, but small-brained conservative chuds have too high a disgust reflex and are too low openness to appreciate this (and the same thing applies to candid portrayals of sexuality). Thank God Mel Gibson is probably 0th percentile agreeableness, or Passion never would have been made!

Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is another great example of conservachud pigheadedness. This is probably the most positive portrayal of an old racist white guy in any mainstream work of art since the 1960s. It also has some of the funniest ethnic banter you’ll hear in any film made this century. But STILL edgy wignats counter-signaled the movie because the protagonist gives his car to the Asian kid at the end.

These people can’t handle being challenged at all. They want everything to be pretty and nice and comfortable. They want ideas to fit together neatly and cleanly, and get really f*cking annoyed at the prospect of any nuance or contradiction.

This tendency also surfaces with argumentation.

A lot of people on the right and in the rationalist community are annoyed by the style of my essays here on Substack because I don’t always explicitly say how I feel about something or directly resolve tensions / contradictions in my worldview.

Instead of laying out my beliefs syllogistically in a manifesto, I use a stream of consciousness rhetoric that builds intimacy with my reader and advances my point covertly through subtext or implication.

In other words, I am arguing artistically. This is why my essays are actually enjoyable to read. I’m going for Voltaire, Franklin, or Nietzsche—not Kant or Noam Chomsky.

Because of this style, I’ve grown very explosively on Substack during my short tenure here, even going viral on multiple occasions. At this rate, by the end of the year I will have a huge platform and enough subscription income to doxx myself and quit my job. Whatever I am doing, it is very obviously working.

But to a certain type of conservative mind my style comes off as shifty slimy sophistry. They have an instinctive aversion to rhetorical provocation, and think of posts like this as “engagement farming” because, again, they don’t understand art. They don’t see you as trustworthy or “serious” unless you write in a very boring and direct way.

They obsess over tensions in your worldview because they don’t have the emotional intelligence to see the world as a messy and complicated place that’s inescapably contradictory and makes hypocrites of us all. To these guys the only legitimate approach to political debate is stoically presenting your opinions as a straightforward “platform” or “ideology” with perfectly Kantian internal coherence.

This mindset is frankly retarded.

Having fixed views on object-level issues is basically just LARPing. Nobody of consequence thinks this way in practice, and virtually nothing in politics gets done like this. You will always refine and pivot your exact positions based on edge cases, in accordance with changing macroeconomic / technological / geopolitical conditions, or in response to coalitional pressures.

How I feel about trade, immigration, monetary, or foreign policy is hugely circ*mstantial, so I don’t feel any pressing need to write some elaborate general treatise explaining my views on all these things. I can just align directionally with subject matter experts in my coalition where appropriate, and instead focus my energies on more engaging topics where I have something interesting to say.

Similarly, I don’t have a fixed level of white ingroup preference because—as Shane Gillis observes—racial sentiment is almost always a function of your environment. I became a WN in 2015 because of conditions on the ground, and stopped being a WN once those conditions changed, but if things got really bad for white people again I’d be the first back in the trenches. This doesn’t mean I’m “not consistent in my morality”; it means my morality recognizes we live in an incredibly dynamic world that demands perpetual recalibration of one’s views.

I also don’t feel like it’s some great defeat if I modify my views in response to an insight gained from an interlocuter. I am very firm in my basic convictions, but how these convictions manifest is flexible, and this is by design.

I think future podcast guest sunshine describes my attitude best in these comments:

This, to my mind, is the only proper way to do right wing politics.

My approach recognizes that society isn’t a computer that can be programmed in a systematic and predictable way, but rather a living and breathing organism that does lots of weird sh*t. You need to approach it like a physician, not a software engineer.

And therein lies the biggest flaw of rationalism and adjacent schools of conservative and centrist thought—too many goddamned programmers.

The world is messy and nuanced, and literally all debate is curtailed by implicit power relations, incentive structures, and courtesy norms. A lot of these dynamics are literally too subtextual and complicated for more linear-thinking shape rotator men to grasp, and that’s why women and liberals feel such naked contempt for rationalists, incels, and libertarians. Such dynamics are the actual forces shaping political development, especially on a generational level. Contra Hunter Wallace, metapolitics are much more important and vastly more interesting than object-level politics.

But by definition you can’t influence metapolitics through debate. It can be done directly through propaganda or strategic activism, or it can be done indirectly (and usually MUCH more impactfully) through art. Either way, to properly compete in the metapolitical idea space, the conservative cannot afford to alienate the artist.

Sadly, conservatives don’t just alienate artists. They actively drive them away.

This is a huge unforced error, because attracting these people wouldn’t otherwise be hard. Liberals have created a monstrously repressive and finger-wagging ecology where a lot of disagreeable and free-thinking creatives who’d otherwise be staunch progressives (think Dasha, Nick Mullen, or the Dirtbag Left in general) are very sympathetic to the right. But when these people enter conservative spaces they’re mocked at best (i.e. Dasha’s bodycount) and treated with suspicion or hostility at worst.

The best example of this is Delicious Tacos, a writer who accurately and beautifully describes the world from the perspective of a sensitive man with many diseases of modernity, most notably a crippling sex addiction. His style is similar to Houellebecq’s, and he’d probably be just as influential if Americans weren’t so grotesquely hypocritical about sex and intimacy.

DT’s stories are without exception politically incorrect and even somewhat fash-coded, but they’re also strikingly vulnerable and display tremendous empathy and even romantic idealism. This makes them the perfect vehicle for sending a degenerate urbanite like me down a more “trad” path emotionally.

But the conservative chud refuses to see them as such. Instead he’ll just call Tacos a degenerate race mixer for f*cking Filipina hookers, in the same way the catty little Zoomer bitches on reddit call him a pedophile rapist.

They refuse to meet Tacos where he is. They refuse to meet the world where it is.

And that is why they always lose.

It’s also why so many of their kids f*cking despise them and end up moving to Minneapolis to become a lesbian or some sh*t .

A lot of conservative beliefs are highly maladaptive and will alienate creative people.

One such belief is an unsophisticated insistence on very simplistic sex roles.

I say this with a caveat because I am clearly no feminist, and generally celebrate the existence of sex roles both in my personal life and on a societal level. I love spending money on women, holding the door open, etc., and look down on men who don’t.

But conservatives tend to have an incredibly primitive and grug understanding of masculinity / femininity that makes people feel inadequate and insecure for very stupid things. This drives tremendous resentment and in practice actually prevents people from self-actualizing into healthy sex roles.

It’s also bound to alienate artists, because to make great art you need to call upon both masculine and feminine energy—in Jungian terms you need to integrate your anima / animus. This means that talented artists are usually gender nonconforming in some significant way. And that doesn’t have to mean gay or trans. It often does, but it usually doesn’t. It’s more that male artists are more sensitive / empathetic than the median man, while female artists are more rational / objective than the median girl.

This nonconformity often draws hostility from the Chud Right because smooth brained conservatives tend to view masculine and feminine as “opposite”, while non-woke liberals and more enlightened conservatives view them more as orthogonal.

Our goal isn’t to become some amorphous nonbinary blobfish, but rather to cultivate a lot of both masculine and feminine energy, as this combination gives you the almost superhuman charisma of a David Bowie or Cate Blanchett.

In the chud conservative worldview being a theater kid makes a man “sissy” or “gay”. To a more enlightened mind it’s what lets you tap into your anima and do sh*t like this:

Simpleminded chuds without any dimensionality to their manhood hate seeing sh*t like this because it reminds them how painfully mundane they are. Even if they had Spencer’s height and money, they’d never be able to inspire the reaction he does in the above clip. The chud conservative worldview severs men from their anima and this makes them horribly uncharismatic, especially in a sexual or romantic context.

If you think I’m exaggerating, just listen to chuds talk. They’re always painfully monotone, because as a kid their chud dad told them it’s fa*ggish to speak in an exuberant or theatrical way. Because of this they have no power over language, and this prevents them from scaling up or exploiting more exponential / asymmetrical life strategies. The chud never rises beyond middle management and a $200k salary, and nobody ever sees him as a real leader—not even his children after 10 or so.

And the chud will certainly never make a girl bounce. Instead he brute forces his way out of inceldom with a gym body or money, and even then girls will only ever settle for him after that late twenties anxiety kicks in. If the chud ever experiences genuine lust from a woman it’s only thanks to sweet oxytocin—the beta male’s best friend.

Another highly maladaptive conservative view is the extreme hostility to hom*osexuality and promiscuity.

By this I don’t mean “not wanting gay marriage” or “preferring your daughter not start an Onlyfans.” I don’t even mean expressing disdain for the licentious sexuality of degenerate urbanites when one enters your particular community. I believe in thoroughgoing freedom of association, and if you want to live in a community that discourages hom*osexuality and promiscuity, that’s perfectly fine by me.

What I mean is pigheadedly refusing to build tactical coalitions of mutual interest with gays / rakes / slu*ts, even when doing so would very obviously benefit you.

What I mean is being hostile to us for literally no reason, when we just want to live in a city and do our degenerate thing in peace, far away from your fat people suburb.

Look chud—you don’t have to “protect” anyone from me. I have no desire to infiltrate your “parish” and despoil your rectangular sister. And we’re certainly not competing for anything. At this point any woman you’d consider wifeable would probably seem frigid and unfeminine to me, and you’d likewise be repulsed by my women. These days I exclusively date neurotic Jewesses on Seeking—the sort of girls who are always fighting with their mom and used to strip and have eaten a bottle of Xanax at least twice. Half of them have sleeve tattoos or septum piercings, and the rest have twenty grand in medical debt. That’s the type of girl who I find hot and who understands me. These are the gals that give a degenerate guy a triple digit bodycount. Not your sister who works at Denny’s and writes Wizard101 fanfiction. I’m not “corrupting” anyone.

Guys like me and Delicious Tacos don’t create slu*tty women.

Conservative chuds do when they molest their daughter.

Alright, that was probably too harsh. That’s enough anti-chud invective for one essay.

At this juncture I should make at least some overture to more thoughtful conservatives and propose a concrete list of ways to get out of this mess.

To that end, my first solution is pretty straightforward—stop attacking degenerates and nonconformists. When you do that, you’re just going to negatively polarize guys like me against you, and the same principle applies even more strongly with the sloots and the gays. There are an enormous number of us in creative positions, and all you need to do to benefit from our outsized cultural influence is be slightly less annoying than the hectoring schoolmarms of the modern left. Not exactly a high bar.

My second solution is to spend your money better on actually good art.

Namely, please stop funding retarded organizations like The Daily Wire that make cringeworthy and kitsch “conservative art”. That isn’t even how art works.

Liberal creatives aren’t trying to make “liberal art;” they are merely creating good art that subtextually (and often unconsciously) reflects their authentic worldview, which for most artsy people is going to be liberal for the myriad of reasons spelled out above.

But plenty of exceptions exist, especially among disagreeable contrarian types. Hell, a lot of the best art with a conservative message is actually made by intellectually honest liberals who simply follow their creative instincts to their natural conclusion.

Perhaps the most notable example of this is Lena Dunham’s Girls, which is very famously a favorite of Ross Douthat and other elite, high openness conservatives because it brilliantly eviscerates the narcissism of liberal millennial women. The reason this works artistically is that Lena herself is a tremendously narcissistic liberal millennial woman, so she knows how to couch otherwise intolerably bitter redpills about life and love in language / aesthetics that won’t alienate her demographic with a hectoring Charlie Kirk approach.

If you want to create conservative art you need to empower independent and authentic voices like Lena, and you need to make peace with the fact that they won’t always agree with you on everything—or even most things. Sometimes their creations won’t be polished and will turn out weird or offensive or even cringeworthy. That’s all part of the process. You just need to give these people your money and then step away to let them ride the tiger, and if you’re lucky the kid you patronize will mature into someone like Dasha or Delicious Tacos and send aging rakes / slu*ts back to the pews.

You specifically need to patronize independent art scenes. Your contributions to artists in these communities are tremendously significant, especially in an age where AI increasingly allows artists to create high quality products without any expensive equipment or training. These days getting started as a career artist can be as simple as not needing to wagecuck.

(Speaking of that, now is a good time to become a Paychad and contribute to the Walt Bismarck Doxxing Fund if you are a man of means. I’m certain I could write three books worth of great essays and even a Hamilton-esque musical this year if I could stop wagecucking. But back to the show…)

The most important thing is that you stop discouraging your children and family and friends from pursuing a career in anything creative while insisting that it isn’t “practical”. Not everybody should be practical. A lot of people simply can’t be.

If I’d had the balls to monetize Walt Bismarck on Patreon in 2016 and resisted Disney’s copyright lawyers I probably could have figured out a way to support myself as a full time satirist. Instead I was a puss* and wasted my twenties in dissociated STEM wagecuck hell, and I’ve regretted this for a long time.

But it was only ever my fans who encouraged me to take Walt Bismarck pro—my parents and other family members thought it abject lunacy to give up a promising career for such a risky proposition. At the time I was only 23 and very naive about the world, so I reluctantly followed their advice.

The ironic thing is that for the past eight years I’ve been living an incredibly risky life anyway, rapidly jumping between jobs and consistently getting promoted despite never really learning anything. I can tread water and exploit my companies well enough by dint of raw IQ, but this feels patently undignified, and my life is infinitely better now that an engaging writing career has become a real option.

So if you ever encounter someone in your life who has a creative dream—especially your own kid—don’t be the asshole to kill that dream and push them back in the cubicle. Be a stolid practical conservative all you want, but learn from John Adams:

The final thing conservatives need to do is very consciously develop their own faculties for media literacy and art appreciation.

The first priority is to get better at understanding things like subtext and symbolism and irony. This isn’t that hard if you have a high IQ—not even for a shape rotator mathcel. Once you do it enough it will become almost algorithmic via pattern recognition, and you’ll be able to keep up with wordcels in most discussions.

I suggest you specifically begin by watching The Sopranos—which strongly appeals to conservative sensibilities on an aesthetic level and will be easy to watch—and then consulting this blog after every episode. Also watch Pure Kino’s episode recaps on YouTube. If you do this for the entire series you will become a lot better at understanding art, and will also have an easier time keeping up with liberals and women when they try to weaponize their superior social intelligence in everyday life.

The second step is to kill your urge to look away when your disgust response is activated by art involving sexuality, violence, and weirdness / eccentricity. We all have this response to some degree, but conservatives feel it a lot harder on average. It isn’t entirely a bad thing, and has some prosocial implications, but it also leads to things like my grandma hating Passion because of the Jesus torture, or chuds turning off Netflix the moment dudes kiss or they see a bit of man ass.

Honestly, if you want to be taken seriously as an adult you can’t do sh*t like this. It’s fine for you to be disgusted or offended by something. But you should realize that is often the point. Not all art is meant to be pleasant. Disgust and offense can and often are weaponized by artists to subtextually invoke a prosocial message you’d probably approve of. This is everywhere in Houellebecq and Delicious Tacos. It’s usually how high openness degens are actually drawn to more “trad” lifestyles in practice.

Weaponizing disgust was also the point of movies like Cuties and Pretty Baby, but conservatives chuds are too dense to understand that and so they hysterically condemn such films as pedo bait.

And then they go buy their preteen daughter a smart phone.

This was a characteristically meandering and uncharacteristically inflammatory essay, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

If I said anything too provocative I’ll ask you to forgive me—this was written in one sitting, in a fit of passion and under the influence of a bit too much Adderall.

I’m going to end this piece by grifting again, because I have become incredibly serious about building this Substack into a platform with legs.

I want to spit insightful new essays on this platform every day and collate them into book form. Eventually I want to form a real thinktank that pays guys like Ryan Faulk and Sean Last an annual salary to publish books, journal articles, and white papers.

So far Walt Right Perspectives has been an unqualified success. But I need to massively scale it up and engage with a lot more alternative scenes and subcultures. Eventually I intend to get the DR / AR / whatever talking to freethinkers of all backgrounds.

I want to create a comprehensive daily newscast to give us something comparable to TRS circa 2015. We also need weekly salons where high IQ freethinkers and contrarians can shoot the sh*t with no rules in a heavily gatekept environment. This will be developed alongside a fundraising / patronage network for provocative and independent young artists.

I also need to upscale my own artistic production by hiring AI prompt engineers to help me execute my vision and create lots of great content for you all. I intend to use this approach to write a musical—a biting and provocative synthesis of Hamilton and 1776—that goes viral and pushes my ideas into mainstream metapolitical discourse. If I managed this in 2016 with poorly sung Disney parodies, I can absolutely do it in 2024 with something a lot more polished.

To execute this vision I need manpower and lots of money, and I’m not worried about getting either those things long-term. I’ll just need to brush off my slide deck skills from my days in consulting, and will spend lots of time talking to rich dudes behind the scenes. Eventually I will convince someone into helping us out. I’ve done it before for a friend’s startup, and it will be a lot easier for something that’s mine.

Unfortunately, this kind of fundraising simply can’t happen until I crowdfund sufficient income to doxx myself and quit my job. Rich guys just won’t take me seriously under a pseudonym, so I need to show my face and ditch the Walt Bismarck label (or perhaps change my actual name to Walt Bismarck, since I identify with that a lot more than my real name). Ideally I will reach this point before the election.

To do that I need your help. I need you to upgrade to Paychad status and send me five bucks a month. If you can afford more, send that too. But if just a few hundred people did the $5 I could absolutely make this work, and the return on your investment will be nothing short of colossal. I will work 110 hour weeks and publish a veritable tsunami of top shelf content, and this will absolutely get the discourse moving in a more productive direction.

This doesn’t require you to agree with my vision even 50% of the time. If you agree with me more than the median CNN anchor, giving me money can only benefit you.

Also it’s literally only $5.

Please consider it and help make this dream a reality. We’re building something truly special here on Substack—something better even than the 2015 AR—and with just a bit of help from you I am confident I can take it to the next level.

Thank you,

Brother Walt