Ryan Williamson Commentary, Politics

Why I’m No Longer with WarGate Books

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.

Ryan Williamson Commentary

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.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson On Writing

Claude Sonnet 4.5 was Offered to Ghostwrite for a Bestselling Author—And What This Means for You

After a bestselling author brand with high ratings and substantial readership rejected my ghostwriting pitch for being “overwritten, meandering, and unmarketable,” I resubmitted with something more… tailored to their audience and brand—written by an LLM (because at that point I was going to tell them to take a hike anyway). “Perfect!” they said. “When can you start?” Which is exactly what I suspected they’d say, proving that the dozens of titles a year written by poverty-wage ghostwriters they churn out are indistinguishable from something an AI can produce for pennies on the dollar in a fraction of the time. I laughed my ass off and walked away from the deal. Partly because their lowball offer was insulting, and mostly because they wouldn’t know quality professional writing if it slapped them across the face (my most recently published novel has a 4.8/5 rating across hundreds of reviews). They do know what sells for their market though, I’ll give them that: competent plot delivery with competent characters doing competent things competently. No pesky character arcs. No nuance. No unique authorial voice. No emotional subtlety. And their sales prove many readers prefer that sort of thing. And that’s perfectly fine. But AI can vomit that slop out all day long without breaking a sweat, so if you write for that market, you’re right to be worried about being replaced by AI. And sooner rather than later. It’s just basic economics. Meanwhile, the rest of us can breathe easy. In this essay I prove why…

Ryan Williamson Commentary, Politics

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.

Ryan Williamson Commentary

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.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson On Writing

AI Will Always Push Authors Toward Mediocrity

I asked Grok to rate my fantasy novel’s opening scene. It gave me 8/10, so I asked it to rewrite for 10/10. It made it objectively worse by replacing distinctive voice with clichés, crude humor with bland description, showed psychology with explained backstory. Then I fed that “perfect” rewrite back to it in a fresh session. Result? 8/10 again. Grok couldn’t recognize its own “masterpiece.” Each “improvement” drifted further toward generic template prose while maintaining the same encouraging-but-short-of-perfection score. AI doesn’t improve writing toward excellence—it pushes innovation toward bland conformity. Scores are arbitrary, feedback is retrofitted justification, and it’s already screening manuscripts for publishers. Innovative creative writing will always fail algorithmic evaluation because AI can’t recognize what it’s never seen before.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ And it sure as hell can’t write it.

Ryan Williamson Commentary, Politics

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.

Ryan Williamson Dark Dominion

Mešvi 2.3 Conlang Update

The Mešvi language has expanded with Version 2.3, adding 157 new words and establishing a distinction between sacred and everyday speech. It now features 423 vocabulary entries and 53 phrases, enhancing theological terminology and cultural expressions. These developments support the upcoming serialization of the book "Immortal," reflecting deep cultural concepts.

Ryan Williamson On Writing

Empathy is Everything in Storytelling

Can AI ever write a truly masterful story? I asked Claude—and even the AI admitted its own limitations. “Pattern matching can produce competent genre fiction,” Claude told me. “It cannot produce the purple thread line, because that line doesn’t come from craft—it comes from consciousness shaped by experience.” That moment in my manuscript—where Wulan sees bruise-colored thread and thinks of her dead brother—emerged from empathy, not algorithms. From understanding how grief ambushes you through concrete details. AI can recognize what makes prose emotionally resonant. But creating that resonance? That requires something no training data can provide: a consciousness that’s actually lived. It requires empathy.

Ryan Williamson Commentary, On Writing

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.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​