Ross Douthat has long had an interest in thinkers and ideologies that do not ordinarily feature prominently in his employer's pages. That has been to his great credit, for it has made the Times a better paper and, I have no doubt, has made Douthat a more interesting and generative thinker.
This is likely why the paper tapped him to host a new podcast called "Interesting Times." The pitch of the podcast is that we live in a highly uncertain political and cultural moment where the formerly unthinkable has become possible, even plausible. Ideas once regarded as fringe now find a home in the mainstream, and figures one regarded as extreme are now surprisingly influential. You can listen to the trailer for the podcast over at the Times's website.
There is also something specific about our own national setting that makes all of this tumult even more complex than it would be on its own terms. We live in a liberal democracy. Ours is a system which protects free speech, free press, and freedom of assembly. All of that is, actually, very good: Free speech, a free press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion... a system that protects these things is a far better system than one that doesn't.
But it also presents a challenge when illiberal ideas arise within liberal systems. If you are committed to liberalism, then even illiberal people get the benefits of liberalism. We give even the devil himself the benefit of the law, or at least we ought to given our priors.
When an illiberal system faces a serious political threat, it can simply take decisive action to exterminate the threat coercively. You can see what that looks like by simply turning your eyes toward China or Russia. But if the rules of your political system do not allow such action, then how do you deal with radical theories that would, if implemented, pose an existential threat to liberal order? That is the problem facing us now.
One strategy is to angrily denounce the threat in the loudest, most incendiary terms in order to label that idea as being fundamentally antithetical to your political system and as something that should be categorically rejected. You could call this "the Bulwark strategy." The trouble with this strategy is that the order being defended has to have a certain level of broad, socially recognized legitimacy in order for the denunciations to have the desired impact.
But if that legitimacy is gone, the denunciations lack power. In fact, when legitimacy is gone, loud and expressive denunciation can actually strengthen the rival system it is targeting. Such an anxious response implicitly announces that the established order, which already lacks broadly recognized social legitimacy, is also weak and vulnerable.
This is the point Evelyn Quartz made so well in a recent piece at Compact:
The most important question in American politics is not whether we can defeat Trump again, but whether the bipartisan class that produced him—and that continues to dominate our media, campaigns, and institutions—can admit what it built. It will come down to whether the pro-democracy center can face the possibility that Trump is not an anomaly, but a consequence. That authoritarianism didn’t arrive from outside, but emerged from a system emptied of meaning, purpose, and trust, and eroded by elite capture, institutional decay, and top-down cynicism. Until that reckoning happens, the so-called pro-democracy movement isn’t saving anything. It’s managing decline.
So angry denunciation will not work at this point.
The other school of thought some have embraced—you could call this the Claremont Institute response—is that the important thing is to maintain power and influence at any cost. Therefore, you should ignore the genuinely reprehensible things going on in your own organization as well as the evil ideas being smuggled into your movement because addressing them would threaten your hold on power or your influence on those in power. The best version of this response basically says, "Look, we can manage the radicals and keep them in line, which is better than alienating them." Worse versions of this exist which do not even attempt to manage them.
The problem with this is that when you're dealing with revolutionary ideologues they actually do not want to be managed. They simply want to extract whatever value they can from legacy institutions before leaving and replacing them if they can't simply take them over. If such people feel that they are being managed, they'll rebel. And because of the nature of our current cultural, media, and technological moment, it is actually quite easy for individuals with large platforms to supplant their institutional employers whenever their employer seeks to rein them in. The power in media at the moment is mostly with individual media producers, not with media organizations.
All of this is why Douthat's show is needed and why Douthat is a good person to host it. If anyone is going to figure out a non-Bulwark and non-Claremont answer to the problem of responding to radical political ideologies, it is either going to be Douthat himself or it is going to be other people who listen and learn from Douthat.
This lengthy preamble, then, brings me to Douthat's interview with Jonathan Keeperman, owner and publisher of Passage Press, a Nietzschean vitalist publishing project.
Given what we've already said, the case for interviewing Keeperman is fairly obvious and, indeed, is stated quite clearly by Douthat early in the conversation. He is a rising star in right-wing media with ties to First Things and the Claremont Institute, he seems to have certain close ties to key right-wing power brokers (he hosted an inaugural ball in DC, after all), and Passage Press is doing things that have generally not been done by right-wing media in many years. All of that makes him newsworthy as a mouthpiece of sorts for this broad movement on the New Right.
That being said, when you give revolutionary thinkers access to your audience, it's only valuable if you're dealing with their actual ideas. It's not that you should be triggered by their mere existence, which is too often what the Bulwark response conveys. Nor should you be completely blind or indifferent to their evil, as in the Claremont response. Both of these are bad responses.
But another bad response is to allow someone who has already defined themselves very clearly in a variety of outlets to then come on your show and define themselves in a radically different way in your interview. If you fail to deal accurately and plainly with the ideas and instead allow the thinker in question to control the interview, you don't actually accomplish anything save providing a kind of infomercial for the revolutionary. This, in my view, is what Douthat did in this interview.
There are things one ought to know about Keeperman. For example, Keeperman's press published the book Noticing by Steve Sailer, a book whose very title trades in a common anti-semitic trope. Sailer himself is a loud proponent of the "human biodiversity" thesis, which is a kind of sanitized term for scientific racism or "race realism."
As Bari Weiss documented at Tablet, Sailer has referred to former President Barack Obama as a "half-blood" and written that, "The plain fact is that (Afro-Americans) tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society." (This remark, of course, is very similar to one made by Stephen Wolfe in an IM-1776 essay I have referred to in the past.)
Unsurprisingly, Sailer's anti-Black racism has also spilled over into anti-Semitic tropes, as Weiss again documented in this quotation from Sailer:
It’s uncomfortable for liberal Jews to admit that the massive immigration they’ve backed so viscerally is destabilizing the America in which they’ve attained such a central role. They’d rather continue to portray themselves as unprivileged outsiders, a strategy that has worked well with American gentiles. But with about one-third of American billionaires and about one-sixth of global billionaires being Jewish, it’s not a marketing tactic that’s very convincing.
This is one of the authors Keeperman has chosen to publish at Passage Press. Yet you will find not one mention of Steve Sailer in the interview despite the fact that Sailer is likely the most famous living author the press publishes and they have even promoted him via a $400 "patrician edition" of his essays.
Another name left out of the interview is Charles Cornish-Dale, or Raw Egg Nationalist as he is known on Twitter or X. Cornish-Dale runs Man's World magazine, a magazine purchased by Passage Press sometime in the past two years.
Cornish-Dale's magazine has published actual Nazi collaborators, such as the French fascist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. In addition to publishing such authors, Cornish-Dale's magazine, which Keeperman publishes, has run a number of racist advertisements targeting Black people. These images appear in issue 11, for example:
You will also find horrible content targeting women in the magazine. For example, in issue nine, Cornish-Dale ran this image:
In issue 9, Cornish-Dale also ran a short story in which the male narrator writes about murdering his girlfriend. Here is one representative passage—and I apologize for how disturbing this is, but I am placing it here because I want our readers to understand that the man responsible for publishing this is the same man Douthat interviewed in the Times:
He found his jump rope. It was the first thing that came to mind. It would work. Deejay went back into the living room, went over to the window, and closed the blinds. It was almost dark outside. He switched on a lamp. In coded language, Emily was telling him he had no right to be mad at her. He wasn’t sure what she was referring to. There were a lot of things he had no right to be mad about. Which was funny, because he didn’t feel mad at all. He stood on the chair and tied the jump rope to the hook, made what he hoped was a respectable knot. A noose. He stepped down and gave the rope some hard pulls, put his weight on it. He was confident it would hold. “I’m sick and tired of being made to feel like I’m the problem when—” Deejay held out his hand to her like he was asking her to dance. She took it. He guided Emily up onto the chair, motioned for her to put the noose around her neck. “This is like a trust exercise, right? I’ve heard about this.” Deejay kicked the chair out from under her, then went outside to have a cigarette. He could still hear her sneakers clapping together as he went down the stairs. It was a sweet sound."
Man's World also features ads for a variety of right-wing publishing houses in most issues, including Antelope Hill, which publishes the speeches of Adolf Hitler, amongst others.
In addition to all this, Cornish-Dale has quite an extensive history of anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler posting on social media, which I previously documented after the leadership of New Founding, the organization behind American Reformer as well as the Center for Baptist Leadership, announced a business partnership with Cornish-Dale.
Cornish-Dale's magazine is now owned and published by Keeperman, who seems to have acquired it at some point after Cornish-Dale had already made the above publishing decisions. So not only did Keeperman seem unfazed by such depravity, he actually thought it was something worth spending money on, assuming he paid Cornish-Dale some amount of money to acquire the magazine, and also was worth continuing to publish.
You will not find Charles Cornish-Dale's name anywhere in Douthat's interview either, however.
There is more: Prior to this interview, Keeperman's latest turn in the media spotlight came at the Natalism conference he sponsored alongside Charles Haywood held earlier this year.
Haywood, who made a fortune from selling a shampoo company, is a self-styled wannabe warlord who believes we are living on the brink of the collapse of civil society and the failure of liberal democracy. Haywood believes that our current order will be replaced by a balkanized system of small "armed patronage networks" led by well-off warlords who provide security and material prosperity for small bands of people:
I sometimes believe that I am fated to become a warlord myself, by which I do not mean some kind of predator, but rather the head of an armed patronage network. The key function of a warlord is the short- and long-term protection, military and otherwise, of those who recognize his authority and act, in part, at his behest. The classic example is early medieval feudalism, although naturally there are many variations throughout history and different cultures. A warlord doesn’t need to be raiding his neighbors all the time (though that’s possible, for example, the Vikings; he just has to prevent his neighbors from successfully raiding him and his people, because that’s the number one rule of patronage—make sure those who recognize you as patron feel secure.
We should also remember that Road Warrior-type societies don’t exist, and never have, in the West at least. People will do almost anything to avoid anarchy. Thus, if society falls completely apart, it will rebuild itself immediately, though starting at the lowest level. This is where I come in. At this moment I preside over what amounts to a extended, quite sizeable, compound, which when complete I like to say, accurately, will be impervious to anything but direct organized military attack. Yet it requires a group of men to make it work; the fantasy that one family can garrison a large area, or any area, and be left alone, is just that. You have to sleep sometime, and as a friend of mine once, many years ago, stated my view on the world, “Bad people are everywhere, and they must be put down.” Thus, I need what I call “shooters”—say fifteen able-bodied, and adequately trained, men. Together, such a group can operate my compound, both defensively and administratively. And I have the personality, and skills, to lead such a group. I am nothing if not decisive, the core competency of a leader in any field, and I am adequately charismatic.
Once you take on such men, however, whether extended family or friends, you are responsible for them and their families. You are their patron. You are the source of authority, and you must deliver the goods. From there, in any societal collapse or fracture, there is only one way forward—taking responsibility for more people, because of the gravitational force exerted by any successful mini-society. Shrinking your patronage is probably fatal; it’s certainly dangerous. All the incentives are to build your patronage network. Moreover, trade of many types develops naturally, and a patron is incentivized to work with other patrons to benefit everyone involved, by encouraging and protecting beneficial trade, further expanding patronage. Of such ferment are warlords born—not just to protect their people, but to ensure they are fed, to administer justice, and to provide relaxation, entertainment, social intercourse, and all the benefits people crave, especially in uncertain times. A good warlord makes it so his people can sleep soundly at night. Someone has to do it, and I’m logically positioned, both materially and psychologically, to do it in my little area of the world.
So Keeperman sponsored this event alongside an aspirant warlord.
The speakers Keeperman appeared with at the event would, one expects, also be of interest to a traditional Catholic writer, such as Douthat. Cornish-Dale was one of them, for example.
Keeperman also hosted noted eugenics boosters Malcolm and Simone Collins:
Collins is, however, an unabashed advocate for IVF, which is opposed by many conservative and anti-abortion Republicans. Simone and Malcolm have used IVF themselves and plan to continue having more children. They also are “huge early supporters” of embryo selection based on a “polygenic score” related to intelligence. In other words, selecting embryos based on IQ.
Additionally, he invited Carl Benjamin to speak at the event. Benjamin, a media personality and former member of the UK Independence Party, is known primarily for being deplatformed on Patreon over his use of the n word and for anti-Semitic remarks.
Here is Benjamin attacking certain white media personalities by saying they behave like black people:
I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n******, just so you know. You act like white n******. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right... Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f******.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n****r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me.”
And here he is commenting on the Holocaust:
Jewish people work very hard. They're very smart. Of course they're successful.
If we want to have any idea that we're living in a meritocracy, if Jews weren't succeeding in our societies, they must be being held back.
But they're not. They're doing great... Because they're not being held back because they do work because they are smart.
Jewish people, unfortunately for them, have got to drop the identity politics. I'm sorry about the Holocaust but I don't give a s***. I'm sorry.
You will also find no mention of Haywood, the Collinses, or Carl Benjamin anywhere in Douthat's interview.
The Keeperman you are left with, if you ignore all the above, is a somewhat dim media figure who is not terribly interesting, perhaps, but at least seems to trigger the right people and has a sense of humor. It's not that Keeperman comes off as particularly impressive in the interview, to be clear. His treatment of art is juvenile, for example. The lazy equating of "art I like" with "art that is good" with "art that affirms my politics" is something I'd sooner expect to see in a freshman comp paper than from a notable publisher.
Yet, be that as it may, Keeperman comes of as a kind of "edgy" media personality who perhaps dabbles in certain transgressive ideas but is himself a relatively harmless good-time guy who is simply trying to emancipate himself from the moralizing schoolmarm progressives who have dominated American public life in recent years. Who can get mad at that? And if anyone is mad at that... well, doesn't that prove Keeperman's point?
"Americans have just gotten far too serious and moralistic and fond of scolding people they disapprove of. Keeperman is fighting that." That's the sense one gets from the interview.
The figure we encounter, then, is not terribly impressive intellectually, but also not particularly objectionable either, which, one suspects, was Keeperman's goal all along.
The Jonathan Keeperman who publishes scientific racists and Nazis and like short stories about the "sweet sound" of murdering one's girlfriend is almost entirely absent. The Keeperman who asks eugenics enthusiasts to speak at his conferences that he sponsors alongside aspiring warlords where they can appear alongside UKIP reps who got blackballed for calling people "white n******" and who tells Jewish people it's time to get over the Holocaust is similarly missing.
What's important is understanding that this is not about vague scolding words beloved of progressives everywhere that ultimately are wax noses which mean whatever progressives need them to mean. The problems with Keeperman are not about some vaguely defined concept of "racism" or "misogyny." They are about very specific publishing choices he has made which suggest that he is at least tolerant of quite hateful, prejudicial views of people of color as well as being at least tolerant of quite hateful and, I think, bigoted content aimed at women. The specifics matter immensely; the issue isn't generalized moral offenses against a (discredited) progressive sensibility. The issue is that Keeperman publishes the specific content he publishes.
If you are going to engage with radicals like Keeperman, you need to quote their own words back to them and ask them simple, direct questions. You don't do this because you are anxious or triggered or scandalized. You do it because you simply want to know what they actually believe, and you want your audience to know what they actually believe. If Keeperman wishes to make the publishing choices he has, he is within his rights to do that. But Douthat would also be within his rights to ask about specific choices he has made and challenge him about those. Unfortunately, he did not do that.
So, for example, you should ask someone like Keeperman whether or not he agrees with his author, Steve Sailer, that former President Obama is a "half-breed." You should ask him if he, like Cornish-Dale, thinks it is good to publish stories about the "sweet sound" of hearing one's girlfriend being strangled to death at one's own hands. You should ask him whether he also believes, like the man he shared a stage with at a conference he funded, that Jews should get over the Holocaust. These are all things Keeperman has published. He has a responsibility for them. It is right and good (and deeply liberal) to ask him to explain and defend those choices.
But Douthat did none of that. The interview spent more time discussing the Passage Press editions of The Hardy Boys than it did the works of Steve Sailer or Charles Cornish-Dale—which, one suspects, is precisely why Passage publishes those Hardy Boy books in the first place.
There is one last thing we should say about this: Radical ideologies have a kind of Jekyll and Hyde quality to them. There's a reason for that. Many of the things they actually publish, believe, and promote are vile and monstrous and most normal people find vile and monstrous things to be... well, vile and monstrous. Because of this, radicals virtually always have multiple personas they use in their work, some of which are more honest about their beliefs than others.
In venues they do not control, or that have a larger audience, or when they are publishing under their own name, they try to present a more respectable, "normal" face. Then in the venues they do control, or that have a smaller, more targeted audience, or where they are using a pseudonym, they let the mask drop. (Recall the Thomas Achord affair.)
What this means is that purveyors of radical political ideologies benefit from doing interviews in which they are allowed to don the mask, and they avoid interviews where they suspect that will not be possible. This makes it very difficult to get them to talk about their most repugnant beliefs in plain terms because they simply avoid the situations where that might happen. (Recall, for example, how Stephen Wolfe twisted and squirmed when Michael Bird pressed him on his segregationism.)
That said, when you are the New York Times you hold a unique position in the media landscape. Because of your reach and prestige, most media creators will agree to an interview with you because it is in their interest to do so. This means that Douthat was uniquely positioned to press Keeperman on these issues, which makes his failure to do so all the more frustrating.
We do indeed live in "interesting times" as Douthat's podcast is named. It is a time when the range of political ideologies enjoying popularity in American discourses is broader than it has been at any point in the past 100 years, I suspect. That is why a podcast like Douthat's is, potentially, quite valuable.
But it will only be valuable if Douthat actually forces his revolutionary guests to own their revolutionary ideas and associations. If he can do that, then the podcast will be a great success. If he cannot, then he will merely be making himself an accidental propagandist for the radicals he welcomes to his show.