Christopher F. Rufo  ⚔️

Bap book is 3 years old. Douthat gets a big initial sale when the publisher dumps it on every bookstore and reviewer in the country. A year later…forgotten. BAP, 100% through word of mouth. Still selling. It’s not even close which one has more cultural impact

Meh? 1000 copies/month means <40,000 copies over 3 years. So an order of magnitude less than a single Douthat column, and that’s before the reach of the tv appearances and podcasts. But show me the major politician or pundit adopting an innovative BAP insight, & I’ll buy a copy.

I agree with you, although it's interesting: I've seen a lot of discussion about the Bronze Age book over a long period of time, but very little after the initial reviews for a lot of the mainstream books.

Same kind of reaction with Curtis Yarvin and Slate Star Codex: they have devoted niche followings, but they're not going on Tucker Carlson and reaching the masses.

Even relative to BAP, important people read Siskind and Sailer, and they get laundered into the conversation, though perhaps not as much as they should. But Douthat used to be a nobody blogger too. He got the platform because he was good.

Ross is a very good writer, but getting selected to be the respectable conservative at the NYTs is not a measure of how broadly resonant one’s ideas are. This is self-evident.

Again: you’re greatly overestimating BAP’s reach. He has a fraction of Ross’s Twitter following, and a fraction even of Chris’s. And both of the latter two are substantially less online and reliant on Twitter.

Im not over or under estimating it. I’m not estimating it all. I'm looking at the raw numbers of their respective book sales. That’s a measure of people willing to pay for their ideas. The rest is noise.