In 2022 Jonathan Keeperman, then a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine, who for years had moonlighted as a right-wing Internet provocateur, founded a boutique publisher called Passage Press. His goal, he told Ross Douthat in a New York Times interview last year, was to build a reactionary cultural apparatus that would form an “enduring and meaningful counterweight to a dominant left.” 

For too long, he argued, conservatives had stood by stuffily as the left commandeered arts and entertainment and bent mainstream institutions to its ideological will. Keeperman wanted to change that. By drawing on the energies of the so-called New Right and its various overlapping cohorts—red-pilled Silicon Valley types, Dimes Square podcasters and playwrights, manospheric influencers, proselytizers of raw milk—he hoped to show that the right could produce culture that was just as vital, just as possessed of spiritedness and “thymos,” as that produced by the left, if not more so. “If you are telling the truth about the world,” Keeperman told Douthat, “then you are going to make right-wing art.”

Passage may be a small operation but it has gained considerable influence in its political orbit. Last January, on the eve of Trump’s return to office, it hosted a “Coronation Ball” that was attended by Steve Bannon, Jack Posobiec, Dasha Nekrasova, and other members of the reactionary glitterati. Thanks to Passage, Keeperman has become part of this glitterati himself. The Guardian has described him as a “celebrity” of the New Right and a “tastemaker in a burgeoning proto-fascist movement.” Douthat for his part seemed seduced by his stardom: he opened his interview by telling Keeperman that he looked “fantastic” and remarking on his “amazing head of hair.”

Passage’s output consists of titles by both contemporary far-right thinkers and their intellectual forbears. Its publications include Gray Mirror: Fascicle I, Disturbance, the first volume in a planned four-part treatise by the blogger Curtis Yarvin in which he systematically if unpersuasively advances his signature theory that America should be ruled by a technocratic king; collections of writings by the “race realist” Steve Sailer, the antiegalitarian accelerationist Nick Land, and the former National Review mainstay John Derbyshire; an anthology of speculative fiction with contributions by the far-right influencers Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist; and reissued memoirs by two Russian noblemen who fought for the White Army as well as the German nationalist Ernst Jünger. 

The books vary in genre and tone, but together they offer a clear vision of the world as seen by the far right. It’s a world in which men have been domesticated—or, in the parlance of the manosphere, “longhoused”—by an effeminate culture bent on dispossessing them of their virility; in which a fixation on inclusivity and equal opportunity has scrambled natural hierarchies, elevating the weak at the expense of the strong; and in which large-scale immigration and “suicidal empathy” have poisoned Western civilization and imperiled its rightful supremacy. Each of Passage’s books contributes directly or indirectly to this overall ideology. 

Last year, however, Passage put out what at first seemed like a very different set of books—books beloved by millions of readers around the world, very few of whom, presumably, would consider them far-right texts. In two handsome box sets with illustrated covers by Alex Wisner (a comic artist who has published two graphic novels with the press about an anti-Bolshevik Russian general), Passage released the original versions of the first six Hardy Boys novels, which began entering the public domain in 2023. 

Lest anyone think Passage was broadening its curatorial horizons to include nonpolitical material, or simply making a cash grab by appealing to young readers, the press made clear that it considers these tales of sleuthing teen heroes to be of a piece with its revanchist worldview. The product page for the “Passage Children’s Bundle” (which also includes an edition of Treasure Island) asserts that “Passage is committed to making children’s literature great again.” On X it promoted a sale on the books with the discount code EATTHEWEAK. 

Why would a publisher as selective as Passage take interest in these hokey detective stories, and in the “original” versions of the books in particular? What were the novels I’d gobbled up as a child doing on the same shelf as Raw Egg Nationalist? To find out, I read the Passage editions of the first three Hardy Boys books alongside the standard revised versions published by Grosset and Dunlap. Much like Frank and Joe Hardy at the start of every book, I sensed trouble in the air, a mystery, and I returned to their idyllic world to try to solve it.

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The Hardy Boys came to life in 1927 under the stewardship of the children’s literature magnate Edward Stratemeyer, who initially conceived of the characters and premise and whose Stratemeyer Syndicate—a book packager that relied on publishers for distribution—also gave the world Nancy Drew in 1930. The series, first ghostwritten by Charles Leslie McFarlane and later by a succession of others, but always credited to the pseudonymous Franklin W. Dixon, was hugely successful. Under different publishers, the novels continued to come out at a steady clip until 2005, when the series was officially concluded with Motocross Madness. By then it totaled 190 books and had sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.¹

Every Hardy Boys book follows the same formula. Brothers Frank and Joe, sons of the famed private investigator Fenton Hardy, hear tell of some criminal mischief that has been visited on their otherwise picturesque coastal hometown of Bayport (though as the series goes on the novels take them to points as distant as Hong Kong and Marrakesh). The brothers, who aspire one day to become detectives themselves, work in parallel with Fenton to unravel the mystery and bring the offenders to justice. Assisted by various chums, they crisscross the surrounding countryside on their motorcycles or ply the waters of Barmet Bay in their boat, casing abandoned houses, exploring hidden passageways, and spying on dubious characters. In the first book, The Tower Treasure, they investigate a theft from a nearby mansion; in the second, The House on the Cliff, they uncover a drug smuggling scheme; in the third, The Secret of the Old Mill, they expose a network of counterfeiters.

But aside from these basic plotlines, the Hardy Boys books most readers know are not the ones conceived by Stratemeyer and written by the series’ first ghostwriters. Beginning in the 1950s, the Syndicate undertook a radical stylistic and structural revision of the novels to bring them in line with modern sensibilities and readerly tastes. New ghostwriters stripped out dated references (no more automats, no more “roadsters”), simplified the novels’ diction (expunging such vocabularial baubles as “sextette” and “declivity”), and excised passages evincing racial, ethnic, and sexual prejudice, which parents had been complaining about for years. They also seized the opportunity to shorten the books (from twenty-five chapters to twenty), speed them up (eliminating scenes not directly pertinent to the plot), and drastically simplify them, turning what had been atmospheric, moody, and often startingly lyrical narratives into chipper, two-dimensional capers. “The slimmer books and quicker syntax,” writes Mark Connelly in his cultural history of the series, The Hardy Boys Mysteries, 1927–1979, “were geared to appeal to the shortened attention spans of children accustomed to fast-paced television programs.” Aficionados of the Hardy Boys refer to the revisions as the “Great Purge.”

Formerly complex characters became cardboard cutouts. In the original versions of the novels, for example, the Bayport police chief, Ezra Collig, is an almost noirishly compromised figure, a “fat, pompous” layabout who’d rather polish his badges than work cases and who sees the Hardys as threats to his reputation. In the revised versions, perhaps in a concession to the conformist cold war politics of the time, he’s reimagined as a virtuous figure who aids Frank, Joe, and Fenton in their investigations even as they prove to be his crime-fighting betters. 

The revisions also reduced moments of genuine pathos to scenes of cartoonish schlock. In the 1927 version of The Tower Treasure a woman cries quietly when she learns that her husband has been arrested and lost his job as her son comforts her, his face “white and stern.” In the 1959 version, the emotional power of a family silently confronting ruin is traded for melodrama: the mother collapses in a fainting spell, necessitating the administration of smelling salts.

Perhaps most needlessly, the Syndicate took a hacksaw to the originals’ many scenes of descriptive beauty. Here is how The House on the Cliff (1927) portrays a moment in which the brothers scope out a secret cliffside tunnel from their friend’s boat:

Twilight deepened into darkness and the lights of Bayport could be seen as a yellow haze through the mist at the distant extremity of the bay. The cliff was but a dark smudge in the night and the waves broke against the rocks with a lonely sound. 

And here is how the scene appears in The House on the Cliff (1959): 

Twilight deepened into darkness and lights could be seen here and there through the haze. The cliff was only a black smudge and the house above was still unlighted.

To the extent that contemporary readers know the series was updated, it’s likely because they’ve heard tell, as I had, of the original novels’ racism and sexism. But when I read the first three books from the 1920s I found that the problematic passages were few and far between, comprising only a handful of moments in each novel, and that they consisted largely of the sort of crude stereotypes and retrograde turns of phrase you’d expect to find in any number of books written in the early twentieth century. In The Tower Treasure an Italian grocer is portrayed as having, “like most of his countrymen…an excitable nature.” In The House on the Cliff one of the smugglers is described as a “rascally Chinaman” who would love to have “white men in his power.” And in the same book Frank expresses his suspicion that his father is in trouble by saying he has a “hunch that there’s a n[⸺] in the woodpile.” 

All of this language has been scrubbed out of the revised versions at no cost to the quality of the narratives. The damage done by the midcentury bowdlerizations is almost entirely tonal and structural. What many readers now think of as an effort to sanitize the books of offensive content was, in truth, part of a broader project aimed primarily at ensuring their commercial survival. (It’s also worth noting that the sanitizations went only so far: the 1959 The House on the Cliff, for example, still has the Hardys running across a lawn “lithe as Indians.”) The Stratemeyer Syndicate, much like publishers today, saw its product threatened by new media and diminished readerly patience. Faced with the rise of television and the changing cultural mores of postwar America, it met its customers where they were, giving them novels that read like pop screenplays. 

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And yet it’s precisely the expurgation of these offensive moments that evidently attracted Passage’s interest. As the press laments in a publisher’s note preceding each book, the revisions meant that “politically incorrect content was removed, the writing was simplified, and the plots were given more of an action-theme” [sic]. In restoring the originals, then, Passage appears to be acting on two related motivations: a political one and an aesthetic one. If its objective in publishing the original versions of the novels was simply to restore them to their narrative complexity and occasional lyricism, we might say that its project was successful. (We might also say it’s redundant: another publisher, Applewood Books, began reissuing the original versions back in the 1990s, albeit with a prefatory note dutifully warning readers that they might find some language “extremely uncomfortable.”) But Passage is also on a crusade against political correctness: the originals are better, it suggests, not despite their offenses but because of them. Yet the novels themselves may not live up to the publisher’s anti-woke marketing. It’s hard to imagine that their relatively tame transgressions will do much to excite a far-right audience already awash in racist memes. 

Is Passage overpromising, or misunderstanding its product? Did it simply grab a legendary series from the public domain, hyping its revision history as another example of PC overreach while failing to grasp the nature of the cultural forces behind it? Or is there something else about the Hardy Boys novels, apart from their unsavory language, that might appeal to an intellectual incubator for the far right? 

In his interview with Douthat, Keeperman characterized Passage’s work as part of an ongoing “vibe shift” toward a right-wing worldview with the potential to “infiltrate” mainstream media, as happened during the Reagan era. The work of that shift can involve the creation of new cultural products or the installation of new tastemakers—Keeperman approvingly cited David Ellison’s recent media acquisition spree with Paramount Skydance—but it can also involve the retroactive reclassification of mainstream cultural products from the past. (Keeperman characterized the 2007 film No Country for Old Men, for example, as a conservative work of art.) 

It’s hard to imagine a product more mainstream, more embedded in the very DNA of America, than the Hardy Boys. Connelly, speaking to the novels’ global popularity, writes that they “have shaped the way millions of young people around the world perceive American life and values.” By reissuing them under its imprimatur, Passage is making an ambitious statement: these novels of adventurous, upstanding boy-heroes are not only quintessentially American but fundamentally right-wing. 

Certainly, the basic premise of two brothers fighting crime without the help of fumbling authorities appeals to a political movement that idolizes, with an almost erotic fervor, the beauty and ingenuity of male fellowship. This strain of reactionary ideology is captured by Bronze Age Pervert, in many ways the poet laureate of the contemporary far right, in his manifesto Bronze Age Mindset. “Every great thing in the past was done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men,” he writes. “Tyrants and totalitarians”—by which he means the liberal nanny state in all its forms, its universities and corporations, its “human resources cunts with fibromyalgia”—“are suspicious of strong friendships between men.” 

The audacity and gallantry displayed by Frank and Joe Hardy fulfills a fantasy of what men could accomplish if only they were liberated from the feminine confines of the “longhouse.” (Douthat, in making sense of Passage’s eclectic output, speculated to Keeperman that what might link the Hardy Boys to a memoir by a White Army general is the “idea of human greatness beset by mediocrity.”) From the perspective of the far right, the Hardy brothers serve as the ideal embodiments of this fantasy: strapping young white males who are strong of body and clear of mind, resourceful and courageous and self-sufficient, willing to go to any length to protect their community from enemies who are often “dark” in appearance and of foreign extraction. They live in a perpetual summertime, never aging, never changing, never failing to restore their lives to the way they once were, before the arrival of people with strange names and sinister motives. 

And their city of Bayport, with its sparkling harbors and rustic hillsides, is precisely the kind of Rockwellian paradise that far-right influencers like to hold up as an example of the America we once had and must do everything to recapture. As the Department of Homeland Security wages its merciless and lethal deportation campaign, it has become one of the principal purveyors of such nostalgia. One of its Instagram posts pairs an oil painting of a group of boys playing football in a yard with the caption “The Homeland we seek to defend.” The painting, by Andy Thomas (whose kitsch oeuvre also includes a group portrait of Trump with Nixon, Reagan, and other former Republican presidents), conjures a right-wing wet dream, an America without mosques or Spanish-language customer service lines, and it’s easy to imagine the boys in the painting as versions of Frank and Joe and their chums.

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Despite their retrograde narratives and cultural homogeneity, however, the Hardy Boys novels never quite lend themselves to a rigidly reactionary interpretation. Passage may want to present the series as a vision of a glorious American past, the kind of Edenic innocence to which we should “retvrn,” but one could just as easily focus on the way that the texts depict history as an antagonist. In the Hardy Boys series the past is not a place of glory or prelapsarian innocence—it’s a source of danger and something to overcome. 

In each of the first three books, the boys’ investigation comes to its suspenseful climax at a site of historical desolation. The burglarized house in The Tower Treasure is “a lonely old mansion” full of rooms “heavy with dust,” and the water tower where the stolen goods are eventually found is “one of the old style built before the modern tanks came into use” that has since fallen into a “state of disrepair.” The eponymous House on the Cliff, described as a place of “gloomy history” and rumored to be full of ghosts, gives the boys “a shiver of apprehension” with its “deathlike silence.” And the defunct mill in The Secret of the Old Mill, once “strong and imposing,” is now “weatherbeaten” and shows the “ravages of the years.” The Hardy brothers, revving their motorcycles and bursting with youthful energy, regard these relics of faded glory and moribund industry not with longing but with dread.

Their suspicion of the past plays out on a more personal level in their vexed relationship with their father, who serves as an embodiment of the generation they will succeed. The brothers may admire Fenton but they also see him as their opponent. Their goal, as aspiring detectives, is to prove their worth by beating him at his own game, and in the original version of The Secret of the Old Mill this leads them to withhold evidence from him—in effect impeding and potentially sabotaging the investigation—so that they can be the ones to claim victory. 

Respect for male authority is foundational to the far-right worldview, as is vividly apparent in the fawning language conservatives use to describe Trump. Keeperman has called Trump a “great father of the American people”; the official White House X account has referred to Trump as “Daddy”; and in late 2024, at a campaign event in Georgia, Tucker Carlson likened Trump to a “pissed” father who, upon returning to office, would “spank” America for being a bad child.

In contrast to this culture of filial worship, the Hardy boys are perfectly willing to acknowledge their father’s vulnerabilities, and with good reason: Fenton is constantly disappearing, overlooking clues, and getting into scrapes from which his sons must rescue him. It’s possible to read the novels as dramas of oedipal frustration in which the brothers act on an imperfectly suppressed desire to “murder” their father, to get out from under his influence and surpass him, to clear their world of dusty remains and adults past their prime in order to become creative forces in their own right. In the original version of The Tower Treasure, when a friend tells Frank that Fenton “can do anything,” Frank replies, “I used to think so, too.” As the literary scholar Tim Morris has noted, “Fenton Hardy never captures a single criminal or solves a single case.… He is infallible but always failing,” and in this way he exemplifies “what many think of their own fathers: utterly powerful, contemptibly inept.”²

What will young people today find in the original Hardy Boys novels? Will they find nostalgic narratives of white male supremacy, or tales of heroes anxious to be free of the past? Like the Hardy boys, children know when they’re being told half the story; they know the full truth is something they’ll have to discover for themselves. In the revised version of The Tower Treasure, in a line that always haunted me, the narrator remarks that “Frank and Joe had learned early in their boyhood that it was impossible to keep any secrets from their astute father.” But their father can’t keep any secrets from them either.