I was kind of on the edges of Institutional Libertarianism back in the day. Entered the free-market.net prize drawing daily, finally won once in college (the months on either side won like $40 in e-gold, I got a copy of L. Neil Smith’s “Pallas”, a CD of atrocious folk music, and a steady stream of solicitations from Jews for the Protection of Firearms Ownership)

Anyway when I moved to LA and tried to become a screenwriter I knew I’d have to do some networking and I figured I might as well go to this conference put on by the Institute for Humane Studies - the institutional libertarian talent-development arm, basically - on “Culture & Liberty”, down at Chapman University, a right-affiliated college down in the OC.

For one, you imagine “libertarian conference” you might envision a sausage fest, but the attendance was like 2/3 female and smoking hot. A lot of Eastern Europeans, either from the Russian Jewish expat anti-communist tradition or the scions of the new bandit-industrial class from the post-Soviet states who were flown in.

Every day we’d go through a few sessions, I think we watched some movie by a Chinese borderline-dissident, also a watch and Q&A with the director of Waco: Rules of Engagement (which was firmly in the “yeah, I can see that” camp of conspiracy theories, in which disparate parts of the government are all independently trying to advance their institutional interest, fucking up, and then trying to cover their ass).

Every night we had a mixer where they basically just left us in a ballroom with a few cases of beer.

On the last day we basically had the whole session to turn out some sort of cultural product, proud to say I clearly had the best, a story I’d been turning over in my head for a while, “How Yusuf and Hassan Saved 9/11”. It was a little gimmicky, but that’s kind of my thing and I’m still proud of it.

Another year and that branch of the program had been shuttered I think, but someone put together a successor program and specifically invited me to a 2-day movie-making conference at UCLA. We went through sessions on development, financing, pitches, alternative channels - to give you the sense of how “Hollywood” and “conservative” interact, they praised the Left Behind films for using church networks to get the word out and make a nice neat profit on a pretty low production and marketing budget, “and that stuff is completely unwatchable — I tried”.

Notably, no one thought to mention Tyler Perry as a model for extra-Hollywood strategies drawing on church structures, though looking at the attendees I don’t think many of us had ties to the black church. There was a black speaker who’d been a writer on the parachurchy Saved by an Angel. Surprisingly/unsurprisingly she was a dedicated New Ager and I kind of wondered what she got out of it, but listening to her word choice, her rhythms, it was like oh my god, this is where Tess came from, dead on. (I’m still a little curious why the Angel of Death was done ambiguously gay in that ‘90s way, shoulda asked).

There was a night reception, of course, this time there was champagne.

Was at a table talking about what we’ve been doing, I mentioned that I lived in Echo Park and the neighborhood council (which was the potemkin government set up as part of LA’s anti-valley secession charter reform, basically as a way to keep local activist types away from real business) had recently had a complete slate turnover from nice white NIMBY types to latino, which involved honest-to-god sound trucks on the streets with messages in Spanish. That intrigued me and I traced it back to the head who was a guy who was affiliated with Gil Cedillo’s East LA Latino Caucus machine (which was moving in on with Waxman’s westside machine for control of the LA Democrats, that’s how Villaraigosa ended up mayor and then fucked it up so bad that mighty whitey swept them back out with Garcetti). And anyway I looked through council minutes and stuff and realized the guy leading this had also been the guy brought in to clean up when down in the little cities southeast of LA proper (which are *hilariously* corrupt) some of the Cedillo machine’s men  had gone too far and brought on a backlash, and went down to interview some guys but didn’t have an outlet for the product. This was around the time of James O’Keefe’s ACORN thing and a kid who’d clearly been inspired was pumping me about how I HAD to put this together for Brietbart’s Big Politics site, it would be huge.

And everyone at the table just went around sharing the outrages of those liberals and I was wondering who was going to be the first to admit we had clearly heard this all first from Steve Sailer. (no one)

Anyway second day we came up with movie ideas and advanced them through a few competitive rounds, my idea which made it to the final selection was about hot-rodding moonshiners and the founding of NASCAR. Because ‘Merica. I think as it got workshopped I ended up overlaying a Romeo & Juliet romance plot on it, basically as a way to justify having a singular protagonist. The real producers’ advice for pitching was basically to be more obsequious and present it in a way that a real producer could see a way to fuck it up in their own idiom, which is basically the kind of reason why I’m not in LA anymore.

I think out of it I got an offer to come work with the production office for the guys doing the Atlas Shrugged films but dear god did I know better.