It was only because I brought Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), who tweets as @BronzeAgeMantis (this is your cue to follow him) to the attention of my friend, the Right Honourable Roger Chamberlain, that local media first learned of BAP and were, naturally for them, flummoxed. I haven't lived in all 50 states but something tells me our local media are among the laziest of them. Certainly their work product wouldn't disabuse you of that notion.
In the cringe but aptly named political newsletter "Hot Dish," J Patrick Cooligan deigned to take notice of a retweet by Chamberlain (found by him on my TL) and wondered "Wat mean?" Only Cooligan wouldn't know the nomenclature of BAP to appreciate the "Wat mean?" But that's what he did, even if he didn't know it. And he didn't.
So what does a lazy member of the lazy Minnesota media do? Turn to the discredited house organ of neoliberalism, Politico, to understand this strange new phenomenon, that somehow pierced the thick membrane of Minnesota isolationism, for an explanation. The result was enough to make a cat laugh.
It was then that I knew I had to perform yet another uncompensated public service task (this sets me apart from all the MNGOPe grifters, of which there are legion) and explain to people too often entranced by burgers and craft beers, sports ball, the weather, the opening of yet another buglife apartment complex and the generally quotidian that makes modern life all but slow motion suicide, who is Bronze Age Pervert. Let's begin.
BAM or Bronze Age Mindset
By now, Bronze Age Pervert is inseparable from his signature book, Bronze Age Mindset. You should buy it. BAP is anonymous. You may have noticed that the Cathedral is currently waging war on people who remain anonymous online, all in the interests of "transparency" and "accountability." Accountable to whom? Transparent to whom? This is but a thinly veiled attempt to squash dissenting narratives, those that challenge the usual neoliberal orthodoxes.
BAP's Twitter account is littered with pictures of gorgeous landscapes and equally gorgeous young, buff men, resulting in the deadly, albeit hilarious, hashtag #ShowPhysiq or similar iterations, deployed most effectively against fat aging Boomers. These are the kind of tweets that would make Democrat Senate member Scott Dibble want to masturbate or put in a butt plug with an anonymous stranger on WhatsApp and then claim victim status when his degeneracy was made public. The usual suspects rallied to his defense. They always do. Weimerica.
Bronze Age Pervert is the acid rain that washes away this defilement of straight male friendship and camaraderie, that celebrates the masculine without the homoeroticism. Look for the dominant culture to get him wrong because of its own deformities and celebrated pathologies.
Same sex marriage is a joke, like Caitlyn Jenner and "transgender" claimants: neither are what they insist to be. And we all know it. Most of us are bludgeoned into a silent acquiesce. Not me.
"Still, it moves."
"Still, it moves."
BAM Breaks Through
There can be no doubt that we're talking about BAM because Michael Anton, he of the "Flight 93 Election" article, decided to review the book in The Claremont Review of Books. This was seminal. One could hardly believe it and, if they'd been following BAP previously, were rightly astonished. This article is the first of two you have to read if you want to be up to speed.
What caught the observant eye was that Anton had been given the book by Curtis Yarvin, who pens under the name Moldbug and from which the concept of the Cathedral originated, at a dinner party. It probably won't mean much to the republican lobbyists here, by definition not a bright lot, but Anton having dinner with Moldbug? That alone was something in itself.
Anton, having first tried to read BAM and stopped, was encouraged to try again by his former White House colleague Darren Beattie and did. His resulting review has set everything in motion, including this column and the ignorance and deliberate misrepresentation by our lazy media.
Neti, Neti: Not This, Not That
Neti, neti is the classical Hindu definition of God: not this, not that. So too it can be said of "Bronze Age Mindset."
I don't think the book is a Rorschach test but I suppose in some ways it could be taken as such, especially by Boomers who don't understand the justified resentment of them, bordering on hatred, of the under 30 set. I do understand because I follow closely those under thirty on social media, primarily Twitter; it isn't difficult if your mind isn't ossified. I saw the term "apostate Boomer" applied on Twitter to Steve Sailer and thought "This will do."
BAP responded to Anton in due course at The American Mind with a succinct, deadly and accurately titled piece "America's Delusional Elite Is Done." This is the second article you have to read if you want a basic grasp on what is currently roiling the intellectual Right.
I think BAP has the better argument here but I'm at pains to praise Anton for having the courage to review BAM and try to come to terms with what it represents, which, fundamentally, is almost everything Boomers and their corrupt, grifting "Conservative, Inc." has peddled to the credulous and the weak as authentic right wing politics.
If the Biblical admonishment that "by their fruits ye shall know them," means anything, then a quick peak in our public libraries showcasing drag queens reading state sponsored sodomy tales to our youngest children tells us everything we need to know.
If you want a cheat sheet to the action, I don't think I'm doing violence to either side's argument when I put it this way: Anton acknowledges the critique (how could he not?) but falls back to a defensive counter-argument of "what will you build in its place?" In the final analysis this simply won't do because the conservative status quo has preserved nothing, allowed much to be destroyed [press esc to go back] and offers no plausible way forward to triumph.
Managing the decline and simpering acquiescence to cultural decay and collapse is really, once the high minded Boomer language is stripped away, all that is offered.
BAP essentially laughs at this posturing born out of intellectual & cultural poverty, out of a desperate necessity and throws the present back in the face of those who fail to see how much has already been lost. "If you only knew how bad things really are." That's a meme, Boomers.
Here is a crucial passage from BAP's response to Anton that I think wins the argument:
BAP responded to Anton in due course at The American Mind with a succinct, deadly and accurately titled piece "America's Delusional Elite Is Done." This is the second article you have to read if you want a basic grasp on what is currently roiling the intellectual Right.
I think BAP has the better argument here but I'm at pains to praise Anton for having the courage to review BAM and try to come to terms with what it represents, which, fundamentally, is almost everything Boomers and their corrupt, grifting "Conservative, Inc." has peddled to the credulous and the weak as authentic right wing politics.
If the Biblical admonishment that "by their fruits ye shall know them," means anything, then a quick peak in our public libraries showcasing drag queens reading state sponsored sodomy tales to our youngest children tells us everything we need to know.
If you want a cheat sheet to the action, I don't think I'm doing violence to either side's argument when I put it this way: Anton acknowledges the critique (how could he not?) but falls back to a defensive counter-argument of "what will you build in its place?" In the final analysis this simply won't do because the conservative status quo has preserved nothing, allowed much to be destroyed [press esc to go back] and offers no plausible way forward to triumph.
Managing the decline and simpering acquiescence to cultural decay and collapse is really, once the high minded Boomer language is stripped away, all that is offered.
BAP essentially laughs at this posturing born out of intellectual & cultural poverty, out of a desperate necessity and throws the present back in the face of those who fail to see how much has already been lost. "If you only knew how bad things really are." That's a meme, Boomers.
Here is a crucial passage from BAP's response to Anton that I think wins the argument:
"The left completely abandoned Americanism in the 1960's; at this point they've also abandoned biological reality. Vitalism is all that is left against their demented biological Leninism. Encouraging health, normality, and physical nobility against their celebration of deformity, obesity, and sexual catamitism must be one of the basic functions of conservatism in our time. It is one of the reasons my message is powerful among many with the left's gospel of wretchedness: what is your plan to take that on?"
Anton, of course, has no plan, in fact you might say he didn't actually realize the problem before BAP and he's no slouch.
If you're a Minnesota republican Boomer who thinks the fraudulent Turning Point USA, and like minded grifter groups, are the berries, if you still don't get the point of the passage quoted above, search for images of Aisha Gomez and Jay Xiong.
Then, if you're still clueless, I'm afraid the best that you can hope for is not being smothered to death in your nursing home staffed by people who look like them.
Extra Credit
Anton responded to BAP's response, called a sur reply (also spelled surreply and sur-reply. Aren't you here to learn?) Unfortunately, his title gives the cringe game away: "Which way, Jester Man?" When name calling is in the title, you know they're out of arguments.
The editors of The American Mind had the good sense and courage to run "Conservatism In The Bronze Age." I recommend you take a look at it and click on the link of the various essays there that might interest you.
I thought Second City Bureaucrat, @CityBureaucrat on Twitter, had the best reply and you get the sense of this from his title: "Why Not Actually Engage With Bronze Age Mindset?" The subtitle leaves no doubt: "Ideologues seem incapable of doing so without resorting to name-calling."
Bronze Age Mindset has said he's replying to Anton in due course, as of this writing yet published.
There you are, Minnesota, roughly up to speed.
Wat Mean?
This column is only a primer, not a complete or thorough exegesis of the Bronze Age Pervert phenomenon. That it exists shows, I think, how uninteresting politics have become in Minnesota, a feature not a bug. More than three years ago I wrote "Do Minnesota Republicans Believe In Anything?" Then, as now, I think the answer remains the same: not much really, paychecks mostly, chair rearrangement on the decks of the Titanic, arrested high school egos vying for prominence on social media. "It's all so tiresome." Another meme, Boomers. Wake up.
The indictment that Bronze Age Pervert brings to the desiccated Conservative, Inc. applies with even more force to the small potatoes of Minnesota republican politics.
Does anyone realistically think they'll win another statewide election in the foreseeable future? Not if they're honest or, for many of the grifters, sober.
So what the great Joe Sobran said of Conservative, Inc., now manifested by the pathetic, lobbyist run CPAC, or Boomer donors making younger types dance to the tune of nationalist self-destruction, Turning Point, USA or a local "activist think tank" that throws a courageous (read honest) member overboard, can well be said here:
"It was all a game, or a way of making a living."
And I haven't even talked about no nut November.
