Major craziness going on right now in a certain niche corner of the Right. Do you know who Jack Murphy is? I barely knew of him until I saw him pass by in the hallway at the National Conservatism conference recently. He’s a striking figure: very tall, bald, with a dramatic beard. Someone explained to me that he is a big figure in the manosphere, and fronts a hypermasculine philosophy that at one point included polygamy. Here is a link to his self-description on his website Jack Murphy Live. Excerpt:

I was wondering why Jack Murphy — real name is John Goldman — turned up at NatCon, but someone told me that he is a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. Someone else told me that they thought he had recently turned to Christianity, but weren’t sure. “Is he still a polygamist?” I asked. My interlocutor didn’t know.

Why is Jack Murphy in the news this week? In part because Lyndon McLeod, the far-right mass shooter in Denver who wrote novels under the name “Roman McClay,” was allegedly a member of Murphy’s private brotherhood called

What’s this Liminal Order all about? I suspect we will be finding out soon.

Plus, a week or so ago, Murphy went on a chat show and was asked about an article he once wrote speaking of the pleasures of being a literal cuckold (he wrote about farming his girlfriend out to other men for sex). Jack Murphy did not appreciate the question (don’t click on this at work; he drops several f-bombs):

Exploding on a woman, who is simply reading a super chat is exactly the behavior I would expect from a man who wrote an article about how being a cuck is cool.
Bonus demerits to @ElijahSchaffer for letting that dude scream at her like that. Come on brother, that’s your friend. pic.twitter.com/XAV5Pbvhyu

— TheQuartering (@TheQuartering) December 18, 2021

It turns out that back in 2015, Murphy, who now sells himself and his masculinist advisory services as an extreme chad, wrote a piece extolling the erotic pleasure of being a beta cuck. You can find this online; I’m not going to link to it. Some Redditors got busy digging, and found that Murphy and his girlfriend had acted in a self-made porn broadcast back in 2019 (Murphy admitted this on Twitter today). In the film, there is apparently a sequence in which the super-masculine Murphy impales himself with a plastic phallus, while simultaneously pleasuring himself. This is not a rumor, alas; I stumbled across the image online, and can’t unsee it.

So we now see that a far-right public figure whose entire personality and business model was promoting himself as a villainous straight white male is … rather more ambiguous about his straightness and his masculinity than he would have us know.

The reader who tipped me off to all this says this passage from Theodor Adorno describes Murphy:

At the root of their sadism is a lie, and only as liars do they truly become sadists, agents of repression. This lie, however, is nothing other than repressed homosexuality presenting itself as the only approved form of heterosexuality.

Murphy has a history of sadistic writing and messaging. In 2015, he informed his readers that “feminists need rape” to solve the “problem” of man’s “natural tendency towards dominance and women to passivity and submission.” And now there are images going around of his self-sodomization in a porn movie that he and his girlfriend did for money.

A decade ago, Johann Hari, the gay, left-wing British journalist, wrote an essay exploring the connection between homosexual men and fascism. It will be interesting to see how the Jack Murphy story plays out. Looks like one more piece of evidence for the Weimar America thesis.