WHO WAS WHO IN THE DISSIDENT RIGHT: Z-MAN

Alaric being offered a young boy, the preferred avatar of Z-Man

by Colin Liddell

A once anonymous blogger who was "outed" in February 2022 as John Christopher Zander, 55, a software salesman from the Northern suburbs of Baltimore. His identity became known due to a data breach at domain registrar and web host Epik. He passed away in 2025.

He became associated with a "race realist" Alt-Right position around about 2015, but was more of a  paleoconservative type. Since 2020, he wrote for the rather tame Taki's Mag. Despite his relatively mild positions, Zander was afraid of being doxxed, hence his closely guarded Z-man persona.

He started his Z-Man blog in 2013, after a history on comment sections and message boards. Relatively sane and nuanced on the JQ and other racial issues, he nevertheless allowed himself to become associated with actual Nazis, for example by writing for Counter-Currents. He produced rather dull content with a strong streak of "boomer" fatalism and conspiritardary that made him sound a lot older than he was (just Gen X). His American insularity was amply demonstrated by him mistaking Russian shill Morgoth for a Scotsman.

Revealingly, his chosen avatar was from a "homoerotic" painting by the German artist Ludwig Thiersch that appears to shows the German barbarian Alaric the Visigoth being offered a small male child. Some may naively doubt the "homoerotic" nature of the painting, but I would also draw their attention to this part of the painting:

As you can see, Thiersch has carefully composed the painting so that it looks like another male child is reverently "cupping" Alaric's balls. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a more openly homoerotic painting than this for that period, outside of actual illicit pornography, yet Z-Man chose to take this for his avatar. 

Make of that what you will.

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Read other entries like this in Who's Who in the Dissident Right, a biographical guide to the colourful characters of the on-line Right.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

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