On June 25, 2025, the right’s most prolific pundit, John Christopher Zander, died of natural causes. He was known online by the handle Z Man, but also identified as Christopher Zeeman when appearing on podcasts or speaking at conferences.
He was doxxed by the SPLC in 2022, but never publicly used his birth name. To either his readers’ credit or the SPLC’s waning reach, I never saw his birth name appear within the comment section of his blog, in response to any of his X posts, or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe because his name was the least interesting thing about him.
I published a post about Z Man a few months ago in May 2025, as a resource for new readers or listeners. In it, I intentionally omitted his birth name out of respect for his desire for privacy. Given that he self-identified primarily as Z Man online, I will use that name going forward.
The Z Man
If you’re unfamiliar with his work, Z Man was an extremely prolific and effective orator and author. He published articles on his blog, nearly daily, for ten years, and he likewise released an hour-long podcast every Friday, for years. He only ever missed a publication if he told you about it in advance.
Consequently, Z Man wrote and spoke about a lot. If you read my profile on him, you’ll know that I narrowed down his main themes to Freedom of Association, Human Biodiversity, and Managerialism. But that only captures a small part of his thought.
For someone who read and listened to him for years, Z Man was surprisingly hard to pin down politically (at least for me). I knew what he didn’t support, but often found myself wondering what he did. Because in a way, Z Man was a delightful grump, and I sincerely mean that in the nicest way possible. There was no end to the fodder he found in life. He saw dysfunction and disinformation everywhere, and yet, he never despaired. There was always something we could do to help bring sanity back into the world.
What I always appreciated from Z Man was his insight. I know that’s a trite statement, but that’s as simple as I can make it. He didn’t just avoid despair, but he expounded original (or at least, uncommon) perspectives on everything. Of the thousand Z Man articles or podcasts that I must have read or listened to, they all had at least one “huh, I hadn’t considered that,” or at least one “yeah, I guess that’s a pretty fair assessment,” or at least one “hmm, I suppose he’s right.”
Z Man comprehended politics like a butcher knows a pig. He knew it in the holistic, in the abstract, and how the sausage was made. To pin him down–for lack of a better word–he was a rationalist. He saw through the fluff and treated things as they were, on reality’s terms. But unlike the “rationalist” communities online, he wasn’t afflicted by any self-hating, suicidal, liberal tendencies. That propaganda just never worked on him.
He must have been someone who thinks like he writes. Most people have a scattered structure to their longer writings. Where they don’t, it’s because they’ve edited them once or twice, or their writing simply lacks profundity. Somehow though, every day, Z Man was able to regurgitate his inner thoughts into a tight, thoughtful, and topical article.
To cover the breadth of his work is clearly beyond the scope of this post. Analyzing or even just summarizing it could be a book in itself, so I’ll briefly touch on his main themes in case you’re unfamiliar.
In a way, they’re all related. Mangerialism–excessive bureaucracy, unearned authority, and anointed elites–lead to a willful, systematic disbelief in Human Biodiversity–that different people are different, regardless of their particular social upbringings–which in turn leads to an erosion of the First Amendment’s Freedom of Association–where everybody and anybody has the right to work with, live near, or simply avoid whomever they want.
The one thing Z Man was most consistent about, throughout all of his work, was his displeasure with being forcibly integrated with people who were rude and violent. He didn’t believe in any grand Jewish conspiracy, because to him, the world didn’t run on conspiracy. The world was run by individuals pursuing their own individual interests, and those sometimes aligned.
No, more important to Z Man was our simple inability to live in a normal, decent, sane society. He believed in a world where women should feel safe walking the street alone at 9PM; where violent criminals are not just apprehended, but also kept behind bars instead of released on the street; and where one’s pet cats aren’t at risk of being eaten by a gaggle of Haitians.
The Man Himself
Given that this post is written in memoriam to Z Man, aka John Christopher Zander, aka Christopher Zeeman, I’ll tell you what we do know of the man himself.
He was unmarried and without children. In at least one podcast, he admitted that he regretted having no children, and his advice to others was that they shouldn’t get too hung up on finding the perfect spouse or moment to have kids. By that, he meant that maybe one’s spouse or partner isn’t perfect, or that maybe the marriage will or won’t work out, but you could still make the child your priority and sort the rest of the dynamics out later.
For years, he lived in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, which he sarcastically referred to as Lagos. A few years earlier he managed to escape Lagos, if only for a short while, and landed in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. According to Peter Brimelow of VDARE, he recommended the area to Z Man at one of their annual conferences, in part because all West Virginian counties went red in 2024.
But that’s not to say that Z Man was a dedicated Republican. In a two-party system, that’s where he’d shake out, but not out of any love for “conservatism.” He’d be the first to ask the question, “what’s actually been conserved by the party?” Instead, I’d imagine his vote for the GOP (if he did vote GOP) to be a simple reaction against whatever lunacy the left was promoting that year, i.e. “anything but that.“
Occasionally, he showed a soft spot for Trump, but he was hard on him too. I think he took some pleasure watching Washington’s machinations against Trump, and Trumps’ relative ignorance of the game they were playing. For the first time in a long time, it wasn’t politics as usual, and it at least gave him something to write about.
As of the time of writing, we don’t know Z Man‘s cause of death besides that it appears to be of natural causes. Brimelow shared that his wife Lydia was first contacted by the Berkeley Springs Sheriff about his’s death. They don’t know how the police identified her as a contact person. Lydia privately reached out to the community to help locate any of his living family members, but one of her contacts leaked the news of his death online prematurely.
Since then, the platforms on which Z Man posted have been flooded with reader comments expressing their admiration and condolences. Unfortunately, his official website, thezman.com, has a spam filter now preventing new posts from appearing on site. This has severely hampered efforts to keep the community apprised of updates regarding his upcoming memorial service and our content preservation efforts.
When I first drafted this post, the final entry on Z Man‘s website had 778 comments, excluding the unknown number of comments pending moderation approval. Now, the website is offline due to a database error. His Substack only has 78 comments, but readers can still post their comments there.
A personal friend of Z Man from [redacted] started a Twitter/X account as @FriendsOfZMan. It was active for about a month, but has since slowed its activity.
I’ve learned that a next-of-kin was identified, and Z Man‘s personal friends have made contact with them. We will learn in time how receptive they are to his friend (mentioned above) assuming control over his website assets, to help keep the site alive, but so far it’s not looking promising.
In brighter news, Z Man‘s two Ocicat cats were adopted as a pair from Morgan County Animal Control.
Looking Forward
One reader put together a torrent (magnet link, 21.2 GB) containing a scrape of the official website (using wget). Since then, other readers and listeners have uploaded his audio podcasts, video appearances, and guest shows to archive.org for preservation.
I’d like to think in 5 or 10 years, Z Man‘s legacy will stand in good company alongside other dissident right thinkers that died too soon, just as there are websites and podcasts dedicated to preserving and sharing the writings and speeches of Samuel Francis, Jonathan Bowden, etc.
Fortunately, I’ve been told that a new website is being built from these archived files to host his insights in perpetuity. It will hopefully contain all of his blog articles, Taki Mag posts, free podcasts, premium podcasts, guest appearances, and videos, but I don’t know when it will go online.
If you haven’t spent any time with him yet, I encourage you to watch the following speech from the 2022 American Renaissance conference titled, “What Is to Be Done?” It’s the only known conference speech on record, and was only publicly released after his passing earlier this year.
Rest in Peace, Chris.
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