April Update: On Top Of The Pile For Once

Hey team! A few days late with this one, apologies.

Since Last We Spoke

In the last update, I gave 70/30 odds that I'd get another video online before the end of March, and I did, indeed, pull it off. The Alt-Right Playbook: Mainstreaming was uploaded March 31st, though it didn't go public til April 4th. I pretty much rolled straight into PAX East, where Ken podcasted our panel on Patreon. And then, much like in March, I got April's video online to all of you just before the deadline and it went public a few days later.

Conferences are fun and all but doing one at the tail end of playing catchup on the videos is exhausting. I am currently fighting off my second cold in a month and I betcha it's related to running myself a wee bit ragged. Though, at this point, I feel like every update is me saying "hey, whoa, this was a busy month" so maybe that's just what life is like now.

I did get to meet a couple folks who know me from the videos at PAX, which was a fun time! I haven't met with many fans in my career, and it's always a little odd? Jonathan Coulton once compared meeting with fans to what it must feel like to be a tourist attraction, where you forget how to be a person and just guess at however the other person hoped this would go and try not to disappoint them. I think I do a decent job of acting like a human without coming off as a dick? If any of y'all who met me are patrons, feel free to report if I was a dingus.

Oh, also: I finally finished reading Jason Stanley's How Propaganda Works, which I livetweeted for the past several months on the hashtag #IanLivetweetsHisResearch. You can read the unrolled Thread Reader version here, if that's what you're into.

What Do I Do Now?

In my ideal scenario, when I finish a video I've got a little work done on the next one. Momentum is a big part of my work flow, and, while I like to take a little time to relax after launching something, I never like having to start from scratch when the relaxation is over.

While I was playing catch-up, getting work done on the next script wasn't doable, so I'm in that lull where I have to get myself back to work after just releasing something. It's always my least favorite part.

The P L A N has been to do one more Alt-Right Playbook before doing something non-political. (Well, less political.) A lot of Alt-Right Playbook videos are designed to be released in batches: I started with Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense because they're very foundational tactics. I knew I'd need to refer back to them many times. Then I did the Monkey Island video. Now I have one more video in what you could call the Mainstreaming Trilogy - Mainstreaming, The Ship of Theseus, and the next video are all loosely connected in being ways the Far Right manipulate the Overton Window. Future cycles of related videos will talk about how indoctrination works and what the strategic function of bigotry on the Right is.

But, with Endnote 1 coming out right before Mainstreaming, I've done three Alt-Right Playbooks in a row, and, y'all? I'm tired.

So I'm operating on the assumption that there is one more Alt-Right Playbook coming out before I do something different, but, seeing as I want to at least get some script work on that video done this month as well, I'm going to dabble in both. Which means there's an outside chance I'll get real excited by this other thing and will break up my idealized flow of political videos and, folks, you'll just have to forgive me.

Anyway, to get myself back into writing mode, I'm doing research. For one video, I'm studying the Goldwater campaign, and, for the other, I'm watching a lot of action movies. Woooooooooo.

Anyway, that's all there is to say right now. Let's keep this one short. Talk to you soon!

-I