Inside the Meltdown of a Right-Wing Publisher

And how readers of its men’s mag reacted when it published a trans model.

(Composite / Photos: X / Screenshot / Shutterstock)

THE READERS OF FAR-RIGHT men’s magazine Man’s World want content that is strong, virile, and politically incorrect—like they are, you might say. The magazine’s founder, an esoteric fitness guru named Charles Cornish-Dale who goes by the alias “Raw Egg Nationalist,” encourages his followers to guzzle more than a dozen uncooked eggs a day.

This cover from one issue of Man’s World should give you a sense of what we’re dealing with:

The Spring/Summer 2024 issue.

So it came as a bit of a shock to Man’s World readers back in May 2024 when they discovered that included among the glossy photos of hot ladies that had just run in an issue of the magazine was a shot featuring a transgender woman.

The offending issue was published soon after the magazine was acquired by “New Right” publishing house Passage Press. The transgender woman in question, who goes by the name “Pariah the Doll,” is a fixture of New York’s reactionary Dimes Square scene. In the photo, Pariah is smeared in mud and what appears to be white paint as another person rubs their nose on her face.

Readers were angry to have been titillated by this without knowing the context of Pariah’s identity. But as angry comments flooded in, Cornish-Dale defended the choice, saying he had just been given a stack of pictures to choose from.

“I don’t actually know who this person is. It’s a picture from a fashion show,” he said—adding that “it just looked like another ugly model to me.”

His fans weren’t mollified.

“In seriousness though you should probably issue some kind of a retraction or statement of disavowal or something, even an honest mistake like this is likely to be used against you for a while and lots of people feel betrayed,” wrote one irate reader on X.

Running a photo of a transgender model by accident may not seem like the biggest transgression in conservative journalism. But in an age where anti-trans politics is ascendant on the right—and manosphere vibes are dominant in certain quarters—this was a major debacle for Passage and Man’s World. And yet, it was far from the only serious problem then facing the publication and causing frustration for its founder.

In a June 2025 letter to Passage executives that I obtained, Cornish-Dale complained that the publisher had botched his magazine’s rollout, run months behind schedule, and allowed its social media accounts to go dormant. He claimed he had been promised Man’s World would be distributed in “fraternities, gyms and gentlemen’s clubs,” but that such distribution never came to fruition.

“A magazine formerly read by hundreds of thousands has, in your hands, withered and died,” Cornish-Dale wrote.

One month after that letter, Passage announced that it was handing Man’s World back to Cornish-Dale, and would no longer be involved in its publication.

---

LAUNCHED IN 2021 BY JONATHAN KEEPERMAN, a former lecturer at University of California, Irvine, Passage Press has become the premiere publishing house of the authoritarian New Right movement associated with Peter Thiel and Vice President JD Vance. It publishes work by a range of far-right favorites, including Silicon Valley monarchist Curtis Yarvin and Austrian extremist Martin Sellner, plus reprints of writers like German World War I veteran Ernst Jünger.

All of it, according to Keeperman, is meant to encourage conservatives to play a more active role in the arts.

“Conservatives are afraid of the artistic gesture,” Keeperman said in a podcast interview.

But Keeperman has run into problems with that mission.

For years, Passage’s founder was a right-wing commentator writing under the pseudonym “Lom3z.” He called for journalists to be publicly executed and said Republicans should boil down their arguments to one message against Democrats: “shut up fag.” After the Guardian revealed his real name in 2024, Keeperman rebranded himself as a right-wing public intellectual.

Keeperman’s publishing operation hosted a “Coronation Ball” for Donald Trump’s inauguration that GQ dubbed the “New Right Party of the Year,” featuring guests like Jack Posobiec and the hosts of the right-wing “Red Scare” podcast. In perhaps the ultimate coup for Keeperman’s own brand as a right-wing thought leader, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat interviewed him last May on a podcast about masculinity. And late last year, Keeperman launched a podcast at the Blaze with anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo.

But even as Keeperman’s personal star has risen, authors say his publishing house has struggled with basic management issues.

Passage Press didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Passage’s plans aren’t limited to the strictly political. They have also launched a science-fiction imprint, sparking drama in the world of anti-woke science fiction. And they have rapidly absorbed other right-wing publishers. In May 2025, Passage announced it had acquired Terror House Press—founded by Matt Forney, a far-right commentator and outspoken sex tourist—with plans to relaunch it as a Passage imprint.

But Terror House authors whose books were transferred to Passage were kept in the dark about how the new arrangement was going to work until November 2025, when Daniel Lisi, the chief operating officer of Passage’s parent company, told them in an email I obtained that the rights to their books would revert to them, outstanding royalties would be paid out, and Passage would stop selling copies. But that doesn’t seem to have happened: The books stayed up for sale on Amazon for months and Terror House authors griped about not having received any money.

Matt Lawrence, an author and former art director at Terror House, complained in a March 6 email I obtained that Lisi had ignored numerous emails from authors regarding the money they were owed or having their books removed from Passage’s Amazon storefront as promised. Another Passage project Lawrence said he was working on—a vinyl audiobook version of a book by sex-crazed underground writer “Delicious Tacos”—also fell through after Passage went silent.

“Lisi seems almost completely incapable of sending any updates or replying to emails,” Lawrence wrote to Keeperman in one email I obtained.

The money owed to the Terror House authors probably wasn’t enormous—Lawrence’s The Chronicles of Bronan the Barbarian, a collection of decade-old blog posts from the early manosphere, likely wasn’t flying off the Amazon shelves. Still, Lawrence estimated in his email to Keeperman that the Terror House authors together were owed a few thousand dollars and had been ignored for months.

Lawrence, who didn’t respond to my request for comment, wrote in his email to Keeperman that he was baffled by the incompetence of Passage’s management.

“I would expect more from an established publishing company,” he wrote. “It’s honestly both surprising and disappointing.”

Karen Hunt, another Terror House author, told me in an email that she’s “far from satisfied” with Keeperman’s handling of Terror House.

But perhaps Passage’s biggest problem came from its strained relationship with Cornish-Dale, who, as “Raw Egg Nationalist,” ranked as one of the biggest stars on the publisher’s roster.

Amid the rise of similar ideologues with Hellenic aesthetics and fascist-coded politics, Cornish-Dale thought in the summer of 2025 that his moment had come. He had been featured a few years earlier in Tucker Carlson’s documentary on masculinity, which explored unorthodox practices like testicular tanning. The ascendant MAHA movement looked like his perfect chance to be lifted out of the right’s sweatiest corners and become a crossover star. In his June letter to Passage, Cornish-Dale claimed there was an “all-time high level of interest in my work.”

He planned to capitalize on it with a new book published through Passage titled The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, which argues that men as we know them may soon be a thing of the past, thanks in part to “endocrine disruptors” and overly processed foods. But with a July 2025 publication date looming, and Man’s World already languishing under Passage’s guidance, Cornish-Dale grew worried.

In late May, Cornish-Dale and Lisi met for dinner with right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at the Los Angeles mansion where Yiannopoulos lives, according to two sources familiar with the meeting. Yiannopoulos grilled Lisi over Passage’s plans to promote the book. The meeting apparently did not convince Cornish-Dale that the book wasn’t headed for disaster.

Days later, Cornish-Dale sent Passage his list of concerns: a lack of review copies, marketing plans, or live events, typographical errors in published copies, and the absence of a more expensive “patrician edition.”¹

“There is no leadership, no direction and no interest in the product from Passage,” Cornish-Dale complained.

Cornish-Dale also slammed Passage’s habit of releasing similar books by multiple authors at the same time, jumbling up the marketing strategy. His book The Last Men, for example, was set to be released around the same time as several other Passage books, including one similarly called The Last Alpha Male from 89-year-old right-wing author Taki Theodoracopulos, who had been sentenced to a suspended prison term in 2023 for attempted rape.

“I have been given equal billing with a book by a geriatric sex offender that bears a confusingly similar title to my own; a collection of essays by a fringe right-wing professor; and a book by an anonymous Twitter poster with 15,000 followers called ‘Rambo Van Halen,’” Cornish-Dale wrote.

Worst of all for Passage, though, according to Cornish-Dale’s letter, was a major procedural oversight: they had never remembered to make him sign a book contract. Without drastic changes, he planned to walk with the book—and whatever advance they had already paid him.

“We are on the brink of an avoidable disaster that can only be averted by a wholesale change in your approach to me, and to this book,” he wrote.

Apparently, Cornish-Dale was never satisfied with Passage’s response. The Last Men was eventually released last December—by a different right-wing publisher, Regnery.

1. Passage sells limited-edition leather-bound “patrician” copies of certain authors’ books for hundreds of dollars. One Yarvin book, for example, sells for nearly $300.