It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The exterior of the Federal Reserve Board building in Washington on March 13, 2023. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has introduced legislation to end the Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank responsible for managing the country’s financial and banking system.
The bill titled the “Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act” or “End the Fed” seeks to abolish the Federal Reserve System by dismantling its board of governors and the Federal Reserve banks. The legislation also aims to repeal the Federal Reserve Act, which created the Federal Reserve System in 1913.
In introducing the bill, Mr. Massie criticized the Fed’s monetary policies for record-high inflation.
“Americans are suffering under crippling inflation, and the Federal Reserve is to blame,” Mr. Massie said in a statement on May 16. “During COVID, the Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars out of thin air and loaned it to the Treasury Department to enable unprecedented deficit spending. By monetizing the debt, the Federal Reserve devalued the dollar and enabled free money policies that caused the high inflation we see today.”
The Federal Reserve System, also known as the Fed, was initially founded in 1913 in response to banking panics at the time. Over the following century, its powers have expanded to include regulating and overseeing banks and maintaining financial system stability. The Fed’s major function is implementing U.S. monetary policy. According to the Fed, its primary objectives include maximizing employment, stabilizing prices, and moderating long-term interest rates.
Mr. Massie also blamed the Fed for colluding with the executive and legislative branches, as well as Wall Street, for the financial problems Americans are now facing.
“Monetizing debt is a closely coordinated effort between the White House, Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Congress, Big Banks, and Wall Street,” Mr. Massie said. “Through this process, retirees see their savings evaporate due to the actions of a central bank pursuing inflationary policies that benefit the wealthy and connected. If we really want to reduce inflation, the most effective policy is to end the Federal Reserve.”
If enacted, the bill will allow one year for the Fed to be shut down. In addition, the Federal Reserve Act will be repealed, and its assets and liabilities will be liquidated. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget will be responsible for the liquidation process.
The Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act was first introduced in 1999 by then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). The legislation was reintroduced every single year until his retirement in 2013.
The legislation’s cosponsors include Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (R-FLa.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), and 15 others.
Besides the “End the Fed” Act, Mr. Massie, a Libertarian who favors limited government and lower taxes and opposes high government spending, has also introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2023 to require a full audit of the Federal Reserve. The Fed Under Criticism
Since its creation, the Fed has faced increasing scrutiny and criticism over its controversial role in the U.S. economy.
The most notable critic of the Fed is late Nobel laureate and economist Milton Friedman, who on multiple occasions called for abolishing the Fed for its ineffective policies, saying “It’s done more harm than good.”
In one interview, Friedman said, “There is no institution in the U.S. that has such a high public standing and such a poor record of performance.”
Last year, E.J. Antoni and Peter St Onge, research fellows at The Heritage Foundation, published an article titled “Time To End the Fed and Its Mismanagement of Our Economy,” which lays out the argument for ending the Fed. According to the authors, “Every major economic downturn of the last 110 years bears the mark of the Federal Reserve. In fact, as long as the Fed has been around, it has swung the economy between inflation and recession. Yet Americans, surprisingly, have tolerated it.”
Argentine President Javier Milei, an economist, drew headlines last year with his promise during his presidential campaign to abolish the country’s central bank, calling it “the worst garbage that exists on this Earth” and “one of the greatest thieves in the history of mankind.”
“Central banks are divided in four categories,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg last year. “The bad ones, like the Federal Reserve; the very bad ones, like the ones in Latin America; the horribly bad ones; and the Central Bank of Argentina.”
Last year, Mohamed A. El-Erian, an economist and former CEO of investment management fund PIMCO, also criticized the Fed for its failures.
“The U.S. Federal Reserve’s growing list of policymaking, supervisory, and communications failures is becoming increasingly consequential not just for Americans but also for the rest of the world,” he wrote in an article for Project Syndicate. “The global economy’s single most important institution has lost its way.”
Much digital ink has been spilled since the hard-right Mises Caucus took over the Libertarian National Committee, the governing body of the United States’ third-largest political party. The Caucus removed the party’s longstanding support for abortion rights and opposition to bigotry from the platform. Mises Caucus leaders in State Parties have adopted anti-immigrant and anti-queer stances. Yet, this more open bigotry is not something recently injected into the libertarian bloodstream. It’s something that dates back to the time of the movement’s early days.
Rose Wilder Lane was the coauthor, with her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder, of the ever popular Little House on the Prairie books. Additionally, Lane is considered a “founding mother” of the American Libertarian movement, but she had unsavory associations with anti-Semitic, pro-fascist groups of the Right. Lane endorsed the publication Right, whose publisher, Willis Carto, went on to found and lead the virulently anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. For seven years she wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council newsletter. The Council not only defended Francoist Spain but its founder Merwin K. Hart also adopted Holocaust denial. While Lane was writing book reviews for Hart, he was warning of the “the international Jewish group which controls our foreign policy.” Lane was not a bigot, but she was willing to work with bigots in a reverse Popular Front against Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Robert Leferve, another libertarian pioneer, too made alliances with pro-fascists and anti-Semites in the early days of the libertarian movement. Leferve set up Rampart College, an unaccredited libertarian school which published the Rampart Journal. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes contributed to the Rampart Journal and his colleague James J. Martin headed the history department. Both men were nothing less than the founding fathers of American Holocaust denial.
For the Journal Barnes wrote that “the atrocities of the Allies in the same period were more numerous as to victims and were carried out for the most part by methods more brutal and painful than alleged extermination in gas ovens.” In a different issue Barnes mocked the “almost adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged.” Barnes’ views were already apparent in his writings before he wrote for the Rampart Journal. In a 1964 article for the American Mercury, Barnes termed the Holocaust a “Zionist Fraud” concocted by “the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers…” Today the Barnes Review, named in his honor, is one of the leading journals for Holocaust denial.
Unlike Barnes, James J. Martin kept his disbelief in the Holocaust and sympathy for fascism mostly under wraps for a long period. Nevertheless, they were bedrock parts of his worldview. He wrote to his mentor, Barnes, to ask “When is someone going to debunk this story of the 6,000,000 Jews murdered in the concentration camps?” An interview with libertarian publication Reason quoted Martin as saying “I don’t believe that the evidence of a planned extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe is holding up.” In his 1977 book The Saga of Hog Island, Martin referred to the “fables emanating from Buchenwald.” In the same book he calls the well-documented Nazi destruction of the Czech town of Lidice “probably the Allies’ most publicized propaganda stunt of the war.”
1976 was the high point of libertarian acceptance of Holocaust denial under the guise of “historical revisionism,” as seen in Reason’s special revisionism issue. One of the contributors to the issue was Austin J. App, a pro-German nationalist, not a libertarian. App’s activism went back to World War II. His FBI file places him at a rally where the mass murder of American prisoners of war by the Waffen-SS was defended. Later, he served as a member of the advisory board of the Neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance and authored The Six Million Swindle and A Straight Look at the Third Reich: How Right How Wrong. App’s article for Reason, “The Sudeten-German Tragedy” said the infamous Munich Agreement which handed over a portion of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis “was not appeasement, but belated justice…”
Gary North, another contributor, recommended The Myth of the Six Million as having “presented a solid case against the Establishment’s favorite horror story…” i.e. the Holocaust. North went on to be a legislative researcher for libertarian darling Ron Paul and later supported the establishment of a Christian theocracy in the United States. Percy L. Greaves endorsed the conspiracy theory that President Roosevelt allowed the Pearl Harbor attacks to happen in the issue. In 1958, Greaves was an initial board member of Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby and he joined the notorious Holocaust denial outfit the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). Greaves’s obituary in Reason lauded him as “a long-time advocate of freedom.” For some reason, there was no mention of his membership in Neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic organizations.
Several libertarian readers of Reason were unhappy with the magazine for publishing deniers like Martin and App and those libertarians made their displeasure known in letters to the editor. Reader Kevin Bjornsson pointed out that Martin and App had written several articles for the anti-Semitic American Mercury (One of those articles, reprinted in The Saga of Hog Island, offered a defense of Mussolini’s rule) but Martin responded that Bjornsson was engaging in “guilt-by association.” Another letter from Dr. Adam V. Reed attacked North for promoting the denialist tracts, warning that “History is ignored, or distorted, at one’s own peril.” North responded “I shall continue to recommend that those interested in revisionist questions read The Myth of the Six Million and Did Six Million Really Die?” In both cases, Reason gave the deniers the last word.
Samuel Edward Konkin III was one letter writer who adored the “revisionism” issue. He wrote that the issue “kept [him] up all night reading from cover to cover.” Konklin, publisher of the New Libertarian, and founder of the libertarian school of thought known as agorism, went on to join the editorial board of the IHR. Here, he linked up with James J. Martin, who had come aboard the Institute in 1979 and stayed for the rest of his life. L.A. Rollins, also a regular Reason contributor made his way to the IHR editorial board to write articles like “The Holocaust as Sacred Cow.”
Since the publication of Reason’s revisionism issue, libertarians have reacted to the association between libertarianism and Holocaust denial in varying ways. In Brian Doherty’s court history of the movement Radicals for Capitalism he notes that “movement magazines like Reason would devote respectful issues to [historical revisionism] in the mid-1970s.” Doherty’s book also mentions in a footnote that James J. Martin “shifted into questioning the veracity of standard anti-German atrocity stories, including the standard details of the Holocaust.” Doherty’s 2004 obituary of Martin mentions his turn towards Holocaust denial as well, but he unconvincingly makes the case that Martin’s Holocaust denial was an unfortunate late career turn, not, as demonstrated, a foundational part of his worldview. Jeff Riggenbach’s obituary for Antiwar adopts a similar framing.
Other libertarian outlets don’t even acknowledge their early heroes’ embrace of denialism. The Mises Institute, whose leader stated weeks before the Unite the Right Rally that “blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people,” is one such outlet. The Institute (similar to but distinct from the Mises Caucus) hosts works by Barnes and Martin with no acknowledgment of their sympathy for fascism or denial of the Holocaust. Reason has adopted a stridently defensive tack when asked about their infamous “revisionism” issue. After Mark Ames wrote an investigative piece dredging the issue up again, Reason editor Nick Gillespie wrote a justification under the title “Did Reason Really Publish a “Holocaust Denial ‘Special Issue’” in 1976? Of Course Not.” Gillespie protests too much. It may be true that the issue was not solely dedicated to Holocaust denial, but many of the contributors were prominent Holocaust deniers and some did advocate Holocaust denial in the issue.
Since the Mises Caucus takeover, it has become increasingly clear that there is less and less daylight between modern self-styled radicals for capitalism and the American far-right. A gay leader in the Libertarian National Committee resigned due to leaders in Mises Caucus complaining that the party should be more focused on lowering tax rates than the murder of trans women. Anti-semitic dog-whistles have proliferated such as referring to intraparty opponents as “rootless cosmopolitans.” State affiliates have fled the organization due to the hard right turn, with the Pennsylvania branch setting up the Liberal Party, the Massachusetts and New Mexico branches disaffiliating, and the Virginia chapter voting to dissolve itself.
At the upcoming Libertarian National Convention, announced speakers include conspiracy theorist and independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former-President Donald Trump. This suggests a continued openness to the far-right within the Party and where the leadership sees their audience. It recalls the “paleolibertarian” strategy of libertarian eminence grise Murray Rothbard, who saw Klansman and Neo-Nazi David Duke as a model to reach out to “right-wing populists.”
As we approach the likely rematch between Biden and Trump, it’s probable that those “double haters” who have an unfavorable view of both candidates and are looking for an alternative will glance at the Libertarian Party. They should keep the movement’s distasteful history in mind when they do so. The Party has become just another flavor of the same reaction that propelled Trump to office in the first place.
Revealed: US university lecturer behind far-right Twitter account and publishing house
Guardian investigation identifies Jonathan Keeperman, a former lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, as ‘Lomez’
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 identification is based on company and property records, source interviews and open-source online materials.
The reporting has revealed that Keeperman’s current status as a key player and influential tastemaker in a burgeoning proto-fascist movement came after years of involvement in far-right internet forums.
Much of that journey coincided with his time at one of the country’s most well-regarded writing programs: Keeperman first came to UCI as a master of fine arts (MFA) student, and was also a lecturer in the English department from 2013 to 2022, according to public records.
The emergence of Passage Press and other such publishers has been a key part of the development of a swathe of the current American far right, which is seeking to capture US institutions – or develop far-right equivalents – as part of a political and cultural war against what it sees as the dominance of a liberal “regime” in America.
In a June 2023 podcast interview, Keeperman characterized Passage Press and its literary prize as part of this effort to “build out alternative infrastructure, alternative institutions”.
The library on the UCI campus in 2022. Photograph: Paul Bersebach/Orange County Register via Getty Images
It is a fight wholeheartedly embraced by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican party, especially in their railing against “the deep state” and promises of retribution should Trump win the 2024 presidential election.
The Guardian repeatedly contacted Keeperman requesting comment on this reporting, at a personal Gmail address and a Passage Press address, and left a voicemail message at a telephone number that data brokers listed as belonging to Keeperman, but which carried a message identifying it as belonging to a member of his household.
Keeperman did not directly respond to these requests. However, hours after a request on 1 May, “Lomez” on X castigated “lying, libelous journalist-activists” and appeared to make veiled legal threats. Another detailed request was sent on 5 May, and just an hour later, Passage Press’s star writer posted about a “major legacy media outlet threatening to dox a pseudonymous Twitter account”.
Like many other far-right publishers, Passage’s list is bolstered by reprints of out-of-print or public-domain books by historical fascist and reactionary writers. These include books by radical German nationalist and militarist Ernst Jünger; Peter Kemp, who fought as a volunteer in Franco’s army during the Spanish civil war; and two counter-revolutionary Russian aristocrats, White Russian general Pyotr Wrangel and Prince Serge Obolensky.
A James McAdams, professor of international affairs at the University of Notre Dame, who has done extensive research on far-right thinkers and publishing houses, said such publishers operate “on the level of ideas – scary ideas – but it’s also about wanting to be recognized, and finally it’s about money”.
“This is a source of money,” McAdams continued. “The general public does not know about Ernst Jünger, but you can sell his books to the far right, and you can make money.”
Ernst Jünger, seen here in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, on 31 December 1996. Photograph: Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy
Passage Press differs from many others in its niche in offering new work by the contemporary far-right’s intellectual celebrities, and in curating in-person events and a far-right literary award.
The publisher also produces high-end limited editions of selected titles. The “patrician edition” of Noticing, a book by Sailer, for example, is “bound in genuine leather, gold-foil stamping” and “Smyth-sewn book block”, according to the website.
Though lavishly produced, the “patrician” offerings appear to have generated significant income for Passage. At the time of reporting, Passage had sold out its limited run of 500 patrician editions of Noticing at $395 apiece, according to the website. This equates to some $195,000 in revenue. An earlier patrician edition of winning entries in the 2021 Passage prize sold 250 editions at $400 apiece, according to the website, representing another $100,000 in revenue.
The publication of Noticing – also available as a $29.95 paperback – was spun out into a series of in-person events in Austin, Los Angeles, Miami and New York City, held in March, April and May.
Passage offered a $75 bundle comprising a copy of the book and a ticket to an in-person event, though the website warned prospective attendees: “Location details will be delivered via email. No photos or recordings of any kind will be permitted at these events.”
Buyers of the patrician edition could attend “salon events” in these cities for a $300 upcharge. These were advertised as “small, intimate spaces that include dinner, an open bar, and a unique conversational setting with Steve and special guests”. The website did not indicate how many salon tickets were available, but at the time of writing they had sold out.
Passage Press has also commenced publishing a print version of the hitherto online-only magazine Man’s World, which is helmed by the pseudonymous editor “Raw Egg Nationalist” (“REN”), a British writer who was described in left-right syncretist magazine Compact as “one of the brighter stars in a sprawling constellation of rightwing social-media influencers who exalt nature, tradition, and physical fitness”.
Pyotr Wrangel, commanding general in the Russian civil war, in 1920. Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty Images
REN, who has previously published cookbooks with white nationalist publisher Antelope Hill, batters his social media followers and Substack subscribers with dubious dietary and health information along with “anti-globalist” conspiracy theories. He came to wider prominence when he was featured in a 2022 documentary, The End of Men, produced by Tucker Carlson when Carlson still worked at Fox News.
“REN and Man’s World represents a paradigm case of how masculinity is being articulated at the heart of rightwing politics,” said Scott Burnett, an assistant professor of African studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University.
“There’s stuff in Man’s World that is fascist, sometimes bordering on neo-Nazi,” he added, but it is draped in “an ironic gauze”.
Currently, Passage is soliciting entries for the third annual Passage prize, an art and literature prize for rightwingers who feel “straight-jacketed by the increasingly hysterical and vicious gatekeepers of their institutional homes”.
‘L0m3z’ on Twitter
In previous coverage, Lomez and REN have been identified as prominent members of the so-called “new right”, a term that has gained currency as a description of a cluster of illiberal, anti-democratic, “counter-revolutionary” tendencies in rightwing politics in the US.
Lomez acquired early influence in the new right movement by means of the L0m3z account on X, which has 55,000 followers at the time of reporting.
Internet archives have preserved a range of the posts with which he attracted a large audience, but also suggest he has deleted many of these.
One of the account’s themes is an antipathy for racial justice protests, especially after the George Floyd protests in 2020.
Lomez also supported those who responded to protests with violence, posting at the end of Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial: “Rittenhouse is a hero. He is a symbol, in word and deed, and in his baseless persecution, of what is good and decent and courageous and the forces arrayed against those qualities. May a million Kyle Rittenhouses bloom.”
Anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments also have constituted a consistent theme on the account. In January 2020, he wrote he was “coming around to the idea that the most powerful and effective political argument against the left in 2020 is probably simple as: shut up fag.”
Kyle Rittenhouse testifies during his trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on 10 November 2021. Photograph: Reuters
Journalists have also been a favorite target of the account. A post reads: “the press are in fact the enemy. They are mewling midwit scum. Sniveling liars and desperate status junkies. My abiding contempt for them is only ever confirmed.”
A list of “policy proposals” begins with “lamppost the journos” – an apparent call for summary lynchings of members of the media.
As the Twitter account grew, Lomez increasingly engaged in chummy interactions with prominent far-right figures including self-described eugenicist Bo Winegard, but above all with culture warrior Christopher Rufo, with whom Lomez has had dozens of interactions.
The Guardian has reported in several stories in recent months on Rufo’s links with far-right media outlets, would-be “warlords” and proponents of scientific racism.
Rufo has characterized these stories on social media as illegitimate “guilt by association”.
The former MFA student in print
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”.
Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison last October for election interference over his dispatch of mass text messages in November 2016 urging Black recipients to “vote by text” instead of casting a legitimate vote, with the messages purporting to be sponsored by the Clinton campaign. Mackey is currently appealing that verdict.
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.
Christopher Rufo in Sarasota, Florida, on 25 January 2023. Photograph: Thomas Simonetti for the Washington Post via Getty Images
In the piece, “Lomez” proffered the Passage prize competition, then accepting submissions in its second iteration, as a way “to remedy this problem, to provide an arena for the competing visions that exit from the longhouse will require”.
But it was in launching the first Passage prize in late 2021 that Keeperman inadvertently offered crucial clues that tied him to the Lomez persona.
How the Guardian identified Keeperman
Keeperman appears to have made considerable efforts to limit his online footprint, thereby reducing the possibility that he would be linked to the Lomez persona. Keeperman has no discoverable profiles in his own name on social media, blogging or professional-networking sites.
The identification was made possible by unavoidable traces left in public records such as property deeds and public salary records, but also by the sequence of events that led up to the announcement of the first Passage prize.
According to Whois records, the domain passageprize.com was registered on 6 October 2021 via a domain name registrar who anonymized the domain’s true owner.
One day later, Passage Press LLC was registered in New Mexico. Filings name Jonathan Keeperman as the sole member of the LLC and online legal services company LegalZoom.com Inc as the organizer.
At that time, only one other company called Passage Press LLC existed in any US jurisdiction – that one was owned by a female freelance technical writer and editor in Colorado and had been established in 2014, and its website is now dormant.
The Keeperman-founded New Mexico company was dissolved in December 2023. Passage Press LLC was re-registered in Delaware on 9 May 2022. The Delaware registration only identifies a corporate services company as agent and director.
Although the New Mexico LLC registration was registered at a mailbox provider in Garden City, Idaho, another company that lists Keeperman as a member – Paradise Valley Partners – is registered at a Livingston, Montana, address. The property at that address is co-owned by Keeperman, according to Park county property records.
Less than a week after the 2021 domain and New Mexico company registrations, “Lomez” announced the Passage prize on his Twitter account. Snapshots preserved by internet-archiving services indicate that by at latest 14 October 2021, a webpage at passageprize.com was soliciting entries for the Passage prize, “a literature and arts contest” with “a $10,000 prize pool”.
The proximity in time of the domain registration, Lomez’s competition announcement and the company registration identifying Jonathan Keeperman as Passage Press’s sole member offer one line of evidence for the identification of Keeperman as Lomez.
Posts by “Lomez” on what is now X reveal crucial details that line up with Keeperman’s biography.
In January, he posted that he was the third child in his family, which matches details offered in public accounts, including a parent’s published biography.
That obituary says that Keeperman’s parent died on 1 October 2022. On 3 October 2022, a post by Lomez indicates that his father had died in the immediate past.
Also, a range of posts indicate that the person behind Lomez worked at a university, attended graduate school and spent extended time in an academic milieu.
A 20 September 2022 tweet indicates that “Lomez” has decided to resign from his job, blaming a “bio-statist ukase”.
The date coincides with the beginning of the University of California, Irvine’s 2022-2023 academic year. A personnel record obtained via records request from UCI indicates that Keeperman departed UCI at the end of that academic year, finishing in his then-100% remote position on 30 June 2023. The record gives the reason as “resign – moved out of area”.
The tweet referencing unwelcome decrees came weeks after UCI’s August 2022 policy changes that generally required staff to spend several days a week on campus, and tightened eligibility for wholly remote work and out-of-state remote work for UCI employees. In July 2022, UCI’s chancellor announced an extension of the university’s pandemic mask mandate through that school year.
As Lomez, the Montana-based Keeperman posted conspiracy-tinged tweets about masks and vaccines before and since the tweet indicating his departure from UCI.
This alignment of Twitter posts and biographical events in Keeperman’s life are another line of evidence for him being behind the “Lomez” persona.
UCI connections
Until his departure from UCI, Keeperman had been a composition teacher in the English department. California salary records published by Nevada Policy show Keeperman earning a UCI salary every year from 2013 to 2022, except for the pandemic year of 2020; the UCI personnel record indicates that he originally began working for the university in January 2009; his earliest rating on RateMyProfessors.com is from July 2010.
In 2015, a local media report from Santa Monica announcing a book reading by authors recently published in the Santa Monica Review, described him as one of two “recent grads of the UC Irvine creative writing MFA program”.
In 2016, Keeperman was mentioned by another southern California media outlet when it published a press release from the UCI College Republicans. The release was a response to the club’s suspension following their invitation of conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on to the campus.
Milo Yiannopoulos in Australia in 2017. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
The title of the planned Yiannopolous talk was “Social justice is cancer”, according to contemporaneous media reports. At that time, Yiannopoulos’s campus visits were attracting protests and counter-protests in the UK and the US.
The press release featured a supportive quote from Keeperman, in which he said: “Freedom of speech is an extraordinary right that requires extraordinary vigilance to uphold. We must do everything possible at our universities to allow for the exchange of all political ideas, even those that may shock and offend, and allow for rebuttal to those ideas through civil debate.”
No other UCI faculty were quoted in the release.
Keeperman was also involved in labor activism as a member of UCI’s American Federation of Teachers chapter, and spoke at several conferences about labor conditions for lecturers, who are not tenured.
A former colleague of Keeperman’s, who worked closely with him in such activism within the UC system, positively identified Keeperman’s voice from recordings of his many guest appearances on far-right podcasts.
An early persona: Mr Lomez
One of those podcast appearances as Lomez was an episode of the Carousel published on 10 May 2023. Host Isaac Simpson asked “Lomez” about his history online.
“I’m on my third [Twitter] account,” “Lomez” replied. “They’ve all been some version of Lomez. My, I mean, I’ve been posting in this Twitter space since about 2015-ish.”
He added: “I 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.”
On the question of his online history, “Lomez” concluded: “Actually, I ran a blog. I’m not going to talk about it too much because there’s potentially doxable material there, but I actually ran a blog at one point that … well, I’ve already said too much, so anyway, I’ll just stop there.”
An individual with the screen name “Mr Lomez” was a frequent commenter on Steve Sailer’s iSteve blog between 2012 and 2014. The archives of Sailer’s early blogging have since been transferred – along with comments – to the Unz Review, an aggregator of far-right content run by antisemitic software millionaire Ron Unz.
Mr Lomez posted criticisms of affirmative action in college admissions, commentary on the trial of George Zimmerman over his fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, and complaints about anti-immigrant parties being characterized as “far-right” in media coverage.
Mr Lomez also frequently flexed literary expertise, a deep knowledge of sports and a particularly intimate familiarity with college athletics.
In a post on 23 February 2013, Sailer was critical of the William Pereira-designed architecture at the UCI campus, with his post including a photograph of the Social Science Tower.
“Mr Lomez” commented: “My office is in that building. It’s as bad on the inside as it is on the out – claustrophobic and soulless. I feel like I’m in a rat maze.”
Keeperman maintained a separate blog under “Mr Lomez” in 2006 and 2007.
The Social Sciences Tower on the campus of the University of California Irvine in 2020. Photograph: Steve Cukrov/Alamy
The self-portrait – which includes a photo – that begins in the first post on that blog, made on 29 November 2006, appears to be of the same person depicted in the few other publicly available images of Keeperman, including one in a now-paywalled (but archived) article at the California Federation of Teachers website, and others in a third-party archive of his wedding photos, which link to the archive using Keeperman’s wife’s name on Facebook.
In comments on the blog, interlocutors address him as “Joey”. University of California, San Diego men’s basketball media guides indicate that a “Joey Keeperman” played for the team in 2001-02, when Keeperman was 19.
Local news and high-school basketball reporting from 2000 indicates that as a high-school senior, Keeperman was an accomplished football wide receiver and star basketball player for Campolindo high school in Moraga, in northern California. “Joey” and “Jonathan” are used interchangeably in the coverage.
Moraga is the same northern California town where Keeperman was raised, according to the 2022 parental obituary, and is also where Keeperman celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1996, according to a contemporaneous issue of the Jewish News of Northern California.
Posts on the blog detail his travels in south-east Asia, including destinations “Lomez” has mentioned on Twitter. Anotherpost mentions a sibling’s health problems, and that sibling’s first name matches that of one of Keeperman’s siblings.
In the last posts on the blog, there are hints of the racial thinking that “Mr Lomez” would later express on Sailer’s blog.
On 2 May 2007, in response to a New York Times report on a study that found racial bias in NBA refereeing, Keeperman made an argument characteristic of “human biodiversity” proponents: “I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that black players get called for more fouls because black players do in fact commit more fouls.”
Keeperman added: “Before calling me a racist, at least hear me out.”
