We Lost A Great One
On Thursday afternoon I had watched just a few minutes of a Youtube video with The Zman and Ramzpaul speaking with Padraig Martin about Iran and Islam….
I didn’t get very far into it before I had to run but I made a note to go back and watch the rest later. Then later than day I saw this on Twitter.
He must have passed either shortly after this video or the next morning. His final post of his blog auto-published in the morning on the 26th and it is possible/likely he was already dead: The End Of Free Will.
The Dissident Right will miss him. His real name was John Christopher Zander and his was a powerful, sober voice and a needed contrast to the multitude of silly fools and/or degenerates that often dominate the conversation in the medium of social media that rewards the loud and obnoxious at the expense of the serious and thoughtful.
He was a pretty private person. I know he still had a regular job and it sounded to me like he did consulting of some sort. Whatever it was, I got the impression that he was good enough at it that he could move from Baltimore, a city he lived in for many years and referred to Lagos, to West Virginia. He was apparently doxxed by the anti-White hate group that calls itself “The Southern Poverty Law Center” but I didn’t even realize it as he didn’t mention it to my recollection and it didn’t appear to impact him professionally but it does reinforce that the SPLC, ADL and other anti-White hate groups are made up of the very worst people in America. There is a great deal of freedom in finding a way to make a living that is insulated from Their shenanigans.
His writing was usually lucid and thoughtful although he did have an amusing tendency toward typos and misspelling that he didn’t seem to care about. He lived alone for as long as I can remember reading him, and it has been a long time, probably at least 10 years as his was one of the websites I frequented before starting my new blog.
From what I can tell, and mostly confirmed by a post from Peter Brimelow…
The Zman was a somewhat solitary creature. He had recently moved to West Virginia and had two cats but as far as I know he wasn’t married, perhaps was divorced?, didn’t have a girlfriend nor close family. While I don’t know who found him, the local sheriff contacted the Brimelows who managed to track down a relative. Like I said, he was a solitary guy but seemed mostly comfortable with that. He was getting into gardening, bought an older truck to fix up, was working on a badly needed update to his blog and generally seemed to be enjoying life. He struck me as someone that it would have been a lot of fun to hang out with in his garage enjoying a cold beverage.
I didn’t agree with The Zman on every issue or position, the only person I agree with 100% of the time is the handsome devil looking back at me in the mirror, but I agreed with him almost all of the time. He epitomized the Dissident Right, being someone focused on what really is and not what we wish would be.
He didn’t suffer fools and in what I can say is one of the highest compliments I can offer, his writing and podcasts often made me really stop and think. I mean that literally, on many occasions while listening to his podcast while on a walk I would stop and back up to listen to something he said again, and I often referenced something he said on my own blog. I didn’t read everything he wrote although I tried, nor did I listen to every podcast, but I found his thoughts valuable enough to subscribe to him on Substack. I hope his blog stays alive for some time to come, it is a wealth of interesting material.
He was a much needed voice on the real Right and will be missed by many.