Agents of Counter-Spoliation
A Conversation with Hans G. Schantz about Based Books
Four-and-a-quarter years ago - has it already been so long? - I penned an article called The Spoliation of Pop Culture. It’s one of my better essays, but the Tree of Woe had a much smaller readership then, and most folks have never read it.
Spoliation means “incorporating art into a setting culturally or chronologically different from that of its creation.” In contemporary usage, spoliation is “a practice consisting of a transference of power from the past through a taking over of its cultural expressions and incorporating them into one’s own. The purpose of appropriation [is] to convert the object of appropriation to one’s own purposes.”
In the original article, I explained how America’s progressives had gained control of the arts, entertainment, education, and media industries, and used that control to engage in spoliation: They identified every valuable expression of American culture and repurposed those expressions for their own use.
The optimist in me had hoped that the rise of anti-woke sentiment among normies might cause Big Entertainment to back off from spoliation by now, but I see little evidence of that. Everything from AAA gaming to Starfleet Academy to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey continues to be spoliated.
That leaves us where we were back in 2021, when I urged people interested in defending our culture to actively wage counter-spoliation. I’ve done so myself with my own work and I’ve supported the output of others. Today, one of the foremost agents of counter-spoliation today is Hans G. Schantz, chiefly by means of his Based Book Sale. Hans kindly agreed to converse with me on it.
Hans, let’s start with the basics. Let’s assume the woeful readership here at the Tree hasn’t heard of the Based Book sale. What is it?
The Based Book Sale is a grassroots, author-driven book sales event built on a simple idea: great books should rise to the top because Based Readers want them, not because they’ve been gatekept for diversity-checklist characters, sensitivity-reader-approved stories, and social-justice sanitized themes. Based Authors gather under the “Come and Read It” banner at BasedBookSale.Substack.com four times a year, lowering the price of some of our most Based Books to $0.99 or free for the same week, so readers can browse and explore our offerings with low risk. Then we mutually promote the sale and each other to our own reader mailing lists and social media.
When did it start?
I first saw the concept in the “Booknado” or “BookBomb” sales hosted by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance a decade ago: authors banding together to discount their books and include them in a common sale. When they discontinued doing their sales, I picked up the ball and formalized it, hosting the sale at the late John Walker’s Ratburger site. I moved it to my blog beginning in 2020. The 2020 Black Friday sale had grown to more than eighty books, an eclectic mix of indie offerings along with more based mainstream offerings. The sale was plagued with being unable to communicate through email because of corporate spam filters.
Finally, two years ago, we moved the sale to Substack. We host quarterly sales with about a hundred participating authors and 200-300 titles, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but also drama, mystery, thrillers – even non-fiction. We also host smaller niche sales in between the primary sales. Recent niche sales have focused on military science fiction, books for men, alternate history, and North American fantasy.
Last year, The Based Book Sale referred 2186 Kindle Free E-books and 10,458 Kindle Paid E-Books. That’s 12,644 books in all.
Would you agree with me characterization of the Based Book Sale as “counter-spoliation?”
Characterizing the state of contemporary culture as “spoliation” is an apt description. The gatekeeping is real, and the mission of mainstream publishing is to push the narratives and cultural programming they want to impose on you, not to offer the entertaining and worthwhile stories you want to read. One mainstream literary agent declares she is “ONLY open to receiving queries from writers from marginalized backgrounds such as (but not limited to) those who identify as BIPOC/BAME, LGBTQ+, ND, and DIS.” In addition, mainstream publishing largely writes books by women and for women, as fantasy author John Douglas observed last year in a video with over 30M views.
Author Brian Niemeier aptly characterizes this mainstream as “Deadpub.”
Male readers and female readers alike are looking beyond the Chick Lit and Booktok slop and are moving away from old school brick-and-mortar bookstores to buy elsewhere. The indie market is thriving, but with well over a million titles being added to Amazon each year, it’s tough to sort out the wheat from the chaff. That’s where the Based Book Sale comes in.
The Based Book Sale is an exercise in counter-spoliation. The sale brings together books that have been marginalized by mainstream publishing’s ideological selection criteria.
First, it’s about reader discovery. The sale lets readers sample dozens of independent books in a short window with minimal cost, the way bookshops used to encourage browsing. If a reader likes what they find, they return later for sequels or print editions. The sale lowers friction and restores the joy of discovery to reading.
Second, it is about author independence. Most participating writers operate outside mainstream publishing pipelines. The sale allows them to reach readers directly, without agents, acquisitions boards, or marketing departments acting as gatekeepers. Success or failure is determined by readers alone. A good-looking cover and a solid, engaging blurb grab readers’ attention. The sale offers valuable feedback to authors helping them refine their pitch and up their game.
Finally and most importantly, the Based Book Sale is about cultural reaffirmation. The participating authors all identify as “based” in an explicit rejection of Deadpub ideology. We stand – each in our own way – for the “good, the beautiful, and the true” as we see it in our writing.
Some of the offerings stand in deliberate defiance of the cultural mainstream. For instance, my own The Wise of Heart is an intentional counter-spoliation of Inherit the Wind, the classic progressive touchstone of enlightened scientific thinking on evolution over backwoods religious superstition about creation. I realized that today the shoe is on the other foot, and the advocates of transgenderism are in gross defiance of the basics of biological science as it pertains to sex. So, I flipped the script on them. I drew from the original Scopes Trial transcript to write a courtroom drama of biological science versus transgenderism that brings the Scopes Monkey Trial up to date for the twenty-first century.
The most popular authors in the sale tend to be those who reaffirm the classical values of storytelling without bending the knee to Deadpub opinion. You’ll see many authors who identify as conservative argue that they don’t want politics in stories. They just want to be left alone to write stirring tales of adventure and action, families bound together by ties of blood, duty, inheritance and honor, strong male leads working through hierarchies to defend their communities from outside threats.
The problem is that Deadpub does see writing like that as inherently political. They are often broken people from broken families, and they see natural families as stifling and exploitive. Tradition, culture, and continuity they see as repressive. They focus on the present and on freedom from any social constraints. Conflict, in their view, isn’t about defending a community from outside threats, but rather about dismantling internal power structures that reinforce oppressive hierarchies.
In the context of Anonymous Conservative’s r/K framework, Based Books embody K-selected values. They reflect long time horizons, treating family, hierarchy, and moral order as necessary conditions for human flourishing. They assume objective standards, emphasize duty and sacrifice, and portray authority and inequality as functional responses to reality rather than injustices to be dissolved. Deadpub literature presents r-selected values. It tends to favor short time horizons, prioritizing individual autonomy, emotional validation, and flexibility over inheritance, judgment, and continuity. It softens moral boundaries, distrusts hierarchy, and selects for narratives that minimize risk and conflict in order to appeal to the broadest, least-offensive audience. Deadpub views classical storytelling as a threat to their worldview, and in a sense, they are correct.
Writers and readers of classical adventure stories may not be interested in politics, but the politics of the Deadpub world are most definitely interested in us. They see us as a threat to be eliminated at all costs.
The Based Book Sale is not merely a promotional and marketing event; it is a cultural corrective to the prevailing trends spoliating literature and storytelling. As The Federalist observed a couple of years ago, “conservative guerilla marketing like the ‘Big Based Book Sale’ is how we fight leftist gatekeepers.”
Right on. But what makes a book “based”?
I wasn’t happy with the shallow definitions I found for “based” online, so I made a point to offer my own:
based [ beyst ] / beɪst / adjective
1. Well-grounded, resting upon a firm foundation.
2. Principled, devoted to fixed standards, especially in defiance of conventional wisdom.
3. Rejecting politically correct attitudes and celebrating nonconformity with woke opinion.
4. Committed to upholding and advancing the good, the beautiful, and the true.antonyms: debased, cringe
A book is “based” not because of its genre, politics, or target audience, but because of how it relates to the good, the beautiful, and the true.
First, a based book is well-grounded in truth. Its world, characters, and moral logic rest on a coherent and correct view of human nature. Actions have consequences. Courage, cowardice, loyalty, betrayal, love, and sacrifice behave the way they do in real life, not the way ideology wishes they would. Even in the world building of fantasy or science fiction, the underlying anthropology is stable rather than wishful.
Second, a based book upholds the good. It affirms objective moral order. Right and wrong are not determined by consensus, fashion, or power. Characters may disagree about what is right, but the narrative itself does not pretend all choices are equal. Some actions lead toward flourishing and honor; others lead toward decay and ruin. Tragedy is possible precisely because moral truth is real and unforgiving.
Finally, a based book treats beauty as a standard, not a preference. Craftsmanship matters. Language aims at clarity and elegance. Degradation, ugliness, and vulgarity are not celebrated as authenticity but shown for what they are: symptoms of disorder. Even brutal or tragic stories acknowledge beauty by contrast, through what is lost or defended. Even when the story is humorous or pulpy, it does not sneer at excellence or treat meaning as a joke.
That’s my personal idealization of what makes a book based.
To what extent is a “based book” really a book written by men, for men? Mainstream publishing spent a decade celebrating as it removed men from literary culture and denied them any opportunity for a publishing deal, and is now bemoaning the fact that men don’t read anymore.
Modern publishing does tend toward homogenized and feminized least-common-denominator literature in which avoiding controversy trumps creativity and quality. The industry converged around the tastes of affluent white liberal females to the exclusion of everyone else, particularly men. Books by men and for men are a big part of the Based Book Sale. In fact, one of our most successful genre sales last year specifically focused on books for men.
But there are many women authors and readers involved in the Based Book Sale as well. The trend in modern publishing is to flatten the differences between men and women, fitting both into the same feminized template. Based men and women alike appreciate stories about masculine men and feminine women who aren’t merely interchangeable copies of each other. In fact, one of our participating authors, L. Jagi Lamplighter, will be organizing a romance Based Book Sale in June, and we’ll get a better idea how books with a more feminine target market do in the community.
You’ve dropped a bunch of names. Let’s bring them together. Who are some of the authors participating in the Based Books sale?
Public domain works by classic authors do well in the sale. Robert E. Howard’s Conan collection, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ complete collection, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Rafael Sabatini’s genre-defining Captain Blood have been among the top sellers.
2025’s top Based Book, though, was Ryan Patrick’s science fiction thriller, The Martian Incident. John C. Wright has a strong showing in both fantasy and science fiction with his Dragon-award-winning best novel Somewhither, it’s sequel, Nowhither, and in fantasy with modern classics like One Star to Guide Them and Iron Chamber of Memory.
Following Ryan M. Patrick and John C. Wright, Robert Kroese earned fourth place with his comedic space opera, Starship Grifters. Richard Paolinelli closed out the top five with his excellent science fiction mystery noir mashup, Of All the Gin Joints in the Universe. Here are the complete top twenty Based Books for 2025 in science fiction:
In fantasy, just behind John C. Wright, Vox Day’s epic fantasy A Throne of Bones captured third place, and his new release, Death and the Devil, came in fourth. M.S. Olney’s The Sundered Crown Saga (1-3): (Books 1-3+ The Nightblade prequel novel) An Epic Fantasy Boxset closed out the top five. Here are the rest of the top twenty fantasy Based Books from 2025:
Have any of the contributors to the Based Book movement had a breakthrough into the mainstream yet?
Breaking into the mainstream? The trend is mostly in the other direction. Traditionally published best selling authors have been closed out from Deadpub despite being proven, successful writers with devoted fan bases. They moved into indie and small press publishing and carved out their own successes in defiance of the Deadpub gatekeepers.
Increasingly, Deadpub is for insecure authors who want the ego boost of validation from authority. Deadpub has become the vanity press of the twenty-first century. It is immensely liberating to realize that the door to “mainstream” approval is firmly shut and won’t open for most Based Creators. Instead of wasting time and effort seeking the approval of people who hate them, Based Creators are making their own successes and their own fan communities. The Based Book Sale is proud to be a part of that.
There are some exciting small press publishers stepping into the mainstream Deadpub void. We’ve had participation from authors who work with:
And, Based Book Sale veteran, Travis Corcoran, recently signed with Ark Press, the new Peter-Thiel-backed house, who just published his Red State Mars.
I agree, in part. But as an independent creator myself I’ve seen first hand that “the struggle is real.” We have talented creators. But we don’t have funding, we don’t have distribution, we don’t have IP deals. The entire ecosystem that can carry, say, a mainstream novel from Kindle to Simon & Schuster to Netflix, simply doesn’t exist for us.
You do highlight a problem, but it’s one more for the creators instead of the readers. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for an author to support himself on book revenues alone. The way authors succeed is through price differentiation and by building fan communities to support them.
On Amazon, the choices are ebook, soft cover, hard cover, and maybe an audiobook. When an author builds a fan community, the options expand enormously. Some people will happily pay a monthly $5-$10 just to be inside the author’s velvet rope to keep up with the author’s progress on the next release, or just to support a creator whose work they particularly enjoy. An author can offer early access to new releases through a crowdfund, and premium offerings like signed or leather-bound copies. The neo-patronage model is viable for many creators, but it works because Based Readers are willing to step up and support them. If you’re a Based Reader, you should cultivate a handful of creators whose work you appreciate and back them, through Substack or Patreon, or “Buy Me a Coffee,” or whatever other platforms they inhabit.
Based Creators don’t need a publisher, but if you’ve established yourself as an author, and if you want someone else to do your marketing for you, there are any number of competent small presses you can work with, depending on your genre.
And even a movie deal is not out of reach. Recent successes include Chuck Dixon, whose Levon’s Trade: A Vigilante Justice Thriller (Levon Cade Book 1), was adapted in a theatrical release: A Working Man.
When last we spoke, you were crowd funding Fields & Energy Book I: Fundamentals and Origins of Electromagnetism. How did that go?
The crowdfund closed successfully, and I finished fulfillment in November. On December 5, 2025, Fields & Energy: Book 1: Fundamentals & Origins of Electromagnetism debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Electromagnetism to the great joy of all of us at the Society for Post-Quantum Research.
Most of Fields & Energy Book II: Where Physics Went Wrong is already posted on my Fields & Energy Substack. I’m currently discussing the history of science to introduce and lay the foundation for Book II. Fans of the history of science may appreciate my take.
In a sense, you can think of Fields & Energy as a counter-spoliation of physics. I liked how you describe it as “a return to the original, physically grounded formulations of the 19th century (especially those of Faraday, Maxwell, Heaviside, and Hertz)” that “can provide a clearer, more coherent foundation for physics.”
Now, you’re of course not just an agent of counter-spoliation you are a counter-spoliator yourself. You’ve written fiction, too. Where can the friends of Woe find your work?
My fiction is all available on Amazon. My novels include an alternate-history conspiracy techno-thriller, The Hidden Truth, and sequels, and we’ve already mentioned The Wise of Heart, a courtroom drama of biological science versus transgenderism that brings the Scopes Trial up to date for the twenty-first century.
Right on. I hope people will check out your work, as well as the other Based Books we’ve talked about today. It used to be that publishing indie fiction was a thankless job. Nowadays it’s often worse than thankless - not only do you not get gratitude, not only do you not reach readers, all too often you just get attacked and cancelled for even trying. So thank you for being in the arena. It matters.
You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure engaging with so many hard-working indie authors to mutual benefit, and to the benefit of all the Based Readers who follow us.
One final question. What do you think we can do to resist and triumph over cultural spoliation?
Progressives have systematically replaced cultural touchstones of significance in traditional American culture with their woke replacements. A poignant example of that phenomenon occurred recently when a statue of General Robert E. Lee was melted down, the face carved off in a ritualistic manner with blue lighting and orange sparks to create a death mask, and then melted in a 2250°F furnace.
Your post on spoliation offers us three choices.
Enjoy what you can from woke art
Enjoy old great art, or
Make and enjoy new non-woke art
I find those options too… limiting. The fundamental lesson of the conservative experience is that “standing athwart history yelling stop” is not a winning tactic. Artists on the right have been playing a defensive game, seeking to be left alone to do their own thing. (1) is capitulation. (2) is worthwhile for there is much of value in old great art, but ultimately, it is similarly a capitulation. (3) is a better option, and there is a wealth of non-woke art out there, including many of the books of the Based Book Sale.
But even going our own way and creating and enjoying our own non-woke art is principally defensive, merely insulating ourselves from woke culture. What’s needed is not only to fight progressive spoliation, but also to engage in a true counter-spoliation. Fighting and defeating progressive spoliation and creating additional Based Art – worthy as those efforts are – is not truly a counter-spoliation.
A true counter-spoliation does unto woke art what woke artists have done unto our cultural touchstones.
I propose a fourth option:
Spoliate the woke.
The most significant and Based cultural phenomenon of 2026 to date has been “Amelia,” a distinctive, purple-haired “extremist” character in an online game designed to combat hate. John Carter has a full analysis of Amelia at the Postcards from Barsoom Substack. Legions of meme-warriors have busied themselves depleting the purple pixels from their graphics cards, repurposing Amelia as a spokes-manic-pixie-dream girl in support of right wing causes. What is Amelia if not a prime example of spoliating the woke? We took a villain from the woke and turned her into a heroine.
I’d argue you did much the same with Dungeons and Dragon. “The new edition of Dungeons & Dragons has long-time players fleeing the tabletop gaming system with the woke changes Wizards of the Coast is making.” Wizards of the Coast also rewrote the history of D&D in a way that many fans believe is disrespectful to Gary Gygax.
Your Adventure, Conqueror, Kings System (ACKS II) counter-spoliates Dungeons & Dragons offering a non-woke alternative that does not infringe Dungeons & Dragons IP because it avoids use of protected terms, names, and artwork.
Right, exactly. There’s definitely more to ACKS II than simply being “non-woke” but that is part of it. I made a similar effort in the superhero genre with Ascendant. The spoliators deconstructed what I loved and reduced it to something I didn’t recognize; I reconstructed it until I loved it again. Do you see this trend happening broadly within the Based Book community?
Yes. It wasn’t until I was already nearly done with the book before I realized why I had such a visceral appeal for executing my The Wise of Heart project. I took a woke touchstone, Inherit the Wind, and spoliated it for our side. Inherit the Wind lauds progressive science against the foolish superstition of the ignorant religious rabble. The Wise of Heart flips the script, lauding biological science and traditional values against the ridiculous self-contradictory ideology of the ignorant academic and political woke.
Novels like Owen Stanley’s The Missionaries, Travis Corcoran’s The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1), and Robert Kroese’s Titan (Mammon Book 1) all hold up a mirror to Social Justice Warriors, exposing and satirizing their conduct.
John C. Wright’s first Starquest book, Space Pirates of Andromeda, was not only a top-ten finalist in the 2025 Based Science Fiction listings, but also kicks off an epic series that aims to provide the sequel Star Wars should have had.
Jon del Arroz is similarly spoliating the tropes and canons of Star Trek with his Valliant Frontiers Trilogy, currently funding.
There’s so much woke art out there that’s just crying out to be spoliated. Disney’s 1940 movie, Pinocchio, is based on a public domain 1883 story. How about an alternate version in which Geppetto rallies the townsfolk to hang the child sex traffickers on the ramparts of the castle? The structure might resemble a certain castle you may have seen in Florida, but it’s clearly based on “Mad” King Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein.
Rely on public domain elements and do not include elements specific to the Disney version, and you can rework the source material however you desire.
A certain bear is also now in the public domain. Mostly. I’ll let him explain.
Kingswell discusses the details.
Much of Disney’s source material is free for the taking. Bambi, Snow White, Tangled [Rapunzel], Frozen [The Snow Queen], Sleeping Beauty, Winnie the Pooh, Song of the South [Uncle Remus], and many other works are similarly either in the public domain, or based upon earlier public domain works. Incorporate only public domain elements, and you can craft your own based version of the story.
You can’t copyright history. Not happy with Titanic? Sink the ship your own way and so long as you stick to the historical facts and not others’ unique copyrighted versions, no one can stop you. That’s precisely how I was able to retell the Scopes Monkey Trial without infringing upon Inherit the Wind.
There’s a world of opportunities out there for Based Creators. Go forth and counter-spoliate.
If you allow a tangent:
One thing for Americans trying to stem the tide of woke and associated forms of deviancy to be on the look-out for and ready to fight is this:
Tax-based grants and funds to artists.
Invariably, the boards allocating such funds become infiltrated by the usual scum, and start funneling money to their cronies for the production if crap no-one would ever pay for voluntarily.
It is common practice in many EU-states, and is fully captured and incorporated into both the state and the capitalist parts of the economy and the market space (call it cultural corporativism if you will).
The next step is always making the corruptors' ideals into the formal guidelines and conditions for grants et cetera. Including access to publicly owned venues, and putting pressure on private outlets to not rent out space to people with a politically incorrect message.
And the next step is the criminalising of alternatives, something corporate capitalists tend to support too.
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Over here, reading has dropped through the floor among the under-40 segment of the population. The women read various forms of chic-lit, clit-lit, or chique-lit - detective novellas about girl-bosses, cook books, and feminazi romance stuff.
Men, being disgusted with what's on offer, have simply stopped reading unless one include the geek & nerd-market. And while plowing through all the 'Horus Heresy'-novels or the entirety of 'Wheel of Time' certainly is reading technically speaking, that kind of literature is such that one might just as well read any one of the novels in the series several times over instead.
But - collecting old books is becoming a New Thing, how silly it may seem. Public libraries have started selling makulatura for 1:-/book (that's less the 10 cents), no matter the actual book in question. Next to me right now is a copy of Kropotkin's diary, close to a century old, bound in leather and printed on paper of a quality not even made in today's world.
This is what all young and ambitious writers are up against: not the woke mindslop, but the pre-1970s foundational works. You will - maybe - see far, but first you must climb onto the shoulder of that giant called Literature.
Several of mine have been in the BBS. You can see them here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Zaklog-the-Great/author/B0F717355H