Before the era of Donald Trump, online radicals on the far right shouted at the Republican Party from cheap seats. Now, they have become players within the conservative power structure, as the walls that once kept them at bay have crumbled. The Republican nominee for vice president cites a neo-monarchist blogger as an influence on his thinking about the executive branch; Trump Jr. was a White House staffer Read all that is said A writer named “Bronze Age Disfigured”.
The impact of these fringe ideas on the right is, at this point, undeniable. But most people don’t understand the details of how it happened – and, in fact, continues to happen.
There is a whole network of propagandists, often invisible to mainstream observers, who are actively working to bring radical ideas into mainstream America. Their goal is to (re)introduce ideas, such as the idea that black people are generally less intelligent than white people, into the mainstream intellectual world — and in doing so, ultimately transform the contours of what is permissible in our politics for the worse.
So I listened with interest when a prominent figure in this world, a book publisher and secret Twitter troll named Jonathan Kiperman, Went on an obscure podcast to explain exactly how his mainstream strategy works.
At its core, it’s about creating an alternative set of social institutions, ones that are strong and well-established enough that people who hold extreme views can rely on them to help weather attacks and social sanctions from the mainstream. But it also depends on building relationships with mainstream figures, like Tucker Carlson, who act as go-betweens to pump far-right ideas into the political bloodstream.
Kiperman runs an outfit called Passage Press, which is historically right-wingers (eg Interwar German radical Ernst Junger) and concurrent (The aforementioned neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yervin) he is considered a respected figure by the mainstream, to say the least Same National Conservatism Conference This July the Sens hosted JD Vance, Josh Hawley and Mike Lee. Tucker Carlson once A passage press book blurredA collection of essays by author Steve Sailer, who Promotes false beliefs That racial discrimination is biological.
Yet Kiperman lives a double life.
A The Guardian may be fragmented revealed that he is the man behind the prominent online right personality L0m3zwhose X account Gays are called f-slursthe asianMongoloid” and (jokingly?) He suggested that journalists should be beaten. L0m3z is obsessed with what he calls “gay race communism.” He describes as “a civilizational scale shit-test that … is conducted on the inherent threat of feminine hysterics.” he noted casually White nationalists MemesConspiracy theory that Barack Obama is gayand something called “retard power“
in his face Unsupervised learningIn a podcast hosted by conservative geneticist Rajib Khan, Kiperman addresses this dichotomy — explaining how and why his shitposting under the handle L0m3z connects to his broader strategy.
Kiperman says his work is built on a central premise: any quest to convince mainstream cultural institutions to discuss “externally correct issues” will fail. People on the right who want to discuss taboo topics, such as the link between race and IQ, must “form our own self-verifying and self-verifying networks.”
Passage Publishing is designed to be a foundational institution in this network. So is the online community of anonymous right-wing posters where L0m3z thrives
“Anons,” as they are called, create a self-reinforcing world for discussing extreme ideas, largely impervious to mainstream efforts to expose and shame them. This sect uses offensive language as an ideological weapon, using profanity to deliberately break down the boundaries of public discussion of far-right ideas.
“You use these words because you shouldn’t,” Kiperman said on the podcast. “You want to demystify this language and strip this language of … the ability to control what people can say and how they say it.”
Because of this, he stopped criticizing the Guardian using F-slurs and similar offensive words.
“I’m not sorry for using that language [and] I don’t apologize for it,” he said. “When you’re talking online in these speech communities, you use this kind of language. And that’s okay—in fact, I think that’s a good thing.”
This boundary-breaking strategy seems to have worked: Kiperman published under the moniker L0m3z more than one different right wing publicationEvidence is positive that the kind of vile language his account routinely uses is no longer acceptable even in relatively respectable conservative outlets. First Things Magazine.
A combination of high-brow and low-brow outreach helped Kiperman weather the storm of his unmasking at the hands of the Guardian. Cultivating key ideological allies he describes as having “one foot in the credible institutional world,” Kiperman can rely on elite protectors to ensure that his active online cruelty has no real professional consequences. In the podcast, Kiperman named Chris Ruffo — one of the right’s most prominent activists — as one such ally.
Trump’s former top strategist (who is currently Federal prison) Steve Bannon is another such ally. Following the Guardian’s publication, Bannon hosts Kiperman on his podcast And vowed to defend him: “We’ll be behind you, and others will be behind you,” Bannon said.
I don’t want to overemphasize Kiperman’s personal influence. Passage Press is a relatively small publishing company; L0m3z’s 85,000-person following on X is large but not huge.
But his interview with Khan is significant because it illustrates, in unusually blunt terms, how a larger network of influence operates. He vividly describes how abstract high-brow publishing works hand-in-hand with online shitposting on mainstream radical ideas; He also shows how conservative mainstream figures provide cover for such actions.
In the podcast, Kiperman didn’t spell out a detailed vision of what his ideal America would look like. But there is one belief she is clear about: that women have gained too much power in universities and other cultural institutions.
“If you’re an honest observer, you look at how these institutions are run with such a feminine superstructure over them and you’ll very easily determine that it’s not good,” she says. “I think we need to be honest about it, say it out loud and then make amends for it.”
