In Memoriam ZMAN

A devastating premature death here in Berkeley Springs WV

ZMan, a.k.a. John Christopher Zander

It’s a measure of the extreme OPSEC with which the great podcaster ZMan (twitter handle @TheRealZBlog, Gab handle @TheZBlog—he was a great fan of Andrew Torba’s Gab, as are we), conducted his life that the Berkeley Springs WV sheriff had to call Lydia, while she was driving our two daughters back from 4-H camp, to tell her he had died, apparently from natural causes although he was not yet 60, and to ask if she knew his next of kin. No evidence was apparent in his home. (But his two cats, with some difficulty, had been captured and transferred to Animal Control, pending rehoming).

We don’t know why the sheriff chose to call Lydia in particular. We didn’t even know that his real name was John Christopher Zander. But Berkeley Springs is a small town and everyone knows everything. Lydia was able to find a relative, with help from friends. Unfortunately, however, despite her explicit urging, one of these friends released the news on X before that relative could be contacted.

Zman attended all the VDARE conferences at the Berkeley Springs Castle, prior to our mugging by New York Attorney General Letitia James. When I realized from his podcast that he was thinking of leaving Baltimore (a location he never acknowledged but always referred to as “Lagos”), I urged him to look at West Virginia. (All American patriots should move to West Virginia. Every single county voted for Trump in 2024 and there’s no big black city to kick the rest of the state around, unlike e.g. New York, Maryland, Illinois, etc). I invited him to stay with us during his search.

He did not respond—he was not a great correspondent—but, next thing I knew, he had moved to Berkeley Springs, less than ten minutes away from us.

I took particular pleasure in hearing him discuss hearing a brook from his bedroom, rather than gunshots, and the delights of mowing his lawn, even though you still had to deduce from context clues where he now was.

Zman was highly intelligent, very well read, and immensely prolific. He was judeocritical, a race realist, and an immigration patriot. Needless to say, this would have excluded him from any career in Conservatism Inc. To the end of his life, he apparently had what he called a “day job” in the commercial world.

The Xer @CostcoFrank has a compendium of Zman’s work here. Personally, I particularly enjoyed Zman’s crushing of Jewish Supremacist Ben Shapiro, who has hypocritically smeared me as a “White Supremacist,” here and here.

Zman wrote two articles for VDARE.com: Report From The Gatekeeper’s Ball: Yoram Hazony Really Hates The Right; Zionist Attempt To Co-opt National Conservatism Will Fail; and THE VIRTUE OF NATIONALISM: A Book Of Contradictions. Perhaps as a result of these, he was excluded from Yoram Hazony’s further National Conservative conferences.

Their loss.

And, of course, America’s.