The Hardy Boys Get Red-Pilled
Daniel Lefferts on why a right-wing press is reissuing the adolescent novels
The Hardy Men
Daniel Lefferts
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.”
Passage may be a small operation but it has gained considerable influence in its political orbit. Last January, on the eve of Trump’s return to office, it hosted a “Coronation Ball” that was attended by Steve Bannon, Jack Posobiec, Dasha Nekrasova, and other members of the reactionary glitterati. Thanks to Passage, Keeperman has become part of this glitterati himself. The Guardian has described him as a “celebrity” of the New Right and a “tastemaker in a burgeoning proto-fascist movement.” Douthat for his part seemed seduced by his stardom: he opened his interview by telling Keeperman that he looked “fantastic” and remarking on his “amazing head of hair.”
Passage’s output consists of titles by both contemporary far-right thinkers and their intellectual forbears. Its publications include Gray Mirror: Fascicle I, Disturbance, the first volume in a planned four-part treatise by the blogger Curtis Yarvin in which he systematically if unpersuasively advances his signature theory that America should be ruled by a technocratic king; collections of writings by the “race realist” Steve Sailer, the antiegalitarian accelerationist Nick Land, and the former National Review mainstay John Derbyshire; an anthology of speculative fiction with contributions by the far-right influencers Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist; and reissued memoirs by two Russian noblemen who fought for the White Army as well as the German nationalist Ernst Jünger.
The books vary in genre and tone, but together they offer a clear vision of the world as seen by the far right. It’s a world in which men have been domesticated—or, in the parlance of the manosphere, “longhoused”—by an effeminate culture bent on dispossessing them of their virility; in which a fixation on inclusivity and equal opportunity has scrambled natural hierarchies, elevating the weak at the expense of the strong; and in which large-scale immigration and “suicidal empathy” have poisoned Western civilization and imperiled its rightful supremacy. Each of Passage’s books contributes directly or indirectly to this overall ideology.
Last year, however, Passage put out what at first seemed like a very different set of books—books beloved by millions of readers around the world, very few of whom, presumably, would consider them far-right texts. In two handsome box sets with illustrated covers by Alex Wisner (a comic artist who has published two graphic novels with the press about an anti-Bolshevik Russian general), Passage released the original versions of the first six Hardy Boys novels, which began entering the public domain in 2023.
Lest anyone think Passage was broadening its curatorial horizons to include nonpolitical material, or simply making a cash grab by appealing to young readers, the press made clear that it considers these tales of sleuthing teen heroes to be of a piece with its revanchist worldview. The product page for the “Passage Children’s Bundle” (which also includes an edition of Treasure Island) asserts that “Passage is committed to making children’s literature great again.” On X it promoted a sale on the books with the discount code EATTHEWEAK.
Why would a publisher as selective as Passage take interest in these hokey detective stories, and in the “original” versions of the books in particular? What were the novels I’d gobbled up as a child doing on the same shelf as Raw Egg Nationalist? To find out, I read the Passage editions of the first three Hardy Boys books alongside the standard revised versions published by Grosset and Dunlap. Much like Frank and Joe Hardy at the start of every book, I sensed trouble in the air, a mystery, and I returned to their idyllic world to try to solve it.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
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