Baptized Bronze Age Pervert
No.175: September 8, 2023
Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview for free subscribers, so please click on the button below to enjoy this along with an “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about “A Growing Menace,” and I promise not to belabor it for weeks on end. But, to recap: the “New Right” (National Conservatism, Christian Nationalism, etc.) has been and continues to be very accommodating to loathsome elements in their ranks—namely, real white supremacists and even self-styled Nazis. This deference is due in part to the NETTR “principle”—when you’re at “war” you must not engage in friendly fire. There are no enemies to the right. Anyone training fire on the “Left” is, if not a friend, at least a co-belligerent. And so common cause is made with nefarious characters.
You will recall that this problem came to the surface because Jake Meador accused American Reformer (an increasingly influential online publication among young men who are “angry at a world that will not obey”) of partnering with a Neo-Nazi. It turned out that American Reformer wasn’t partnering with said Neo-Nazi; rather, their other organization, New Founding, founded and run by the exact same people at the exact same address, was partnering with said Neo-Nazi. Jake brought the “receipts,” as they say, and it wasn’t pretty.
In the you-couldn’t-make-this-up-if-you-tried category of things, American Reformer thought it wise to run an essay this week entitled, “The Conservative Nazi Hunters: How The Right Started Acting Like The Left.” Ah, yes. The problem isn’t Nazis. The problem is people discovering the Nazis. I find the essay itself a litany of “whattabouts” and deflection—one long tu quoque fallacy. But the punch line is:
What modern political conservatives fail to see is how their willingness to cancel others for violating egalitarian principles shares more in common with the ideologues they claim to oppose than it does their conservative heritage. Authentic conservatives have a much stronger argument against National Socialism but it is not one they need to deploy seeing as how busy they are fighting actual threats.
Translation: we’ll get around to fighting Nazis when we’re done with the “real” threats. Thus does American Reformer just dismissively wave it all away. Nothing to see here. But I want to note just one more thing. This is the penultimate paragraph:
But this [“blood and soil”—bgm] was never the problem political conservatives had with Nazism until very recently. In fact, some of their critiques were that National Socialists did not value people and place enough. The Nazis violated sovereign borders, persecuted their own countrymen, and destroyed sacred traditions. Thus, conservatives [sic] the “blood and soil” slogan as merely that, a slogan. To whatever extent the conservatives possessed an affinity for their own people, it disagreed with the Nazi instinct to replace natural affections with a love for power and ideology.
I am squinting and tilting my head here to find a charitable read of this paragraph, and his missing verb (the “sic”) doesn’t help, but I am coming up empty. Mr. Harris seems to be saying that race consciousness and racial chauvinism (“blood and soil!”) wasn’t the problem with the Nazis at all! And that “authentic conservatives” are superior to the Nazis because they care more about blood and soil than the Nazis did! Authentic conservatism out-Nazis the Nazis. True National Socialism hasn’t yet been tried! Or something like that.
“We’ll do ‘blood and soil’ better than the Nazis” is certainly one way to reply to the accusation that you’re a bit too cozy with Nazis.
Pardon the language, but on Twitter Mr. Kamel had the rational reply:
This brings me to another recent scene in this unfolding drama of angry young men stamping their feet and issuing Primal Screams at the incorrigibility of the world. Andrew Isker wrote The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counter-Offensive in a Post-Christian Nation. Rod Dreher, noted author of The Benedict Option and thus no stranger to alarm about the cultural direction of the West, wrote a lengthy review of Isker’s book and he very thankfully made it free on his Substack. I encourage you to read the whole thing.
Dreher writes:
Because this review is mostly critical, I want to go on record here affirming that broadly speaking, I share Andrew Isker’s disgust with the world as it is. What sets us apart is mostly what to do about it. I say ‘mostly’ because even I, on my angriest days, can’t come close to mustering the rage Isker brings to nearly every page in this book.
And:
This is a book written by an angry young man, for angry young men. I don’t say that to criticize, but to observe. If you aren’t Very Online, you will wonder why the word “bugman” keeps popping up, and “globohomo,” as well as other terms and phrases familiar to memelords.
And while Dreher’s review just rushes on to very helpful insights, I want to stop right there. Right there. These words, “bugmen” and “globohomo,” as well as the kinds of adjectives used for the corruption of the modern world— “fetid,” “corpulent,” “disgusting,” “repulsive” and so forth—are not of Isker’s invention. They have a provenance on the “Very Online” world. This is patois invented by an anonymous internet celebrity known as “Bronze Age Pervert.” “BAP” as he has come to be known, is the author of a self-published book called The Bronze Age Mindset. BAP’s book gained notoriety and influence when it was embraced by a host of people in Trump-world. The Claremont Review of Books published an essay on Bronze Age Pervert written by Michael Anton (of “Flight 93 Election” fame). That’s called giving someone attention he doesn’t deserve.
What do you need to know about Bronze Age Pervert? He is a full-throated Nietzschean, an atavist who decries the advent of Christianity. (An “atavist” is sort of the mirror image of a utopian; a utopian looks forward to an imagined golden age, while the atavist looks backward to an imagined golden age.) With Nietzsche, BAP thinks the “soft,” “effeminate,” “weak,” and “meek” ethos and ethic of Christianity is the source of this fetid, disgusting world. The “Bronze Age Mindset” is a pagan one that rejects Christian ethics and embraces Nietzsche’s “will to power.” Strength, masculinity, and violence is the order of the day. This is where terms like “gynocracy”—a female dominated world—comes from. Yes, you may recall Stephen Wolfe embracing that term in his book, The Case For Christian Nationalism.
Like Nietzsche, BAP believes that humanity must transcend and overcome this filthy, disgusting, effeminate world by returning to our pagan roots. It’s all about strength, beauty, power, and violence. None of this dying to yourself or taking up your cross to follow Jesus. The Bronze Age Mindset makes strength, masculinity, tooth and claw, might makes right, a romantic ideal.
Is this a coincidence? I observe a renewed interest in things like patriarchy and masculinity and even Crossfit and pumping iron in segments of the conservative Christian right. I observe a Christian Nationalist darling throwing around terms like “gynocracy.” I observe Andrew Isker borrowing wholesale the patois of Bronze Age Pervert. And this is all supposedly in the interests of Christian nationalism. It’s in the name of Jesus.
Here’s what I think. So-called “Christian Nationalism” is a renaissance of 19th century “blood and soil” nationalism with some “Christiany” language sprinkled on top. That was, after all, the express method of Stephen Wolfe’s book. He started with a definition of “nationalism” that he cobbled together from Aristotle and some German Romantics (and pretended he got there by the sheer exercise of his “natural reason.”) Then he sprinkled some Christian-sounding doctrines on top of it. He just baptized blood-and-soil nationalism.
But it seems some are busy baptizing more than just that. They are baptizing the language, ethos, and ethics of a Nietzschean pagan—a literal antichrist.
An awful lot of “Christian Nationalism” sounds to me like Baptized Bronze Age Pervert.
Perverse, is right.
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Clear, bold — and true.