In 2022 Jonathan Keeperman, then a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine, who for years had moonlighted as a right-wing Internet provocateur, founded a boutique publisher called Passage Press. His goal, he told Ross Douthat in a New York Times interview last year, was to build a reactionary cultural apparatus that would form an “enduring and meaningful counterweight to a dominant left.”  For too long, he argued, conservatives had stood by stuffily as the left commandeered arts and entertainment and bent mainstream institutions to its ideological will. Keeperman wanted to change that. By drawing on the energies of the so-called New Right and its various overlapping cohorts—red-pilled Silicon Valley types, Dimes Square podcasters and playwrights, manospheric influencers, proselytizers of raw milk—he hoped to show that the right could produce culture that was just as vital, just as possessed of spiritedness and “thymos,” as that produced by the left, if not more so. “If you are telling the truth about the world,” Keeperman told Douthat, “then you are going to make right-wing art.” …