Slightly to their right, we find chauvinists like Mike Cernovich, whose testosterone-fueled Persicope rants garner millions of views, or Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, who faces charges relating to his involvement in the January 6th Capitol Hill riot and previously livestreamed his trolling of “fat” female pro-immigration activists with openly racist and smooth-chested attention whore Catboy Kami, whose real name is not quite pinned down, but who livestreams himself in anime costumes or blackface and says seriously effed up things to teenagers on Omegle and once went on a “hilarious” hot date with podcaster Nick Fuentes, the bigot-king of the Groypers, who targets rightwing pundits and … okay, I’ll stop there.Watching Don Lemon on CNN without knowing a thing about him, who would know that he's a gay man? He's well-groomed and put together, but so is every other TV anchor. Sales of Jordan Peterson’s self-empowerment tome Twelve Rules for Life were bolstered by his early anti-trans comments. Gavin McInnes and members of his Proud Boys have made a name for themselves by proclaiming celibacy and planning and joining misogynist and white-supremacist rallies. Today, its center is held by a cluster of stars, whose celebrity has become increasingly mainstream.
It’s a turbulent terrain of white male resentment, which found its footing in the 4chan and 8chan ethos of “ There are no girls on the internet” and “Tits or GTFO” and the ensuing 2014 hate-fueled doxing of and attacks on female journalists known as Gamergate. Today, this tradition is alive and well, living on Telegram, Discord, Reddit, Gab, and other online platforms. Jean Raspail’s 1978 dystopic anti-immigrant fantasy The Camp of the Saints is the story of the last surviving white man on Earth it was a professed favorite of Trump’s immigration advisors. The most famous in the canon is William Pierce’s 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, the protagonist of which inspired Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. There is a tradition in far-right propagandist literature-to which Bronze Age Pervert is a modern-day inheritor-of a white male hero who rises up against a liberal, racially mixed, feminist, and/or otherwise degenerate society. “It’s not too hard to go from one scapegoat to another: ‘I’m going to blame all Jews, or all people of color.’” “These men are concerned about the white race being destroyed, and part of that concern involves the need for controlling women and particularly white women, and an investment in them having white kids.” She warns that the manosphere is fertile soil for red-pilling, recruitment, and general crosspollination. She points to Carlson’s concern for faltering manliness as echoing male supremacist rhetoric, just as he has echoed white supremacists in his endorsement of the Great Replacement theory -a key intersection of these two groups. “There is a real connection between these male supremacists and white supremacist networks,” says Kristen Doerer, managing editor of Right Wing Watch, a project that tracks extremist activity for People for the American Way. “The End of Men” is Tucker Carlson’s lame attempt to glom onto some BAP-esque clout, and I am still not laughing.
His now-suspended Twitter account once teemed with homoerotic images of sun-dappled bodybuilders and reeked of sexism and xenophobia. He loves to exaggerate and glorify masculinity to the point of being jokingly gay. You must show them for what they are, which is dour, old, sclerotic, ugly, pedantic it’s good if you show yourself in the opposite light, although not necessary.” It’s a pretty apt description of how I feel for writing this: Tucker Carlson is an asshole so am I.īronze Age Pervert is a master of setting this type of trap, and I’m just the sort of guy to step in it. You really can’t underestimate the power of a good prank.… This can be as little as putting up a funny banner or a witty slogan.” The goal, according to BAP (as all the cool-kid right-wingers call him), is to “make the enemy look ridiculous. But Carlson’s viral schtick reminded me of something not so silly: a passage from Bronze Age Mindset, a bizarre 2018 long-form essay that has become popular in the far-right “manosphere.” The book’s author, who uses the pen name Bronze Age Pervert, cynically advises that “the equivalent of the ‘meme’ in political action is the prank.