Conservative Decline? Pajamas Media Goes Belly Up

Well, I just read through every post at Memeorandum in response to Jeff Goldstein's layoff notice from Pajamas Media.

Long story short is that Roger Simon has pissed away his venture capital on hand and new revenue has dried up as the recession has sapped online advertising. It looks like Pajamas is going to focus on its television programming venture, and the main Pajamas portal will stay up and continue publishing conservative commentary. Those big blogs that signed exclusive advertising arrangements are now out of the remuneration stream. Goldstein's feeling the rejection: "I am officially out of work. So save going to a pay model, this site will likely have to shut down."

I have some personal interest in all of this, as I started publishing at Pajamas last year and I was interviewed by Bill Whittle for a PJTV episode last October. In my case, of course, I've never had any illusions that I was going to make a lot of money blogging. Folks have asked why I don't run ads on the sidebar, while others have ribbed me for my prodigious output. My response is that American Power is a labor of love, and my goal all along has been to make a name for myself as a public intellectual in the blogospheric commentariat. Keep in mind that the Blogger platform is free, so the only cost I incur is time, and lots of it. And since the blogging enterprise has a steep start-up curve for new entries, it's not likely that lower-level 9th-tier bloggers are going to overtake Hot Air anytime soon. The networked structure of the blogosphere prohibits easy entry to the top of the hierarchy of opinion, so newcomers will need to worry about finding both a niche and an outside means of support more lucrative than Google's Adsense. In my case, I have a day job.

There's a lot of sour grapes and I-told-you-sos over the news, but this comment at Tools of Renewal is worth pondering:

I used to see the PJ fiasco as the result of greed, treachery, foolishness, and dishonesty. These days I see it more as the evidence of a curse. The US is declining very quickly. We’re not going to be the world’s leading nation any more. The economy may have a dead-cat bounce left in it, but we’re going into a recession which will never end. We’re going to settle permanently at a lower level of prosperity and power, and we may experience a near-depression on the way to that level. The self-destruction of conservatism is probably just one of the tools that will be used to work this judgment on America ....

The right used to be blessed. Until maybe 2003, our star was rising. Maybe that’s because we were more closely attuned to God. Now we think we have to dump God in order to attract voters. We keep hearing that the problem with the right is that the religious nuts hijacked it. But the right was stronger back when religious people had more power. And it will weaken more and more, as we get more desperate and distance ourselves from God. And if we give up our support of Israel, things will get even worse. In many ways, we already have.

I normally blow off such prattle about America's inevitable decline. It's nonsense. The U.S. is already taking the rest of the world down with it to deep-recession levels, and there's no other current competitor ready to replace the U.S. as the king of the hill (least of all China). Most importantly, there's no other nation-state on the face of the planet possessing the intellectual-demographic dynamism that will form the bases of the next boom of entreprenuerial-scientific market renewal (see Bill Whittle for more on America's sure return to the towering heights of prosperity).

The second part of Renewal's comment is worth further consideration. We've seen all of this debate about the GOP's path back to power, and one of the biggest meme's is that the sooner we dump cultural conservatism the better. Hogwash. I've said it before and I'll say it again: The "GOP Must Stay True to Core Values." We're riding the downside of the political cycle, but religious expression is hardly in decline, and in fact Christianity is the most dynamic religion in the world today. If America indeed drops off the top ranks of hierarchy in international relations, the cause will be the godless progressivism now stripping this country from its founding roots and the bases of its historical strength.

As for future of conservative media like Pajamas? Well, Andrew Breitbart just started Big Hollywood, and I was intrigued reading over there the other day that Breitbart was offering $100,000 to Matt Damon to debate neoconservative warhawk Bill Kristol on Iraq. I have no clue as to Breitbart's funding model, but $100,000 a good chunk of change, and Big Hollywood's off to a good start.

So, keep plugging away right-bloggers! There's gold in them thar hills!