[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

For many years, conservative culture critics like myself have been raising the alarm about the left’s near-hegemonic control of the entertainment field and the urgency for the political Right to get more troops on that battlefield. But raising the alarm is only half the equation for a critic; the other half is acknowledging and promoting conservative content creators who are actually stepping into the arena to offer non-woke options to an underserved audience.

Ari Mendelson is one of those men in the arena. An attorney and homeschooling father, he is also a novelist, author of the Kingmaker trilogy (the titles of which are, in order: Consent, Due Process, and Just Power).

I posed a few questions to Ari about his books, their relevance to current events, and conservatives in the culture.

Mark Tapson:         Tell us a bit about your background and what inspired you to turn to writing novels.

Ari Mendelson:      I met the love of my life when I was in law school. When we got married, I was a lawyer, and she was a college student with dreams of becoming a doctor. When we had our first two kids, neither of us could bear the thought of having anybody raise them except one of us. So, when my wife did her residency, I took care of them.

During that time, I gave myself a second education. One thing I learned in those studies is that the secret of invention and creativity is recombination. As I began recombining the elements of what I’d taught myself, they began to crystallize in my imagination into stories.

One of those stories was of a great villain, the tech titan who is at the heart of Kingmaker, who has an algorithm that can persuade nearly anybody to do nearly anything. When that vision appeared to me, I just had to make it real. Once I figured out who my villain was, other characters appeared to me: the Hollywood starlet caught up in the villain’s web of artificial seduction, the honeypot spy from China with infinite sex appeal and cunning. Set against them were the heroes, independent journalists like James O’Keefe who discover the plot one step at a time.

Writing it turned out to be one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever faced, but it was wonderful that first I helped my wife make her dream come true. Now she’s helping me make mine a reality too.

MT:     Tell us about your first book, Bias Incident. Why do you call it the world’s most politically incorrect novel?

AM:    If I’m going to pick a fight, I’m going to find the biggest bully on the block. When I wrote Bias Incident, the LGBTQAI+ movement was picking up steam. The radicals in that movement had begun to take over, and many of them were truly vicious. I’m not talking about ordinary gay people; I’m talking about the activists. It was then that I began to notice “cancel culture.” That’s all I needed to know about where that movement was headed. James Lindsay’s subsequent exposure of the origins of Queer Theory has borne this out.

Bias Incident is still a fun little satire, and I’m enormously proud of it. It’s been 14 years since I’ve written it, and I’ve heard it called a work of prophecy.

MT:     What’s the premise of your Kingmaker trilogy, and what are a few of the political and cultural themes that run through it?

AM:    Remember what I said about going after the biggest bully on the block? In recent years, the merger of big government and big tech is that “biggest bully.” Kingmaker is based on two insights: 1) AI has advanced so much that a human grandmaster is powerless to win a single game of chess against a computer. 2) Like chess, persuasion is a rule-bound endeavor. What if AI could master the rules of persuasion? What if it got so good that human beings were powerless to resist its charms? What would limit its abilities?

Naturally, I needed to make this terrifying technology realistic. I drew on what I learned from that second education to show readers how this vision was plausible. In showing it being developed step-by-step, I like to say that I set out to “out-Crichton Michael Crichton.”

As to the cultural themes, Kingmaker is a story about what it takes to fight for freedom. What it takes is not the “proper” political alignment but to develop ourselves into the kinds of people who can achieve excellence. That involves physical skills, employment skills, interpersonal skills, and spiritual growth.

Kingmaker starts with two young men looking to improve themselves. They face many challenges and setbacks along the way. Another character is a former Antifa fighter based on Gabriel Nadales. He gets to experience true repentance and redemption with the help of his mentor, Father Gus. None of them are looking to be heroes. Heroism is just what happens when they reach their potential.

Along the way, the book explores faith, family, redemption, forgiveness, the importance of art and culture, growing up, the difficulty of achieving greatness, and how we should think about our lives as a whole.

It also explores what consent and free will mean as influencers (both human and electronic) get ever better at persuading us. Where does our will end and their will begin? That answer is getting less clear by the day.

MT:     On a related note, what parallels do you see between the Kingmaker books and what’s happening in America today?

AM:    I’ve lost count by now. The Border Crisis, for one, and the way that politicians are taking advantage of unchecked immigration. The need for reforms to our criminal justice system that nobody’s even talking about. My predictions about the prevalence of lawfare were spot on. For instance, we saw an independent journalist perp-walked for a misdemeanor, just like in Kingmaker. The dishonesty of the corporate press is proceeding as I have foreseen. Of course, underlying it all is the issue of election integrity. If the government knows it has no need to answer to the people, it will govern for its own benefit, rather than for the people’s.

To finish Kingmaker, I had to answer one critical question: why is the outcome of a presidential election an ending that a reader would consider satisfying? The ability of the political process to improve people’s lives is something I’m very skeptical of. Further, the persuasion algorithm that my villain owns is a reality in the world I created. What to do with that? The answers I came up with were something that I was very proud of and my readers have enjoyed. Those are predictions that I hope do come true.

MT:     How should conservatives push back against the left’s cultural hegemony? Should they engage, for example, in more storytelling rather than just nonfiction polemics? And are you optimistic that the right can turn the ocean liner of the culture around and steer it back toward sanity and stability, or are we outmanned and outgunned?

AM:    Stories capture the mind unlike any argument. As you watch or read, you put yourself in the position of the protagonist. Imagining what you would do in his situation has a power to persuade that cannot be equaled by any argument, statistic, or quote.

The right can definitely turn it around. I suspect that our talent pool for creating great stories is very deep. What we need most is to build an infrastructure for getting those stories out there. Last year, Christian Toto wrote an article on how we’re not going to win the culture war unless we find a way for conservatives to promote one another’s work. I couldn’t agree more.

I sat down to write Kingmaker with no guarantees. I was up every day before dawn for nearly two years struggling to finish it. I was always optimistic that I could create something as good or better than anything that’s out there. If it’s worth it for a guy like Kurt Schlichter to write his Kelly Turnbull novels, I bet that I could make it worth my time as well. What we need most is for people to realize what they’re missing if they turn down the opportunity to read stories like mine.

MT:     Do you have a new book idea in the works?

AM:    Yes. I’ve explored some ideas for a sequel. There’s plenty of mischief that can be done with new ideas and new technology. Genes, germs, DNA all look like fertile ground for more great stories.

MT:     More power to you, Ari. We’re looking forward to it.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior