Before the Donald Trump era, the right’s internet radicals shouted at the Republican Party from the cheap seats. Now they have become players within the conservative power structure, as the walls that once kept them at bay have crumbled. The Republican vice presidential nominee has specifically cited a neo-monarchist blogger as an influence on his views on the executive branch; Trump’s younger White House aides all reportedly read an author called “Bronze Age Pervert.”

The influence of these fringe ideas on the right is now unmistakable. But most people do not understand how it came about – and indeed continues to happen.

There is an entire network of activists, often invisible to mainstream observers, actively working to bring radical ideas into the American mainstream. Their goal is to (re)introduce ideas like the notion that black people are generally less intelligent than white people into the mainstream intellectual world – and in doing so, ultimately change the boundaries of what is permissible in our politics for the worse.

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

At its core, it is about creating alternative social institutions that are robust and well-established enough that supporters of extreme ideas can rely on them to withstand attacks and social sanctions from mainstream society. But it is also about building connections with more established figures like Tucker Carlson, who act as intermediaries to pump the ideas of the radical right into political society.

Keeperman runs a company called Passage Press, which publishes books by right-wing extremists, both historical (such as the interwar German radical Ernst Jünger) and contemporary (such as the aforementioned neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin). He is regarded as a respectable figure by the general public, and in July he spoke at the same National Conservatism conference that hosted Senators JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and Mike Lee. Tucker Carlson once promoted a book from Passage Press, a collection of essays by writer Steve Sailer, who espouses the debunked belief that racial inequality is biological.

Nevertheless, Keeperman leads a double life.

A May Guardian article revealed that he is the person behind prominent right-wing online personality L0m3z, whose X-account calls gay people the F-slur, calls Asians “mongoloids,” and (jokingly?) suggests that journalists should be lynched. L0m3z is obsessed with the specter of what he calls “homosexual racial communism,” describing it as “a civilization-level shit test that operates on the… implicit threat of female hysteria.” He makes casual references to white nationalist memes, conspiracy theories that Barack Obama is gay, and something called “retarded strength.”

During his performance on Unsupervised learninga podcast hosted by conservative geneticist Razib Khan, Keeperman addresses this duality and explains how and why his shitposting under the name L0m3z relates to his larger strategy.

Keeperman says his work is built on a central premise: that any attempt to persuade established cultural institutions to discuss “far-right issues” is doomed to failure. People on the right who want to discuss taboo topics like the connection between race and IQ must instead “form their own networks of self-examination and self-accreditation.”

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

The “Anons,” as they are called, create a self-reinforcing world for the discussion of extreme ideas that is largely impervious to mainstream efforts to expose and shaming them. This community uses offensive language as an ideological weapon, deliberately using slurs to break the boundaries of public discussion of far-right ideas.

“They only use these words because they’re not allowed to,” Keeperman says in the podcast. “They want to demystify this language and take away its ability to control what people say and how they say it.”

For this reason, he shrugs off the Guardian’s criticism that he uses the “F” swear word and similar offensive words.

“I don’t regret using that language, and I don’t apologize for it,” he says. “When you speak online in these discourse communities, you use that kind of language. And that’s OK – I actually think it’s a good thing.”

This strategy of crossing boundaries seems to have worked: Keeperman has published under the nickname “L0m3z” in numerous right-wing publications, which is clear evidence that the kind of vicious language regularly used on his account is no longer a reason for disqualification even in relatively respected conservative media such as First Things magazine.

The combined work of high-profile and unconventional public relations has helped Keeperman weather the storm that arose after his exposure by the Guardian. By cultivating key ideological allies who he says have “one foot in the credible institutional world,” Keeperman can count on elite defenders to ensure that his performative online cruelty has no real professional consequences. In the podcast, Keeperman names Chris Rufo – one of the right’s most prominent activists – as one such ally.

Trump’s former top strategist (who is currently in federal prison) Steve Bannon is another such ally. After the Guardian’s revelation, Bannon hosted Keeperman on his podcast and vowed to defend him: “We will stand behind you, and others will stand behind you,” Bannon said.

I don’t want to overstate Keeperman’s personal influence. Passage Press is a relatively small publisher; L0m3z’s 85,000 followers on X are large, but not gigantic.

But his interview with Khan is notable for laying out, in unusually blunt language, how a much larger network of influence works. He describes bluntly how abstruse, highbrow publishing goes hand in hand with online shitposting to bring radical ideas into the mainstream; he also shows how figures in the conservative mainstream provide cover for this kind of work.

In the podcast, Keeperman doesn’t describe in detail what his ideal America would look like. But he is clear about one thing: women have gained too much power in universities and other cultural institutions.

“If you’re an honest observer and you look at how these institutions are run with this kind of female superstructure, you very quickly come to the conclusion that this is not good,” he says. “I think we just need to be honest, say it out loud and then make corrections.”