I forget who said that, but it’s pretty sensible wisdom. If you’re going to take someone out, especially someone important, take them out. At the very least, don’t do something that will make your target stronger, rather than weaker. That would just be stupid, wouldn’t it?
Well, that’s exactly what The Guardian did last week when it published a long denunciation of my good friend Jonathan Keeperman, a.k.a. L0m3z, a fellow anonymous Twitter personality and founder of the publishing company Passage Press.
The charges levelled against John, over the course of a forensic examination of his life and work, were serious. He’s successful in multiple career dimensions. He has a loving family. Perhaps most shockingly of all, The Guardian’s Jason Wilson told us Jonathan Keeperman is handsome and athletic.
How could a man ever recover from such a public battering? Next you’re going to tell me he’s mythically well-endowed! Imagine that!
For those of us who know John, and have studied his rugged features and watched him run his fingers through his nice hair during a conference call, it was pretty clear that the hitpiece, which had been anticipated for some time, was not going to be your standard journalistic mugging. We even warned as much. “A major legacy media institution has been threatening to dox a pseudonymous Twitter account for months,” tweeted Steve Sailer at the beginning of the month. “The funny thing is that the man behind the pseudonym isn't a 400 pound basement dweller, but is charismatic, articulate, athletic, a snappy dresser, and movie star handsome.”
Of course, John is a right-wing publisher and has verboten views about DEI and political correctness and he was a naughty boy during the pandemic and refused to go along with the medical tyranny, all of which is more than enough to convict him in the eyes of a certain kind of liberal—the kind that reads The Guardian—but, even so, it’s really not clear what that loathsome rag was actually trying to get out of doxxing him.
I mean, where’s the public interest in telling the world any of this stuff? There are handsome right-wing dudes everywhere, many of whom are also successful and have beautiful wives and lovely children. This isn’t news. Science even tells us that attractive people are more likely to be right-wingers, as I noted a few weeks ago. You might as well report on how ugly and spiteful leftists are.
And it’s not as if the revelations are going to lead to Jonathan Keeperman being “cancelled” in any recognisable sense either, which is what so many hitpieces against right-wingers aim to do. John’s his own employer, with his own successful business. None of Passage Press’s customers are going to stop buying their books now they know the owner isn’t just based, he’s handsome and based. A literal Chad. I’m told sales went through the roof in the days after the hitpiece dropped.
What the hell is going on here?
I think I know. Look at the man who wrote the piece, Jason Wilson.
First of all, actually look at him. Just take a moment to look at his face. A face for radio, as they say. I’m sure his mother loves him, at least.
Now, Jason Wilson lives in Portland, Oregon, and like many of Portland’s ugly, failed academics—he has a useless PhD on video games—Jason is involved with Antifa. Although he likes to maintain the pretence that he is in fact a serious journalist bound by a code of integrity and professionalism, it doesn’t take long, observing his behaviour, to see that just isn’t the case, as a 2019 piece in Quillette makes very clear. Actions speak louder than words.
But the words speak pretty loud too. Occasionally, in his writing, the mask slips and Wilson states, quite openly, that he supports all of the well-established methods of his friends in the black bloc, from doxxing, deplatforming, stalking and harassment, to open violence of the kind that convulsed America in 2020 during the Summer of Floyd.
It’s hard to resist the conclusion that Wilson was specifically chosen to write the article about Jonathan Keeperman because of who he is and what he represents: the threat of actual radical-leftist violence. This isn’t about making John look bad or depriving him of income, as we’ve established. It’s about making him afraid, afraid that Jason’s nasty friends are going to come for him or maybe even his family.
How else are we to interpret the inclusion in Wilson’s piece of photographs from Jonathan Keeperman’s wedding, or details about his father’s death? None of this “evidence” was necessary to establish who L0m3z really is. But it would make John uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.
It’s a threat, plain and simple.
And it’s a threat published by a national—no, an international—newspaper.
This isn’t some isolated phenomenon, confined to the occasional anonymous Twitter account or publisher of spicy books who gets on the wrong side of a journalist with a chip on his shoulder that would shame Quasimodo. Look at what happened in Slovakia just a few days ago, when a 70-year-old far-left activist attempted to assassinate the Prime Minister, Robert Fico. Members of the government were quick to point the finger of blame at the nation’s liberal media for creating a febrile atmosphere and “whipping up hatred.”
“You have made us all targets,” said Ľuboš Blaha, the deputy speaker of the Slovak parliament, during a press conference. “You have spread a haunting hatred for years. You hated that people elected us so much that you went after us like wild animals. These are the fruits of your labor. The prime minister is fighting for his life because of you.”
Another minister said that, because of constant “attacks and expressions of hatred” from the media, Slovakia is “standing of the threshold of civil war.”
Remarkably, newspapers and television media outside Slovakia thought it good and proper to suggest the assassination attempt was legitimate, to be expected, because Fico is a populist who wants the war in Ukraine to come to an end. There was no condemnation, not even feigned neutrality. Britain’s Sky News broadcast a particularly reprehensible “breaking news” segment on the attack in which a reporter stated, quite baldly, that since Fico is a “divisive” populist, it wasn’t “surprising that this sort of event [the attempted assassination] might take place.” “He’s become very pro-Russian and one wonders why and how, but maybe that’s his conviction,” the reporter mused.
We’ve heard this all before. Russian collusion. The populist threat. Extraordinary measures for an extraordinary time. It’s the Brutus Option again. If you didn’t read my piece on the way the leftist media and deep state are openly suggesting that the only way to stop Trump, like Caesar, may be to kill him, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Right now. It’s been going on for months, since it became clear that the Democrats have no alternative but to wheel out a shambling extra from Night of the Living Dead III as their candidate.
Back in December, in a piece in The Washington Post entitled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” Robert Kagan played the Caesar card for all it was worth. The piece even featured a graphic splicing the bottom half of Trump’s face onto a bust of the man who brought to an end the glorious 482-year reign of the Roman Republic.
This isn’t subtle imagery. That’s not the point.
Kagan is the husband of a certain Victoria Nuland, by the way. It might as well have been the deep state addressing the American people, and the world, directly.
Orders received.
I won’t mince my words. The mainstream liberal media now functions as ringleader and apologist for radical-leftist violence. The newspapers, the magazines, the television shows: they pick the targets, whether a Jonathan Keeperman or a Donald Trump, and they justify the violence. They only have to point their fingers—and hope the real crazies will do the rest.
