Their Ranks Have Broken—Now What? Arch Weighs In!

Join Malcolm Collins as he sits down with a special guest, Arch from the popular Arch Warhammer and Arch Cast YouTube channels. Malcolm and Arch explore the rise of the New Right, the evolution from Warhammer enthusiast to conservative commentator, and the current state of the gaming and media industries. They delve into the challenges and opportunities in the gaming world, discussing how small studios and AI could reshape the landscape. The conversation also touches on the pitfalls of mainstream media, the enduring appeal of Warhammer lore, and the future of content creation in an increasingly digital age. If you're a fan of gaming, Warhammer, or curious about cultural dynamics, this is an episode you won't want to miss. Arch: [00:00:00] Hello, this is malcolm collins.

I'm excited to have a special guest here today This, out of all of our special guests, is probably the YouTuber who I watched most before this. But it's funny, it's that the thing I knew him most for was Warhammer content, because people who know me know I love lore. If anything with a ton of lore, I love, but now he is known as a conservative, Politics commentator, so he's got his arch warhammer channel, which is just arch and then the arch cast which is his more Politics channel very similar takes to us.

I'd say very sort of New right this new right movement that we we have an episode on this where we're like It's really weird that like the online right today is descended from like the online atheist movement of like ages ago I was like, how did that end up happening? But what I wanted to talk with you about today was because, you know, you're such an expert in obviously like popular media.

I guess I'd call it like low media, the type of media I prefer video games, [00:01:00] Warhammer, Star Wars, all of that. And so I wanted to focus this conversation on two particular questions. One is, is that we have been fighting against the sort of like mind virus that's been controlling our society for a while now.

And finally, with this vibe shift over these past few months, it feels like the tide has finally, not the tide, the enemy troops have broken rank. And, and we can attempt to do something now, right? But the question is, is what does that look like? Like, what does taking advantage of this look like? And then the second question I want to focus on in this podcast is we are increasingly seeing that despite whether it is fantasy games or video games or media, the demand for it has never been higher and yet the mainstream companies don't seem to be able to produce something that that demand wants anymore.

There's obviously a ton of opportunity that's opened by this. How do we take advantage of this? [00:02:00] What does taking advantage of this look like? And where do you see the future of the media space going? So take the stage.

Okay. It's quite a lot to unpack there, isn't there? What does winning look like? I suppose is Is the first question because I don't think we know just yet.

I don't think anyone quite knows. Great question. What does winning look like? Like, in your head, like, how would you answer that? That's like, that's

a great f*****g question.

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Because I, I have been seeing a little bit recently as well that there have been a I don't know about resurgent, but more like a creation of a new group of people who are now moving into this space.

As our side is becoming more popular, we are going to see a lot more people join our quote unquote side in essence. Like Zuck. Did you see that? Yes. Yes, exactly. Zuckerberg getting rid of fact checkers, which is an obvious attempt to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. In essence,

you're, you're [00:03:00] already moved the fact checking team that's what's left of them from California to Texas.

To try to make them sane again. Anyway, continue.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is of course, then the normal thing. Whenever a political movement gets into power, then everyone else will begin to move up to join around it for advantage. This is why Disney and all of the entertainment industry joined around the left, because they saw advantage in doing so, rather than an ideological one.

And then of course, a lot of people were hired into that company to be like, okay we need you to explain to us why it's a good thing to be progressive. You're going to be in the IHR department. You're going to hire people like you and we'll be popular. Didn't work out so much. So a lot of the, how do we continue from here is going to be studying what the left did wrong and attempting to avoid that whenever possible because we are not trying to simply recreate the left's rise to power, which was meteoric and then plungingly meteoric in the opposite direction soon thereafter.[00:04:00]

I love that you pointed that out because it's one of the things I've heard pointed out that I really wrap my brain around is that the time period of American history, while we lived through it, what we call the urban monoculture or the far left, the time period where it was a dominant culture in the world, it's probably the shortest any civilization has ever held power, it held power for like yeah, 20 years before dying.

Like it's wild that that happened. And I think that one of the things you point out and it's one of the things that I think that we all need to be very careful about is us repeating the mistakes that they made. Now that we have more power and a lot of people, you know, like James Lindsay has been calling out like the woke, right?

And stuff like that. And I think some people bristle at this, but I think he's very smart to be doing this because The biggest mistake that we can make is attempt to do what they did to us, which is impose our cultural values on people who don't want those cultural values. If we can just enforce a system of [00:05:00] cultural freedom I think that to me, that's winning enough because it might be stable, but thoughts.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I myself have been kind of mulling this over, the idea of the tyranny of neutrality, to enforce this upon everyone, to bring back the idea, if you're at a gaming table or a comics convention, make discussion of politics and religion taboo again, and allow these to be in specialized spaces where people want to bring them up.

Allow fantasy to become an escapist hobby.

Yeah. Well, and there's so much you can do with fantasy. So one of the things that I've been working on recently, some people know this, I've been funding the development of a game. And when we were like deciding on game worlds what we've ended up focusing on is a post apocalyptic LLM based world where we're sort of like automating everyone, but we were looking at doing an Izakaya world.

And one of the Izakaya things I was looking at doing is, oh my God, can we have like a historic sibling? Hold on, you mean Izakaya? Hold on. Hi, sorry, [00:06:00] they go all in on their historical tropes. Like, can I have like a native American civilization? That's like the most extra like as techie thing ever. Can I have like Middle Eastern and Magi floating on magic carpets?

And I was like, it was genies and stuff. And I'm like, it's so wild that we lost this world of being able to like lean in to ethnic and religious tropes, even though Like the Wokies might have a problem with like a Magi on a magic carpet, like dressed up like a, but I don't think Middle Easterners would, they'd find that dope.

Like, so yeah, the, the new worlds that are accessible to us is really exciting, but then how do we not? overplay those world's hands. And I guess people would be like, Oh, well look at Warhammer. This is an example of overplaying into rightist fantasies. And yet even there, you know, we seem to be, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, all entertainment goes in [00:07:00] w