SNEAK PEEK: What BAP Didn't Learn from Feminism
Read my new essay about a rather ill-judged critique of Bronze Age Pervert and the new book by Costin Alamariu
Welcome back, my friends. Here’s a sneak peek at an essay that, for reasons unknown to me, has been languishing in developmental hell for some months. It was due to be published in a special edition of The Asylum magazine on Costin Alamariu’s new book Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. It may yet appear in that special edition.
There’s absolutely no reason why you should be paying attention to what goes on over at Compact Magazine. Because removepaywall.com doesn’t work for the Compact site, you have to pay $90 a year to read shitty articles about “gnostic bodybuilders” by Malcolm Kyeyune – aka “Tinkzorg” – or pieces asking important questions like “Are chemicals causing gender chaos?” that have been cribbed, almost word for word, from articles I’ve written. There aren’t enough ideas to go round at Compact it seems, not real ones the writers can call their own, so they either invent absurd caricatures, like the aforementioned “gnostic bodybuilders”, or they just nick other people’s work, then hide all but the first few sentences behind a paywall to make you think there’s something worth reading back there. $90 a year, by the way.
About a month ago, the man who copied my work on endocrine disruptors, Geoff Shullenberger, wrote a piece about the anonymous figure Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), and the man he thinks is Bronze Age Pervert, Costin Alamariu, who’s just written a new book that’s been very popular indeed. “What BAP learned from feminism,” the piece is called. File this one under “absurd caricature”. It’s certainly not friendly. Then again, there are plenty of pieces about BAP these days and most of them are unfriendly; although a few are actually quite warm. It’s hard not to like BAP, especially if you’ve actually read Bronze Age Mindset.
So, there’s something of a cottage industry these days with dozens of largely unsuccessful writers churning out a steady stream of pieces about anonymous figures on the online right, mainly BAP but also me and a few of my other friends. There must be some degree of coordination behind the scenes, since new talking-points and speculations emerge in multiple places at once. Maybe there’s a Slack channel or Whatsapp group these dorks are in, with some minor functionary of the regime feeding them the latest plan of attack against the right-wing bodybuilders and their spiritual leader, the BAPman. I wouldn’t bet against it. Something like that is definitely happening with the Keith Woods types and the Fuentard / closet-homosexual Latinx tradcaths on Twitter – you know, the ones who think BAP has a “Talmudic network” and post “Aren’t you a Jew?” under every tweet written by suspected members of this shady organisation, including myself.
One tack that’s been tried a number of times is to connect BAP to real-world violence, to dangerous individuals who’ve done pointless destructive things, like the moron Lyndon McLeod, a.k.a. “Roman McClay”, who shot up a tattoo parlour and a killed a bunch of tattooed people he didn’t like – he had a tattoo parlour himself and lots of tattoos – before being blown away by Denver PD. McLeod actually wrote a book himself called Sanction, a “novel” in which the protagonist, er… Lyndon McLeod, murders the author Lyndon McLeod’s future victims. Talk about meta! Commentary on the rampage, and McLeod’s Wikipedia page, tells us loudly that he was a fan of BAP’s Twitter account and read Bronze Age Mindset, but he clearly didn’t learn a single thing from the book, which says nothing about being a schizophrenic loser and murdering your business competitors over a bunch of small perceived slights. Or did I miss that part?
BAP also featured alongside me in a bizarre paper by the “Global Network on Extremism and Technology”, a Zuckerberg-funded think tank, about the “far right” and its “obsession with raw food.” Apparently, by encouraging people to eat raw milk and raw eggs and avoid exposure to estrogenic chemicals, we’re somehow also encouraging them to seek violent overthrow of the government. There’s no way to make this conclusion sound less ridiculous than it actually is, but two university academics were paid to research and write the piece, so somebody with clout and a bit of cash obviously thought it was worth a squirt.
Really, this is what I think is going on: the aim is to get enough media outlets and think tanks and talking-heads to say that BAP and other figures on the online right are violent extremists or “domestic terrorists”, and then the authorities will have cause to treat them as such. Simple. Maybe it will work. I hope not.
Anyway, back to Geoff Shullenberger. His big “gotcha” for BAP and Costin Alamariu is that they – he – is actually just a kind of inverted liberal, a shade of liberalism if you will, because he repeats a “myth of matriarchal prehistory” that is of great importance to certain varieties of modern feminism, especially the so-called “goddess” movement. The myth is, briefly, that there was an old Europe, many thousands of years ago, that was broadly egalitarian and peaceful, and where women were afforded the highest status, even worshipped in the form of fertility deities. This suddenly changed, however, with the arrival of nomadic pastoralists from the steppe – the Indo-Europeans – who subjugated the women-loving people and imposed a new hierarchical, patriarchal order, setting the stage for the rest of world history in its hierarchical, patriarchal form. This myth found its fullest exposition in the later work of the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who died in 1994. And it is a myth, at least as far as there’s no evidence a truly matriarchal society has ever existed, in Europe or anywhere else. On that point, all serious anthropologists, archaeologists and historians concur. But the Indo-Europeans existed, and they certainly shook things up with their arrival in Europe, as we’ll see.
One thing that’s worth adding about the “matriarchal myth of prehistory”, before we go any further, is its importance to leftism across the board, and not just some kinds of feminism. A belief in the actual existence of matriarchy in the past is foundational to modern leftism, all the way back to the early days of Marxism. The matriarchal conception of history became formally integrated into Marxist dialectical materialism with the publication, in 1884, of Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The Origin traces the emergence of class society out of a so-called “primitive matriarchy”. On Engels’ reading of history, the emergence of class society was not just the overthrow of the egalitarian ideal, but also the beginning of the overthrow and ruin of women as a sex. Class society is, by its nature, patriarchal, since it depends on the man’s control over the reproductive function of the woman. This is where monogamy and then private property, and later the state, emerge from.
I called this tradition “the Longhouse Delusion” in a piece I wrote for MAN’S WORLD Issue Ten. The Longhouse Delusion tells us as much about the value of the dominant leftist conception of history as it does about the fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and society at the heart of modern leftism in all its forms. “What we know and feel intuitively — that leftism is a monstrous falsification of the human spirit and history — is true,” I wrote.
“The leftist egalitarian vision of a world free from hierarchy is rooted in fantasy and inversion, plain and simple. On the intellectual plane, we already know this from Nietzsche and The Genealogy of Morals, and an examination of primitive matriarchy and longhouse values – the root of the Marxist theory of historical materialism – only confirms this further.”
It’s easy to see why this claim about BAP’s “feminism” would be of great value not just to Shullenberger but also to the wider “post-liberal” crowd, including fellow Compact contributors like Sohrab Ahmari, who joyously promoted the article on Twitter when it was published. Basically, if the claim is true, it means this incredibly popular new movement on the right is nothing more than a product or epiphenomenon of liberalism. And therefore, like liberalism, BAPism can be dismissed totally out of hand: that’s what the “post” in “post-liberal” means. BAPism is a symptom, not the solution.
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