Exit Dalrock

This is truly depressing.

Yesterday Dalrock announced that he’s stepping away from his blog. Not only that, but he’s contemplating deleting the blog and over 10 years of what can only be described as seminal work in explaining contemporary Christianity from a Red Pill perspective.

I’m not sure what prompted this decision. I want to chalk it up to burnout, but I’m afraid that doesn’t explain the desire to erase a body of work of Dalrock’s magnitude. Everyone gets burned-out at some stage and 10+ years is a long time to sustain a blog that’s as well-thought as Dalrock’s.

I’m talking with Dal via email now and I’m trying to make sense of this decision. Several people have already begun to archive the ‘best of’ Dalrock for posterities sake, but I’m not sure this aligns with his desire to remove his work entirely.

I’ve been friends with Dalrock for 10 years and it’s no exaggeration to say that no one has done more seminal work on examining Red Pill intersexual dynamics in the context of mainstream Christianity than Dal. His blog has been the go-to place for discussing the Red Pill within a framework of Christian convictions for as long as I’ve been blogging. In fact, we both began blogging at around the same time and we used bounce ideas off each other on the old RooshV forums in a private discussion sub Roosh himself had set up for the likes of myself, Dalrock, Roissy (for a brief time) and various other Manosphere notables of that time.

When I first launched this blog I gave serious consideration to include some section or dedicated space to issues of Red Pill awareness and how religion (Christianity in main) is intertwined in it. I gave up on that idea in the early days of The Rational Male because Dalrock had so thoroughly covered what I knew then would be a necessary part of what was becoming the “manosphere“. And to be completely honest, Dalrock did it better than I had the time to invest in making it worthwhile. So I stuck to my policy of never discussing religion (or politics or race) in specific unless it crossed over into intersexual dynamics.

In these 10 years the one forum or commentariat that I participated in with regularity was Dalrock’s comment sections. I would relate the ideas he was developing to Red Pill concepts and he in turn would use my ideas to better illustrate what he was seeing transpire in Christian dating, Christian marriages, romantic/chivalric idealism and secularism transforming intersexual dynamics in a Christian context. A lot of this came to a head when he (and I) began challenging a new generation of ‘masculinity pastors’ and their own misguided ideals, and their efforts to turn the Manosphere into their pet ministries. It’s these grifters who’ll be toasting the demise of Dalrock’s blog the loudest this weekend.

When I began work on my upcoming 4th book about the Red Pill and religion my first impulse was to coauthor it with Dalrock. I asked him more than once to consider going in on the book with me, but his desire for privacy and anonymity had him decline my requests. Instead I asked if he (and various other men I respect in the christo-red pill community) would be someone I could quote and consult for the book. This he agreed to. In the new book I quote Dal’s blog quite a bit; particularly with regard to scripture and his concepts of marriage and child rearing in our brave new world of gynocentrism.

Dalrock filled a unique position in the ‘sphere. He more than myself has always been a thorn in the side of Trad-Cons & Red Pill Pastors (Warhorn) and their efforts to force-fit their old order beliefs into what the Red Pill was making more and more Christian men aware of. The Red Pill has never been a threat to faith, but it has been a threat to men who’ve built social and personal frameworks around a church culture that validates their Blue Pill conditioned lifestyles. If Rollo Tomassi points out how the Feminine Imperative has replaced the Holy Spirit in contemporary church culture and doctrine, well, he’s just a sinning PUA who can be dismissed. But if Dalrock rips back the veneer of ‘Christian Kosher’ Feminism that pervades the modern church, that’s when these guys have to do their homework.

All that’s gone now. And, potentially, all of that work is at risk of being deleted. All of the well-thought articles that held feet to fire and challenged an increasingly more feminized church (and their male feminist ‘christian’ apologists) to seriously look at itself are going away. And as I said, I’m sure the grifters are rejoicing and seeing it as a sure sign that God is at work in the Manosphere.

Blogs are Dead

I’m wondering if the age of blogging is at an end. 12 years ago blogs were the way to express ideas to a wider audience. Twitter and most of the social media we take for granted today was around, but it was certainly less endemic as it is now. Hell, even YouTube was still privately owned back then. If you wanted to build an online media brand you had to really believe in what you were doing to make the effort worthwhile. Blogging has always been a labor of love. That’s especially true today because everyone on social media today is their own Brand of Me. If all you do it curate an Instagram account with no other function than to show off how great a life you live, congratulations, you are your brand. It’s second nature to us now, but it used to take a lot more effort to relate your digital consciousness to an audience. That was what you used to blog for.

Now, even the most basic social media accounts can be ‘influencers‘. In fact it’s become so endemic that big name brands and their social media PR specialists have figured out that tween-age girls like to think of themselves as ‘micro-influencers’ and “hire” them to represent their brands for as little as a 30% discount on the product itself. As I mentioned in last week’s post, the barrier to entry has been reduced to almost nothing these days. But that ‘nothing’ barrier removes the process necessary to really develop one’s passions, or develop what one thinks about their beliefs. Content is king, but just calling it “content” reduces passions and ideas to a commodity. Are you a content provider or are you an ideas person?

The commodification of ideas, beliefs, imagination, creativity, etc. is really where this ‘sphere and countless others are heading. It’s not hard to start an online brand. Drop-shippers are all basically selling the same Chinese product, but the brand, the logo, the competition is all just a popularity contest now. Want to be a Red Pill dating/life coach? Just read passages from The Rational Male verbatim on a 5 minute video shot on your iPhone 7 and call it your original work. It’s not plagiarism, it’s content deliverables, right?

The easier things are to produce, the more real creativity suffers. Assuming most people in the future actually have original content to deliver, the process also makes them beholden to prioritize the production over the actual product. Blogs are not very good at that kind of prioritization. I was always amazed at how Roissy/Heartiste could produce a blog post a day right up until ‘his’ deplatforming last year. Most of those daily posts were just current event filler crap and C&P’ed comments from his threads, but in between it all there were the occasional strokes of genius. And those genius posts became fewer and fewer in the last 4 years.

I’ve never posted for the sake of posting. Traffic has never been my priority on this blog. Neither has monetization. The message of this blog and my thoughts have always taken precedent. In almost 10 years I’ve never written an essays for an audience. I put forth what I think needs to be considered and hopefully people can use that information to construct a better way of living with it. But in the coming decade pandering to an audiences’ sensibilities will be the only thing most content producers will focus. Audience engagement and content providing is already trumping any real discourse.

And this is the real hard thing to accept about Dalrock’s retirement and deleting himself; it’s 10+ years of real, passionate, ideas and necessary debate that’s been instrumental for men in understanding the state of Christianity, church culture, Red Pill awareness and so many other related issues:

When I think of the wholesale destruction of Dalrock’s work I’m reminded of how violent members of a conquering tribe/nation/religion are prone to destroy the artistic and intellectual works of the society they’ve overthrown. The first order of business is to erase the art, the ideas, the ‘gods’ of the defeated tribe, or to plagiarize the best of it and erase the rest. Burn the books, destroy the symbols, appropriate and assimilate the ideas; in the end it’s an indictment of the one who’s doing the erasing. I have no doubt that once Dalrock’s work is gone there will be ‘grave robbers’ lining up to distort what he built to fit their own narratives and provide them with content to call their own.

And all for what? Roosh has decided to erase himself recently as well. All the work he created that was so influential in the ‘sphere, now that’s traded for a new kind of nihilism. And all the usual moralist suck ups are ready to see him as the Prodigal Son. See? We were right all along. Our faith is validated and confirmed! But all the same problems that brought us to questioning that faith are still where we left them. Only now there’s no one left to point out their inconsistencies. No one’s left to identify the Blue Pill conditioning that’s prompted so many men to leave the churches. No one’s left to call bullshit! Only those grave robbers are left; the same guys who’ve been apologizing for never understanding the Blue Pill or their compromised masculinity because their faith and existence depends on it.

Blogs are dead. Long live The Rational Male.

Just to allay any concerns, no, I’m not shuttering this blog. I’m still going to be writing here and elsewhere. I’m not unpublishing anything. Maybe blogs are now a dead media, but I do my best thinking here. And yes, I fully expect some ‘coaches’ will be lifting my material to fulfill their content quotas. Just be sure to remind them where they’re sourcing it from whenever possible.

I will apologize for not posting as consistently as I have in the past, but this is mostly because I’ve been focusing on the latest book. Like I said, I don’t post for the sake of posting. I craft my essays and I don’t publish them until I think I’ve stated what I needed to state.