War of Angels
By Mark Granza · 19 May 2025
Note: This essay is part of a multi-part series.
Nightmares & Dreams: A response to Lomez’s “What is right-wing art?”
You’re a painter struggling to find inspiration for your work. After another frustrating day staring at an empty canvas, you decide it’s time to go to bed.
Now you’re in the White House, and the Vice President is talking. Before you get a chance to listen, however, you find yourself on the streets of New York. A man and a woman are fighting in the middle of a crowd. As you look closer, you realize the woman is actually a man. His eyes look possessed as he tries to dominate the other man; nothing but hatred is spread across his face. You want to look away, but you’re drawn to it. You watch the fight unfolding from a safe distance. Then, two minutes later, everything around you suddenly freezes. You look around, see a placard lying on the sidewalk, and take it with you.
You head to a nearby coffee shop where other artists hang out. “Did they see the fight?” You want to ask, but they are also frozen. You write a note on a piece of paper and drop it on the floor. You find yourself in someone else’s living room, in front of a cat. For a second, it makes you forget about the fight. Then, a placard drops from the sky. You’re back on the streets of NY. The placard reads: Wow. You look away, satisfied. You find yourself back in the house, in front of the cat. You don’t care how cute it looks; you’re obsessed with the fight. “Who were those people?”
You have control over your location, so you transport yourself back to the bar. But everyone is still frozen. You see a familiar face and leave a note in his pocket. You wait a minute to see if he moves. He doesn’t, so you decide to leave again, this time frustrated. You forget that you have control over your location and find yourself back in the White House. The former President is now talking. You hate him, but you still listen in. Before you know, the White House is gone, and you’re standing near a crowd cheering at the president. Music is playing loudly. You can’t stand the song. You look away in disgust and find yourself in London, where a stabbing has taken place. Bitcoin. A placard drops in your face: Moron. You are back in New York. Two inhuman faces appear, laughing at you. Five more placards start dropping: You’re evil, reads one. FUCK YOU, reads another. Kill yourself. You can’t read the others because you’re staring at the photograph of the man who called you evil. His face reminds you of the man you saw fighting—you want to hit him, but you can’t. “Should I insult him? Leave? What should I do?!” — BLACK.
Exhausted, you put your phone down and finally decide to go to sleep.
***
Legend has it that Michelangelo sat in silence for four months staring at a piece of marble before he started working on the Statue of David. Today, we scroll our eyes down a virtual nightmare for several hours a day, 365 days a year, and then wonder why our culture lacks inspiration and ambition.
For years now, the online Right has been trapped in a recurring cycle of discourse around the topic of “right-wing art.” Some parrot the common refrain that the Right needs to pay more attention to art, others blame the conservative donor class for not nurturing artists, and few say that all good art is already right-wing. Rinse and repeat. To the best of my knowledge, this mimetic cycle started right here in 2021 with my interview with Michael Anton, followed by his Tom Wolfe essay in our first issue. Art as a topic is not new to the Right; the debate has been going on for centuries. What is new is the sense that there is a great artistic deficit on the Right.
The latest iteration of the debate came from Lomez, founder of the right-wing publishing house Passage Press. Lomez, who began ‘posting’ pseudonymously on Twitter in 2017, is also known as of last year as Jonathan Keeperman, a family man and former academic at the University of California, Irvine.
Since 2022, Passage has released two collections of the Passage Prize, a literary and visual art contest for online writers and artists, reprints of essays from right-wing columnist Steve Sailer and neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, as well as reprints of the original edition Hardy Boys teenage detective series.
In an essay on his Substack titled “What is Right-Wing Art Anyway?” reflecting on his New York Times podcast interview with Ross Douthat, Lomez argues that:
The problem with [the definition of “right-wing art’] is not that it’s wrong, but that the question itself is asking us to conjoin two spheres of human experience that are mismatched…
Unlike many conservatives who still fail to differentiate between culture and politics, Lomez is correct: art meant to achieve political victories is by definition propaganda. As he points out, the “what is right-wing art” question merges two incompatible spheres. But so does the “what is art” question, for that matter. The moment we’re trying to define art, we’re in the domain of criticism. The problem is not just with conflating art with politics, but also with conflating art with philosophy.
Politics is the art of philosophers. Art is the war of poets: it has the power to inspire Greatness, to reveal our deepest fears and desires, to turn everyday life into a myth, and to transcend suffering. Simply put, art is anything that can elevate the soul.
Lomez understands this at some level. He quotes T.S. Eliot in a different piece; his cover of his first Prize book features the silhouette of a man ascending into a higher dimension, and he has written a whole essay on hunting for morels as a spiritual ritual. But when he tries to articulate his favorite examples of right-wing art on his Substack, he writes:
Whether [right-wing art] is the evocation of civilizational precarity and the nature of entropy, [or] the fuzzy, ineffable, semi-permeable veil of reality that our lives all nervously breech from time to time, [or] the cold, bitter consequences of total liberation…
Precarity? Nervously? Bitter? He then encourages artists to:
Be uncompromising in your vision: tapping into the root conditions of the human experience is enough [and it] will get you as far as you need to go [since that’s] all that art can hope for anyway.
Is that all art can hope for? Where’s the aspiration?
As an academic and self-described ‘wordcel’, Lomez is used to putting his mind to work. And clearly, he thinks in words. But art requires heart before intellect, and artists think in images. None of this is to say that intellect isn’t also necessary. But why aren’t the words: heart, dream, soul, muse, beauty, greatness, creativity, or even talent mentioned even once in his 2,000-word essay on what art is about?
***
The online Right struggles with defining Art because the very nature of their ecosystem prevents them from succeeding, and as a consequence, from producing it.
As I recently wrote in “The Anti-Meme”, part of a series of essays in which I argue that social media incentives are reverse-engineering us: “A key component of most art endeavors is to look inward: to open ourselves up to, among other things, our pain and suffering. But social media, which constantly incentivizes disagreement, requires us to look outward: to identify other people’s weaknesses.”
As an individual, Lomez is clearly ambitious. But Passage is a creation of social media, so it has to play by those rules. When he looks outward, Lomez sees incompetent elites and left-wing activists, and he’s constantly incentivized to debate them. Therefore, when he tries to define art, his definition naturally falls into an attempt to debunk them. This is why he spends half of his essay concerned with “sensitivity readings.” How ambitious can you be when the goal is to defeat gender-studies professors?
In his IM—1776’s review of the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Ben Braddock picks an example that perfectly illustrates this social media dynamic. In the film, Dylan is pressured by the music industry to tailor his songs to the people’s demands. Exhausted one night, he tells his ex-girlfriend that: “Everyone asks where the songs come from, but when you watch their faces, they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.”
Artists like Dylan reach deep within themselves for inspiration; in other words, they tap into their muse. But social media trains us to reach out to an audience for a broad appeal. Every time artists log in online, they see thousands of faces asking why their music isn’t tailored to their political preferences, and the incentive-reward structure is difficult to resist. The certainty of immediate approval and financial reward is far more appealing than the risk of remaining a complete unknown.
The art of criticism suffers from this. Talent is rare, and the best among us should be constantly pushed to improve. But social media incentivizes flattery. This is why the online Right insists that art should be apolitical, while simultaneously arguing that artists should be promoted exclusively among “our guys”. Or, why it endorses aristocracy, but gets upset when someone points out that talent in their midst is rare. It’s admirable to want to help our “mutuals,” but it’s also more rewarding to flatter than to be honest with them.
Are we going to create an elite without being elitists? And how are artists supposed to make apolitical art if the prerequisite for being promoted is to become part of the political Right on a platform that incentivizes partisan content?
In the most interesting segment of his interview with Douthat, Lomez says that, “If you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art,” to which Douthat points out that his definition is circular: “Then you’re saying that all great art is somehow right-wing.” Here, Lomez had the opportunity to drop the “right-wing” label in the art question and focus on identifying where art comes from or what the artist should aspire to. Instead, he retreats to a defense of vitalism.
His defense of vitalism is a symptom of the same problem. Vitalism is a good antidote to the Left, but only to the extent that the Left lacks depth. Although Lomez has previously said that he doesn’t identify himself as “Nietzschean,” almost every art discussion from the Nietzschean Right ends up as a defense of vitalism. But Nietzsche was also a man willing to gaze into the abyss, which eventually drove him mad. Are healthy, good-looking people doing cool stuff all the wisdom we can extract from his writing? Vitalism is also more of a philosophical concept, and can only get us so far if not combined with meaning. The vitalist aesthetic of the online Right is often just love of biology, not Beauty.
Vitalist and futurist sculptor Fen de Villiers, one of the most talented sculptors working today, is a great exception. But I know Fen; he dislikes being on social media and doesn’t like to be labelled as “right-wing,” and it’s not because he fears cancelation. “I doubt the Coen Brothers would call themselves on the Right, and I don’t even know if Cormac McCarthy would […] But to my mind, it is precisely right-wing art,” Lomez tells Douthat. There’s a reason why they wouldn’t, and it’s the same reason why no artist worth mentioning ever did: they are concerned with chasing perfection, not belonging to a group.
“I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have,” said Leonardo da Vinci on his deathbed.
For sure, the virtual world can be useful in many ways. As film critic Titus Techera recently pointed out to me in response to my critique of memes: “Memes might be mere caricature, but it’s still characterization. Digital is also about trying to reconstitute an understanding of character, like populism is all about trying to reconstitute national character.” This is true, but as I argued in “No Honor Among Mutuals”, social media prevents personal character development, and ultimately virtue, especially in young men. Character trumps ideology (as Lomez himself understands), and once established, it needs to transition to the realm it belongs to.
Culture needs to return to the physical world and aspire towards the spiritual. Only then can artists rediscover within themselves the same ambitions that tortured the greatest men in history. In the age of social media, artists can often monetize their work. But they are constantly forced to put out “content” or satisfy the ideological demands of their followers, so their art tends to become repetitive and uninspiring fast. Patronage is important not so that artists can make a living, but so they can learn to aim high and take the time to perfect their craft without being slaves to influencer culture.
In this respect, online networking between artists can be counterproductive, too. Private spaces may seem like a good idea, and occasionally they do result in useful collaborations, but social media incentivizes meaningless distractions. How can inspiration arise from a platform that incentivizes displays of ugliness? This problem is further exacerbated when artists are forced to compare themselves with left-wing propaganda. Yes, “left-wing art” is terrible, but nowhere near as bad as the non-ideological middle-of-the-road stuff that never gets attention online, some of which is actually great. All platforms like X do for conservative and right-leaning artists is lower the bar.
Good aesthetic taste emerges from love of grace, little of which can be found on platforms like X. There’s a reason why memes are universally aesthetically ugly: there’s no class in mocking other human beings. “Something that is beautiful is ethical, and unethical things aren’t beautiful,” said the great Gianni Agnelli. Or why the more time people spend online, the more likely they are to have poor taste in dressing. “We must also remain soft and unjaded,” as Isabella Redjai writes. Class is the art of lovers of lifestyle and good manners, and has to be practiced with adults in the real world. No amount of Ralph Lauren Nationalism accounts will ever teach a young man to dress if he never goes out and walks up to the pretty girl at the bar.
Love of Beauty with a capital B is not about physical attraction nor aesthetic appreciation. As I wrote in my previous essay: “[It’s right across the line between good and evil], the transitory state between temptation and myth, that life provides us with fertile ground for reflection.” In other words, Beauty emerges from us being able to perceive the battle in our hearts, and oscillating in between, while never tilting too far in either direction. “Living on fire and never getting burned,” as D’Annunzio says. This is why Paolo Sorrentino, the ultimate Master of Beauty, simultaneously plays with and romanticizes themes of the sacred and the profane in every one of his movies (no better film to watch than The Great Beauty to understand Beauty, or Fellini’s La Dolce Vita). Kanye West, crazy as he is, understands this. Lana Del Rey, too. Dasha Nekrasova as well, to some degree.
Of course, someone can still look at pictures of Monica Bellucci and Cathedrals online, and they should, but they won’t ‘produce’ Beauty until they learn to see it everywhere. This is why street photographers often focus on details that would never even occur to us to notice. Have you ever found yourself staring at a construction worker, feeling like you could write an essay about him? True passion between a man and a woman can only happen if you see Beauty, not just biology. A better alternative to the pornographic vitalist aesthetic of the online Right is photographer Bruce Weber. Even Tarantino, despite his foot fetish (or perhaps because of it), understands Beauty.
Art can only be as potent as the nature of the internal conflict it’s addressing. If right-wing art means anything, it would be the artist's courage to face his own shadow, and to incorporate it in the process.
Creativity inevitably suffers, too: artists used to be forced to fill moments of solitude with reading and contemplation. Now they fill them with scrolling—on platforms which have gotten increasingly “sloppier”. When I decided to write this series on social media ecology in April, I had initially come up with a simple thought on how online interactions hurt masculinity, and almost posted it on X. Then I realized it could have been a thread, an essay, and eventually, it turned into a series. But I never planned to. Social media incentivizes us to release our undeveloped thoughts and never think about them twice. How many ‘takes’ could have been essays? Books? The next Great American Novel will not come from a ‘poster’, unless he takes a break from posting.
Arguably, the closest thing to an art form that emerged from the online Right is the so-called “schizo-edit” we often see on X. My friend Benjamin Roberts made a case for it last year in “The New Speed” for our Futurism issue: “The often anonymous artist constructs a cacophony that threatens to drive us mad, which rips out and drags us by our veins to a violent, irrational energy.” I enjoy some of the edits, but they are often poorly made with no attention to aesthetic detail. In other words, they lack ambition. Not to mention, constantly being driven mad by schizos can only produce a society of lunatics. British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, arguably the main precursor of the “edit”, is a much better alternative. Mike Ma, too (notice the aesthetic consistency in his edits.) With that said, there’s a reason why Mike isn’t too active online. If Marinetti were alive today, would he have a YouTube channel, or would he be driving a Ferrari at 120 mph straight into Google’s HQ?
Sight and vision are not the same thing. Lomez encourages artists to be “uncompromising in their vision,” which is a worthy directive. There is vision that comes from observation, similar to what his friend and colleague Steve Sailer does: “noticing.” Noticing is important; pattern recognition is biologically hardwired in our brains for the sake of our survival. But when noticing is based on algorithmically curated data points, what we think are patterns might be distortions or even hallucinations. Artists are not machines processing data. Vision with a capital V must be something more than observation. Propaganda itself can be—you don’t have to be a fascist to recognize that their aesthetic was majestic. Hugo Boss only manufactured the SS uniforms; they designed the concept themselves. In other words, art can be political, but it still requires Vision: talent, inspiration, and aspiration.
“So long as your politics are anchored in an honest assessment of how people behave […] honest art will confirm those politics,” writes Lomez. Being able to observe how people behave and report it with integrity is the job of scientists and journalists, not artists. Asking an artist to just be objective would be like forcing CGI on Christopher Nolan. Of course, understanding the natural world and how society works is also necessary, but it’s often just a prerequisite for the artist. Few exceptions aside, it’s never what drives the artwork. Stanley Kubrick was a genius, but not because he was into science. Tom Wolfe understood society, but it’s not what made him a great writer. Same for Hunter S. Thompson; Gonzo journalism is about observing but also about experiencing. It’s not about the journalist getting high and writing about what they see; they need to be genuinely interested in and able to connect with people.
Lomez picks novelist Cormac McCarthy and filmmaker David Lynch as his favorite examples of right-wing art (good ones). But neither were they observers, nor thinkers for that matter. McCarthy only edited with his mind. Lynch only directed with his mind. Both were visionaries tapping into their hearts and dreams before their eyes and minds ever played a role. As Lafayette Lee writes about McCarthy: “He is driven forth into the desert as a nomad, to a place where gods and demons still roam.” This is why their work still resonates with millions. By looking inside their hearts, they connected with their muse, and were able to touch people’s souls. When Mel Gibson directed Braveheart, he didn’t have “the bitter consequences of total liberation” in mind. Did you feel “bitter” when Wallace shouted, They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom, or did you feel like you could die for Scotland tomorrow?
“All a new cultural Right has to do is tell the truth.” I don’t know what Lomez means by truth here, but I know Truth is often a judgment on us. Not every artwork is supposed to validate the artist’s beliefs, certainly not our own. Assuming art is meant to confirm the artist’s beliefs is like assuming the Bible is meant to make us feel good about ourselves. There are exceptions to this; we are not all David Lynch, but what makes an artist great is their ability and willingness to express themselves in their art, regardless of whether they want to see it or even understand it. This is similar to how our dreams, and especially our nightmares, can reveal truths about ourselves. In the words of Lynch himself: “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.” Or, according to the great Werner Herzog: “What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
To encourage artists to be “uncompromising,” by which Lomez means to openly defy liberal norms, is to encourage artists to put the cart before the horse. This varies depending on the field, but artists should have some degree of limited control over the direction of their art, otherwise, they would be activists. This is how we get people online to dismiss a 2-hour-long movie because a single black man appears once in the background. Do you have control over your dreams? The better advice is to be fearless: to be willing to plunge the depths of your soul until you come face to face with your own demons. Art can only be as potent as the nature of the internal conflict it’s addressing. If right-wing art means anything, it would be the artist’s courage to face what Jung calls the “shadow” (which is a much harder monster to fight than any you may find in Washington) and then to incorporate it in the process.
Knowing who we are fighting against is not enough if we don’t keep in mind what we’re fighting for. When we’re only focused on the enemy, we eventually end up mirroring it. Ever gotten the impression when you’re witnessing two people brawling online that they’re both projecting? As Daniel Miller wrote already in 2022 in his “Art Beyond the Right” essay from Art & Literature issue: “Because the self-identified Right defines itself purely negatively, that is, against an ideological enemy rather than for a positive cause, it itself obeys the structure of resentment identified by Nietzsche. Where the contemporary Left imagines injustice in the mythical victory of an omnipotent Right, the contemporary Right flips the script while preserving the psychological structure.”
Because of this, when he eventually tries to get rid of the “right-wing” label in the art question on his Substack, Lomez gets stuck. And no wonder. He understands that art should be apolitical, but his commitment to identifying his project as primarily anti-Left prevents him from going all the way, forcing him to argue against his own intuitions. Trapped and discouraged, he inevitably incorporates elements of left-wing art in his definition: lack of depth, transcendence, sacredness, and meaning. Most notably: grievance, but with no Vision. This, ultimately, is how we get what we see today with meme culture: transgression for the sake of transgression.
There’s no such thing as the Culture Wars online. Culture War is online culture.
***
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien
None of this is to say there’s no utility to being online, especially from a political perspective. And there are certainly ways the virtual world can assist artistic endeavors. This magazine itself is a testament to the great work of many online writers, including Lomez, and some good artists lurk within the online Right, some of which Lomez has identified. Bronze Age Pervert’s Bronze Age Mindset is one of the best literary contributions of the century. My friend Sam Finlay’s Breakfast with the Dirt Cult is a book I’d certainly recommend. And Lomez’s attempt to separate culture from politics is also a step in the right direction, at least ahead of Conservatism Inc. Still, the more we obey the laws of the online game, the more those laws will become our own.
Fighting corrupt elites is a worthy goal. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to have fun on the internet. Regaining full control of our humanity online is not about ‘kindness’. It’s about knowing how technology often reverses the incentives for natural behavior, instincts, and intuitions, especially for men. As Mystery Grove recently encouraged his fellow anons: “People need to become human again, which is to say they need to become instincts, duties, and roles rather than egos and memes.” BAP might be crazy, but I have it on good authority that he spends hours on the phone helping young men. He’s also not LARPing about loving danger. Sam doesn’t mind hanging out on X, but the man has seen war. I guarantee you that he’s not writing with his intellect. Did Elvis? Johnny Cash? T.S. Eliot? Even Yarvin wasn’t writing poems with his brain when his wife passed.
There’s nothing wrong with being an intellectual; the world needs plenty of brains. But the Golden Age of Culture is not an intellectual revolution; it’s a spiritual one. At the same time, every man should be careful when fighting his demons. Hemingway didn’t commit suicide because he was battling fascists. As Nietzsche reminds us, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Artists should know that not everything they see at the bottom of their nightmares is meant to surface. The purpose of art isn’t to frighten. As Hitchcock puts it: “Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.” And the more we spend fighting monsters, the more chances we have of becoming one.
Still, even when fighting liberals, no artist can capture one until they’re willing to see the liberal within themselves. There’s a reason why The Lives of Others humanizes the Stasi spy. It’s because Henckel von Donnersmarck put himself in his shoes. It wouldn’t have been a masterpiece if he hadn’t. To say that art is about noticing would be to say that marriage is about sex.
No man has yet been born and died of old age in the age of social media. In other words, we don’t know what social media is or what it will lead to. And wearing a mask online can be useful, sometimes necessary. But we write a whole essay on what Art is about and the words: beauty, greatness, meaning, heart and soul don’t appear once, whereas “enemy,” “uncertain,” “nervous,” “bitter” and “hopeless” are all over the place, it would be worth considering whether it’s really us writing the essay. Could it be that Lomez, forced to operate within social media and subject to their rules and incentives, is letting a platform that crushes aspiration and the human spirit speak for him?
I remember the first time I talked to Lomez on the phone. It was shortly after my interview with Anton, which he has since credited as an inspiration for Passage. As we discussed starting an online literary group chat for right-wing writers, one of his kids interrupted our conversation and asked him to play with him. In a calm and fatherly voice, Lomez told him he’d be right with him. Although I didn’t know his real name then, I knew I was talking with Jonathan.
“There is, deep in the American soul, a resilience that is not yet extinguished […] Direct action politics will flail and follow, rather than lead, if it is not tethered to the kind of self-understanding that can only be achieved through art,” he writes in Our Generation’s War, an article we published a few months before our phone call.
It’s in our nature to understand that Art is about more than accurate data on a canvas or a vehicle to win over activists. If we want to stay in charge of the online game and avoid becoming trapped, discouraged, or worse, we have to remember who we are when we log in. Keeping in mind that even virtual nightmares have a rock bottom.
***
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
— Carl G. Jung
The day I began thinking about this essay, I was sitting outside my favorite coffee shop in my hometown of Verona, near Castelvecchio, a military castle built by the Scaliger dynasty that ruled the city in the Middle Ages. It was a cloudy morning on a regular weekday. As I was drinking my cappuccino and smoking a cigarette, I lost track of time scrolling X.
Before I knew it, an hour had gone by. I went inside the bar and was shown the bill. Then, as I was leaving, I noticed a girl in her early 20s sitting alone next to the entrance. She was attractive, looked relaxed, and there was something very smooth about the way she was sitting, looking outside. I don’t know how long she had been there; I didn’t see her while sitting on the other side of the window. Just as I grabbed the door on my way out, she turned her head. We smiled at each other, and I left satisfied without looking back.
Walking home, I put on my earbuds and selected Zack Hemsey’s “The Home of a People”. As I was passing by the very walls outside of which Shakespeare said no world but torture lies, the sun came out. I looked up at the sky, thinking about the tragedy of young love, and suddenly my thoughts evaporated. As the glorious drums of Victory began their tune, a bright light turned one of the clouds into a shiny silver palace from which a newly crowned King marched slowly towards his crowd of believers. Then the light reached higher, above the sky, revealing a Kingdom where Angels and white horses in slow motion battled eternal fire among the Gods.
Back in the day, I’d have returned to the bar and asked what they’d put inside the coffee. Today, I only wish I could have dragged all the artists of the online Right inside. There will likely never be another Michelangelo, but inspiration is all around us all the time. Life provides us with a finished canvas every day. We just have to be willing to go out, open our eyes, and start dreaming. Ultimately, Culture is only as good as what we love, and as Maximus says; what we do in life… echoes in eternity.
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