Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)
speaker
140 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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, it's a good question when that might have happened. There certainly was a shift. But what's probably happening here is just the same old cycle of leftist excess that we've seen periodically over the course of American history, at least going back, to Second World War and probably even before that, there's a kind of decade of sort of leftism that takes hold, creates a kind of counterculture.
There's a period of pushback. And we saw this, like, for example, with the original neocons in the 70s. We see the cycle then play out again in the 90s with political correctness, another basically 10-year cycle. And then all we're just seeing is this same pattern emerge in the mid-2010s. I identify 2014 as this inflection point.
That was the year of Michael Brown and Ferguson and the kind of rise of BLM. It's also this interesting period where the Academy, at least, and I think probably this is happening within... newspapers and media is coming out of this interesting transition into the digital age and out of the recession. And there's like new incentives kind of driving the content.
And what happens there is that a bunch of conservatives and especially sort of younger conservatives who are frozen out of the conservative movement are frozen out of mainstream politics, are frozen out of
You know, the kinds of professions where they might have a platform to express new ideas that might regenerate conservatism, go online and go underground and start developing a unique and sort of native style of discourse all our own.
And as that cycle of progressivism just naturally exhausts itself, which it always does, and it takes new form each time, but it kind of always follows the same plot. What we're seeing now is the emergence of this conservative ideology. You know, some people counter elite or counter cultural force simply emerging in place of where the progressives have vacated.
And, you know, we could come up with all sorts of likes.
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.
Oh, yeah. No, that's absolutely right. I think you hit the primary people, the primary figures, and you're capturing what the sort of zeitgeist is here, for lack of a better term. And it's still sort of being developed. And I'd be lying to you if I said that I had some intentional project here or some intentional aesthetic that I was trying to cultivate with this. But
So the idea is that the future is discovered. OK, we're not going to be able to predict ahead of time what this new sort of culture will look like. It is throwing these ingredients out there based on a kind of shared understanding at the highest level of abstraction, some kind of alignment that at least for now is Is defined in opposition of both the left.
OK, and like wokeness, which is easy, but it's also defined in some sense in opposition to the conservatism that has come before. Not because it's antagonistic towards that kind of conservatism per se, but that that kind of conservatism is. Right.
And so, you know, and this is a lot of the frustration that people have had with the right is any time anyone on the conservative side goes to make some kind of art or do culture. It's just bad. And the left is right about this. You know, there's been, at least for my lifetime, this critique that the right can't do art, that the right can't do culture.
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.
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