The Lomez Challenge

And some proposed solutions

I had no (and have no) interest in commenting specifically on any of the drama going on with certain big NormieCon outlets and their hiring practices. However, with Election Day looming and huge potential changes on the horizon for rightist organizations in terms of demand, exposure, etc. I have been thinking in more general terms about the structures for cultivating talent within what could broadly be conceptualized as “the movement.” JD Vance is a sort of avatar of this: young and self-made, with Thiel connections on the one hand and an ear to the ground in less housebroken areas of the dissident right- a locus around which might form a motley coalition of everything from Harvard alums in First Things to autistic redditors plying their trade between shifts at Arby’s. And I’m obviously not the only one thinking about this.

I saw this yesterday on X, a post by Lomez from Passage Press.

This week has raised some questions about personnel selection in the conservative/rw ecosystem, something that has come up before and will become a major point of contention in the event of a Trump win next week and his subsequent staffing of the administration...

How do we select good people? People who are reliable ideologically *and* characterologically? People who are smart, aligned, competent, and won't embarrass the organizations that affiliate with them?

These selection filters gets very narrow, very fast, and if we are being honest, it becomes clear that finding *good* people at scale is actually quite difficult.

Firstly, ideological alignment is necessary but insufficient. People can whinge about it all they want but optics matter. You have to know how to not raise people's alarm bells. In the context of administrative/public life you have to practice a certain amount of rhetorical and operational prudence. This cuts against the personality type of many early adopters of now au courant rw views. These types tend to be (almost pathologically) disagreeable. Those who cannot code-switch and suppress that tendency when necessary are going to cause problems and often be more trouble than they are worth.

Secondly, those who can code-switch, who can succeed in an administrative setting, and who also are aligned (i.e. have successfully resisted leftism), tend to already be professionally successful, or are well down the path to professional success, and have *a lot* to lose by openly aligning with the right and/or leaving behind their (probably very well paying) jobs for the pittance they will earn as political operatives. The perception (if not fact) that the right does not take care of its own people, makes this an incredibly difficult sell. Leaving a successful law practice, or job in finance, or in tech etc. just doesn't add up for all but a very few.

For those in this latter group, the onus is on the right to protect these people, ensure a meaningful (if not exorbitant) livelihood, and the promise that good service will be rewarded with opportunities and yes, money, once their political work is done. As Silicon Valley, eg, begins to flirt with the right, it has to be the case that those who want the right to prevail, the JD Vance wing of the right to prevail, that the appropriate incentives are in place to recruit capable and aligned people into public service who are incurring massive opportunity costs by doing so. Will a crypto rw tech bro who goes to work for Trump have a place in Silicon Valley when his term ends? There has to be a very loud signal that the answer is yes.

For the former, the onus is on the ideologically aligned poster to demonstrate that he won't embarrass people who affiliate with him. Some people should just stay posters. It is a noble and worthy role. And in fact anyone who is a poster and has ambitions beyond that, I immediately regard with suspicion. Their aspirations often overtake their political commitments and their personal loyalties. They are more likely to defect and betray the interests they previously supported. Rather than concentrating on getting stuff done, the main concern is engaging in the petty ego-driven carnival of "political influencer." You don't have to compromise your beliefs and shouldn't, but it's perfectly legitimate that the vetting of these types is much more stringent.

I don't have answers to this double problem––those who can, don't need to or want to, and those who want to carry a lot of different risks. This is only to say that the selection of personnel––particularly young people on the right––as we go through this major generational and ideological transition, is of critical importance. Personnel selection is maybe *the most* important thing for us to be thinking about. And the people in charge of personnel selection need to be taking this very seriously.

I’m on the other end of personnel selection in the right wing ecosystem, a part-time writer only just now branching out into seeking to be published by established outlets [full disclosure, I have been published by IM-1776]. As such, I thought I might offer a kind of counter-perspective on the points Lomez makes and how the problem might be addressed.

As to how to select people who are ideologically aligned and who won’t embarrass their organizations, I first of all take this as an allusion to other recent contretemps I have no wish to mention directly either. Perfidy is contemptible, whichever direction it runs; a betrayal of the people who work for you or whom you work for runs counter to all traditional principles of loyalty and honor. It is indeed essential to find people unwilling- no matter what- to debase themselves so. Rightists are up against strong headwinds here. The liberal norm of contracts and stipulation parsing is ubiquitous but should, as best, form but a shadow of the kinds of relationships men of the right should be cultivating.

When Rohan calls for aid, Gondor answers. That’s just rightwing 101.

To that end, while I agree that finding “good people at scale” is difficult, it never wasn’t, and never will not be. The endeavor can be aided, however, by casting a wider net. Something like this already occurs, but in a way that I think is perhaps counterproductive. I’ll grant that my view of the overall situation is necessarily limited, but I sense a narrowness of perspective and an unwillingness to develop a broader conception of how talent and enterprise are masked by managerialism. If you’re depending on the same processes that produce good neoliberals to mold principled rightists, I can only see trouble ahead. Our institutions are broken. The selection mechanisms that produce our ‘elite’ no doubt still produce some fine people. But that number must surely be dwarfed by the great and fungible mass of box-checking mediocrities whose salient characteristic is being liked by neoliberals with money. A process primarily concerned with training clerks for Globohomo might produce “elite human capital,” but will give you little in the way of humans with character traits any traditional-minded human might regard as aristocratic, or even just interesting. Such people are caste functionaries with no greater vision than propping up an order where they are free to prosper in the tech industry in the culturally blue areas they favor while being kept safe from crime and disorder by stouter men. The can be likable, the can be useful, but they cannot be the center around which any movement concerned with change aligned with permanent things arises.

Minimum expectations for urban techbro office-wagies. If that’s not you, do better.

So who then? To the first point: it is entirely correct that there are people who espouse rightist views purely out of a sense of contrarianism, are indeed generally pathologically disagreeable. I’ve encountered them many times; everyone trying to do something positive has. They tend to fixate on Jews, but it could really be anything- I once had a guy threaten to kill me for advertising a group meetup in a hotel lobby, which he took to be a sign of bourgeois decadence. They were hated before they came to their extremism and adopted it largely as a rationalizing cope: “it’s not my terrible personality people find objectionable, but my hundredth bold take exposing the fraud that is Auschwitz.”

If only they would keep it a secret, as opposed to spamming comment sections, desperate for the attention that no special-ed class could provide. Even chatbots block these people. EDIT: This is from a game designed by progressives, so consider it politically safe for cancellation purposes.

So how to avoid such people in favor of those who work well with others and can hold their own in terms of talent and industry, people who are committed to thoroughgoing rightist politics while possessing the requisite intellect and character? Well, as it happens, there is an ongoing social laboratory of just such a filtering mechanism. It’s called Substack. Left wholly to their own devices, self-publishing and building their own networks, Substack writers who’ve successfully established themselves have done so solely through building exactly the sort of reputations that Lomez notes. The rightist networks that have formed on Substack are, for the most part, an emergent property of real, organic connections made between people committed to sharing ideas for their own sake. That so many have attracted substantial followings is a testament to the underserved demand for such writing. But without any institutional backing, Substack writers have recourse only to those reputations. Those who are unstable, or dishonest, or who are clout-chasing grifters, end up getting shunned. It’s a meritocracy in the one good sense of the term, where everyone must pass a gauntlet of engaged peers to gain any type of following. Outside funding and company support might help some, but it’s impossible to hide a crappy subscriber/engagement ratio. People understand who’s really earned what, in terms that are apparent to all.

To the second point: Lomez holds that people who are successful or who have the prospect of being successful have much to lose by being associated with the right, and thus are hesitant to follow through on their beliefs. They also face the prospect of losing out on financial rewards by becoming “full-time” political operatives. This is true to a point, but I again wonder how much of this is an artifact of a prejudice in favor of people educated a certain way and who happen to live in places with a predominantly leftist or neoliberal political culture. I’m struck by how often it seems that big rightist outlets wholly agree with those leftists and neoliberals that the only important things that happen in America occur within a few blue cities among people with graduate degrees. The effect of this is that discourse gets monopolized around the concerns of a particular urban caste, money is stovepiped through a few big foundations and donors with goals that are, to put in mildly, not wholly centered on the promotion of the traditional and transcendent, and the miasma of the surrounding culture begins to permeate what should be a counterculture. It’s not so much Conquest’s Law as a type of Manhattan zoning code that everyone just sort of drifts leftward over time; one can’t help but go native, sometimes in a very literal sense.

This is the story of a self-described traditionalist Catholic taking psychedelic drugs used in pagan rituals while hanging out with a bunch of rich leftists. It’s amazing what can come to seem normal depending on the company you keep.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Thiel and tech bros generally. I don’t think that cities are rampant dens of iniquity in and of themselves. But we on the right have to stop this culture cringe posture of deferring to left and neoliberal markers of status. And in any case it stands to reason that if corporate America forces good and talented men to choose between their careers and their traditionalist values there are some who will hide their lights under bushels (the current talent pool) and others who’ve simply foresworn that life for the sake of authenticity. Perhaps try the latter group.

If that happens, one might also find that the need for those political operatives to be full-time is obviated. I share Lomez’s suspicion of people ambitious to move up from poasterhood. There are, quite simply, too many people seeking to make a living pitching ideas and too few in the world executing them. It encourages all kinds of scheming and grifterhood. I would hold that it’s actually better for any prospective member of any rightist organization to be able to support himself financially independent of any funds he earns from ‘political’ work, other than that in direct service of some particular goal (a campaign manager, for example). Men who live among people for whom rightist beliefs are the norm don’t face the challenge of choosing between earning a living and being real and they are also the sort who aren’t seeking to become dependent on wealthy donors.

The conclusion details the duties and expectations of the patrons and workers in the right wing ecosystem, which I think is generally good. However, again, I think the model of paying people in blue cities to abandon careers to become right wing activists, finding a shortage of prospects, and then expanding the search into the surrounding liberal biome is not sustainable on the long run, and will indeed prove counterproductive. Imagine a different scenario. Call it Project Checkmark.

It’s not unheard of for some of these big NormieCon organizations to offer salaries in the multiple six-figures to talent of questionable rightist rigor (so the rumors go). Imagine if instead of hiring one person at such a rate, that money, on an annual basis, was used to subsidize the work of a hundred or so Substack writers, enough to get them their first check mark indicating 100 paid subscribers. 150 paid subs would grant the typical writer a net income of around $900 a month. This isn’t enough to live on, but it would be an extremely meaningful supplement for someone otherwise employed. Given that these people could live anywhere, such money would also probably go farther for them then for someone in Manhattan or Palo Alto, and allow for the transmission of right wing ideas directly into communities where in-person networks can develop. Along with this would come the prospect of access to a central network of mutual support- podcasts, crossovers, and other media ties. Checkmark Fellows would be expected to take pledges of honor, honesty, industry, loyalty, and courtesy. The fellowship could be revoked through the simple mechanism of an unsubscription. Out of 100 such writers, drawn from the full breadth of what America and beyond has to offer, it would be astonishing if some future thought leaders couldn’t be found and cultivated.

As I’ve mentioned, it is key premise of the right is that our institutions are failing. Everyone has to get more creative in the quest to build new ones. We on the right have the advantage in this as our modal deference is toward those perennial aspects of human culture that reflect transcendent reality. We can move forward by returning.

To that end, as I’ve critiques what I feel are some holes in the current methods of discovering rightist talent among those looking for it, I would be remiss if I didn’t add what I think those of us on the other end ought to be doing for our part. My final break with NormieCondom (he he) was my encounter with two words in a meme: Become Worthy. They still strike me in their stark truth, an aspirational creed expressed in the simplest possible formula. I cannot control whether people like my work, whether I get paid or whether I make an impact. But I can control who I am and what I do. I can do my part to make the world a better place and advance my principles. I expect to be held accountable for the following:

• Is my work of consistently high quality and published regularly?

• Am I honest to all parties I address in my work? Am I willing to accept just criticism?

• Do I actively engage with my readers? Do I thank them and acknowledge their support?

• Do I like and restack the work of my peers? Do I offer meaningful commentary where appropriate? Do I encourage others to read them?

• Do I support newer and smaller writers? Am I subscribing to and following people with promise, not merely because they can help me?

• Do I seek new challenges as a writer? Do I write about new subjects, or write longer pieces, or just generally try to improve each time?

• Do I never accept a lack of reader interest in particular works as anything other than an indication to work harder?

• Do I have a meaningful life outside of writing? Do I let this work get in the way of faith, family life, work, or other obligations and duties? Am I the same person under my pseudonym as I am in my own name? Am I a credit to my family and community here, and will my ideas make their world better?

I proceed in my career with total faith that if I am becoming worthy my worthiness will find its proper outlet. Note that worthiness is a state of becoming rather than being; one is worthy in the same way one is physically fit- contingently and with great effort. I would never declare myself such, as deciding that one is worthy is the surest sign one isn’t. But despite all my failures and setbacks it’s where I fix my gaze. And the best part is, so can anyone else. No one is so low of station or ability that he can’t aim higher, and no one is so lofty as to be able to rest.

For those running the outlets, I hope you look more broadly at who’s out there, restructuring those networks of talent cultivation. For those hoping to join those networks, endeavor to be employable, mainly be being the sort of people who would otherwise be suitable as worthwhile friends- intelligent, trustworthy, mature, dependable, loyal, and committed to mutual betterment. The great test of our time is ultimately whether such relationships can survive the acid-bath of neoliberal managerialism, whether we can resist being atomized by a totalist, homogenizing system of systems. We on the right have the great advantage of values that transcend all of that, and the ability to create based upon them. Let’s use that power and create the solutions we need.