I want to try to run through some of these ideas. One of the founding fathers of this in the New Right is Bronze Age Pervert. Can you describe who that is?
He is a thinker whose real name is Costin Alamariu. He’s Romanian American, and he has a whole persona about bodybuilding and eugenics and Nietzsche.
Those are maybe his three favorite things. There’s almost an “I am Dracula” level to hamming up the accent. Once again, this is somebody who’s playing a character on the internet.
The way I describe the book — which is aesthetically interesting, even if, intellectually, it becomes a bit tedious — is that it has this really Nietzsche-for-gooners quality. It’s very Romantic poetry but filtered through 4chan lingo.
I want to play a clip of this interview he did with Michael Malice in 2024, talking about the problems of modernity.
Archival clip
Bronze Age Pervert: Why is it disgusting? It’s because it privileges safety and mere life, the preservation of life, at the expense of things that are exciting and great and free, you know?
When I wrote this book in 2018 — sorry to keep talking, Mike, if I may go on.
Michael Malice: No, this is why you’re here.
Bronze Age Pervert: When I wrote this book in 2018, some people liked it because I expressed myself directly and with humor and so on, and they said, “OK, BAP, this is very nice, but is it really true?”
And then what happened — people will say now I planned it. No, I didn’t plan it. The pandemic happened, which basically, I think, demonstrated the truth of what I’m saying. And the pandemic, in my view, was a mass sacrifice of the world’s youth to the desires of disgusting old people who sacrificed the youth and also to women, frankly, especially the middle-aged, sterile woman who made the pandemic procedures her whole life. It gave meaning to her life. I saw it in action, you know?
Malice: I can’t tell you how much joy it brings me to hear you with your accent say the phrase “these middle-aged, sterile women.” It’s just — mwah.
This book, “Bronze Age Mindset,” got written up in The Claremont Review of Books. There are reports that most young staff members in the Trump administration had read it. It had become a piece of code passed back and forth — samizdat.
The reason I think that clip is interesting is it combines the two things the book does, which is this sense that there is something more than mere life — he says, “The preservation of life at the expense of things that are exciting, great and free” — with the campy provocateurism, like: Oh, it makes me so excited to hear you say “middle-aged, sterile women.”
What’s this idea about privileging safety and mere life over things that are exciting and great and free?
Well, this is the idea that women, because of their lack of comparative thymos and testosterone, are weak and empathetic and they don’t want to put themselves in situations of danger. This is the idea that essentially the whole world has one giant H.R. department telling you that you’re not allowed to do the things you want to do anymore, particularly the kind of things that young men want to do.
I can understand why people feel like that, but I also think a huge amount of complacency has driven it. I don’t think people would be talking like that in a time when they had lost three of their eight children to a preventable disease before the age of 2.
I don’t think they would’ve been talking about that immediately after World War I, when you could quite easily have lost four of your sons in a completely pointless advance two miles across France.
This is an ideology that is born out of fat modernity itself. The luxury that they have to play with these ever so spicy ideas are because they’ve never lived these lives.
If you went over to somewhere that is currently in the middle of a conflict and you said to them, “Are you all enjoying this incredibly dangerous masculine experience that you’re having?” I think they’d actually like a stable food supply and peace.
It’s ironic that they talk about Fukuyama, because this is what he predicted in “The End of History and the Last Man.” He said that you’re going to end up with people who are just bored, full of ennui, and they’re going to have to find things to now entertain themselves because they don’t have the material deprivations and challenges that previous generations had.
That’s what I hear when I hear that. I hear, “Oh, we’re all having a go at Karens on a podcast. Isn’t it so spicy?” What has this got to do with the Spartans? This is just the fake, cosplay version of masculinity that everybody’s indulging in.
These people could sign up to the Army. They could go and serve in a war, and they’ve not chosen to do that. They’ve chosen to become podcasters. Interesting.
The LARPing point of that is very important because it is a bunch of intellectuals in elite competition with other intellectuals, a bunch of humanities academics. I mean, Bronze Age Pervert went to Yale, was it?
He’s definitely spent a few terms teaching, I think at Emory. And that’s the same with Jonathan Keeperman — L0m3z — who was an academic. Cornish-Dale has a Ph.D.
Many of my friends are academics. I can see how it slightly deranges people.
This is an elite overproduction problem.