Part 2 - Trump Era 2024: The Dissident Right, the New Right, the Zionist Right, and the Anti-Zionist Right
Part 2 - The New Right
In our last article, we explored how Dissident Right talking points had more or less become mainstream by early 2024. As a result, many claimed that the Dissident Right is dead.
I also explained how there was one major exception to this: criticism of Israel was still taboo. In early 2024, it seemed as if the divide had become not between the dissident and mainstream Right, but rather the Zionist and anti-Zionist Right.
The establishment Right had always been deeply Zionist. However, what was new is that many on the “Dissident Right” began to drop this position—a position which had once been one of the defining positions of the Alt Right and had distinguished it from the establishment GOP.
This part of the Right—still younger and mostly online, but otherwise of a distinct character to the online Right of the Culture War era—should probably be called the “New Right.” In fact, many in this faction themselves did not identify with the “Dissident Right” label.
The term “New Right” has been used many times in the past and is extremely generic. But it will have to do for now. Like the “Alt Right,” it did not have a particular ideology (on the surface anyways, it may have had one on a Straussian, esoteric level, as we will soon explain). It was not centered around a single prominent figure. There were certainly influential people such as Peter Thiel and Bronze Age Pervert, but it was really more of a faction or network of a few important nodes along with many smaller ones. There were online communities that are somewhat a part of it, which some have given nebulous names such as “Frog Twitter,” but these are hard to define, and there was a lot of overlap between other communities such as Dimes Square. Thus, it is very difficult to name. “New Right” will have to do for now.
Choice of Words: “The New Right”
There are some good things about the name. First, New Right is close to “neocon” (new con). Their detractors, such as the Groypers, claimed that the “New Right” was a successor to the neocons based on their perceived Zionism and lack of social conservatism. According to their detractors, the New Right is thus also the “neu”-right (neutral right) on important issues such as social conservatism and Israel, issues which would otherwise make them problematic to the status quo. I want to try to keep a merely descriptive and neutral tone, so I will not use this spelling, but it did occur to me.
There was once a Lefty meme which said something along the lines of “if you think the Alternative Right is bad, wait until you see the Nu Right” (a reference to Alternative Rock and Nu Metal). Nu Metal—a genre popular in the 2000s—saw a nostalgic resurgence in the 2020s. So that’s another interesting angle. There are also some 4chan memes that are appropriately applied here. “Nu-male” was a predecessor to the modern memes of the “beta male”, “bug man” and “soyboy”—used on 4chan to describe a modern, effeminate, likely Leftist, consumerist man.
Nu-male
just another word for Soy boy;
internet slang term referring to men and boys who do not conform to traditional masculine gender roles. Online, the term is often used as a pejorative in a similar fashion to "beta male," "cuck" or "soy boy", but is typically reserved for white men with facial hair and eyeglasses.
Let's be nu-males together and never get laid
— Urban Dictionary, “nu male” (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Nu-male)
Affixing the prefix “neo-” as in “neo-/b/”, “neo-/pol/”, “neo-Trump” etc. was also used on 4chan to describe something that was newer and inferior to the original version of something, often because it had been watered-down and flanderized. These are certainly criticisms that the Alt Right, if it was still around, would levy at this “New Right,” for better or worse.
I considered being more clever and original by calling it the neo-Right, neu-Right, or nu-Right, but I will simply use “New Right” because it is simpler and a bit less cringe.
The New Right Rises
During the Alt Right days, anti-Semitic rhetoric—some ironic, some meta-ironic, and some simply sincere—had been a main element of the movement, along with racism, misogyny, homophobia, and the rest of the package. A. Wyatt Mann’s anti-Semitic “Happy Merchant” cartoon (https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/happy-merchant) was a popular sight on /pol/, alongside Trump lazer eyes memes and Pepe the Frog.
However, a shift occurred in the majority of the Dissident Right during the Censorship Era. During this time, most Alt Right or Alt Right adjacent accounts were banned from Twitter and most other major platforms. This included Nick Fuentes, Keith Woods, Mike Enoch, Jared Taylor, and others. But a small number of them conspicuously remained. These included many anonymous followers of Bronze Age Pervert, author of Bronze Age Mindset. BAP sometimes referred to this faction of the Dissident Right as “Frog Twitter” and it included figures such as Lomez, Zero HP Lovecraft, Raw Egg Nationalist, Mystery Grove Publishing and others. Although BAP was eventually banned during the most censorious phases of the Censorship Era, these “Frog Twitter” accounts tended to stick around the longest. Perhaps in order to do this, they typically espoused much more moderate right wing views—focusing on topics like bodybuilding, right wing esoterica such as Julius Evola, right wing diet fads such as eating raw eggs, etc.—compared to other segments of the Dissident Right, such as the Groypers or the remnants of the Alt Right.
The lines between this faction of the Dissident Right and other factions of the Dissident Right are blurry. For example, Scott Greer was one of the early supporters of the Groypers, and was Alt Right adjacent before that, but I would not classify him as being part of the “Frog Twitter” But, he did tend to share their memes and sometimes collaborate with them on podcasts and other projects. And he, like many of them, was not banned off of Twitter or even YouTube. This may be because of one thing he had in common with them: they rarely if ever criticize Israel.
BAP
Who is “Bronze Age Pervert?” His account has been on Right Wing Twitter for a long time. However, until now I did not cover him because I did not consider him to be pushing the Overton Window and making Dissident Right views more mainstream, the topic of my book. However, in hindsight it’s now undeniable that he has in fact done this. So, I will cover him now.
In his writings on X, his podcast Caribbean Rhythms with Bronze Age Pervert and in his 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset, BAP advances reactionary ideas influenced by Nietzschean philosophy, promoting what he considers the heroic ideals of classical antiquity and denouncing modern society as decadent.
— Wikipedia, “Bronze Age Pervert” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_Pervert)
Author’s note: This is the part of the article where I have to copypaste stale memes and cringe at myself. But this is intended for those who may not be familiar with the subject matter, so bear with me.
Some of the BAPsphere’s prominent memes included the following:
“BAP speak.” These were intentional misspellings (such as ghey for gay, attaq for attack, poast for post, etc.). Primitive, cave-man like speech such as “Wat means?” instead of “what does it mean?”. There were a number of other “BAPisms” that seem to be intentionally created to be reminiscent of 4chan Internet slang— “Twatter” for Twitter, “Frogs” for anonymous accounts, and so forth.
An example of BAP speak “Post physique” and body-building gymbro culture in general. BAP often posted shirtless, muscular men on Twitter, sometimes with the hashtag #HandsomeThursday.
An obsession with “seed oils” and healthy eating.
Researchers Joshua Molloy and Eviane Leidig of the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) have identified BAP as a key figure in an emerging right wing raw food movement. According to BAP, as a self-described 'anti-xenoestrogen activist', the modern food industry is "full of harmful chemicals" that “slowly destroy your essence”.
In particular BAP and other (far) right food influencers are very paranoid about the supposed pollution of the food supply with seed oils, PUFAs and soy products, the latter of "which are said to increase men’s estrogen levels and decrease testosterone (although scientific studies reportedly dispute this)."
…
To counter these supposed dietary ills BAP and others promote raw food diets which tend to be heavy on (raw) meat and dairy consumption.
…
'anti-xenoestrogen activism' also precedes adoption by far-right activists as it was first championed by alternative nutritionist Ray Peat, whose works are often cited and shared by BAP.
— Wikipedia, “Bronze Age Pervert” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_Pervert)
One of BAPs more popular tweets was: “Ancient men conquered cities put them to the sword and fire, meanwhile you go to WINE BAR with "gf" and enjoy tasteful banter.. YOU ARE GAY!!”
In 2023, Politico discovered BAP’s true identity, Costin Alamariu, a then-43 year old Romanian-American with degrees from MIT, Columbia, and Yale.
BAP was best known for his book, Bronze Age Mindset. According to Politico, the book was highly influential, “count[ing] Michael Anton, former White House national security spokesperson, Darren Beattie, a former Trump White House aide who was fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference, and a number of young former Trump staffers among his readers.” Politico also claims that “the book was getting passed around by young Trump staffers.” BAP is also followed by Vice President JD Vance on Twitter.
Bronze Age Mindset was reviewed by Michael Anton in Claremont Review of Books.
First, I did not then—and still do not—quite know what the “alt-right” is. That is to say, I know what the term means to the Left and to the mainstream media (apologies for the redundancy): “anyone to my right whom I can profitably smear as a Nazi.” But so far as I can tell, even many who consider themselves “alt-right” can’t agree on the term’s meaning, or on who or what qualifies. Furthermore, some of those least afraid to accept the label insist that the underlying phenomenon is dead, having immolated itself in Charlottesville in August 2017. Why bother writing about something that no one can define and whose most prominent proponents claim is defunct?
Second, in looking into this a little, I found plenty of books about the alt-right but none by the alt-right. This is perhaps not surprising, since one of the few things that those who talk about it can agree on is that it is, or was, primarily a social media phenomenon. But I was convinced then, and remain so, that a long review of volumes summarizing blogs, tweets, and memes would be as tedious and fruitless to write as to read. So I begged off.
Months later, the tech entrepreneur and anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin brought to a small dinner at my home, in lieu of the more traditional flowers or wine, a book—one I had never heard of, called Bronze Age Mindset (hereafter BAM) by a person calling himself “Bronze Age Pervert” (hereafter BAP). A few weeks later, I took it up in a moment of idle curiosity.
…
Then I happened to mention this strange gift to a young friend and former White House colleague, Darren Beattie, who urged me to try again and persevere. The book, he said, has struck a chord with younger people—especially men—who are dissatisfied with the way the world is going and have no faith in mainstream conservativism’s efforts to arrest, much less reverse, the rot.
— Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2019 Issue, “Are the Kids Al(t)right?” (https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/are-the-kids-altright/)
Note the connection between Claremont and another influential Dissident Right figure, Curtis Yarvin. (Yarvin was covered in Part 6 of “A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right” under the section about Peter Thiel). According to Politico, “Yarvin ‘literally held it up over his head with two hands like it was some kind of talisman,’ Anton told me about when he was given the book. ‘He said, “Behold, Bronze Age Mindset.”’”
You will find that nearly everyone who was not anti-Zionist, from Peter Thiel to Curtis Yarvin to BAP to Claremont, are all connected. This rang especially true after the ascension of this faction to the White House under JD Vance, protégé of Peter Thiel, who galvanized this faction in the same way that Trump once brought together the disparate factions of the Alt Right.
Technology investor Peter Thiel has on more than one occasion referenced BAP in speeches to conservative audiences. In February 2017, Curtis Yarvin sarcastically claimed to The Atlantic that Bronze Age Pervert was his White House "cutout / cell leader". In addition to right wing politicians, the broad group of political influencers, bloggers, and podcasters known as "anti-woke leftists" or "dirtbag leftists" have received criticism in the press for discussing and engaging with BAP and the broader far right on Twitter, most notably Anna Khachiyan of the Red Scare podcast.
—Wikipedia, “Bronze Age Pervert” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_Pervert)
Like Michael Anton and Costin Alamariu, those in this faction tended to be well educated and well connected, not simply the typical anonymous Pepe avatar posters like the author of this piece and the anonymous 4channers of the Great Meme War.
Like Peter Thiel, Michael Anton was a “West Coast Straussian,” a follower of philosopher Leo Strauss (Covered in “A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right Part 6). Claremont and the West Coast Straussians were another prominent influence on this “New Right” faction.
While some in this faction—such as Peter Thiel and JD Vance—were nominally Christians, social conservatism was not a major element of it. Many on the “Post Left”—such as the Red Scare girls and the transsexual “Pariah Doll” of the “Dimes Square” scene in New York City—seemed to have adopted Catholicism more for the aesthetics than as a genuine ideology (Covered in “A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right Part 6). Peter Thiel was a homosexual, and JD Vance was a recent convert with a Hindu wife.
For his part, BAP followed a Nietzschean, pseudo-pagan ideology of sorts.
Where BAP differs from many trads is in his veneration of values that have nothing to do with Christian concepts of family or morality. In the book, BAP argues that modern society should take after Ancient Greece, when beauty, strength and courage were prized above all else. In particular, BAP prizes the classical conception of masculinity and wants modern men to emulate it. The key relationship that gave a society its strength in civilizations like Ancient Greece, BAP argues, was not that between men and women, or within families, but between young men who perform great deeds together. In BAP’s ideal world, these male friendships should be a young man’s focus. In his telling, modern society wants to weaken these masculine bonds because of their threat to the established order; “every great thing in the past was done through friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power,” he writes in Bronze Age Mindset.
— Politico, Jul 16 2023, “How Bronze Age Pervert Built an Online Following and Injected Anti-Democracy, Pro-Men Ideas Into the GOP” (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427)
Costin was also hostile to Christianity in his 2023 book Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.
[Costin Alamariu] argues that the Platonic approach of making philosophy appear morally nonthreatening and a “friend of the regime” foundered in the face of an “international missionary religion,” namely Christianity. Quoting Nietzsche, Alamariu contends that the loss of Platonism’s “esoteric” teachings on hierarchy and nature under Christianity led to a “misbreeding of modern European man.” In the new introduction, Alamariu gives this a literal meaning, arguing that the Christian prohibition of cousin marriage enabled the spread of universalist and egalitarian ideologies.5 In the dissertation itself, he simply asserts that Christianity “took the Platonic exoteric teaching more seriously and enforced it more comprehensively than Plato himself could ever dream of.” By suppressing Plato’s appreciation for the prerational—of breeding, of the connection between philosophy and tyranny—Christianity eventually undermined the possibility of philosophy and aristocracy.
— American Affairs, Aug 26 2024 “Statesmanship and Political Philosophy” (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/08/statesmanship-and-political-philosophy/)
On Israel, Costin aligned well with the mainstream GOP consensus. In 2006, while at Columbia, Costin wrote an article in the Columbia Daily Spectator titled “The Hypocrisy of Academic Freedom” which was reminiscent of the mainstream conservative critiques of the pro-Palestine protests on college campus, essentially calling them “woke.” In it, he complained that pro-Zionist professors such as Professor Thomas Klocek were penalized for “resolutely stand[ing] up for Israel in the face of equally resolute accusations.”
Echoing Ben Shapiro’s comments about Israeli settlers spreading the “light of freedom” to the barbaric Palestinians, Costin wrote that “The expression of this agenda [academic multiculturalism] in the MEALAC (Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures) department and its analogues at other universities is anti-Zionism, since Israel is considered the last bastion of Western colonialism.” (https://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/?a=d&d=cs20050408-01.2.15&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------).
Many of his tweets echoed the mainstream conservative framing of “woke Leftist Palestine protesters” versus “based Israel supporters.”
Other tweets advocated for simply leaving the Middle East to its own devices.
On the one hand, this “disengagement” was consistent with the anti-interventionist sympathies typical of many Trump supporters. On the other hand, if the US and its Western allies were to disengage from the Middle East entirely, this would also allow Israel a blank check to do as it pleased in the region with no oversight from international organizations like the UN and Human Rights Watch. This did not necessarily contradict the foreign policy goals of some Zionists, such as the “National Conservatism” movement, a topic we will return to later on. On the other hand, we could simply take BAP’s statements at face value, as an expression of earnest anti-interventionist sentiment. In any case, he was clearly not anti-Zionist.
BAP also defended Jared Kushner. Kushner had been criticized by some Republicans for pursuing an “Israel First” agenda, in contrast to Trump’s supposedly “America First” agenda.
In his Yale dissertation, The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Political Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, BAP named David Sidorsky as an “early mentor.” (https://ebin.pub/dissertation-the-problem-of-tyranny-and-philosophy-in-the-thought-of-plato-and-nietzsche.html).
Sidorsky was a veteran of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and a board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), an influential pro-Israel think tank in Washington.
None of these is necessarily a “smoking gun” that BAP was some sort of pro-Zionist infiltrator, as others on the Right—notably the anti-Zionist Groypers—implied at times. But it does demonstrate that BAP’s politics were compatible with the Zionists, and thus it makes sense that he would be promoted as a safe alternative to the Groypers by institutions like Claremont, as we shall soon see.
BAP’s ties to West Coast Straussianism, on the other hand, seem pretty much undeniable.
[While at Yale] Alamariu was mentored closely by his thesis adviser, the scholar Steven Smith, who is known as an expert on the German-Jewish-American philosopher Leo Strauss, whose midcentury works on political philosophy have been an important influence on conservative intellectuals.
…
He at first shared Smith’s interest in Strauss and may have been particularly influenced by Strauss’ 1952 work Persecution and the Art of Writing. “Strauss’ thesis about esoteric writing, that great writers kind of hide themselves behind different masks and different devices, they don’t reveal themselves plainly and clearly to their readers — I think he was intrigued by that idea,” Smith said.
— Politico, Jul 16 2023, “How Bronze Age Pervert Built an Online Following and Injected Anti-Democracy, Pro-Men Ideas Into the GOP” (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427)
In American Affairs, Julius Krein wrote that Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy is, in essence, Straussian.
To the chagrin of his academic advisers and many media commentators, Selective Breeding is probably the most widely read work to emerge from the Straussian tradition of political theory since Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
…
In his polemical rhetoric and political positioning, Alamariu seems to represent everything that Straussian professors, along with the entire Western educational system, seek to prevent.
Yet, in critical respects, Alamariu offers little more than a restatement of Strauss. His work, and the fevered reaction to it, serves mainly to illustrate the narrowing effects of Strauss’s influence on American political thought. This episode also demonstrates the limitations of “Straussianism” as a right-wing political project. Regardless of whether its outer valences trend Bushian or Trumpian, Straussian attempts at political manipulation tend to terminate in the self-delusion of academics rather than the self-knowledge of philosophers. As James Burnham observed almost a century ago, those who begin consciously promoting a “noble lie” end up becoming the last people to sincerely believe it.
…
In sum, whether one finds his work morally repulsive or exhilarating, Alamariu does little more than invert the Straussian rhetorical style. Rather than wear the mask of a “friend of the regime,” Alamariu advertises his disdain for contemporary pieties. In terms of content, however, what’s original is not especially subversive, and what’s subversive is not especially original. The “Bronze Age Pervert” remains more than professionally loyal to his Straussian professors.
— American Affairs, Aug 26 2024 “Statesmanship and Political Philosophy” (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/08/statesmanship-and-political-philosophy/)
Elsewhere, this article provides an interesting characterization of Straussianism as a whole, which may explain the connection between BAP’s “Bronze Age” philosophy and the Straussians.
“Although at bottom it was arguably just another variant of ironic postmodernism, Strauss’s recovery of autonomous, ancient philosophy still seemed to offer a way to navigate the absence of metaphysical and political certainties without falling into nihilism and radicalism. One could recognize and critique the shortcomings of American liberalism, yet remain a wise “friend of the regime”—ironically, of course—indirectly guiding it for the benefit of philosophers and philosophy.”
— American Affairs, Aug 26 2024 “Statesmanship and Political Philosophy” (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/08/statesmanship-and-political-philosophy/)
According to Politico, BAP seems to have been tacitly promoted over figures on the anti-Zionist Right—such as Nick Fuentes—at Hillsdale College, where Michael Anton is now a professor.
“It seems to be more popular with younger people on the right than any kind of conventional conservatism. … I can tell you that as a teacher,” Anton said. “In a number of programs, I come across a lot of people under 25, or, you know, in that area, and the majority of them, at least the males, and some of the women, … have read the book. Whether they agree with it, whether they ultimately accept it is another question. But there’s a sense that, if you’re under a certain age, and you’re in the conservative world, you need to read it.”
…
And in this environment, where young men could just as easily go down the path of full incel nihilism or overt Nick Fuentes-style white supremacy, BAP’s message of empowerment could actually offer a more salutary alternative. Indeed, Fuentes in particular seems to have recognized BAP as a threat, and has inveighed against him to his followers, known as “groypers,” accusing BAP of being a Jewish establishment plant. “And so you can kind of climb a ladder of BAP to [Jordan] Peterson, who really mystifies the world through like weird Jungian archetypes connected to waking up early and making your bed, into the Ben Shapiros of the world,” the former classmate said. “And all of a sudden you go from being a nihilistic, onanistic teenage boy with no hope in the world to just kind of a normie conservative Republican,” this person said.
— Politico, Jul 16 2023, “How Bronze Age Pervert Built an Online Following and Injected Anti-Democracy, Pro-Men Ideas Into the GOP” (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427)
While I am doing a lot of “connecting the dots” and pointing out aspects of BAP’s philosophy that some readers may not take kindly to (such as hostility to Christianity or lack of true social conservatism) this is not a “BAP hit piece.” It is not really a negative thing in my opinion to be well educated, well connected, and to have ideas that carry political influence. I am simply giving a background on BAP’s philosophy, his connections to other prominent figures on the New Right, and and explaining where he falls on the pro-Zionist/anti-Zionist divide. It is true that the anti-Zionist and Christian factions of the Right will not like what they find, but otherwise none of this should necessarily be of any particular concern.
Passage Publishing
Another recently unmasked member of “Frog Twitter” is “Lomez,” founder of Passage Publishing.
Passage Publishing began in 2021 with the “Passage Prize,” a visual art and fiction contest, implicitly aimed at Dissident Right creatives who might have been blackballed by other creative outlets due to their politics. The submissions were judged by Lomez and Curtis Yarvin.
Passage Publishing acquired “Mystery Grove Publishing”—another publishing house and popular Frog Twitter account—which published out-of-print anti-communist books such as Mine Were of Trouble, an autobiography of Peter Kempf (an Englishman who fought for Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War), Always with Honor (the memoirs of Russian White Army leader Pyotr Wrangel), and Storm of Steel (a World War One memoir by German author Ernst Junger that had been held in high regard by the Nazis—although Junger himself was an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime).
Passage Publishing owned a number of creative literary publications, such as Man’s World, which published various New Right writers such as Raw Egg Nationalist, who roughly fall into the Frog Twitter sphere.
Like Peter Thiel, Passage Publishing sponsored events in New York City catering to the emerging “Post Left” or “Dimes Square” scene (https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/09/what-i-saw-at-the-longhouse-fashion-show).
It also published books by authors on the fringe of the Right, such as Curtis Yarvin’s Unqualified Reservations and Steve Sailer’s Noticing. Steve Sailer was a controversial writer known, like Jared Taylor, for his belief in “human biodiversity” or “race realism.”
On an episode of the podcast “The Carousel” published on May 10 2023, Lomez commented that he “knew a lot of people from Steve Sailer’s comment section on his old iSteve blog, and a lot of the people who I ended up following on Twitter initially were people I recognized or were familiar to me from, from that comment section, and it was the kind of people that Sailer would link to.”
We will return to Steve Sailer shortly.
Man’s World and The Passage Prize were obviously heavily inspired by Right Wing Internet culture, employing the “Vaporwave” aesthetic popular with the Alt Right, the body building and neo-classical memes popular in the BAPsphere, and memes such as “GigaChad,” which first appeared on 4chan and remained one of the most popular memes on Frog Twitter and across the Right Wing Internet space in general.
On October 16th, 2017, a photo of Khalimov was submitted to the /pol/ board on 4chan, which described him as "Gigachad. The perfect human specimen destined to lead us against the reptilians"
— Know Your Meme, “GigaChad” (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gigachad)
Lomez’s true identity was revealed as Jonathan Keeperman by The Guardian in May 2024. Keeperman, like Costin Alamariu, turned out to be an academic (albeit not an Ivy league graduate like BAP).
A Guardian investigation has identified former University of California, Irvine (UCI) lecturer Jonathan Keeperman as the man behind the prominent “new right” publishing house Passage Press and the influential Twitter persona Lomez.
— The Guardian, May 14 2024, “Revealed: US university lecturer behind far-right Twitter account and publishing house.“ (https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/far-right-twitter-identity-revealed)
Like Costin Alamariu, Keeperman was also promoted by Claremont.
Keeperman was able to parlay the growing clout of his Twitter account into commissions at the many rightwing media outlets that allowed him to publish under a social media pseudonym.
Early bylines included a March 2020 piece in the Claremont Institute’s publication, the American Mind, in which he argued that “retards” better anticipated the impact of the early stages of the Covid pandemic than “midwit experts”, and a March 2021 piece at online far-right magazine IM-1776, in which he encouraged readers to believe that they were involved in a “fifth-generation war” against their perceived political enemies.
More recently, in a February piece at the Federalist, Lomez argued that the prosecution of “alt-right” personality Douglass Mackey, once known online as “Ricky Vaughn”, represents the state using an “expansive reading of civil rights law to punish their political enemies and flex their tyrannical authority”.
…
Keeperman’s most influential publication as Lomez, however, may have been an essay published in “theocon” outlet First Things, which popularized a new right anti-feminist concept: “the longhouse”. The essay defines the longhouse as a metaphor for the supposed “overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior”.
This metaphor has been widely adopted by writers on the anti-feminist right, including Rufo, religious conservative Rod Dreher and writers for outlets such as the American Mind.
— The Guardian, May 14 2024, “Revealed: US university lecturer behind far-right Twitter account and publishing house.“ (https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/far-right-twitter-identity-revealed)
Lomez does not appear to have been particularly pro- or anti- Zionist himself. He could best be described as neutral. Nevertheless, he was another node in the network between BAP, Curtis Yarvin, Claremont, Peter Theil, and JD Vance, which seemed to be promoted by the mainstream Right as an alternative to the anti-Zionist factions of the online Right.
This is not a form of “guilt by association” (although there is nothing to be guilty of per se, as I am merely noticing the connections between certain figures and overlap in their views and characteristic attributes). Rather he has been included in this article because publications such as Man’s World and the Passage Prize are a very typical example of the cultural output of this faction.
This faction had become the most significant and pervasive since 2023—far moreso than anti-Zionist networks such as the Groypers. In a way, this BAP-influenced style of the “New Right” became a second cultural wave of the Alt Right of Trump 2016, filling a similar role for Trump 2024. However, it was far more tame than the Alt Right that came before it. Many of the memes of this faction were simply recycled from the 2016-2023 era, if not earlier. For example, a number of accounts in the 2024 election cycle changed their avatar to a “lazer eyes” version of their avatar, a meme that dates all the way back to the Ron Paul campaign in 2012.
Steve Sailer
While Keeperman himself may have been Zio-neutral, some of the personalities he helped to gain a larger profile, such as Steve Sailer, were not.
Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American far-right writer and blogger. He is currently a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy.
Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism. Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.
— Wikipedia, “Steve Sailer” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer)
Steve Sailer had some race realist beliefs, although they also seemed to be tempered by some flavor of civic nationalism.
Sailer, a race realist, argues that race is not a social construct. He also specifically asserts that IQ is not only “strongly hereditary,” but at the same time points to the 15 point gap between white and African-American average IQs.
“[Race] is essentially a lineage. A racial group is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some extent. Thus, race is a fundamental aspect of the human condition because we are all born into families. Burying our heads in the sand and refusing to think clearly about this bedrock fact of life only makes the inevitable problems caused by race harder to overcome.”
…
Steve Sailer subscribes to a political theory called "citizenism," which says that national identity should take priority over race.
— Bionity, “Steve Sailer” (https://bionity.com/en/encyclopedia/Steve_Sailer.html#google_vignette)
Like Ben Shapiro, he characterized Muslims as a backwards people incompatible with Western Civilization.
Perhaps the most quoted social philosopher of our time famously asked:
"Can we all get along?"
Well, when it comes to Muslims and Westerners, the answer is:
No, we can't.
— Bionity, “Steve Sailer” (https://bionity.com/en/encyclopedia/Steve_Sailer.html#google_vignette)
In contrast to this, Israelis are depicted throughout Sailer’s writings as a model for Western civilization. In response to Bibi’s statements that “Illegal infiltrators threaten Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic country,” Sailer wrote in Unz Review: “Generally speaking, much can be learned from Israel about how an intelligent people govern themselves.” (https://www.unz.com/isteve/undocumented-workers-in-us-illegal/).
This is nearly identical to the philosophy of Yarom Hazony and the “National Conservatism movement” (Natcon), which we shall examine shortly.
In the same publication, Sailer would go on to write Bibi fan mail.
Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu:
Congratulations on your triumphal tour of Washington D.C. You have emerged as the de facto leader of anti-Obama sentiment in America.
In return for all that America has done for you, may I ask, in all seriousness, that you do a favor for America?
Namely, please come to America again and deliver a high profile speech and slide show explaining the rapid construction and strong success of Israel’s border security fence. Point out that a properly made border fence has been shown to deter not only drug smugglers and illegal immigrants, but even suicide bombers. Then, compare Israel’s success at rapidly securing its borders to the American government’s dithering and ineffectualness at constructing its own border security fence. Please point out that this kind of defeatism and corruption is unworthy of Israel’s ally. You could conclude by offering to send Israeli experts to the American border to advise Americans on how to build the American fence.
Thank you very much.
Steve Sailer
— Unz Review, May 25 2011, “A Proposal to Bibi” (https://www.unz.com/isteve/proposal-to-bibi/)
In another article, Sailer almost seems to gloat at the amount of influence Israel has over America, praises Bibi’s political acumen, and then comments glibly on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
Old joke:
Q: Why doesn’t Israel apply to become the 51st state?
A: Because then they’d have only two senators.
Poor Obama figured he could take a gentle swipe at Bibi, thought he could articulate American policy without clearing every jot and tittle with Bibi beforehand, because Bibi is the equivalent of a Republican in Israel, so the President would at least have the Democrats in America on his side out of sheer partisanship. He didn’t realize that in the U.S. Congress, “Politics stops at the border (of Israel).”
…
Personally, I don’t think the West Bank is very important. I received this great gift a number of Christmases ago, an extra-large free-standing globe for my office. But even on this globe, I can barely find the West Bank. If the Israelis want to push around the Palestinians, well, I don’t really care much.
— Unz Review, May 25 2011, “2012 Bibi Bandwagon Gains Momentum” (https://www.unz.com/isteve/bibi-bandwagon-gains-momentum/)
In another article, Sailer straightforwardly describes himself as “a long-time admirer of Israel” (https://www.unz.com/isteve/2030-alternative-futures-for-jewish/), in case anyone was still confused.
The consistent themes in these articles can be summarized in four points:
Support and admiration for Israel as a model for American conservatives.
Praise of Netanyahu for his political fortitude.
Disparaging of Muslims and Palestinians as barbarians who are incompatible with Western Civilization (unlike Israelis).
Support for Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.
Sailer sometimes hedged his support for Israel with a psuedo-“America First” sort of position. However, it was always on terms that were conveniently favorable to the Israelis.
If Obama is serious about persuading Israel to pull its settlements out of the bulk of the West Bank in order to allow the Palestinians to have their own state there instead of having to live like prison inmates under the thumb of the Israeli Army guarding the settlements, then here’s a suggestion for a simple proposal that would strike a lot of people as a square deal:
Double or Nothing
In other words, if Israel pulls out of all but the fringes of the West Bank, then the U.S. would double its annual aid to Israel. If it doesn’t, then Israel gets nothing from the U.S.
— Unz Review, Jun 27 2009, “Double or Nothing” (https://www.unz.com/isteve/double-or-nothing/)
Last summer, I outlined in VDARE.com a realist approach to thinking about America’s relationship with Israel in “The Cuban Compromise: A Sustainable Model for the Jewish Lobby,” which suggested that Americans should agree to Israel’s fundamental interests in the same manner as America has treated the Cuban exile lobby’s interests — allowing Israel to push around the Palestinians, and a guarantee of refugee status for Israelis in the U.S. if the worst should somehow happen to Israel; on the other hand, America would not fight Israel’s wars for it and, most importantly, Americans would be free to describe and criticize the power of the Jewish lobby.
I haven’t seen anything since that has caused me to change my mind.
— Unz Review, Jan 24 2009, “Gaza” (https://www.unz.com/isteve/gaza/)
This had become a very common and effective tactic of the pro-Zionist Right, which tried to frame Israel’s interests as being the same or analogous to the interests of conservative Americans. It was reminiscent of the tactic of framing the pro-Palestine campus protestors as “blue haired woke leftists” and thus the natural enemy of “based” conservatives.
Sailer’s “long time admiration for Israel” seemed to go beyond mere political admiration, and stem from his racial self-identification with the Jewish people. In another article, Sailer writes that he always felt he had a “very Jewish-style brain.” He goes on to say that his suspicions were later vindicated, as he discovered later in life that he was indeed half Jewish.
For an extreme example of how pro-Semitism can come about within an individual merely through genes alone, consider me. Although I’m Catholic, I became very pro-Semitic at the age of 13 when my powers of logic kicked in (and my hair turned curly). I quickly noticed that a high percentage of the thinkers I either agreed with (e.g., Milton Friedman) or whom I considered it a worthy challenge to argue against were Jewish. Since I was adopted, a few years later I concluded that it was likely that I was half-Jewish biologically, (which indeed appears to be the case based on evidence my wife dug up when I was 30). It’s important to understand the chain of causation: having a very Jewish-style brain (e.g., enjoying logical argument), I sought out the best logical arguers to read, very many of whom were Jewish. (You may object that my political views today don’t sound much like those of the majority of American Jews, but I was enormously influenced by Jewish neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s. Having gone to some lengths to expose myself to Jewish thinkers (not because they were Jewish per se, but because those who most stimulated my kind of mind more than writers from other ethnic groups), I absorbed from them a lot of typically Jewish political stances: e.g., pro-Israel and pro-immigration.
Now, my pro-Semitism came about even though I was being raised in my (adoptive) family, which has no Jewish relatives, and, in fact, has a slight anti-Semitic mindset. (I realize my case is only a single data point, so I recommend somebody conduct a formal adoption study of Jews and part-Jews adopted by gentile families.) In the future, however, most children of the IQ elite will have Jews in their extended relatives, which will make my kind of pro-Semitism even more widespread in the future.
— Comment by Steve Sailer on an article in Unz Review, Jun 15 2016, “Man Who Fathered Feminist Susan Faludi Is Now Woman Who Definitely Didn't Mother Her” (https://www.unz.com/isteve/man-who-fathered-feminist-susan-faludi-is-now-woman-who-definitely-didnt-mother-her/)
In 2024, aside from the Passage Publishing release of his book Noticing, Steve Sailer gained more mainstream acceptance.
One of America’s most controversial writers, Steve Sailer, spoke Thursday evening, the latest stop on his long journey back toward the conservative mainstream.
He was joined by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who was recently suspended for a year following a prolonged controversy over her remarks on race in America, along with conservative commentator Jack Posobiec. The sold-out event was a promotion for Sailer’s new book, Noticing: An Essential Reader, which anthologises his writings on race, class and intelligence from the past 50 years.
…
Recently, Right-leaning public intellectuals and commentators are now increasingly speaking up on Sailer’s behalf. Noticing has received critical acclaim from Tucker Carlson and Razib Khan. Charles Murray, whose discussion of race and IQ in The Bell Curve made him something of a pariah himself, defended Sailer in the Claremont Review of Books.
…
Perhaps more important, Sailer’s work has become a favourite subject on the Red Scare podcast, an irreverent cultural commentary show that was cited by nearly every attendee I spoke with as their source of interest in Sailer.
— Unherd, Oct 13, 2024, “Is Steve Sailer re-entering the conservative mainstream?” (https://unherd.com/newsroom/is-steve-sailer-re-entering-the-conservative-mainstream/)
Claremont
Notice again the overlap between the Red Scare/Post Left/Dimes Square scene, and The Claremont Review of Books (who also promoted Bronze Age Pervert). Claremont in particular seems to play a central role in this faction, granting them a crucial level of institutional support. But who exactly are they?
The Claremont Review of Books (CRB) is a quarterly review of politics and statesmanship published by the conservative Claremont Institute. A typical issue consists of several book reviews and a selection of essays on topics of conservatism and political philosophy, history, and literature.
…
Contributors have included William F. Buckley Jr., Harry V. Jaffa, Mark Helprin (a columnist for the magazine), Victor Davis Hanson, Michael Anton, Diana Schaub, Gerard Alexander, David P. Goldman,Allen C. Guelzo, Joseph Epstein, Hadley P. Arkes, and John Marini.
…
According to historian George H. Nash, the editors and writers at Claremont are Straussian intellectually, heavily influenced by the ideas of Leo Strauss and his student Harry V. Jaffa. In their view, the Progressive Era culminating in the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson marked an ideological and political repudiation of political ideals of the Constitution and the American Founders, replacing a carefully limited government with government by experts and bureaucrats who were insulated from popular consent. They saw similar threats in the presidency of Barack Obama.
— Wikipedia, “Claremont Review of Books” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claremont_Review_of_Books)
Notice among the authors William F Buckley, one of the most prominent and well-known intellectuals of the Ronald Reagan-era neocon movement which dominated Republican politics before Donald Trump, and which advanced an avowedly pro-Zionist, interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, another prominent neocon taste maker is also a fan of the publication. Nevertheless, they were also critical of George W Bush’s war in Iraq, so their beliefs do appear to have some level of diversity and nuance. Claremont also notably supported Trump in the 2016 election.
The connection between Claremont and this New Right network revolved around Michael Anton, the West Coast Straussian who was mentioned earlier as the Claremont graduate who reviewed Bronze Age Mindset and who served on the National Security Council under President Trump.
Michael Anton (born 1969) is an American conservative essayist, speechwriter and former private-equity executive who was a senior national security official in the first Trump administration. Under a pseudonym he wrote "The Flight 93 Election", an influential essay [published by Claremont] in support of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Anton was Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications on the National Security Council under Trump. He is a former speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, and Condoleezza Rice, and worked as director of communications at the investment bank Citigroup and as managing director of investing firm BlackRock.
— Wikipedia, “Michael Anton” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Anton)
Like his neocon predecessors, Michael Anton was yet another Republican Zionist. And he was deeply ingrained in this Israeli-American network that ties together Claremont, Peter Theil, Curtis Yarvin, Passage Prize, and Dimes Square. Drawing on the traditions of the online Dissident Right, this faction had become the new nexus of grassroots Right Wing culture. It was also tied, through figures like Anton, to both the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party.
Natcon
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, this network appears to be using Right Wing influencers to steer the online Right towards a particular flavor of Right Wing ideology. What ideology? It is likely something similar to that of Yarom Hazony’s “National Conservatism” or “Natcon.”
It is a peculiar irony that one of the most influential theorists of President Donald Trump’s “America First” style of conservative nationalism is an Israeli citizen.
Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute think tank in Jerusalem, has become a mainstay of the American right. Michael Anton, a conservative academic who served as one of Trump’s senior advisers from 2017 to 2018, drew on Hazony’s vision of nationalism in formulating what Anton describes as “the Trump doctrine” in foreign affairs. Hazony’s new American organization, the Edmund Burke Foundation, held a 2019 conference that featured speeches from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.
…
During a trip to Israel, supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, I explored the influence of Hazony and the broader American-Israeli conservative intellectual movement. It is a world that holds extraordinary sway in the current Israeli Knesset (parliament), closely aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party.
— Vox, Oct 26 2020, “How an Israeli thinker became one of Trumpism’s foremost theorists” (https://www.vox.com/21355993/trump-israel-yoram-hazony-nationalism-tikvah)
In an interview with Jewish Insider, Michael Anton explains how Trump’s “America First” policy of withdrawing from foreign adventurism abroad (with the exception of the Middle East of course) would benefit Israel by encouraging other neoliberal elites in Europe and elsewhere to depend on America less, thus freeing up precious American resources that could be used for Israel.
[Anton] writes that the current international world order, with America at its helm, is “a voluntary alliance of neoliberal elites across nations to work together in their own interests.”
According to Anton, Trump’s foreign policy doctrine seeks to fight back against the current structure by rolling back decades of steadily expanding American foreign policy, which dictated that America needed to maintain a presence in every corner of the world.
Trump’s foreign policy has a more narrow focus
…
“It’s a more focused doctrine than what Trumpism replaced. It’s seeing American interest through a more narrow lens,” he told Jewish Insider. “Once you define everything as a priority, nothing is a priority. Once you define everything as an interest, it means nothing is an interest.”
Anton explained that the Trump administration’s approach to the U.S.-Israel relationship fits within such a mold in part because of Israel’s critical position in the U.S.’s security strategy.
“But so many foreign relationships can’t be reduced to dollars and cents,” he added. “America has allies out of shared conviction and shared interests… Some of these alliances that you have are simply because of a natural affinity to democracies that share common values, and so on and so forth, and relationships built up over decades. And you don’t necessarily ask the question, ‘Hey, what am I getting out of this today?’ It’s not a calculation at every step of the way in foreign policy.”
Anton characterized the recent normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as one of a litany of major Trump administration foreign policy accomplishments.
…
Anton also boasted that the Trump administration had helped improve the Israeli-Saudi relationship.
“The fact that relations get better and a lot of quiet and not particularly visible cooperation takes place is also an accomplishment, even if you don’t see it and even if there’s no moment where people sit down and shake hands and sign something,” he said, adding that the Trump administration sees improving relationships between Israel and Arab states as a critical step in facilitating an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Anton acknowledged that the Trump administration’s peace proposal is not, and cannot be, a final peace deal, but laid blame on the Palestinians for the lack of progress — criticizing Palestinian leaders for walking away from the negotiating table after the U.S. moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
— Jewish Insider, “Former Trump NSC official Michael Anton speaks out on foreign policy” (https://jewishinsider.com/tag/michael-anton/)
Michael Anton’s foreign policy is the application of the principles set forth in Yarom Hazony’s 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, which outlines the National Conservatism ethos. In July 2019, Natcon held a conference at the Ritz Carlton in Washington that included a few familiar names.
Hosted by the newly-formed Edmund Burke Foundation, the conference sought to sketch the blueprint of a right-wing nationalism shorn of its uglier elements (the mission statement cast itself “in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race”).
The keynote speakers were Tucker Carlson, John Bolton, Josh Hawley, and Peter Thiel, but the impresario behind it was the Edmund Burke Foundation’s chairman, Yoram Hazony, whose speech announced that “today is our independence day” from neoconservatism and neoliberalism and called for a return to “Anglo-American traditions.”
— The New Republic, Jul 26 2019, “The Man Behind National Conservatism” (https://newrepublic.com/article/154531/man-behind-national-conservatism)
Natcon held a similar conference more recently in London in May 2023, with some more familiar names.
While National Conservatism purports to represent the interests of everyday people, and families in particular, NatCon UK remained an elite affair.
Its lineup of speakers included six British Members of Parliament (including two cabinet members), dozens of prominent conservative writers and intellectuals—from Michael Anton and Douglas Murray to Compact editor Nina Power—and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance over a live video feed.
Yet the movement’s champions do have a mass base in mind, and an international one at that—from British Brexiteers and the American patriots who elected Donald Trump to the voters who propelled Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy and buoyed Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
American conferences have proved popular with a brand of Republican politicians who paint themselves as culture warriors with intellectual cred: Governor Ron DeSantis, former National Security adviser John Bolton, and Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who poured $30 million into the Senate campaigns of Vance and the venture capitalist Blake Masters, has been a frequent NatCon speaker and is among the movement’s major donors.
Wherever they are, national conservatives emphasize the primacy of the family as the core political unit, the immutability of biological facts, the preservation of borders and boundaries (between countries, between genders), the goodness of national histories no matter how bloody, the need for hierarchy and order, strong militaries, and national economies tailored to serve the needs of the people, not the free market.
…
Per Hazony, theirs was a conservatism that rejected liberalism’s commitment to abstract universalism and confidence in the power of human reason, favoring instead the bedrocks of tradition: family, religion, nation, hierarchy, order.
Yet the clearest instantiation today of Hazony’s ideal is neither Donald Trump’s America nor Boris Johnson’s Britain, but the hilltop settlements located deep in the heart of the West Bank: tight-knit communities made up of large, traditional families, united in the face of the enemy, producing legions of young soldiers who have been schooled in the fusion of state violence and spirituality. This is the template that Hazony now offers to the world via the neutralized language of National Conservatism. Like his Zionist predecessors, he too imagines Israel as a light unto the nations—an illiberal model for the international nationalist brigade.
— Jewish Currents, Sep 28 2023, “Light Among the Nations” (https://jewishcurrents.org/light-among-the-nations)
At “Natcon 4”—yet another National Conservatism conference held in Washington DC on July 9, 2024—Jonathan Keeperman (Lomez of Passage Publishing) gave a speech entitled “Dissident Artists and Publishing are Creating a New Culture” where he discussed the importance of creating a right wing artistic ecosystem to capture hearts and minds (https://www.youtube com/watch?v=2dHtMM-8myU).
In this speech, Keeperman identifies the enemy as “universalism” and warns against “being absorbed by the totalizing ambitions of a stateless global liberalism.” Notably, this is also the enemy of Netanyahu, whose nationalistic ambitions in the Middle East are increasingly under scrutiny by international liberal institutions such as the UN.
Keeperman also stresses the need to embrace a certain level of “chaos” and “randomness” in confronting this enemy, obviously drawing from the chaotic culture of 4chan and the Alt Right. He says that art is one way to embrace this chaos, and cautions his audience against being too quick to call Right Wing artists “Nazis,” but instead to allow them a certain amount of artistic license.
Lomez for his part, contra the picture that Groypers try to paint, does not seem to have been a foaming at the mouth Zionist. In a recent article, he laid out a history of the neocons that differs little from that of Kevin MacDonald, going so far as to implicate their Jewish heritage and identity as one of the sources of their ideology.
Exacerbating the rift were the obvious theological and cultural differences between the neocons and the rest of the right. The most salient fact about the neocons is that they were (are) Jewish (not all, but most of them), and what gave rise to their ideology––across every dimension, and undergirding whatever internal differences might have been layered over the top––was their fear of anti-semitism and by extension the question, “What is good for the Jews?”
—Office Hours with Lomez , Nov 26 2024,“ What is a Neocon?” (https://www.lomez.press/p/what-is-a-neocon)
Perhaps this is why he warns Natcon to err on the side of permissiveness rather than sensitivity towards accusations of anti-Semitism. Such sensitivity would make it impossible for him and his project to operate. Nevertheless, he must have been considered no grave threat to their movement if they provided him with a platform. In my opinion, he seemed to be a sort of subject expert on Internet culture literacy whose expertise Natcon was taking advantage of for their own ends.
Lomez, growing up on the Internet and being exposed to its politically incorrect culture, understood its potential quite well. Those aligned with Natcon, such as Peter Thiel, were wise to embrace his observations, and we can see the fruits of this in the Right Wing culture of today, which they have considerable influence over. With young, capable, and digitally and culturally literate young conservatives in their ranks, it is unlikely that the Internet will be as disruptive of a force on the Right as it was in 2016. The establishment has adapted to the technology.
As for Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, it espouses a vision of nationalism that is explicitly modelled after the state of Israel (echoing the sentiments of Sailer), and is amenable to Zionist interests.
An Israeli, Hazony is a man of his circumstances, and sometimes proudly so. He is understandably frustrated by “the international efforts to smear Israel, to corner Israel, to delegitimize Israel and drive it from the family of nations.” His national loyalty pervades the book and, although his sense of belonging is laudable, it leads him to make arguments that are tendentious to the point of being illogical.
— Cato, Fall 2018, “The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony” (https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2018/virtue-nationalism-yoram-hazony)
As he stated in a 2019 speech at the Jewish Leadership Conference, the Christian world is in crisis and its leaders are increasingly looking to Israel for answers: “In every country in the world where there is an uprising against the destruction, the endless revolution that liberal Enlightenment is causing . . . the nationalist leadership turns to Israel, turns to the Jews, turns to the Torah, and says ‘That’s our model for what we want to see in our country.’”
…
Consistent with this analysis, Hazony and his allies favor permanent legal inferiority for Palestinians, which is why he is so adamant that Israel cannot accept any sort of “universal constitution” built upon equality before the law. He enthusiastically supported Israel’s 2018 nation-state law, which held that “the State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People” alone, giving them exclusive rights to self-determination in the land.
…
When Hazony inveighs in Conservatism against the liberal constitutional model, rejecting ideas like universal human rights in favor of a constitutional tradition tailored to national needs and perfected through “trial and error,” we can surmise he is hunting for philosophical footing for this inequitable legal order. At times, it seems that the ideological arguments that Hazony advances are ex post facto justifications for policies that have long existed within Israel.
…
What Hazony offers as a global template is none other than the blueprints for the Jewish state in its most reactionary and exclusionary form. The reason his prescriptions feel at odds with actually existing conservatism in either the US or the UK is that they were cast from the mold of religious Zionism
— Jewish Currents, Sep 28 2023, “Light Among the Nations” (https://jewishcurrents.org/light-among-the-nations)
In his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony argues that international organizations and progressive Europeans alike mistreat Israel not primarily out of anti-Semitism per se, but out of a more generalized disgust about what Israel stands for. They believe in a world without borders and without defined nations; Israel is the exemplar of a country founded on the ideals of national self-determination and exclusive national rights to land, the antithesis of what progressives want the world to become.
Anti-Israel sentiment “is driven by the rapid advance of a new paradigm that understands Israel, and especially the independent Israeli use of force to defend itself, as illegitimate down to its foundations,” he writes. “If Germany and France have no right to exist as independent states, then why should Israel?”
In this way of thinking, Israel — by choosing to “make its stand on the world stage” as an avowedly Jewish state — is at the forefront of a global struggle over borders and nationalism.
— Vox, Oct 26 2020, “How an Israeli thinker became one of Trumpism’s foremost theorists” (https://www.vox.com/21355993/trump-israel-yoram-hazony-nationalism-tikvah)
As in Keeperman’s speech, Hazony frames “nationalism” as opposed to the “globalism” of international organizations such as the United Nations and International Criminal Court, and NGOS such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which all condemned the actions of Israel in Gaza.
Hazony sees liberalism as an international approach to politics, one that plays with gimmicks such as the idea of a universal human nature to foster supra-national government. This latter can be seen as anti-democratic: democracy requires people who speak one language, a lasting legacy of nationalism. It is not by chance that universal franchise is alien to international agencies — they are at best technocracies, whose actions reflect the ideology of a tiny minority rather than the wisdom of the people at large. Hazony thus defends nationalism as the broad political worldview to which Israel, England, and the United States now adhere, in contrast to the United Nations or the European Union.
— Cato, Fall 2018, “The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony” (https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2018/virtue-nationalism-yoram-hazony)
Hazony frames his theory around a conflict (“as old as the West itself”) between two principles of international order: “an order of free and independent nations,” and a universal empire striving to unite all nations under a single legal regime.
The former ideal, he suggests, originates in the Hebrew Bible, with the biblical kingdom of Israel serving as the first national state, but reached its apotheosis in early modern Europe under the “Protestant construction of the West.”
The golden age of nation-states stretched from roughly the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 until the end of World War II. But after Hitler discredited nationalism (wrongly, for he was actually an imperialist rather than a nationalist) the imperial principle made a comeback, at least among “educated elites who have, to one degree or another, become committed to a future under an imperial order.”
…
The main target of his ire is the European Union, “a universal state … whose reach will be limited only by the power that this empire can bring to bear”—the most insidious of empires because it looks least like one. The slowly spreading power of the EU and other international bodies has, he warns, dire consequences: “When a nation wakes up from its sleep and discovers that it has been slowly, inexorably conquered, at that time no options will remain to it other than to acquiesce in eternal enslavement or go to war.”
— The New Republic, Jul 26 2019, “The Man Behind National Conservatism” (https://newrepublic.com/article/154531/man-behind-national-conservatism)
Unsurprisingly at this point in the article, Hazony also had extensive personal ties to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Media coverage of Hazony in the United States has tended to refer to him simply as an “Israeli political philosopher,” but the label doesn’t really do justice to his interesting and highly illustrative career.
Born in Israel in 1964, but raised and educated in the United States, he described being “mesmerized” by an encounter as a Princeton undergraduate with the ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane, a few years before Kahane’s party was banned in Israel for anti-Arab racism. Going on to earn a doctorate in political theory, Hazony chose not to pursue an academic career, instead moving to Israel with Princeton friends to found the Shalem Center, an American-style think tank based in Jerusalem.
Hazony was an early member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle, and Shalem would remain closely aligned with the Likud Party. It would also serve as a nexus for the Israeli and American right; funding came from American billionaires like Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, while the roster of fellows tended to feature Israeli political figures who played well inside the Beltway. Hazony and others in the Shalem leadership spent the 1990s living in Eli, an Israeli settlement deep in the West Bank, until security concerns following the Second Intifada convinced them to relocate to East Jerusalem.
…
He is currently head of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem; the Edmund Burke Foundation—which he founded alongside David Brog, former executive director of the Texas televangelist John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel—gives him an institutional footprint in Washington.
…
Equally at ease in Washington or the West Bank, extolling the glories of England’s ancient constitution or schmoozing with the scourge of rootless cosmopolitanism on the continent, Hazony’s career checks every box for the current nationalist international.
— The New Republic, Jul 26 2019, “The Man Behind National Conservatism” (https://newrepublic.com/article/154531/man-behind-national-conservatism)
Rather than pursue a traditional academic career, Hazony joined the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post and began writing speeches for the rising star of the conservative Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu.
He also helped create a new crop of Zionist institutions. Much like his Republican counterparts in the United States, Hazony understands the crucial role of an institutional infrastructure in spurring the circulation of ideas among intellectuals, policy centers, and political actors.
Together with political scientist Daniel Polisar, a Princeton classmate, he founded the Shalem Center, a conservative think tank and educational institute dedicated to the study of Jewish history, Zionism, and politics. (Early funders included Ronald Lauder, Sheldon Adelson, and Zalman Bernstein, founder of the Tikvah Fund, which has emerged as the premier funder of right-wing Zionist activism in both Israel and the US, and is infamous for its role in the current gutting of the Israeli Supreme Court.)
In the heady days of the Oslo Accords, when many liberals believed a two-state solution was imminent, Shalem served as a vehicle to double down on a nationalist project premised on Jewish control over the whole of occupied Palestine and the rejection of Palestinian statehood, a vision it promoted via right-wing educational programs, publications, and policy advice.
Amid talk of “post-Zionism” within Israel’s intellectual circles, its mission statement declared that “the entire Jewish people is suffering from an identity crisis.” Its quarterly journal Azure aimed to answer this crisis with a much-needed intellectual framework for the Israeli right, which, as Hazony wrote in the inaugural issue, had “no tradition of intellectual discourse to speak of.”
The Shalem platform in the 1990s and early 2000s married the rejection of prospective Palestinian statehood to hawkish foreign policy and calls for economic liberalization. Netanyahu’s first electoral victory in 1996 offered a way to translate this platform into reality, and in 2009, journalist Ofri Ilany remarked that “there is no think tank today with as much influence on the Israeli government as the Shalem Center.”
Numerous Shalem fellows assumed government posts, including economist Omer Moav (who headed the Israeli Finance Ministry’s Council of Economic Advisers), historian Michael Oren (later the Israeli ambassador to the United States), and former IDF chief Moshe Ya’alon (who served as Defense Minister from 2013 to 2016). Today Shalem College, the institution that grew out of the center, boasts that its alumni network includes “a senior advisor to Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, and a senior press officer at the Israeli embassy in London,” along with other leaders.
— Jewish Currents, Sep 28 2023, “Light Among the Nations” (https://jewishcurrents.org/light-among-the-nations)
Like Ben Shapiro and others, Hazony viewed Israel as “representing an outpost of civilization amid a sea of Eastern barbarism.”
In essence, Hazony’s political project was to create an Israeli-led coalition of “national conservative” governments around the world.
The vision is not a new Reich but a global coalition of states that resembles Orbán’s Hungary, Narendra Modi’s India, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and of course, Netanyahu’s Israel. We can guess what this world would look like because it is, to some degree, already here.
…
As the prophet of National Conservatism, Hazony deploys familiar themes of breakdown and renewal. Yet it is no longer just Israeli Jews, but people across the world who, in the view of National Conservatives, are suffering from an identity crisis. In Britain, as Hazony told the crowd in London, the crisis began with liberal attacks on God and scripture, continued with the destruction of British independence (via EU membership), then culminated in the debasement of the nuclear family, military service, and the value of having children. “Cultural revolution, this woke neo-Marxism,” he declared, destroys everything that is great and unique about the countries it overtakes.
— Jewish Currents, Sep 28 2023, “Light Among the Nations” (https://jewishcurrents.org/light-among-the-nations)
During his appearance, Orbán — who invited Hazony to his office to discuss his book in 2019 — identified himself and similar leaders in Central Europe (like Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party) as exemplars of the kind of “national conservatism” the conference was promoting.
“What I represent here is not just a success story of a country, but a success story of a region. And everywhere in this region the governments are based on national sovereignty. They’re all national conservatives,” Orbán said. “You can have great hopes and expectations that the renovation and a new current, a new blood to national conservatism could come from Central Europe.”
…
There is an increasing sense of a “nationalist international” — the idea that various right-wing parties need to band together and fight against the liberal-progressive vision for a more globalized world. Some of the efforts to codify this idea, like Steve Bannon’s laughable organization called “The Movement” in Europe, have failed.
— Vox, Oct 26 2020, “How an Israeli thinker became one of Trumpism’s foremost theorists” (https://www.vox.com/21355993/trump-israel-yoram-hazony-nationalism-tikvah)
Like Keeperman, Hazony also understood the need for a vibrant Right Wing intellectual culture.
“In most countries, the role of defending the idea of the nation — the preservation and deepening of its heritage, its texts and holy places, and the wisdoms and social crafts which its people have acquired — belongs to political conservatives,” he wrote in the inaugural issue of Azure, an Israeli conservative journal he founded in 1996 and whose archives are currently hosted on Tikvah’s website. “What passes for a ‘national camp’ in Israel, the [right-wing] Likud and its sister parties, has no tradition of intellectual discourse to speak of. It has no colleges, no serious think tanks or publishing houses, no newspapers or broadcasting.”
Tikvah has worked to change that, shelling out $10-15 million annually — a meaningful investment in a small country like Israel — to create and sustain conservative institutions. (Tikvah also operates in the United States.)
— Vox, Oct 26 2020, “How an Israeli thinker became one of Trumpism’s foremost theorists” (https://www.vox.com/21355993/trump-israel-yoram-hazony-nationalism-tikvah)
Was Hazony using institutions like Claremont, personalities like BAP, and philosophers such as Curtis Yarvin to replicate this model in the Right Wing of the United States?
When Donald Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, it became clear that the old conservative paradigm did not adequately represent what the Republican Party had become.
The party of free markets had been taken over by a trade skeptic who (disingenuously) promised to protect Medicare; the party of American empire had been taken over by a man who (disingenuously) claimed to oppose America’s wars in places like Iraq and Libya. There was an urgent need to explain what he really stood for and how he had won — a task that the old American conservative elite, steeped in pre-Trump conservative dogma, wasn’t well-equipped to do on its own.
Enter Hazony. In a September 2016 essay in Mosaic (a Tikvah-funded conservative journal), he argued that Trump’s ascendance, together with the Brexit vote, represented an emergent divide in global politics — between nationalists, who believe countries should be free to choose their own destiny, and liberal imperialists, who wish to dissolve national borders and impose their secular, deracinated vision on an unwilling world.
— Vox, Oct 26 2020, “How an Israeli thinker became one of Trumpism’s foremost theorists” (https://www.vox.com/21355993/trump-israel-yoram-hazony-nationalism-tikvah)
New Right Good? New Right Bad?
Personally, I support the creation of a Right Wing art ecosystem. Million Dollar Extreme has collaborated with this faction of the Right, and I certainly am a fan of them. I like Passage Publishing and its promotion of Rightest authors, whether Twitter personalities like Zero HP Lovecraft, or fringe political commentators such as Steve Sailer. I welcome the death of the Millennial, “Woke” Brooklyn art scene, which I never found appealing and instead found censorious and trite. These institutions have made it possible for artists who feel the same way to have a voice. I also like the idea of the Dimes Square scene of artists who are Right Wing and Catholic, insofar as that exists and is not simply a meme.
Because of their overwhelming relevance, it may be appropriate to call this era of the online Right after Oct 7 the “New Right Era.”
The “New Right” is the very first stage of the institutionalization of Dissident Right ideas and their assimilation into the mainstream. The “synthesis” part of the dialectic.
That being said, 2024 is still far more liberal than 2014 was. While Leftist ideology seems less hegemonic and weaker than in 2014, the actual policies are more or less the same, and so one could argue that the system seems to have more or less absorbed the Dissident Right backlash against post-war liberalism for the time being. Nevertheless, we are only at the very beginning of the trend, and its yet to be seen if things will continue to move to the right as liberalism continues to fail.
Additionally, the New Right is far less extreme and anti-establishment than the Alt Right or Dissident Right were. As I predicted in 2016 and in the introduction to A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right, as these ideas spread they will become more and more watered down and inoffensive. Perhaps the gap has closed between the dissident and mainstream right in more ways than one. While at the beginning of the year, it seemed as if the mainstream right was becoming more and more like the Dissident Right—adopting many of its talking points—since the election of Trump the “New Right” has become less and less radical. This is a topic we will return to some other time.
In the next article, we will examine one part of the Right Wing that is still just as controversial as ever—the anti-Zionist Right.