An inside look at how the far right is mainstreaming itself

Before the era of Donald Trump, the right’s very online radicals yelled at the Republican Party from the cheap seats. Now, they’ve become players within the conservative power structure, as the walls that once kept them at bay have crumbled. The Republican nominee for vice president has explicitly cited a neo-monarchist blogger as an influence on his thinking about the executive branch; junior Trump White House staffers were reportedly all reading a writer called “Bronze Age Pervert.”

The influence of these fringe ideas on the right is, at this point, unmistakable. But most people don’t understand the particulars of how it happened — and, in fact, is continuing to happen.

There’s a whole network of campaigners, often invisible to mainstream observers, who are actively working to bring radical ideas into the American mainstream. Their goal is to (re)introduce ideas, like the notion that Black people are generally less intelligent than white people, into the mainstream intellectual world — and, in doing so, ultimately transform for the worse the contours of what’s permissible in our politics.

So I listened with interest when a prominent figure in this world, a book publisher and secret Twitter troll named Jonathan Keeperman, went on an obscure podcast to explain exactly how his mainstreaming strategy works. 

At its core, it is about creating an alternative set of social institutions, ones that are sufficiently robust and well-established that people who espouse extreme ideas can rely on them to help weather attacks and social sanctions from the mainstream. But it also depends on building ties with more mainstream figures, such as Tucker Carlson, who serve as go-betweens to pump the radical right’s ideas into the political bloodstream.

Keeperman runs an outfit called Passage Press, which releases tomes from right-wingers historic (like the inter-war German radical Ernst Jünger) and contemporary (aforementioned neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin). He’s treated as a respectable figure by the mainstream, speaking at the same National Conservatism conference this July that hosted Sens. JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and Mike Lee. Tucker Carlson once blurbed a Passage Press book, a collection of essays by writer Steve Sailer, who promotes the debunked belief that racial inequalities are biological.

Yet Keeperman has been living a dual life. 

A May piece in the Guardian revealed that he’s the person behind the prominent online right persona L0m3z, whose X account calls gay people the F-slur, Asians “mongoloids,” and (jokingly?) suggests journalists should be lynched. L0m3z is obsessed with the specter of something he calls “gay race communism,” which he describes as “a civilizational scale shit-test that operates on the … implicit threat of feminine hysterics.” He casually references white nationalist memes, conspiracy theories that Barack Obama is gay, and something called “retard strength.”

In his appearance on Unsupervised Learning, a podcast hosted by conservative geneticist Razib Khan, Keeperman addresses this duality — explaining how and why his shitposting under the L0m3z handle connects to his broader strategy.

Keeperman says that his work is built on a central premise: that any quest to convince mainstream cultural institutions to discuss “outer right topics” is doomed to fail. People on the right who wish to discuss taboo topics, like the link between race and IQ, must instead “form our own self-verifying and self-credentialing networks.” 

Passage Publishing is designed to be a foundational institution in this network. So too is the online community of anonymous right-wing posters in which L0m3z flourishes. 

The “anons,” as they’re called, create a self-reinforcing world to discuss extreme ideas, one that’s largely impervious to mainstream efforts to expose and shame them. This community wields offensive language as an ideological weapon, intentionally using slurs to break down boundaries about the public discussion of far-right ideas.

“You use these words just because you’re not supposed to,” Keeperman says on the podcast. “You want to demystify this language and strip this language of … its ability to manage what people can say and how they say it.”

For this reason, he shrugs off the Guardian’s criticism of him using the F-slur and similarly offensive words.

“I don’t regret using that language [and] I don’t apologize for it,” he says. “When you are online speaking in these discourse communities, this is the kind of language you use. And that’s fine — in fact, I think it’s a good thing.”

This strategy of breaking down boundaries appears to have worked: Keeperman has published under the L0m3z moniker in multiple different right-wing publications, proof positive that the sort of vicious language his account regularly deploys is no longer disqualifying even in relatively respectable conservative outlets like First Things magazine.

The twinned work of high-brow and low-brow outreach has helped Keeperman weather the storm of his unmasking at the Guardian’s hands. By cultivating key ideological allies he describes as having “one foot in the credible institutional world,” Keeperman can count on elite defenders to ensure that his performative online cruelty doesn’t have any true professional consequences. In the podcast, Keeperman names Chris Rufo — one of the right’s most prominent activists — as one such ally.

Trump’s former top strategist (who’s currently in federal prison) Steve Bannon is another such ally. After the Guardian exposé, Bannon hosted Keeperman on his podcast and vowed to defend him: “We’re gonna have your back, and others are going to have your back,” Bannon said.

I don’t want to overemphasize Keeperman’s personal influence. Passage Press is a relatively small publishing house; L0m3z’s 85,000-person following on X is large but not gigantic.

But his interview with Khan is notable because it lays out, in unusually blunt terms, how a much larger network of influence operates. He bluntly describes how abstruse high-brow publishing works hand-in-glove with online shitposting to mainstream radical ideas; he also shows how figures in the conservative mainstream provide cover for this kind of work.

In the podcast, Keeperman doesn’t spell out a detailed vision of what his ideal America would look like. But there’s one belief he’s clear on: that women have gained too much power in universities and other cultural institutions.

“If you’re being an honest observer, you look around at the way that these institutions have been managed with this kind of feminine superstructure over them, and you would very easily determine that it’s not good,” he says. “I think we just need to be honest about this, say it out loud, and then make corrections for it.”