The Bright and Dark

Reflections From a Truthful Tiger

It may surprise you to learn that, when I sit down to write, I often feel that I have nothing to say.

And yet, I’m not prone to sitting and waiting, thinking and ruminating, toe-tapping and window gazing. 

I simply start writing, as I’m doing now.

There is a term in the creation of art—from writing to painting to building, and everything in between—known as ‘resistance.’ We all feel it. We feel it when our mind begins to go to war with itself. To tell itself that it isn’t good enough, smart enough, capable enough. That nobody cares what you’re going to create. That you are being frivolous, childish or selfish by spending time on creation when you could be ‘productive.’

This feeling often converges with imposter syndrome, which most of us are prone to, perhaps writers most of all.

After all, what makes me special? What makes any of us? And if all of us are special, isn’t that the same thing as saying the opposite?

I am a writer. I have been a writer for some time. Under my human name, my given name I have had successes and failures in the telling of stories.

After a relative artistic boom period in 2018-19, things took a turn for the worst from a business perspective for me in 2020, and I know I’m far from alone. I was engaged in the Information War throughout this period of time and long before it, so much so that it risked consuming much of my attention—attention perhaps better spent on my stories, on my family and on the act of creation.

And yet, I felt and feel the same pull into this strange, fascinating and disconcerting war as many of you. As all of you.

While I followed many minds and kept my own active in the Information War, I never engaged directly. Not until a year ago.

I don’t know where the drive came from, but I felt it more strongly than I’ve felt any creative drive in my life. It wasn’t a drive to share information, or to put together an epic thread. It wasn’t the feeling that I had some revelation or piece of the puzzle everyone else was missing.

It was the same sort of drive I felt as a child after reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. The drive to write. The drive to create. The drive to tell a story.

And so, I sat down in January of 2022 to tell a story.

Not one I had any special knowledge of, or made any new discoveries regarding, but one I felt drawn to, and one I felt was going to become more important than most of us realized at the time.

That story became Righteous Russia, and even if it was not the first piece you read at Burning Bright, in a roundabout way, it likely brought you to me, or me to you.

While there are a mix of historical data points, biographical touchstones and Macro analysis in the series, I have attempted to reflect on what it is about this series that captivated the folks who formed the beginning of the Bright Army.

And I think it’s more simple than I believed at the time.

Righteous Russia feels true, and it’s written to tell a story, rather than to deploy an argument, even if it does advance a specific and alluring perspective that is attractive to an audience as forward-thinking and heterodox in their cognitive patterns as this community. Righteous Russia is not only meant to provide a more global view of what I have dubbed the Sovereign Alliance and the war on the System of Systems—another Burning Bright term used in place of the Deep State or the Cabal. More so, this series was meant to consider our brothers and sisters in other lands, and to dig into their hearts and minds—perhaps even their souls by attempting to gaze into the soul of a nation, of a land that has been obscured to us and weaponized against us for generations.

The Russian man is the American man, because all men are created equal. All men have mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, children and friends. All men have loves, passions and even hatreds they try to tamp down and to rise above.

And all men must strive for sovereignty, our God-given birthright, but one that must be defended, and taken back when it has been stolen from us.

That is what I attempted to do with Righteous Russia, even if I didn’t really know it at the time, and apparently the message—the story within the story—resonated with many of you.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that the series caught the attention of well-known figures in this community, including Jon Herold, who went by Patel Patriot at the time and whose own story—Devolution—provided the most well-sourced and compelling jewel of reasoned, logic-based hope our movement has seen since prior to November 3, 2020.

The ensuing year that followed the publication of that series starter has been a whirlwind in ways I could never have imagined. In addition to branching out in the topics I covered at Burning Bright and beginning to cultivate this bright pocket within a bright community, I was honored to be asked to join the cognitive collective that became Badlands Media before we even had a name for it.

In a way, Badlands has become a family to me, from Herold himself (even if we trade barbs more often than compliments,) to Patrick Gunnels, who took a risk by promoting Righteous Russia before anyone else, to Kyle/Just Human, who has become an Info War brother of sorts as we attempt to parse the war for the mind of collective society.

These are my brothers-in-arms in this Information War, in this Soul War, even if it is not always sunshine and rainbows—far from it—and even if, or perhaps because we disagree as often as we agree.

These men and women at Badlands were forced to show their quality in the midst of coordinated, venomous attacks a few months ago, and the trials we faced during those weeks brought us even closer together in common cause and in shared morality—an unhappy prospect for those who would seek to divide and to suppress.

So yes, it feels apt to call them a family, because that is what these men and women have become to me, even though I have yet to meet 90% of them.

And you know what? So have many of you.

I have hinted that when I set out to put my thoughts on the Information War down on digital paper, I was in a dark place. And yet, I believe that is when bright lights are needed.

Aside from positive and stimulating feedback I get by presenting and modifying my theories and analysis at Burning Bright, what has struck me most about this strange, scintillating time in my life is the feedback loop between myself and all of you.

The Emails, messages and comments I have received from you folks starting with Righteous Russia and continuing far beyond it shocked me with their emotional earnestness and, more importantly in their honesty.

While the prospect was discomfiting to me at the beginning of this journey, it has been rendered clear to me that my words have had and are having an effect on those who read them and ruminate on them.

That is a responsibility I take seriously, even if I maintain that I am simply a man with a mind, like so many of you, even if I have taken on the likeness of a Truthful Tiger.

What is Burning Bright, then? Who is he?

For a while, I considered showing my face and my birth name, and I may yet at some point in the future. The curiosity of this audience is both interesting and illuminating to me, but as I have considered the prospect of going more public with the man behind the tiger, my perspective has changed, first by degrees and later by something more.

Burning Bright is itself a story.

Perhaps it’s one I began telling myself before I shared it with any of you, and yet, as Tolkien himself would say, it is a story that grew in the telling of it.

I cannot see all ends. None of us can, even if we attempt to guess at them, but the Bright Army and the readers of this humble publication have become as much a guiding light to me as this publication—I suppose this mind, these words and the fingers (or paws) that type them—has to so many of you.

I do not know what I offer that others do not, but in seeing how my words have touched so many of you, and how your sharing has touched me, I have felt a connection to God, to the divine and to my own soul in the act of creation and of expression that I have not felt in a long time—perhaps ever.

I will return to the realm of fiction in the future. I have many stories to tell in that realm, and readers who engage with my human name and the stories I have told under it. Stories I feel are important to tell, even if they are not ‘real’ in the traditional sense of the word.

And yet, what began as a strange calling, an inevitable pull has become something much more in this brightening corner in a dark war.

Burning Bright is not going anywhere, and due to the encouragement and, yes the financial support of many of you folks, it’s possible that this funny little corner of stories, truth, discernment and humanistic intent continues to grow in ways I can’t quite predict.

For those of you who have read my words and shared them with others, and expressed to me what they have meant to you over the course of the last year, I thank you.

And for those who have supported me with subscriptions and donations over that time period, your assistance has not only helped me and my family tremendously, but it has given me more confidence than I had before that a life of parsing truth and hunting lies, sharing words of encouragement—and maybe, even if accidentally some occasional jewels of wisdom—could in the future be something I devote my full attention to.

We have all lost much in this strange war. We have lost family and friends, connections and opportunities. Some of us may have come close to losing our very minds, and I am no different.

I am tired. Tired bordering on exhausted. Not just because of the strange, fascinating and sometimes-depressing Information War we all fight against the powers that would be, but that NEVER will be again, but because of the burden of truth we all carry.

And yet, every time I send one of these glowing, fading coals of a story out to the growing collective that is all of you, your engagement, your words and even your silent, scanning eyes and working, unique minds call out to me, and blow life back into them, and into the mind from which they emanate.

For each of us may just be one small light in the darkness, but together, we form a mighty thing, and one that doesn’t just threaten the surrounding dark, but scatters it.

We are in a War of Stories, and the story of Burning Bright, the Bright Army and the Bright Empire built on truth, discernment and positivity is just beginning

So thank you, Bright Army, for a strange, exhausting, exhilarating and encouraging year.

And here’s to many more.

I will continue to fight this war, as long as I have light in me with which to fight it, and as long as darkness remains to fight.

And if you stand with me, that fight will have been worth it.

Until next time, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.

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