A house once stood on good ground. The land beneath it was firm, the bedrock ancient and sound. But when the builders laid the foundation, they cut corners. The mortar was thin, the measurements false. The walls went up quickly, impressive at first, and for a while, the whole structure seemed solid enough. Yet over the years, cracks began to show. Water slipped in. Floors warped. The house leaned a little more with every season until the people inside stopped noticing how crooked the rooms had become.
Now the question is whether to keep patching the walls or to begin again, to build beside the ruins, on the same good earth, with true plumb lines and stronger stone.
That’s where we are with our cultural institutions. The ground — human imagination, our longing for meaning, our hunger for beauty — remains solid. But the foundations poured by the modern academy and publishing world were never quite true. They measured success by ideology rather than by truth. They mixed ambition with sand. Over time, the weight of their contradictions cracked the walls.
The answer isn’t to live forever in a leaning house, propping up the same timbers with new slogans. It’s to build anew, with truer materials.
Why the Old House Leaned
Ideology builds fast but weakly. It promises moral clarity and social progress, but it depends on constant enforcement to hold its shape. The DEI project in publishing, education, and art began with ideals of fairness. It hardened into bureaucracy and fear.
You can’t build lasting art on fear. You can’t legislate the imagination. The more tightly institutions try to control what stories may be told, the more the imagination seeps out through the cracks.
And so it has. The people who still love story, the ones who write, read, and build, have already begun to gather their tools.
Building Beside the Ruins
What’s happening now is not resistance but renewal. The scaffolding of new institutions is rising all around us, quietly at first, then louder as each beam finds its place.
Small presses are the first new frame. Ark Press, Heroes of Liberty, Defiance Press, Conservatarian Press, Castalia House, Arkhaven Comics, and Raconteur Press, each different in scale and style, but all founded on the same principle: publish merit, not ideology. They are proof that the means of cultural creation no longer belong solely to the old gatekeepers. Some, like Silver Empire, Superversive Press, and Liberty Island Media, have already folded, brave warriors who forged the way. Others will come.
Independent magazines and review outlets have appeared where legacy critics fell silent: Fandom Pulse, Hollywood in Toto, Bleeding Fool, Upstream Reviews, Sonder. They cover what the mainstream refuses to see, giving audiences a sense of sanity again.
Platforms are forming that knit the ecosystem together. My own company is building Yggy, a book-discovery network designed to connect readers directly with authors and publishers who still believe story matters more than slogans. Other projects are emerging with the same spirit — new digital marketplaces, review communities, and collaborative reader networks that make it impossible for the gatekeepers to continue shutting out books because they don't like their political content.
Even our gatherings are changing. The mainstream conventions that once defined professional belonging have shrunk under the weight of their own politics. In their place, new ones are appearing: BasedCon, ConFinement, RiseUp Con, and other startup conventions where writers, artists, and readers meet in good faith to talk about story again. There are also the long-established ones — Baen’s legacy gatherings, LibertyCon, and others — that remind us what literary fellowship looked like before ideology captured the stage.
And surrounding all of this is a living network: the CLFA, Substack communities, writer groups that share readers and ideas instead of credentials. When the Left destroys one meeting place, as it did with the old Baen Barflies forum, we simply start another. The community migrates, but it doesn’t die.
That’s the key lesson: we are already rebuilding. The new house is not theoretical. It stands in a thousand small structures, local, diverse, connected by story and trust rather than by institutional decree.
The Improvements
The new builders have learned from the old house’s mistakes.
First, we keep it human-scale for as long as possible. The institutions that collapsed under DEI weight often did so because they grew too big to remember what they were for. Our new presses and organizations are modular, not monolithic. They can adapt, fail small, and rebuild fast.
Second, we choose merit over metrics. The old industry worshiped numbers: representation, sensitivity scores, market slices. We care about craft, meaning, and readers who recognize truth when they see it.
Third, we work in the open. Transparency keeps capture at bay. When funding, hiring, or publication decisions are made in daylight, ideology loses its power to corrupt them.
Fourth, and so important!, we interlock. Education leads to publishing, publishing to distribution (perhaps the hardest part), distribution to review, review to conversation. Each piece reinforces the others. The old institutions built silos. We build circuits.
Fifth, if you're not a creator, seek out these artists. Use the tools that are being built to find books that are better than those the mainstream publishes. And support our writers and artists, both by purchasing their work and by leaving reviews. They need your help more than anything in the world.
Finally, we play the long game. The Left captured culture by controlling credentialing; we will reclaim it by producing excellence for a generation. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s already underway. Every new story told freely, every young reader awakened by truth and beauty, is another beam set in place.
These are not reactive principles. They’re acts of cultural creation.
The Long View
It takes only one generation to lose a culture, but several to rebuild one. That fact should not discourage us. It should focus us.
Real renewal happens in homes, small schools, parishes, workshops, and tiny publishing houses. The monasteries of the Dark Ages preserved civilization because they copied what was good, not because they won arguments. We can do the same.
The great gift of our time is that the tools of creation are in our hands. Printing presses, editing software, digital storefronts, social platforms, and global communication, once reserved for empires, now belong to anyone with vision. The same technologies that made ideological conformity possible can be used to bypass it.
What matters is not whether the old establishment approves. They built a house that's falling down; why do we care what they think? What matters is that our house exists: that stories worth reading are being written, printed, and read.
Every parallel institution we build becomes a refuge for those weary of slogans. Every honest story told without permission shifts the center of gravity a little further back toward truth.
The Way Forward
To rebuild the house of culture, we begin with craft. We tell better stories. We reward excellence. We honor virtue. We cultivate imagination as a sacred trust.
The goal is not to defeat DEI or any other ideology in argument. It is to make them irrelevant, to build so much good work, so much truth and beauty, that the old structure collapses from disuse and irrelevance.
This is how story wins. Not through censorship or conquest, but through attraction. When people encounter truth expressed beautifully, they recognize it. When they see integrity lived out, they are drawn to it. That is how every great revival begins: one honest act at a time.
The new house is already rising beside the old. Its foundation rests on solid ground: the eternal things that neither bureaucracy nor fashion can erode. Truth. Beauty. Goodness. Human dignity. The story that underlies all others.
And when it stands, strong, square, and open to the light, the cracks in the old walls will no longer matter. The people will have moved on, living their stories in the house they built for themselves.
Check out the rest of the series so far:
Part 1: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Gatekeepers
Part 2: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Awards Racket
Part 3: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Market Disconnect
Part 4: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Silencing of the Straight White Male
Part 5: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Writer’s Dilemma
Part 6: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Reader Rebellion
Part 6.5: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: Conventions and Writers’ Organizations
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