Nathan Pinkoski
Political theorist; University of Alberta undergrad; Oxford PhD; Zephyr Institute research fellow/director 2022; prior postdoc at Robert P. George’s James Madison Program, Princeton; NatCon 3 talk “Catholicism and the Necessity of Nationalism” — praised Camp of the Saints, implied Pope Francis may be satanic, quoted Charles Maurras; Edmund Burke Group (Hazony) senior fellow; Field: “dressed-up BAPism”
Who He Is
Nathan Pinkoski is a Catholic political theorist whose career trajectory illustrates the NatCon-to-Hard-Right pipeline. Pinkoski attended the University of Alberta as an undergraduate (as did Field herself), then received his PhD at Oxford. Before his NatCon emergence he was a postdoctoral fellow at Robert P. George’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton — a conservative academic network closely connected to the broader New Right. In 2022 he was research fellow and director of academic programs at the Zephyr Institute, a conservative humanities institute set up to serve Stanford students.
NatCon 3 Talk (Miami, September 2022)
Pinkoski’s NatCon 3 talk was titled “Catholicism and the Necessity of Nationalism.”
- It began with high praise for Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints — the racist dystopian novel about Third World “invasion” of France, which Stephen Miller and Viktor Orbán had also embraced.
- It strongly implied that liberals (perhaps including Pope Francis) were satanic.
- It used the novel to connect Catholic teachings to Hazony-style nationalist particularism, quoting selectively from papal sources “with a level of dishonesty reminiscent of Michael Anton’s use of Lincoln in JAG.”
- It featured a quote from Charles Maurras — an ideologue for the far-right French movement Action Française, which collaborated with the Vichy regime.
- Pinkoski was clearly a Carl Schmitt enthusiast.
Field’s verdict: his argument, “despite its Catholic inflection, was not too far off from dressed-up BAPism.” His demeanor was anxious and scholarly, which made it easy to miss the “ugly fanaticism of his argument.”
Post-NatCon Career
Within months of the NatCon 3 talk, Pinkoski was brought on as a senior fellow with Hazony’s Edmund Burke Foundation (the organizing body of the NatCon conferences).
In May 2023 he published an analysis of Camp of the Saints in First Things — the same issue that published a pseudonymous explainer of the Longhouse concept by “L0m3z” (later identified as Jonathan Keeperman, a UC Irvine lecturer who ran the far-right publishing house Passage Press, which had published many works by Curtis Yarvin). Patrick Deneen took strong and public offense at the L0m3z piece: “Disappointed doesn’t quite capture my response to First Things publishing a Nietzsche-lite article by a Twitter anon. The justified opposition to Wokeism increasingly dominating the mainstream right is in danger of descending into very dark places.” (The tweet was later deleted.)
L0m3z/Keeperman would later be welcomed as a speaker at NatCon, as would Paul Gottfried. In 2023-2024, Pinkoski became a visiting faculty member at the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education — a GOP-led initiative promoting the Western canon. His appointment ended after one year.
Significance
Pinkoski’s trajectory — Ivy-adjacent postdoc → NatCon stage → Hazony’s Edmund Burke Group → First Things — illustrates the New Right’s capacity to launder Hard Right content through Catholic intellectual and academic credentialing. The Camp of the Saints praise and Maurras quotation are markers of Hard Right politics; the Zephyr Institute affiliation and Oxford PhD provided respectable cover. Field uses him to show how, by NatCon 3, the Hard Right was being genuinely welcomed inside the NatCon tent — not just tolerated at its margins.
Cross-References
- National Conservatism — NatCon 3 speaker; Edmund Burke Foundation fellow
- Yoram Hazony — the Edmund Burke Foundation is his organization
- Robert P. George — his postdoc supervisor; Princeton James Madison Program
- Curtis Yarvin — Passage Press (Keeperman) published Yarvin’s work
- Hard Right — the ideological tendency his NatCon 3 talk represents
- Costin Alamariu — the “dressed-up BAPism” comparison; BAP content in respectable packaging
- Patrick Deneen — publicly objected to the L0m3z First Things piece in the same issue