Anthony Weiner to Start Regular Column for Business Insider, Titled "Weiner!"

No really, that is the column's title.

Meanwhile, a group of conservative and libertarian writers and editors have founded a start-up they call "Liberty Island," a forum featuring fiction (mostly of the pulp variety) with a right-leaning sensibility.

Sarah Hoyt interviews one of the founders, Adam Bellow, at PJ Media.

SH: Who is the audience for Liberty Island? What is “conservative fiction”? Shouldn’t good stories just stand on their own?

AB: Great literature stands on its own, but the productions of popular culture often carry a hidden freight of ideology that reflects its authors’ biases. Sometimes not so hidden — the evil conservative businessman is essentially the default villain in Hollywood these days. But think about what happens when great stories are told from a conservative perspective: you get Tom Clancy, or Brad Thor, or James Patterson, or Vince Flynn. Mega-bestselling authors with a huge following. Our audience is anyone who loves great pulp writers like those guys. At Liberty Island you will find dozens of stories like these, in genres ranging from humor to thriller to SciFi. These writers aren’t heavy handed in the least – their conservative outlook is sometimes explicit but just as often merely implied or completely submerged. Besides, a case can be made that traditional pulp genres are inherently conservative.

...

SH: What made you think of the project – and commit to it and work so hard for it?

AB: Two things: first, an impulse to carry the culture war into the field of popular culture. And second, the writers themselves. In 25 years as an editor of nonfiction books I’ve watched the conservative intellectual project thrive and flourish. But like others on the right I’ve been dismayed by the slowness of conservatives to challenge the liberal dominance of popular culture. It’s not enough to carp and criticize the frequently substandard and offensive crap that liberals produce. As Andrew Breitbart used to say, we have to make our own—and it has to be good. But recently we began to notice an exciting development: hundreds, indeed thousands of conservative and libertarian writers were seizing the opportunity afforded by new digital technologies to produce and publish original works of fiction. Others were making music, video, graphics, and other forms of entertainment right on their laptops at home. These were ordinary men and women all over the country, working in isolation, doing their best to hone their art and find an audience. Yet no one seemed to know that they existed. So we started talking about what we could do to help them. Liberty Island grew out of those discussions.

They take submissions. They don't actually pay for those submissions, though they do encourage satisfied readers to hit the tip-jar of any author whose work they like.

Weiner!" &bodytext=No really, that is the column's title. Meanwhile, a group of conservative and libertarian writers and editors have founded a start-up they call "Liberty Island," a forum featuring fiction (mostly of the pulp variety) with a right-leaning sensibility. Sarah Hoyt...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 02:19 PM

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