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Before the Donald Trump era, right-wing online activists shouted down Republicans from the cheap seats. Now, they have become players in the conservative power structure, as the walls that once kept them out have come down. An explicit quote from a neo-monarchist blogger Influenced his thinking about the executive branch; junior staffer in Trump White House According to reports, all reading A writer called “Bronze Age Pervert”.
At this point, the influence of these fringe ideas on the right is obvious. But most people don’t understand the specific reasons why it’s happening — and, in fact, why it continues to happen.
There is a large group of activists, often unknown to mainstream observers, who are actively working to bring radical ideas into mainstream America. Their goal is to (re)introduce ideas like “black people are generally not as smart as white people” into the mainstream intellectual community—and, in doing so, ultimately change the contours of what is allowed in our politics for the worse.
So I listened with interest as one of the world’s leading lights, book publisher and secret Twitter troll Jonathan Kipman, A little-known podcast explains in detail how his mainstreaming strategy works.
At its core, it is about building a set of alternative social institutions that are strong and complete enough so that those who advocate extreme ideas can rely on them to resist attacks and social sanctions from mainstream society. But it also depends on building connections with mainstream figures such as Tucker Carlson, who are the middlemen who inject far-right ideas into the political bloodstream.
Keeperman runs an agency called Passage Press, which publishes right-wing history books (e.g. Ernst Jung, German Radical during the Interwar Period) and contemporary (The aforementioned neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin) He is regarded by the mainstream as a respected figure in One Nation Conservative Conference In July, Senators JD Vance, Josh Hawley and Mike Lee attended the event. Tucker Carlson once Write an introduction for a book published by Passage Pressa collection of essays by writer Steve Saylor, who Promoting Debunked Beliefs Racial inequality is biological.
Yet the goalkeeper leads a double life.
one The Guardian May Issue Revealed that he is the person behind the famous right-wing figure on the Internet L0m3whose X account Calling gay people F-slurAsian”Mongoloid” and (jokingly?) Proposal to lynch journalistsL0m3z is obsessed with the specter of what he calls “gay communism,” which He described As a “civilized scale garbage test, with implicit threats of female hysteria,” he casually referred to White nationalists Memesconspiracy theory Barack Obama is gaythere is also a kind called “Delay Intensity”
In his appearance Unsupervised LearningIn a podcast hosted by conservative geneticist Razib Khan, Keeperman addressed this duality — explaining how and why the trashy posts he posts under the L0m3z username relate to his broader strategy.
Kupperman said his work is built on a core premise: Any attempt to convince mainstream cultural institutions to discuss “outside right-wing topics” is doomed to fail. If people on the right want to discuss taboo topics such as the connection between race and IQ, they must “build our own network of self-validation and self-authentication.”
Passage Publishing aims to be the foundational institution for this network. So does the online community of anonymous right-wing posters in which L0m3z thrives.
Anonymous — as they are called — has created a self-reinforcing universe for discussing extreme ideas, while mainstream society has remained largely indifferent to their efforts to expose and shame them. The group has used offensive language as an ideological weapon, deliberately using name-calling to break down the boundaries of public discussion of far-right ideas.
“You’re using these words just because you’re not supposed to,” Keeperman said on the podcast. “You want to demystify the language, take away the ability to … control what people can say and how they can say it.”
He therefore took exception to the Guardian’s criticism of his use of F-slurs and similar offensive terms.
“I don’t regret using that language, (and) I don’t apologize for it,” he said. “That’s the language you use when you speak online in these discussion communities. And that’s fine — in fact, I think it’s a good thing.”
This boundary-pushing strategy seems to be working: Keeperman published a new article under the pseudonym L0m3z. Various Different Right wing publicationIt’s well documented that the kind of vile language his account regularly uses is no longer disqualifying even in relatively respectable conservative media, e.g. First Things Magazine.
These two forms of high and lowbrow propaganda helped Keeperman weather the storm of the Guardian’s revelations. By cultivating key ideological allies who he describes as “one foot in the credible institutional world,” Keeperman could rely on elite defenders to ensure that his online performative cruelty would not have any real professional consequences. In the podcast, Keeperman named Chris Ruffo — one of the right’s most prominent activists — is one such ally.
Trump’s former chief strategist (currently Federal Prison) Steve Bannon is also such an ally. After the Guardian exposed, Bannon hosts Goalkeepers on his podcast and vowed to defend him: “We’re going to have your back, and so will others,” Bannon said.
I don’t want to overstate Keeperman’s personal influence. Passage Press is a relatively small publishing house; L0m3z’s 85,000 followers on X are a lot, but not huge.
But his interview with Khan is striking because it reveals, with unusual candor, how a larger network of influence operates. He describes in stark terms how the esoteric high-brow publishing industry colludes with online trash postings to push radical ideas into the mainstream; and he shows how conservative mainstream figures provide cover for that work.
Keeperman didn’t elaborate on his ideal America during the podcast, but one of his beliefs was clear: Women have gained too much power in universities and other cultural institutions.
“If you’re an honest observer and you look at how these institutions are run by this female superstructure, it’s easy to see that it’s not good,” he said. “I think we just need to be honest about it, speak up about it, and make corrections.”
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