The Far Right’s New ‘Badge of Honor’
7 min read
The far-right publisher known as “Lomez” kept his identity private, and for good reason. His company, Passage Publishing, has printed books from a German nationalist, anti-democracy monarchists, and white supremacists promoting “human biodiversity.” On X, where he has more than 70,000 followers, Lomez has suggested that journalists be killed, praised Kyle Rittenhouse, and tweeted a homophobic slur on at least one occasion.
Last month, The Guardian revealed his true identity: Jonathan Keeperman, a former lecturer at UC Irvine. This made Keeperman very upset. On X, he called the behavior of Jason Wilson, who wrote the Guardian story, “obsessive” and “delusional.” “They want to harass [me], they want to discredit our ideas,” he said during an appearance on a conservative podcast. Lomez’s fans and followers joined in the outrage. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X that Wilson is “a human worm,” adding, “Even the mafia has a greater sense of decency.” A conservative Substack author wrote that the Lomez’s identity reveal would bring the “threat of violence” from “antifa goons.”
When information that someone wants to keep private is aired to the entirety of the internet, even when that person has been posting their ideas in public, they tend to get mad. A similar script plays out every time someone is “doxxed”: A name is revealed, then outrage ensues. Sometimes, though, doxxing can pose real harm to vulnerable people. LGBTQ individuals have been driven to suicide by particularly vicious doxxing campaigns. Doxxed addresses have led to hoax 911 calls that prompted SWAT teams to raid victims’ homes. The far right has manipulated doxxing to discredit investigations of influencers who peddle violent and discriminatory ideologies in public. Extremists flip the conversation away from their own bigotry into one about how they were wronged. The right screams foul.
In 2022, when The Washington Post revealed that the person running the Libs of TikTok account was Chaya Raichik, a real-estate salesperson, even Senator J. D. Vance tweeted his dismay. This March, when the anti-Semitic internet cartoonist StoneToss was identified, his supporters rallied around him, and X announced that it would change its policies. Accounts that reveal others’ identities are now subject to a suspension from the platform.
In the Keeperman saga, however, outrage wasn’t the whole story. Between the flurries of angry social-media posts, Lomez whipsawed to an entirely different emotional register: satisfaction. An hour after venting his frustration about getting doxxed, Lomez, who did not respond to a request for an interview, let his followers know that they could use the code “Wilson” for a discount on Passage Publishing books. He seemed to relish the “badge of honor” of getting doxxed, as he said during the podcast appearance. “Breaking,” he posted: “the Guardian has exposed a family man with a loving wife and many beautiful children, who played college basketball, worked for Google, traveled the world, then had a 10-year career in academia before starting a highly successful publishing company. I’m shook.”
In this reaction, too, Lomez’s supporters followed suit. Raw Egg Nationalist, another influential far-right pseudonymous account, reposted a meme of a woman asking her husband, “Why can’t you get doxxed the way Lomez did?” Another account, referencing the right-wing online community sometimes called “Frogtwitter,” posted, “Every time an anon frog is doxxed it’s like: * PhD * hot * 6’5″ * was backup qb for the Broncos * owns 19% of Wyoming.”
Lomez’s split response to the identity reveal reflects a subtle shift that has been playing out in recent years among the many anonymous far-right influencers and their followers. After Donald Trump’s election and the corresponding surge of the alt-right, anonymous figures largely had one perspective on anonymity: Preserve it at all costs. But that view is getting more complicated. Far-right posters now simultaneously want two incompatible things: to be anonymous and not.
The far right’s fear of getting doxxed emerged for a reason. Being and staying anonymous—both in physical spaces, with masks, and online—became an important way to continue to push out extremist ideas without social or professional repercussions. In 2017, identifiable participants of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were excised from polite society; many marchers lost their jobs and were ostracized in their communities. A similar thing happened after the January 6 insurrection, with many participants facing serious legal consequences (including in some cases prison time) for their actions. To be known as a racist still makes your life harder. You might lose contact with friends and family. By revealing your politics, you open yourself up to unknown repercussions. By staying anonymous, you know that there won’t be any.
More than before, however, visibility has upsides. Especially for anonymous accounts (or “anons”) with a large following, the opportunities and credibility that follow public identification can counterbalance the costs of being known. At the outset of an anon’s journey, their primary career and social life is tethered to their actual identity, not an anonymous social-media feed where they can freely post heinous things. If an anon account grows and starts to garner its own influence, social connections, and professional opportunities, it can become even more valuable than its user’s primary identity. At some point, the downsides of revealing your real name aren’t as big of a deal. Risks still exist, but they’re now offset by opportunities. With the attention that a big reveal brings, you can sell subscriptions to a newsletter or podcast. You may be able to land a book deal, or even a lucrative job in the right-wing media ecosystem.
This trajectory has played out before. The X user known as “Based Beff Jezos” garnered lots of followers by boosting effective accelerationism, an ideology committed to advancing technology at all costs that was born out of far-right ideas. He managed to stay anonymous until December, when Forbes revealed his identity as Guillaume Verdon, a former engineer at Google. He was angry at first, and appears to still feel that way, but also occasionally basks in having been made “more powerful.” Based Beff Jezos earned a very public endorsement from the tech billionaire Marc Andreessen. Guillaume Verdon never did.
Taking off the mask, voluntarily or not, may be advantageous in other ways. “Operating under real names can shift the narrative from shadowy figures to accountable voices, potentially legitimising their perspectives for broader audiences,” the writer Oliver Bateman argued in UnHerd, while writing about The Guardian revealing Lomez’s identity. Bateman points out that while citing the far-right influencer “Bronze Age Pervert” can sound absurd and too edgy for mainstream Republican politicians and their staffers, citing and praising Costin Alamariu doesn’t run the same risk.
It’s not just that getting doxxed comes with upside for some far-right accounts. The costs have also lessened. Some fringe ideas, such as the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and effective accelerationism, no longer register as novel or shocking, having been embraced by politicians and normalized online. Less than two weeks after Based Beff Jezos was identified, the AI start-up he founded published a press release announcing that it closed a $14 million seed-funding round featuring prominent investors and venture-capital firms.
The internet has also changed in a way that insulates the far right from repercussions. Discord chat servers, Patreon groups, Telegram channels, Substack newsletters, and the like let anonymous influencers dodge moderation by major platforms. These communities can help influencers insulate themselves from the consequences of being “canceled” in the mainstream. Bronze Age Pervert publishes his podcast on Gumroad, a subscription site similar to Patreon. Libs of TikTok has amassed more than 127,000 Substack followers.
Far-right influencers have been observing this shift themselves. In an episode of his podcast unpacking Keeperman’s identity reveal, Christopher Rufo—the same conservative activist who called the Guardian author “a human worm”—said that outing an anonymous right-wing account “seems to not have the same effect” as it used to. Eoin Lenhihan, a right-wing writer and guest on the episode, agreed: “There is a much stronger conservative ecosystem out there to deal with this kind of a thing right now.” Influencers such as Lomez with a real audience can flip their political posting into a business where getting doxxed is “a part of the reward structure,” Rufo noted. In the three days after the Guardian story published, Lomez gained almost 20,000 new X followers, a significant increase from the several dozen a day he usually accrues.
In a response screed to the Guardian saga in the conservative publication Human Events, Raw Egg Nationalist, who remains undoxxed, exhibited this tension himself, writing, “At the very least, don’t do something that will make your target stronger, rather than weaker.” But then, a few paragraphs down, he claimed that in revealing Lomez’s identity, The Guardian made an intentional “threat” to his and his family’s safety. In getting doxxed, Keeperman somehow became both more powerful and more vulnerable.
Freud famously hypothesized that humans have a “death drive”—an innate impulse to engage in aggressive, self-destructive, and even deadly behaviors—but also that this was in tension with humanity’s other impulses, to live and reproduce. Something analogous is happening with anonymous posters. Call it a dox drive. It’s a dynamic that will probably won’t go away anytime soon. Until there’s no social and professional risk to espousing bigotry, people who are not already making their primary income from the far right will find it expedient to don internet alter egos. Giving up a secret identity can be hard, even if that results in earning money. It’s enticing to post terrible things with almost no consequences. But it’s also pretty enticing to be your true self all the time.
