Right-Wing Manifesto Is Winning 'Hearts and Minds'

It's called 'Bronze Age Mindset'
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 24, 2019 3:45 PM CDT
Right-Wing Manifesto Is Winning 'Hearts and Minds'
Joseph Oakman, a member of the Proud Boys, wears body armor during an "End Domestic Terrorism" rally in Portland, Ore., on Saturday, Aug. 17, 2019.   (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Heard of Bronze Age Mindset? Then you know about a right-wing author who's tossing gasoline on the fire of America's culture war, Politico reports. Penned anonymously by Bronze Age Pervert, the self-published book combines Nietzchean philosophy with reverence of the masculine and disgust for liberal impulses in Western society. "Of all the things that you blame for the decrepit times we live in, feminism and the 'liberation' of women is both the proximate and the ultimate cause," writes the author, known as BAP. "Nothing so ridiculous as the liberation of women has ever been attempted in the history of mankind." The author also disparages Islam, Judaism, and gays while revering sweaty, muscular, Nordic-looking men on Twitter.

So who's reading the 200-page screed? "It's still a cult book," says an ex-Trump White House official. "If you’re a young person, intelligent, adjacent in some way to the right, it's very likely you would have heard of it." One commentator even claims young White House staffers are into it. The book's blend of "strength-fetishization, pagan imagery, anti-civilizational superstition, and biological materialism" has an audience in "extreme corners of the Internet Right" and among fans of figures like Jordan Peterson, writes Tara Isabella Burton at the American Interest. And for the rest of America? "In the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing," writes former Trump security official Michael Anton in a review of the book. "BAPism is winning." (More alt-right stories.)

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