The Longhouse Comes for ‘Lomez’

When the New York Times profiled Obama staffer Ben Rhodes in 2016, Rhodes made no secret of his frustration with the media: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old.… They literally know nothing.” But if there’s anything worse than a 27-year-old journalist still wet behind the ears, it’s an older journalist who acts like a petulant child. 

This week, investigative journalist Jason Wilson published an article in the Guardian revealing the identity of the anonymous X account “Lomez,” which has over 74,000 followers. Wilson identified Jonathan Keeperman, a former lecturer at the University of California-Irvine, as “the man behind” the pseudonym and the founder of Passage Publishing, an avant-garde “new right” publishing house. 

The secret is out now, but Wilson didn’t spark the moral outrage he clearly hoped for. Far from undermining Lomez, the dox simply makes the X user more sympathetic. He seems normal, smart, and successful — a far cry from the Left’s bogeyman of “far right” conservatives. As Lomez himself posted on Tuesday: 

[T]he 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.

In the days since Wilson’s article appeared, Lomez’s X account has gained nearly 20,000 new followers. But Wilson’s attempted hatchet doesn’t just fail to land a blow — his Guardian piece actually serves as proof of concept for one of Lomez’s political hobby horses.

In February 2023, First Things published an article by Lomez titled “What is the Longhouse?” Referencing the communal buildings built by some indigenous cultures to house extended families, the online Right employs the phrase to describe the forms of our postmodern culture. Lomez defines the “longhouse” thus: 

It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance; but also to wokeness, to the “progressive,” “liberal,” and “secular” values that pervade all major institutions. More fundamentally, the Longhouse is a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary.

In particular, though, the longhouse is a feminizing phenomenon, patterned off what Lomez calls the “remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations towards social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.” The “den mothers” of the longhouse act as hall monitors who subject their victims to indirect sniping and endless HR-style bureaucracy rather than direct confrontation. 

Under the conditions of the longhouse, the worst excesses of female stereotypes are heightened. The longhouse leads to immature women and emasculated men, all of whom conduct themselves like petty tween girls. Wilson ought to consider himself a member of the tribe.

Not long ago, we had a word for what Wilson attempts to pass off as journalism: stalking. Wilson “repeatedly contacted Keeperman requesting comment on this reporting, at a personal Gmail address and a Passage Press address,” in addition to leaving 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.” 

But Wilson only obtained that phone number from the data brokers after maniacally scouring the internet — and beyond — for every available shred of personal information. He hunted down domain registrars, LLC registrations, mailing addresses connected to various registrations, and property records. When Lomez mentioned in an X post that he was the third child in his family, Wilson cross-referenced the post with “a parent’s published biography” and dug up Keeperman’s father’s obituary. 

And then, because Wilson evidently hadn’t gone far enough, he got in touch with a former colleague of Keeperman, who “positively identified Keeperman’s voice” from guest appearances on various podcasts. Wilson found photos of Keeperman in a “third-party archive of his wedding photos” that linked to his “wife’s name on Facebook.” He found records from Keeperman’s time on the University of California, San Diego, men’s basketball team, from his “accomplished” high school football and basketball careers, and from his 1996 bar mitzvah. 

This kind of sleuthing isn’t normal behavior — it’s pathological. And this is exactly the kind of man the longhouse aims to cultivate. To solidify their power, proverbial den mothers subvert stereotypically “male” behavior with “punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups—social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force,” Lomez explains. 

As such, the longhouse is characterized “in particular [by] the exchange of privacy—and its attendant autonomy—for the modest comforts and security of collective living.” In a paradigm where masculinity is inherently suspect, men gain approval from the longhouse by reveling in their own emasculation; Wilson’s article is an exercise of this sort.

“To be “canceled” is to feel the whip of the Longhouse masters,” Lomez wrote in First Things last year. But, if Wilson’s article means anything at all, those den mothers seem past their prime.

Mary Frances Myler is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022. 

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