I published an article earlier today arguing that X tanked my reach because I removed over a hundred fake accounts. The timing was perfect, the correlation was clean, and I was confident in my analysis. Then I discovered that X rolled out a completely new AI-powered algorithm the very next day—a change significant enough that Elon Musk publicly apologized five days later. Now I have two correlations and no way to prove causation. Here’s what I got wrong, what I might have gotten right, and why at the end of the day the distinction doesn’t really matter.
I Optimized My Audience for Quality, and X Screwed Me for It
I did everything the social media marketing guides tell you to do. Cleaned my X follower base. Removed 137 bot and suspicious accounts degrading my audience quality. Optimized for authentic engagement. My impressions dropped 75% overnight and never recovered. Two months later, I’m still shadowbanned—not for violating any policy, but for following the platform’s own stated values. The algorithm can’t tell the difference between your audience abandoning you and you curating your audience. Or it won’t. Either way, you eat the penalty. Here’s what I learned about why you can’t trust platforms like X with your audience.
“It’s Not What You Said, It’s When You Said It.”
I’ve heard this particular criticism from well-meaning individuals more times than I can count: It wasn’t the content of my September 12th post that was my treason, it was the timing. I “capitalized on tragedy.” I was “tone deaf.” I was “reckless” and “irrational.” It was “deranged ranting.” Hold that thought for a minute and let’s rewind to two weeks before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. On August 30th I posted three checked boxes: they’re stealing our jobs, they’re eating our pets, they’re raping our daughters. The escalating pattern is unmistakable to anyone who’s studied how dehumanizing rhetoric can lead to atrocity. Fast forward to the 48 hours following Kirk’s assassination. What we were witnessing wasn’t grief. It was rage fueled by a false narrative that half the country wanted conservative blood—a narrative built and amplified before the shooter was even identified. I watched it unfold in real-time, and I recognized it for what it was: mass hysteria threatening to justify preemptive violence against people like my neighbors, my coworkers, my family. So I committed an unforgivable sin. I stood up and said something.
An Open Letter to a (Former) Fan
A reader wrote to tell me I have “selective memory” about why my publication contract was canceled. That I “grouped all of the right with racist violence.” That I ignored left-wing transgressions and Trump comparisons to previous presidents. That I alienated “so many people who loved you” because I’m “blinded by hate.” Every single claim is demonstrably false and contradicted by timestamped public records. But that line about “so many people who loved you” deserves special attention. Let’s examine what that “love” actually looked like when I documented the difference between calling someone a racist and saying they’re poisoning our country’s blood. When I distinguished moral judgment from eliminationist rhetoric. When I refused to stay silent about replacement theory targeting my family. Strap in. It gets spicy.
For the Record: Why WarGate Books and I Parted Ways
On September 16, 2025, after I criticized specific extremist dehumanizing rhetoric publicly, some of which targeted my own immediate family members, WarGate Books informed me they would no longer promote my work, claiming I was unmarketable to their audience. They suggested I take my Dark Dominion sequence, which was pending publication with two full manuscripts already delivered, elsewhere. I’m establishing this on public record because the facts matter and third-party agitators with extensively documented credibility problems are attempting to twist the narrative. People can agree or disagree with my political analysis and personal views, but I believe the timeline and circumstances of the separation should be clear and documented. Accuracy matters, and I won’t accept mischaracterization of what happened or why. I have no interest in conflict with WarGate Books. Thus far they’ve conducted the separation professionally and I’m friends with many of their authors. I wish them all well. Meanwhile, I have books to write and an audience more aligned with my values to build. So this will be my last word on the topic. I’m moving on and as far as I’m concerned nothing more about this needs to be said.
The Permission to Hope
I left the Mormon church after serving a two-year mission—seven generations of family legacy abandoned because I couldn’t ignore the evidence. I became an atheist. For seven years, the universe was just matter and energy until entropy wins. Then one secular Christmas, I gave myself permission to hope the Nativity might be true. Not because I had new evidence—simply because I wanted to live in a universe where Love became incarnate to share human suffering. Fourteen years after leaving Mormonism, after studying philosophy, theology, and church history with the same rigor that made me leave, I was baptized Catholic. It wasn’t certainty. It was hope sustained by intellectual honesty. This is what I believe about faith, doubt, and the courage to follow truth wherever it leads.
When a President Weaponizes Murder
Trump blamed Rob Reiner and his wife’s murder on “Trump Derangement Syndrome” while the actual killer—Reiner’s son—sat in police custody. It wasn’t a gaffe. It wasn’t “trolling the libs.” It was strategic messaging: critics suffer consequences, those consequences are their fault, and their deaths mark America’s “Golden Age.” This isn’t a few people dancing in blood on TikTok. This is the sitting President of the United Sates engaging in stochastic terrorism—rhetoric that incites violence without explicit commands by pathologizing dissent, inverting causality, and celebrating outcomes. It’s the same mechanism that got me accused of “TDS” and cost me my publisher when I documented extremist patterns of dehumanizing rhetoric on the Right. The system is self-sealing: analyze it and you prove you’re diseased. Document it and you become its next target.
The Quiet Courage of Lance Corporal Kylie Watson
Lance Corporal Kylie Watson stood five-foot-one in her combat boots when Afghan soldiers tried to stop her from treating their wounded comrade. A woman shouldn’t touch him, they insisted. She told them straight through the interpreter: “If I don’t treat him, he dies. There is no argument, he is getting treated.” Then the 23-year-old medic from Ballymena got on with her job—running seventy meters through Taliban fire, splinting a shattered pelvis, performing CPR in an open field with bullets hitting the dust around her. The story of how she became only the fourth woman in British military history to receive the Military Cross isn’t the Hollywood version circulating online. What actually happened is more remarkable because it’s true.
Setting the Record Straight: The Fandom Pulse Hit Piece
Today, hours after calling out coordinated harassment from WarGate Books community members, Fandom Pulse published a hit piece framing my political essays as “Trump Derangement” and my platform migration to Bluesky as defeat. It’s not journalism—it’s retaliation from Jon Del Arroz, a documented serial harasser with DV allegations, platform bans, and a pattern of targeting critics because I’m guilty of being a Traitor to the Tribe. The irony? Del Arroz champions Nick Cole, whose entire career is built on claiming victimhood from being cancelled… while WarGate cancelled me for criticizing extremist dehumanizing rhetoric. Let me correct the record with receipts, timestamps, and publicly verifiable facts.
I Fed Two AIs Nearly 100K Words of My Story and They Couldn’t Write the Next Scene
Everyone’s worried AI will replace authors. So I decided to test it. I fed Claude Sonnet 4.5 nearly 100,000 words of my YA space opera—the complete novel, 5,000 words of a prequel I’d already written, character guides, alien speech patterns, explicit instructions about my protagonist’s psychology. Then I asked it to write the next scene. The result? Competent genre prose that lost my protagonist’s voice entirely. It could analyze what made her voice work, explain it back to me perfectly, then defaulted to templates anyway when asked to generate prose. Grok 4.1 failed the same experiment. This isn’t about whether AI will improve. It’s about understanding what AI fundamentally can’t do—and what that means for writers.
The Annex 