Today I learned of the passing of The Z Man, author of The Dissident Writer (thedissident.substack.com).
I somehow discovered him about a decade ago, after I had been a paleocon1 for a decade after ditching the neoCONs. I quickly became a big fan2 and went backwards through The Z Blog at thezman.com, reading every post up to the very first.
Then I was horrified by this charge. And the evidence for it.3
Having been ripped off online before, I take plagiarism seriously. I could not read The Z Man anymore. So I stopped. For a time.
Then I returned to his blog. I can’t remember why. Obviously I thought the good outweighed the bad …
… until 2022, when The Z Man became what
calls ZAnon.
Didn't know that Zman was providing icecold takes. He used to be sharp. At least I thought so.
The Zman has been writing rabid pro-Russian postings peaking around when they took Lysychansk.
He was saying "The artillery is pounding the Ukrainian positions to dust and at this rate (the mythical 100 Ukr casualties a day) soon [as of September 2022!] the AFU will disintegrate. The Western media paints a rosy picture of plucky Ukrainian soldiers beating back the invasion, but really it is just one of their lies to cover the scheming and interests of the Washington class in Ukraine, and further delude the Lefties with the Putler meme".
I wrote a few Strelkovian posts in reply and got downvoted to death, I think I had 56 dislikes under one comment.
Frantic was banned from The Z Man’s blog.
I was never banned. I chose to stop reading The Z Man and his commenters whom Frantic called “True Believers”:
Can't believe going on his blog's latest post there are 227 comments and not one of the commentators - I like to call them True Believers - brays about the current Russian disaster.
Either it's some kind of cult and they don't know about the rout yet because they are hanging from his words to receive directions, or they know, but LARP as tough partisans like the Lefties, and readily bend or censor facts and logic to get their points through.
I don’t know what The Z Man has written in the past three years, but what little I’ve heard from others hadn’t enticed me to return to his blog.
A May 17, 2023 update from Frantic:
on August 8, 2024:Now the Zman instead, he is shilling quite hard the naive chad-Russia story.
For example, I’ll still read a blogger named Zman sometimes but he has a lot of limitations
From off-and-on contact with fans of The Z Man, I assume he was still ZAnon, because they’re still ZAnon, and they would have given up on him if he had given up on the great Orthodox Tsar Vladimir. A megafan of The Z Man recently even hinted at the mighty Russian military bringing down America in the near future.
Would The Z Man go that far? Maybe not. But he and I are still light years apart. Glancing at his blog today for the first time since 2022 - and at his Substack for the first time ever - I confirmed that he and I aren’t on the same page anymore - and not just on Russia. He was what I call TAnon - QAnon without Q. He still believed in Trump - just like his fans still on my radar, at least until recently4.
The Z Man may have died believing America was in good hands. Orange hands.
He may have passed away happier than a popular online neocon I once knew. A man who gave my warblog a big boost. When Bush’s war went downhill after the initial thrill, the guy could never admit that he had been wrong5. So he quietly withdrew from the WAnon6 scene and died alone and bitter.
Both that neocon and The Z Man had been huge influences on me in their respective eras - the early 2000s and the late 2010s. I can’t deny that. I can’t erase them from my past, even though I no longer agree with anything the neocon wrote and I’d probably disagree with a lot of what The Z Man wrote even before he went ZAnon.
This post isn’t about agreement - it’s about acknowledgment. I thank those men for their impact on me.
And I say goodbye.
I read paleocons but never embraced the label. I then called myself “Alt Right” for a while until that label got permanently tainted. I switched to “Dissident Right” without hesitation, then abandoned that once I realized that the dissidents had their own orthodoxy. Support Trump. Support Putin. No and no. NO COPE describes me best now.
But not his biggest fan. Although I used to read all of The Z Man’s free material, I never paid him anything. (Rurik was the first and only blogger I ever paid.) I might have listened to The Z Man Power Hour only once.
I have a strong aversion to audio as a medium for serious topics. I can read far faster than I can listen, and my listening ability is poor. I don’t have a hearing problem. Sound goes fine through my ears; the problem is in my brain. I have a processing issue.
Yes, I used to read Vox Day too. He hated The Jordan even more than I did. Unfortunately, Vox loved Trump … and Q. And ZAnon: e.g., in October 2024, he declared that “[i[t’s all but over for the Kiev regime” … eleven months after he wrote in November 2023, “it’s obvious that the neocons have already decided to pull the plug and turn off the life support system of the Kiev regime.” Any moment now … but no shame. Ever. Just keep moving along, keep pumping out copium, keep profiting. Truth doesn’t pay - ask
!After the “bomb-rain” on Iran, I was happy to see a few fans of The Z Man upset at Trump. I think that was just a phase, though. The dissident community is all they have, and if they abandon its consensus, they will be alone. A fate most can’t stand.
Whereas I admitted I was wrong on my blog and had my readership plummet close to zero.
WAnon is my term for War on Terror supporters back in the Dubya days like me. I look back at that shameful period in “PIE in the Sky”:
PIE in the Sky
I’m annoyed by Anons. Not anonymous people like myself, but beLIEvers in SomethingAnon fantasies:
I wasn't sure if you meant he was dead dead or just dead to you for having inferior opinions these days, as he had a post yesterday (but none today) -- but yeah, I see the RamZPaul tweet and all the comments about it on his post from yesterday https://x.com/ramzpaul/status/1938368469432455654 , https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=34419#comments
This is a big bummer. I have read Zman for a decade, although only infrequently in the past couple years as he had a pretty standard paleocon view that didn't understand the structure of the world - i.e. he thought the Russia/Ukraine war was being fought for "real", and he thought Trump's 2024 win was "real". I appreciated how he allowed a wide range of comments to his posts, that he posted every day consistently 5x a week - definitely the most consistent output in the dissident space - and he had a cool, gravely voice when I would (rarely) listen to his Zman power hour.
It sounds like a sudden heart attack - not cancer and not drugs - and he was around 60 years old, which is when a lot of these widow maker heart attacks happen (although I don't think he was married or had kids). In a sense he reminds me of Lawrence Auster, who posted every day for many years and who too passed away too young (although he died slowly of cancer).
Rest in peace, Zman. You will be missed. Fuck.
He had a big influence on me in the mid-2010s too. His blog started my march down the "dissident" Right until I've reached my current point. Xirl Science was one of his more humorous schticks.
I didn't know he was in bad health. He talked a game about fitness in his podcast. Wonder if he took the shots as he was in his 60s (early Gen X).
Yeah the Ukraine cope was too much for me. Posting a couple Rurik articles in August 2022 got me ridden down like Frantic in the comments. He popped in my X feed and most of it was just normiecon observations at this point. Funny how he used to mock Boomers too.