Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Thu, 1 May 2025
The Trump era is ushering in a new age of right wing counterculture, one defined by masculinity and transgression. In this episode of Interesting Times, Ross speaks with Jonathan Keeperman, the founder of Passage Press, about the influence of an edgy, reactionary, right-wing “vibe shift” on American politics and culture.2:09 - Jonathan Keeperman’s Lomez days5:25 - 2014: An inflection point in American culture?7:40 - The emergence of a “conservative counter elite”9:41 - The creation of a right wing counterweight to the dominant left12:32 - What makes something “conservative art”?15:18 - Are David Lynch films right wing art? Is Girls?18:11 - Is there such a thing as good left wing art?19:32 - Right wing counterculture’s obsession with “vitalism”22:56 - Longhouse culture: Is the “over feminization” of society making America weaker?27:55 - Is the longhouse argument just a “long male whine”?30:41 - Is right wing counterculture anti-Christian?35:48 - Trump as mythic hero43:31 - What is the function of racism in right wing counterculture?53:50 - Are racist means transgressive or just racist?1:05:43 - Will the rightward vibe shift show up in pop culture?1:07:37 - Why every high school senior should read “Moby Dick” and watch “No Country for Old Men”(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.) Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Who are the speakers and what is the podcast about?
Hey, how are you? Hey, Ross. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. What an amazing head of hair you have. This is great. Thank you. Thank you. You look fantastic. You look vital, one might say. Thank you. This is a very important part of the discourse on the online, right? Well, we're going to get into that. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.
Chapter 2: What is the 'right-wing counterculture' and when did it emerge?
There's been a lot of talk about a vibe shift since Donald Trump's election and return to office. A change not just in American politics, but in American culture. A sense that right-wing personalities are suddenly driving cultural discourse. And one way I've been thinking about this is in terms of a phrase that is traditionally applied to the left. And that phrase is counterculture.
I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture. A edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo. And so I thought one way to talk about that counterculture was to invite someone who I see — we'll see if he disagrees — as one of its representatives. And that's you, Jonathan.
So, Jonathan Kieperman, welcome to Interesting Times. Ross, it is great to be here. We've known each other for a while online, of course. Purely as digital entities, yes.
Well, you know, I'm seeing your face across from me on the screen, and I'm reminded of watching Blogging Heads, like, from, you know, 10, maybe even 15 years ago. So, we've come a long way since Blogging Heads.
That's a deep cut. So that shows just how far back your online experience really goes to the days when I had more hair and it was me and other junior varsity pundits arguing on the internet. But I think, and you can correct me about this, I think the first time that we actually seriously interacted was... Correct. Correct. And at that point, right, you had a dual identity.
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Chapter 3: What distinguishes Passage Press and the new conservative counter elite?
As Jonathan Kieperman, you were still, right, a lecturer in English at UC Irvine? Correct. That's right. And then you were Lómez, a right-wing anon is the term that people use. That's right. Who wrote pseudonymously online. So that was 2020. And then in 2022... you founded a right-wing publishing house called Passage Press.
And that, I would say, raised your profile pretty dramatically to the point where you were important enough to have your real name exposed by a reporter for The Guardian. Correct. In 2024. And then by January of 2025, just recently, you were notable enough to host one of the big inaugural balls, which was called the Coronation Ball. So... Did I miss anything?
How is that for an account of your trajectory?
Those are the highlights. That all tracks and covers ground well enough for us to get started on this conversation. But, you know, I do want to point out that in 2020, when we first were having this dialogue and debate over the election, you also had something of a pseudonym. And, you know, I was arguing as much with Ross Douthat as I was Italics Ross.
And Italics Ross, you had written at least one column, maybe two. in which you sort of made the case for why Trump might be a superior choice to lead the country despite, you know, the sort of the amount of chaos that we'd have to endure under his leadership.
And I was trying, if I remember the whole episode correctly, to sort of get italics Ross closer to the surface of, you know, the real Ross, the underlying Ross. So we all are trafficking in certain kinds of multi identities, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, I think so. Those were columns that I wrote where I essentially deliberately cultivated a kind of split personality and drew up out of my union subconscious a version of myself that was that would be pro-Trump, right? So I was never for Trump. I was part of never Trump, whatever that may have been way back in the past.
And I retained a basic view that it was a mistake for conservatives to sort of lash themselves to the Trump phenomenon. And so for me, it was like Italics Ross was not the true Ross lurking below the surface. That wasn't how I thought about it. But I thought about it as, you know, a set of ideas that certainly existed in my consciousness.
and that were really useful for understanding sort of where American culture was, why people supported Trump, and that New York Times readers needed to engage with.
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Chapter 4: Why has conservative art historically struggled and what defines right-wing art today?
You publish writing by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian, H.P. Lovecraft, but someone like Curtis Yarvin, who is an example of an author you've published, right?
Curtis Yarvin thinks that the United States should become a kind of based monarchy run by some kind of Silicon Valley-esque chief executive with a dissolution and revolution of the order of government in Washington, D.C.
Nick Land is another example of sort of subterranean far-right intellectuals who would not have fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute, who would not operate in mainstream conservative or sort of centrist or center-right circles. So tell me about that stuff.
OK, so, yes. So what what are we trying to do? So we're trying to revive what is a genuine right wing cultural and ideological. I hate the word movement because it's it's not quite that. But but a right wing that can form an enduring and meaningful counterweight to.
A dominant left and a dominant sort of progressive march that we've seen taking place over the course of, let's just say, the post-war period, certainly from, you know, the 90s and the end of the Cold War up until now. And the premise there is. is that the conservatism that came before, I was recently looking at a picture online of a book called Young Guns featuring Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor.
I am familiar with this cover. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. Yeah, Kevin McCarthy. Okay, so that's the image. of the sort of failed conservative movement that what this new set of figures and cultural texts are trying to replace.
So let's try and get into what is an authentic cultural right. To me, Passage Press and the work you're doing is clearly linked to a bunch of different groups. So you have the sort of Silicon Valley right of someone like Yarvin. Peter Thiel is obviously often invoked as sort of a godfather in that zone.
There is the Red Scare podcast, right, and the so-called Dime Square scene in New York, which is basically... And again, for listeners who think this is a contradiction in terms, it's basically right wing hipsters. Yeah. Then you have the Nietzschean former graduate student turned online essayist and influencer Bronze Age pervert. Right.
Who has received, you know, interesting profiles in mainstream publication. So those would be examples that I would see. But who do you see as your allies and fellow travelers in the cultural project?
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Chapter 5: Can films like 'No Country for Old Men' and shows like 'Girls' be considered right-wing art?
It's not it's not historically true, but at least right in the last 30, 40 years. OK, so it's I think partly it's fear of the unknown. It's a lack of tolerance for artistic. license and the messiness and chaos of what is entailed by the creative process.
And, you know, it's just the case that if you are going to embark on a new cultural project, you have to have some amount of of taste for offense and. Okay, I'll say this. There's probably three aspects to why conservative art is bad or has been bad. And this is reductive, of course, but this might help sort of frame things. It's moralistic. Okay, it's much too moralistic. It's didactic.
It's always trying to tell you a self-consciously conservative message. It's overly sentimental. And then there's also this nostalgia thing. It's always looking backwards. And conservative art is always looking to the past because it's familiar. It's something that's already been established. It's something for which they already know what they're supposed to like, what's good and what's not good.
So there's no risk in trying anything new. And then the third thing I'll say here is that it's grievance-oriented. And this comes in two forms. It's either we're owning the libs or here's a story about all of the ways the libs are making our lives unbearable.
Well, I want to make this just a tiny bit more concrete and say from any period, not the last 20 years, any period in American life, modern Western history, give me an example of something you consider successful right-wing art that doesn't fall into the traps you've described.
Sure. No country for old men as an example. But but it's not self-consciously right wing. Right. Right. Absolutely. You know, the Coen brothers would call themselves on the right. And I don't even know if Cormac McCarthy would who wrote the book it's based on. But to my mind, it is precisely right wing art or, you know, David Lynch.
Pretty much everything David Lynch touches, I think, has a certain kind of right wing coding to it. Certainly his major works.
What is the coding? What makes, you know, to a listener for whom it seems absurd to call No Country for Old Men right-wing, what makes that right-wing to you?
You know, okay, because I like it, it's good, and therefore I want it to share my sort of political preferences. But beyond that, you know, and this is where there would be some points of disagreement. By the way, I'd also call something like Girls, the TV show Girls, is a right-wing... Oh, yeah. Well, well, that now you're just pandering to me because that was my that was my view.
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Chapter 6: What is vitalism and how does it relate to right-wing counterculture?
All right. So then so then we might share the premise here that what constitutes, quote unquote, right wing art, which is, by the way, some labeling we're grafting onto this thing after the fact. And so it's actually like a very flimsy kind of labeling. But
what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art.
But isn't that then a little circular? Then you're saying all great art is somehow right wing. Like to me, for instance, I feel like, you know, a TV show that I've enjoyed is Andor. It's one of the few Star Wars shows that I've enjoyed. I see that as kind of left wing art. It's a show that uses the background of...
you know, the empire in the Star Wars universe to tell a story about sort of, you know, punishing militaristic tyranny and resistance to it in ways that are sort of left coded, but also it's a really good show. Whereas I would look at at at girls and say, look, it is a in the end, it's a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city.
And so it is it is coming from a right wing perspective. So do you think there can there be great left wing art from your perspective?
I suppose. Yeah. But I'll say this. Like, I think it depends. You know, I understand your point that it's highly reductive to just simply say if I like it, therefore, it's right wing art or if it tells the truth. Tells the truth is what you're saying. But OK, so what I mean by that, though, is a point of clarification is there are certain at least modern left wing premises that.
that support their worldview and their political agenda that I think are belied by someone telling the truth about the world. And here's an example of this. The left sort of takes as a foundational principle of its politics, the idea of equality.
that there's a kind of flattening of people and that through carefully managed social engineering, we can produce a society that either levels out any kind of natural hierarchy
or produce a system that somehow can wrangle these natural, almost supernatural sort of entropic forces that, you know, are constantly creating chaos and constantly requiring our maintenance and management and authority to deal with.
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Chapter 7: What is the 'Longhouse culture' and how does it affect masculinity and society?
So that's what I was looking for.
Yes. So this takes us into one of the phrases that I think gets used to describe what the counterculture is up to. And I know you're ambivalent about this phrase, but it's the idea that gets called vitalism, right?
Which is this term that means, let's say, a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as, just the way you described, as leveling forces, enemies of human greatness. And it gets connected to Friedrich Nietzsche, You know, I think there's an Ayn Rand who's, you know, a very popular novelist on the American right.
Whatever you make of her actual books is in some sense in this school. But that to me seems like one common thread, including in the books that you yourself have published. Like what links the white Russian general standing athwart the Bolsheviks? to the Hardy Boys, to Conan the Barbarian. It is some kind of idea of human greatness beset by mediocrity and so on. What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think that's right. I wouldn't contest that basic summary I don't want to overdo like how we're thinking about this word vitality for the purposes of this conversation. It's enough to say it's something like, you know, a thymus, OK, spiritedness, a self-will, a liveness or or a.
Also, I want to say that there's a certain kind of eroticism to vitality that's very important and has often been missing from sort of the conservative view of the world. And I think that's a mistake. I think you're leaving something very important on the table by not –
grappling with this notion of eroticism and what that means and why it might be valuable, especially, and here's the premise we're starting from. And I think, Ross, we share this view that we're reaching this phase, whether it's cyclical or there's sort of this longer term linear path of kind of civilizational exhaustion, decay, decadence. That's a word I know you've used a lot.
And this all requires rebirth. And the process of rebirth is not gentle. It can be violent and difficult. So I would say that vitality serves these two basic functions right now and why it's valuable for us to take on board. One, it attracts young people. Young people, I think men in particular, women too, though, are naturally attracted to this sort of notion of vitality.
They see it, they know it, and they want to be around it. The right has failed for a long time to attract young people. This is finally changing over the last few years. It's also... a way of overcoming a kind of defeatism of this sort of idea that things are past the point of saving, that we can't do anything, that all there is left for us in the 21st century is to, on the one hand, merely manage
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Chapter 8: Is the 'Longhouse' argument just a complaint about changing gender roles?
Yeah. So this this comes from Bronze Age pervert, Bronze Age mindset, which is one of the great texts of the 21st century. And I encourage all the New York Times listeners to read it. It's very important if you actually want to understand this stuff.
I agree.
So he talks about the longhouse and he's got his own take on it. I borrowed the term and actually why I think the term is so valuable is because it is a kind of empty signifier. I don't mean to tie it to this sort of historical context. It's an evocative image. It's this big, long, okay, literal house that we're all stuck inside of. And you're constrained in how you can behave, how you can act.
And I think it's hostile towards men in particular having a kind of freedom of assembly with one another.
So concrete examples would be the crusade against Greek life at universities, right? You would see as... Longhouse in action and corporate H.R. departments and sensitivity trainings. Longhouse in action. Right.
Well, and that can probably be the most sort of salient example of this, precisely because it's where you would at least expect this kind of long housed cultural framing to take root is the military. And actually, Pete Hegg says has talked about this explicitly, is this integration of women into the military? We don't need to get into the politics of that.
Suffice to say, though, that these traditionally male spaces, you know, sort of our martial culture has been now open to women. And this introduces new norms. It just has to in order for it to work. And this is going to necessarily sort of change and I would argue degrade the culture of masculinity that preceded it.
two objections or responses. The second one will be more specific to my own worldview. But the first one I think is a more general one that many listeners would have. They would say, look, What has actually happened in the last 25 years in the longhouse era, as you describe it, is guess what? We removed restrictions on women's advancement and they started out competing men.
They're not longhousing men. They're just getting the promotions that men used to get and, you know, succeeding in corporate America where men used to succeed. And yes, there are specific cases like the military where physical differences between men and women matter and, you know, maybe...
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Chapter 9: How does right-wing counterculture view Christianity and religion?
Yeah, I mean, my belief is that there's actual tremendous amount of synchronicity between these two sort of modes of operating in the world. And it's not just my belief. You know, my favorite author and actually passage press comes from the book Forest Passage by Ernst Junger. There's a great book of letters between Junger and Martin Heidegger.
And Junger's view actually is that none of this, this kind of vitalism, none of this is sustainable without religion and actually Christianity specifically.
And that our idea of poetics and sort of the inscrutable forces of the universe against which our individual will is being tested at all times and which a kind of vitalist view of the world is insisting we're constantly pushing against all has to be sort of live inside of this framework of Christianity. So I don't think these things are incompatible.
But so younger, if I'm remembering his trajectory correctly. Yeah, he was part he's part of the German right. He's not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich and he's not someone who Listeners should think of as like Heidegger, who just sort of goes who goes Nazi in that way. But he remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period.
And my sense of him is that he he did have that sort of a view of Christianity, as you described, to some degree. But it was sort of Christianity as a kind of useful force for. for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. And then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age, right?
So it's like you get to be a vitalist for many decades, and then at the end, you're like, all right, all right, time to succumb to full Christianity. And it just seems to me that even in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian, like Bronze Age perverts, like the Nazis, right? And then there are people who want to put it to use.
But I'm a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way.
Yeah. I mean, your concern is that it's merely being sort of like cynically operationalized.
well. All right, let's pause there. And when we come back, we'll talk about Donald Trump's role in all of this. So let's talk now about Donald Trump. Trump starts as a cultural figure. Anyone who's old enough to remember the Trump who existed before he became a politician remembers the tabloid fixture, the reality TV star, the self-creator whose life is in a
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