It Could Happen Here - Inside The Longhouse: The Right Wing's Latest Meme

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Robert sits down with Gare and James to talk about Bronze Age Pervert and a surprisingly influential new family of far right memes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. it could happen here a podcast about frustrating people and frustrating times that's not all it's about sometimes we talk about nice things like like raising sheep or uh unionization uh efforts

you know the endless struggle of working people to better the world. Yeah. But not today. Today we're having a real piece of shit episode about a real piece of shit, and it's going to make everybody unhappy. Hello, Garrison. Hello, James. How are you both doing today? So much better for hearing that, Robert. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, just ready to have a fine evening here. Yeah. Learning about something that's probably very fun yeah you don't have you don't have your soda stream disappointed in you yet James and I are now soda stream pilled I've not I've not gotten the company soda stream yet that hasn't yeah no the uh unfortunately the company beverage is uh is Billy Beer, Billy Carter, Jimmy Carter's brother's beer that was on sale for roughly a year in the 1970s. Is it made of peanuts?

If only. No, so today, let's start. I got a question for you. Have either of you seen the Barbie movie? Yes, I have. How was it? Well done. Gare?

Oh, I didn't go, go buddy it's all gare uh the the set dressing was was nice um it was it was a great lesson in like liberal recuperation i'm sure i'm sure i'm sure it'll be great for like kids who like don't know who like don't know what feminism is but uh but yeah yeah it seems i have not watched it either um it doesn't seem like my kind of movie but i it seems broadly accurate correct me if i'm wrong here that it has what you might call like very very modest and fairly mainstream approachable feminist messaging yes yes yeah yeah that seems like it's fair which most people would not be particularly angry about. But a sizable chunk of the very online right, the chunk of the right particularly that makes their living by having takes on shit, has been up in arms ever since it came out,

and particularly ever since it made more than a billion dollars in the box office. I'm sure a lot of people are aware that our old friend Ben Shapiro filmed a 42- minute video tearing it apart in his signature preteen stolen valor voice. You know, after I watched the movie, me and some friends tried to watch the Ben Shapiro video for fun. We made it like six minutes in and then everyone forced me to stop. Intolerable shit. Cowards. Yeah, they are cowards, but that's, yeah.

So elsewhere in the right and kind of the less mainstream acceptable chunks of what we'd call the insurgent right around here, various thought leaders attempted to declare the movie stealth conservative propaganda as a way of insisting that its success was really due to it being anti-woke. That's silly too. None of this is worth discussing in detail. I promise you all this is not going to be a podcast about the fucking Barbie movie. None of this is worth discussing in detail, save to say that Shapiro's

anger at the movie, and particularly its comic relief character, Ken, seems to have been the more widespread response from those kinds of people. Now, because I have made over the years a lot of poor decisions in my browsing and engaging habits over the years, Twitter sends me a lot of weirdo right-wing responses to everything that happens in the world, including this movie.

And one of these posts that I caught somewhere in late July, around the 22nd, 23rd caught my eye. Now, this post features a vaporwave filtered kin photoshopped in front of a burning Viking longhouse accompanied by the text exit the longhouse. Now, when you see something like this and you don't know what they're getting at, like you have two choices. If you're like, you get like, I don't know, kids, a really demanding job, anything at all going on in your personal life, you scroll right past it. If you're me, you spend like four and a half hours reading various like fascist essays about feminism to try to figure out what the fuck a longhouse has to do with the Barbie movie. Now, the guy who had made this post is a low-level fascist political columnist named Lómez. He's kind of on the – he's a little bit of Volapild.

He's not like a very major figure. He's kind of several steps below anyone you've heard of. I would say like two or three steps, standard deviations of fame below like Jack Posobiec. But his writing has a degree of purchase among the kinds of conservatives who trick Ron DeSantis into running incomprehensible campaign ads with Sonnenrads in them. He has he's like he's got a little bit of influence among that kind of crew. And he's sort of in the conversation with a lot of those people. I took notice of his post because I'd seen the term longhouse being used by a couple of these guys off and on. And because Lomas's post got like 3000 something likes, which meant that, yeah, there's some community out there that gets what he's talking about. So on a whim,

I clicked to view the quote tweets for this post and I found a post by a user named Siege, which is of course a reference to a book about carrying out acts of terrorism in order to bring about a white ethnostate. The post says, Ken is you. He is an exaggerated Western man in the 21st century.

Anxious, confused, chasing women who don't care about him. He exits the longhouse and discovers his own will to power. Like you, he decides to bring this knowledge back to his fellow man. And it's, you know, I'm going to, I'll show you guys this, this post here. It's pretty. It's pretty Nazi. Yeah.

Pretty, pretty, pretty Nazi. It's not the best work on Ken. Like he looks like a blob. No, I will say I have a little bit of respect for the craft here that he didn't just go to an ai that looks like somebody like crudely cut a picture of of kin that they had like uh uh color inverted and then photoshopped it into a picture of a longhouse with a fire behind it um yeah it's too crude a photoshop for ai yeah i i will say uh sieges a description of ken from the from the from the barbie movie is pretty accurate to what's in the film that's good um so what is

the longhouse what the fuck does a longhouse have to do with what are otherwise pretty standard neo-nazi-esque messaging about you know the decadence and failure of modern man and all that kind of shit. And is this dumb fascist meme something that you need to care about? Now, unfortunately, the answer to that is yes, because all of this ties back to one extremely influential insurgent right-wing ideologue whose followers have been close to the presidency once before and may yet find themselves there again. That asshole is an MIT graduate named Koston Alomario, who posts online under variations of the name Bronze Age pervert. You guys, how aware are you of Bronze Age pervert or BAP, as he's often known? or BAP as he's often known. So I've heard of BAP, but maybe only in passing because I wasn't familiar with Bronze Age pervert.

Thank God. And thank you so much for sharing it with me today, Robert. Oh, you're going to be so much less happy. Garrison, are you familiar with this fella? I think I may have only seen stuff from him in passing. I'm not overly familiar now. Yeah, that was kind of my experience until like a month or so ago when I started really digging into the guy. Um, and I, I don't feel better as a result of having done that, but, uh, yeah,

we know that this guy's actual name is Kostin Alamariu because of a very recent Atlantic article. It was like a month ago that this guy got revealed in this article because this writer for the Atlantic was a friend of his, like in It was just somebody who – and recognized his voice on a podcast. Now, this article, I find it frustrating for a number of reasons. I don't think it's great analysis of BAP's work or what people find appealing in it, or a particularly honest intellectual look at what this guy has to say. But it does have some interesting reveals, including the fact that Bronze Age Pervert's first public media appearance was a parody audio tour for an exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts written by B.J.

Novak, who played Ryan in The Office. Yeah. So that's that's odd. And it's one of those, BJ Novak is not a stealth Nazi, don't worry. But the video or the thing that they put together does kind of fit for like a fascist art project. And I'm gonna read how The Atlantic describes

this audio tour they put together together or that they assembled together. Novak had recruited a Romanian classmate with a deep voice, and together they'd recorded an audio tour for the exhibition Tales from the Land of Dragons, A Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. With the help of friends, they then slipped cassettes containing their tour into the museum's official audio guides. Art lovers must have wondered about the thick Eastern European accent that greeted them over the twang of a Chinese string instrument. The Romanian soon became opinionated.

Personally, he said, I think this painting is a piece of crap. Then deranged, he alluded to his disgusting anatomical abnormalities. He called his listeners decadent imperialist maggots and confessed a desire to smash a glass case with a sledgehammer and rip a scroll to shreds with my teeth, which, by the way, are extremely long and sharp, more like fangs than human teeth.

At last, he offered an interlude of idiot music while he fumbled with his script. This should keep you occupied, you drooling imbecile, he bellowed at the listeners, by now either amused or complaining to management. So there's like little whiffs of degenerate art stuff in there, but it's also just kind of like a little bit like Max Headroom-y kind of stuff, like where you're kind of tricking people into consuming this like parody artwork thing. This was a pretty innocent joke on Novak's part. But Koston, number one, probably got picked for this because he's got a thick Romanian accent that he very much plays up. He was noted in this time as kind of talking like Dracula deliberately. He also would always wear these like long and elaborate black coats so that he kind of looked like a Dracula type figure. Like he was, you know, he was doing a bit. He was putting on like a, that was the image he wanted to portray himself as to people

as kind of like mysterious and Eastern European sort of figure. Now, Koston first started posting as Bronze Age pervert on a series of obscure web forums in 2010. In the November of 2013, he joined Twitter and immediately fell in with a loose community that some people call Frog Twitter. And these are,

you know who these guys are. It's like a general term for anonymous alt-right adjacent posters with like Pepe avatars. Yeah. And the other group, the kind of related people that he fell in with

and that he started to have traction with are adherents to a fascist philosopher known as curtis yarvin or mincius moldbug curtis is his real name mincius moldbug is the the pseudonym he wrote under now i know it's a terror it's these people are very frustrated this shit that it's just so pathetic like play dungeonsgeons and Dragons. Just play D&D. A solid 20% of our fascist problems are like, people didn't get a reliable D&D group early enough. Like a lot of these, I think Baldur's Gate 3 is going to save us

from a lot of these guys in the future. It's the Antifa computer game. Yeah. So Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mincius, is a UC Berkeley graduate in computer science who joined the tech industry and got pilled on a strain of anti-democratic libertarian theory. This is this is like a this is a pathway, man. Yeah, this is perfect. Well, Bronze Age pervert also goes into tech after graduating from MIT. Right. And like, you know, a decent number of these guys come out of like Stanford and shit. Like it's all, it's all these guys who are in fact, to some extent, like intellectual

elites. Bronze Age perverts dad is a teacher at MIT. Like, just kind of like you look at like Stephen Miller's background, right? A lot of these guys come out of like liberal academia families. But anyway. Yeah, it's very common yeah um curtis comes out of uh yeah gets into the tech industry and he writes a book kind of while he's he's working and like he's a he's a founder and stuff for some company he writes a book in 2001 titled democracy the god that failed uh follows it up with a series of blog essays, and his writing becomes very influential among Silicon Valley proto-fascists. Yarvin's idea, in brief, is that the US is run, and a lot of Western society is really run by what he calls the cathedral, which is a mix of professors and journalists who act as a Brahmin class dominating the United States with a progressive state religion.

He sees their egalitarian impulses as toxic, the destruction of natural civic order, and advocates for his followers to design new architectures of exit to replace the cathedral with what is effectively a right-wing dictatorship. The number one supporter of Curtis Yarvin's ideas and financial backer of him is Peter Thiel. Thiel has funded Yarvin's work, is a big fan of what he has to say and his philosophy, which is generally referred to as the dark enlightenment. And this is – when we're talking about the dark enlightenment, we're talking like mid-aughts is kind of when this stuff starts to really take off. This is before the alt-right that kind of becomes really well-known nationwide is a major term. This is like in the pre and right around Gamergate period

is when he's really starting to take off with a lot of folks. And he certainly, he feeds into the alt-right to Trump and to that period of time, but he's much more on the pseudo-intellectual end of things as opposed to the like hitting folks in the street end of things. That's why he gets a lot of Peter Thiel money. So, yeah, Bronze Age pervert is kind of a –

he espouses a philosophy that rhymes with mold bugs, with Yarvin's philosophy in many ways. But where Yarvin dresses his words and his writing up in a costume version of mainstream academic discourse, Bronze Age pervert is unapologetically online and weird. And he writes like somebody who spends too much fucking time on the internet. A lot of his stuff is cloaked in things that are like half jokes or at least want to be have plausible deniability of jokes so that like if you take them seriously, you can make fun of you for falling for the bit. But he describes himself on Twitter as an aspiring nudist bodybuilder, free speech and anti-xenoestrogen activist. So just just the most irritating kind of guy imaginable.

Normal guy. Just the most irritating kind of guy imaginable. Yeah, he's a normal guy. Much of his politics centers around a worship of ancient Greece, which he believes settled on the scientifically ideal human form. He believes men should engage in bodybuilding and nude sunbathing to emulate the Greeks. And you'll see sometimes his followers be like, oh, you're an idiot if you fell for that. But legitimately, half of what this guy posts about is just pictures of bodybuilders and pictures of himself being looking very jacked. Like he's he's it's it's that if that's all a bit, then all he has is this silly bit because it is it is dominant in his content.

BAP's ancient Greek or BAP's ancient Greeks are incredibly straight and hate women with a passion. One of those things is more or less right. Greek, like upper class Greeks, not super pro women. Yeah, not woke. Yeah, not woke. The cathedral in his eyes is an oppressive dictatorship of femininity, if not always of women, over masculinity. Cancel culture is a particular topic of his ire. And he seems to see it as basically these – that there are traditionally feminine methods of argumentation and conflict, whether or not women are the ones doing them in any given situation.

Cancel culture is like the purest expression of this. And he believes that these kind of feminine methods of conflict uh destroy masculinity and and make cultural progress impossible they chain men to this kind of like he he sees you know a lot of anarchists will talk about how ancient societies hunter gatherer societies and like were often more egalitarian than a lot of like medieval societies classical societies um and this is often a lot of folks do make the mistake of like idealizing these cultures but like that's a thing that gets talked about a lot positively by by um by some anarchists um and i think obviously it's worth studying um he takes the opposite tact of like these ancient cultures like like people

lived in the fucking mud and were miserable. And it was because they weren't egalitarian. It was because the women were dominating the men, right? This is going to lead us to the long house in short order, but we have some more to cover right here. So he focuses a huge amount on anti-egalitarian arguments and on supporting a culture dominated by strong beautiful powerful people who look like greek statues and suppress women and anyone else who doesn't look sexy basically you get to feel like that's a big part of it to this guy like he wants he wants a date a dictatorship of hot violent men um that's his that's a big part of what he argues with. Has he watched Lenny Reifenstahl's Olympia?

Because this seems like the summation of his philosophical thought. Yeah, I feel like that's playing in the back of his fucking mind at all times. Yeah. Now, Bap argues that the state in its present form preserves the lives of the weak and feeble-minded, allowing them to oppress the naked Aryan bodybuilders who by all rights ought to run things. The prime repository of his philosophy is his 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset, which was at one point in the top 150 books on Amazon. A former Trump White House official told Politico in 2019, if you're a young person, intelligent, adjacent in some way to the right,

it's very likely you would have heard of it. intelligent adjacent in some way to the right, it's very likely you would have heard of it. In chapter 35 of his book, Bronze Age Mindset, Bap writes, quote, should the tyranny that has descended on our age ever gain the power it seeks and then be challenged enough to feel itself in danger, the mass annihilations that will be carried out by homosexual, transsexual, and especially lesbian commissars will exceed in scale and cruelty anything that has yet happened in known history. Imagine lesbian mulatta commissars with young Martin Sheen face and haircut

manning the future Bergen-Belsons, installations that will span tens of miles. Yep. Sending you to the transgender gulag. Yeah. It's something else. And it's very funny because like that fucking,

the Atlantic writer here, like talks about how he's got this like almost hypnotizing quality to his writing. And he's got this really like fascinating mind that you just want to engage with. And it's, I'll read you a fucking quote from this guy's profile on Bronze Age Pervert. And try not to gag.

I consider myself a connoisseur of brilliant lunatics and I have a high tolerance for their lunacy if it has compensating virtues of say humor or ingenuity. But even I find BAP worrisome. What starts as comedy can become something more sinister. And Bap Schtick, while sometimes hilarious, shows every sign of transforming into a mode of new far-right radicalism. bigoted for years because like we would talk about uh literature together um you know i just had so much respect for his mind that uh i was willing to be strung along for a long time i don't i find this guy kind of a connoisseur yeah a connoisseur of a connoisseur of pig shit yeah yeah i really love sifting through all the different types of donkey dogs. Yeah.

I just can't lick quite enough shit. Yeah. Something else. You know what won't make you become a connoisseur of dog shit internet content? What? What, James? What, James? What will not? Well, it's a Washington State Highway Patrol.

I love them. Well, it's a Washington State Highway Patrol. They've bought some effort. I hope they are ready for the lesbian commissars. Oh, you know it, buddy. Because I know I am. They're there. The woke police. Hey, guys.

I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High.

It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. or wherever you get your podcasts. Modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI

to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real

people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. ah and we're back we're back we're back we're back we're back oh yeah so it was joseph conrad's novel nostromo that that this atlantic writer and uh and bronze age pervert both loved yeah yeah i'll read you another fucking paragraph. For many years we corresponded. Costin's messages arrived irregularly and the tone ranged from friendly and inquisitive

to boorish and insulting. I went to South America on assignment. He sent long messages extolling the virtues of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, which is selt there. Set there, a friend who reads books like Nostromo and can talk about them is a friend worth putting up with.

South America. Not even a fucking country. Just generally South America. And like right after that he says after about 10 years he took to calling my friends and then he uses a series of slurs. At some point

he had begun bodybuilding and he sent me a picture of himself shirtless with the message do you like this pic of me? Again, he's a normal thing. Yeah, it's just a just a real genius. So Bronze Age perverts writings. Yeah, he's devastating. He's obsessed with one of the Greeks he's obsessed with because he claims that like frames himself as an expert on Greek society, which he portrays as something of a paradise. But he only knows about like six guys, and one of them is Alcibiades.

And Alcibiades was an Athenian general and a statesman who was a big player in the Peloponnesian War. He defected from Athens to Sparta, and then from Sparta to the Persian Empire before being recalled and reinstated as an Athenian general. He is a real motherfucker. And an interesting guy. And because he was so interesting and kind of, he was very charismatic in his own

time, and this kind of like, very shady figure too, he becomes an early celebrity. He's like one of the first famous people that's really out there. And a big part of why he stays famous is that Plato will write a lot about him and Socrates, right?

And Plato's writing, I think, after they're dead. So a lot of Alcibiades is like a character written by Plato as opposed to the actual historical fact about the dude. It's also worth noting, given how anti-queer BAP is, that Alcibiades and Socrates were lovers.

Socrates was famously kind of a simp for Alcibiades, while Alcibiades was kind of a piece of shit to Socrates. A lot of fun stories about that, but these guys were not at all straight. Yeah, I mean, pederasty was an institution in ancient Greece. Not that pederasty is the same as

being gay. No, I don't think that's the same as what was going on with these two dudes. Yeah, these dudes were just in love.

It's nice. I'm happy for them. Bronze Age perverts' rants are profoundly silly to anyone who isn't a deranged chud obsessing over why girls don't like him while shooting steroids into his ass. But because that's a fertile demographic, he has influence among some important conservatives.

The chud is fertile in the technical sense of the word. Yeah, not after all those steroids. Yeah, you hit that testosterone too much. Well, and none of these guys will let themselves touch a WAMS because they're so horrified by the concept of women. Yes, that's also true. So former White House speechwriter Darren Beattie followed him on Twitter and interacted with his writing, as did Minnesota State Senator Roger Chamberlain. Curtis Yarvin called him his White House cell leader. Darwin called him his White House cell leader.

This is interesting to me because BAP himself has encouraged his young followers to avoid supporting him in public and instead hide their sympathies while taking positions in the government to institute his ideas. It's also worth noting that you can find some fans of Bronze Age Pervert on the so-called anti-woke left. left there's clips out there from the red scare podcast which the less said about the better where the two hosts read segments of his book with a what seems like a degree of appreciation calling it the good kind of racist yeah that also makes sense in terms of their kind of they're like anti-feminist stuff that they do yes yeah yes yeah um and i think his his writing he has that he has a very like florid purple prose style. I don't think it's good writing. I don't find it particularly engaging. It's very channy and kind of exhausting, but people who are dumb fall for it. So he's hit his demo well. Now, his influence is significant enough that some conservatives have sought to explain it. I found a fun write-up on AmericanMind.org that describes his appeal this way. So what exactly is the teaching of Bronze Age mindset, and why is it so attractive to so many young men?

The answer, I think, is simple. It is a revitalized paganism obsessed with strength and beauty. It appeals to today's young men because these things, strength and beauty, are exactly what contemporary society has tried so hard to deny them. The gospel of sun and steel, of vitalism and strength and power are exactly what have been denied to the boys of the Western world. And their spirits militate against this. Everything great ever achieved, Bap tells us, was done through strong friendships between two men or brotherhoods of men. And this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power. Now I should note part of what he's BAP gets at when he's talking about how these strong groups,

friendships of between two men or small brotherhoods of men, he is a big advocate. And one of the reasons why he is popular among like the Atomwaffen set is he's a big advocate of his followers, forming small two, three, four man groups and training with weapons together and preparing for the future day of the rope style thing.

He doesn't use that term, but he's speaking to those people from a more educated mindset. And there's, I think, an extent to which you could see his writing as trying to pull in that kind of educated upper crust kids of the upper middle class with Ivy League educations who go into politics, trying to draw them in closer to the actual violent insurgent right, at least in terms of the sympathies of their ideas and support for methods of organizing that are more traditionally found against the Elohim City set, right? I think there is a degree of that going on here. Now, Bronze Age pervert is more supportive of Trump than a lot of these guys, largely because he finds him funny and sees him as an avatar of disruption and destruction. Yeah, it's like an accelerationist support. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which is actually, honestly,

that's perfectly logical because Trump is accelerating both the death of the kind of conservatism that is state loyal, that is sort of system loyal, right? The George W. Bush

kind of conservatism, which is very much system loyal. of like the mid-2000s. Yeah. And Trump has done terrible damage to that and damage to the structure of the state in the whole.2000s. Yeah, and Trump has done terrible damage to that and damage to the structure of the state in the whole.

So it's perfectly logical for him to support Trump. He's not like, this is not inconsistent with the other things that he talks about. One of the people that that Atlantic writer talked to is Michael Anton, a former Trump administration national security official who wrote a 2019 essay in the Claremont Review of Books about Bronze Age pervert. He acknowledges that BAP's work is racist, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, misogynistic, and homophobic,

but suggested that like that's all – that's not necessarily what he really believes. Maybe it is. But the big reason why he does this is it key. It distracts leftists from his like his more serious, like secret heresies that are like the real deep, dark, arcane wisdom at the center of it. Like hang out with your bros and, and train with guns or whatever. Or yeah,

like hide in the fucking government and waiting for the right moment to strike, but then blow it all up when you make an ad for Ron DeSantis. That kind of cleverness. Anyway, Anton writes that Bronze Age pervert, quote, speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction, especially among white males, with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day. as propagandized and imposed in our day, a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all differences while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite.

There you go. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real,

inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things

better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. So what does all this have to do with longhouses? Well, let's finally get to that. Longhouse describes a category of dwellings that have existed on basically every landmass in the planet in some form stretching back to the Neolithic period. These are, in general, large halls, sometimes with private family rooms built into them, sometimes with communal sleeping arrangements, but always organized around a large single communal hall. In ancient days, these are where feasts would be held and where groups of families or tribes would huddle together in long cold winters. Bronze Age pervert conceives of the long house as an example of the miserable lives primitive and shameful cultures, not his beloved Greeks, lived in before modernity. In his writing,

he makes it clear that his fear is ruled by degenerates and our fallen modernity will cause society to regress to this prehistoric misery. Now, part of his hatred of what he calls longhouse culture is that in his mind, these dwellings were dominated by women who forced men to live inside the smoky, cloying, stinking confines. This is not really accurate to any kind of history. I expect his conception here comes largely from the fact that longhouses are often suspected because we know relatively little about many of the cultures that had them, are often suspected of having been organized among matrilineal lines. In other words, if you as a dude marry a lady, you move into her family's longhouse, right?

This does sink out. There are modern cultures you move into her family's longhouse, right? This does sink out. There are modern cultures that lived – that had longhouses or have longhouses who also lived this way. The Iroquois being a good example, right? That was a longhouse culture and where – which house you lived in was matrilineal. But it is a mistake to characterize matrilineal as meaning like the women are completely in charge because they were not in Iroquois culture, nor many other cultures where longhouses existed. Vikings lived in longhouses, and you might recognize their society is not precisely anti-masculine. Yeah, the woke Vikings.

Yeah, the woke Vikings. So this is more of a problem, though, with the conceptions of the longhouse that are spread by BAP's followers, because again, he's using it as a shorthand for the fact that this kind of like prehistoric darkness of egalitarianism is going to destroy the only thing that in his view can bring progress, which is small groups of beautiful men enforcing their will through violence, right? That's what he talks about when he's talking about The Longhouse. His followers tend to use The Longhouse as more of a shorthand for the kind of stuff Curtis Yarvin gets at with The Cathedral, a catch-all term for progressive modernity, women who get to say no to sex and have their own credit cards,

trans people on hormones, vegan meat substitutes, and yes, the Barbie movie. Now, I opened this episode with a post about that movie by Lomez, an adherent of BAPism who wrote an interminable article on the Longhouse for a website called First Things, which describes itself as America's most influential journal of religion and public life. I bet it is. Yeah, I bet it is, buddy. You can tell because they always let you know straight away if it's true. Yeah, yeah, they really got to hit that up for you. I'm going to quote from that now. Even for those of us who use it, the longhouse evades easy summary.

Ambivalent to its core, the term is at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate in-joke. Its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles. It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic government, but also to wokeness, to the progressive, liberal, and secular values that pervade all major institutions. The most important feature of the longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant and controversial symbol of our current circumstances,

is the ubiquitous rule of the den mother. More than anything, the longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. As of 2022, women held 52% of professional managerial roles in the U.S. Women earned more than 57% of bachelor degrees, 61% of master's degrees, and 54% of doctoral degrees. And because they're overrepresented in professions

such as human resource management and compliance officers that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally. So the WOMs have taken over human resources. He sounds like he lost a fight with a thesaurus when he's writing that,

like at every point, like he's just using unnecessarily long word. Yeah, it's I mean, it's also just like women have are dominating society because they they're getting more bachelor's degrees yep that's what it is okay uh-huh yeah that's a famously useful bachelor's degree which always leads to employment in a powerful position to tremendous wealth oh also and the idea that like human resources are in some degree somehow setting the terms culturally as opposed to responding to the needs of corporations to mitigate risk. Right? Like that's what HR actually is. It's not setting an agenda.

It is avoiding lawsuits. It is minimizing exposure. Whatever. Yeah. Minimizing exposure, whatever. Yeah. Lómez also goes on to quote Richard Henania, an influential conservative thought leader who was revealed recently to be a neo-Nazi or at least someone who regularly wrote neo-Nazi things in neo-Nazi parts of the web and wants to be seen as respectable now. We'll talk about him later.

Lómez approvingly notes that Henania echoes a BAPIS talking point when he discusses how female domination of HR has given them control over public and private institutions. Now, again, the way Lómez is talking about this shit is not actually in line with how Bronze Age pervert conceives of the longhouse, and one of the funnier results of everything that I've been talking about

today is that Bronze Age pervert now spends much of his time on Twitter angrily tweeting at his followers that they're using the longhouse wrong. I'm going to read you a post of his from July 27th. Longhouse has gone crazy out of control, usually misused.

It's not a synonym for feminism or matriarchy nor for group consensus, though those are part of the story. It's a concrete image from pre-Aryan Europe of lower life and of most traditional societies the author's baby got away from you yeah and some of his ire is likely due to the fact that his followers who are largely very young tend to apply what they see as his analysis to children's movies? Here's a real good one. Yeah, this is a post for a picture of the female villain from the movie Tangled by Activated Sleeper.

If you want a good example of the nebulous longhouse, look no further than Mother Gothel, feigned narcissism, driven by resentment and envy of the young, whose primary and most effective weapons are gaslighting, manipulation, and the rhetoric of fanatical safetyism. It's good stuff. Thank you, activated sleeper.

Thank you, activated sleeper, exposing the... That great cutting commentary on 2012's Tangled. Now, one of my favorite recent examples of how many of these guys use the longhouse was a post in the Off My Chest Reddit, which went viral on Twitter. The post is by a woman who says that she interrupted her husband while he was telling a story and he was like, hold up, Tawny, men are talking as like a joke. And she got angry at this and they had a fight. One popular BAPist response to this story, 1500 likes and counting when I found it, stated, men attempt to take one comedic step out of the longhouse and the locks get 10 times bigger.

Jesus Christ. It is very silly to like bring up actual history with this but one of the points you'll find in like writing about longhouses traditionally is that because everyone was cooped up in the winter come spring the women were generally like doing everything they good to get them in to fucking leave and go hunt or something like get the fuck out of that get out of here like go do something else we need we need like a fucking week or two without you hanging around go to war we didn't care yeah go to war do something jesus christ nobody likes being cooped up in a fucking longhouse um anyway that's that's the longhouse

that's uh bronze age pervert it is kind of worth noting because these guys are convinced that like they are the intellectual vanguard of this movement that's going to overturn what is classically described as liberalism. This idea that like people have like rights that are worth protecting and shit, that that's a failed idea. It's obviously failed. Look at how ugly buildings are today. And they'll post some picture of like the Chicago World's Fair. These people are like weirdly adjacent to the Tartaria conspiracy theory

that a hundred years ago, the world was ruled by this like vast advanced Russian empire that made all the nice buildings. And then World War II was a secret excuse for the rulers of the world to destroy all the good architecture and then world war ii was a secret excuse for the rulers of the world to destroy all the good architecture and that's why buildings are ugly i i definitely seen uh like this bat guy in those in those like circles of of people who are like like culture critic or like yes greek enjoyer or whatever yeah Yeah. Like, yeah. Like post pictures of like, like old expensive architecture stuff.

Yeah. And mixed in with like, like either like, uh, mostly, mostly like brutalist or like modernist architecture and be like, what happened? What,

what, which way was to this cathedral anymore? Why don't we do this anymore? Well, for one thing, like the society that people like you insisted upon this one in which like value is maximized at all costs. So we we took windows out of my school that was built in that brutalist periods because it was cut down on heating costs.

Or because like it's like because some like prince bankrupted their country. Yes. Building this pretty building. And that's why we don't do that anymore. Idiots like you who thought like yeah jacked dudes with guns should run everything started a series of wars that bankrupted those countries and they had to sell their nice buildings to the americans that's why we got the london bridge i assume but it's definitely all that all like in that

in that same rough Twitter milieu. I mean, it's certainly, now that you've explained all of this, it certainly makes sense why they're kind of fawning over the Barbie movie. And I mean, very clearly, Ken is going to become one of these memeable characters because of what he does in the film.

He's going to join the pantheon of American Psycho and all of Ryan Gosling's other roles it is fascinating how Ryan Gosling kind of has become like the literal poster child for much of like the dissident like anti-feminist right just because of the

types of roles that he's taken but yeah I mean it certainly makes sense. Real cautionary tale male actors it certainly makes sense in context of the barbie movie in terms of how they kind of structured all of the like social critique in that in that movie um but but yeah this is very silly i mean uh it's i'm excited i won't have to hear much more about like the stunning poetic prose of Bronze Age perfect. Yeah. Fucking the Atlantic every time.

It never fails to disappoint. It's so like weird because there's this whole thing that opens the article where he's talking about how like, you know, the first strains of this new anti-democratic, you know, anti-liberal thinking in academia came out through philosophy students who realized that their professors just took for granted the truth about things like the value of human rights and weren't ready for their arguments against them. And it was these people who didn't want to be told not to think in certain ways. No, man, they were assholes. They're asshole rich kids who needed somebody to hit him in the fucking face. They need a folding chair deployed on them. Like, yeah, yeah. I demand a shutdown of all coastal universities until we figure out what the fuck is going on.

Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. I don't know what the fuck is going on. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. If you were pretending that you were like somehow in the insurgent underground, uh,

as the son of an MIT professor going to MIT yourself, like you fucking dilettante. That's all. That's all this fucker is, is a dilettante. And that's all. Most of the people following are, it's a mix of dilettantes and guys who are going to shoot up Walmarts.

Um, anyway. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Cool. Give them, give them a follow give them a follow i've been checking out activated sleeper and i've learned a lot already so uh oh yeah yeah you're getting billed by him yeah yeah yeah pretty much i i uh you know as much as one can be billed by a 14year-old. But, yeah, really interesting stuff here. I think it's fair to say that this is an insight into a world. Oh, buddy, fuck me.

All right, yeah. We're not talking about that. We are not talking about his bedroom wall. Bye, everyone. Oh, wait, now I got to look. James, what did you... We can bleep it. You have to at least tell us what you...

Oh, wow. His pinned? It's fucking... Oh, it's a good veteran flag. we can bleep it you have to at least tell us oh wow his pinned it's a Confederate flag no what's on the bed vote and what looks like is that a German nationalist flag is that like a German empire is that imperial Germany

yeah I think this guy is a Kaiser Reich dude no dude he's Francoist I'm sure guy's a Kaiser Reich dude. No, dude, he's Francoist. That's a certainly impressive bedroom. I'm sure he's getting all the ladies in there. I gotta show you guys this pinned tweet. And then I'll read it. It's all caps.

Fed post. Let me tell you how much I want a Fed post. There are 100 billion neurons within my brain. If a Fed post was written on each and every one of those neurons, it would not equal one billionth of the compulsion I feel the Fed post at this micro instant. Fed post. Fed post. That means posting about doing a terrorism so that the Feds come and shoot you.

This is the type of tweet that could either come from some mentally unwell leftist yeah yeah it's really unclear yeah the flag he has just to be clear it's a franco is flag of spain uh which okay it's something that at some point we will have to talk about which is the american right has been embracing franco as like based and good uh for a while now like it's this kind of return to catholic tradition and like uh it's this anti-woke crusader i do like all of the suggested follows here on activated sleepers page sun optimist alaric the barbarian emperor philippus all of these people are such sad nerds here's he's retweeted a post from bronze age jacob yoroski jews are like the one ring for politics i think we've done enough here i think we i think

we reached the i think we reached peak uh peak usefulness i don't think yes i hope you've all learned a lot from this. Have a wonderful week, everyone. Have a wonderful week and fuck you for making me write this to our listeners. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website

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