Originally Published: August 8, 2024 11:07 a.m.

There's a lot of talk about the authoritarian leanings of the modern Republican Party. Donald Trump commits to pardon the January 6 rioters who sought to steal him an election; his rank-and-file supporters cheer him on when he says he'll be a "dictator on day one." Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), Trump's Vice Presidential pick, likes to muse that "universities are the enemy" and play with the idea of unleashing the DOJ on political opponents.

But like any political movement, there's an ecosystem of thinkers and influencers that propel it. There is, in fact, a cacophony of voices, some going so far as to advocate for an end to democracy, others calling for like-minded right-wingers to form institutions and communities that somehow exist outside of American politics and culture. A lot of this group's output is deliberately provocative; sometimes it is (intentionally or not) very funny.

There's show business to it, coupled with the denigration of various minority groups and machismo: some of the figures on this segment of the right really do act as influencers, mixing the need to feed the content-hungry beast of their audience with musings on how to construct a society in which the influence of the left has been eradicated.

This loose-knit group of activists, aspiring philosophers and online personalities sometimes refers to itself as the "new right" (a term, confusingly, shared with other conservative movements in the 1970s and, earlier, in the 1950s). But in recent years, it has worked self-consciously to build a body of writing and art, unleashing deluges of social media posts that might appeal to the same people who also get excited about Trump, and lead them toward a more authoritarian future.

What distinguishes it from others on the right is a Manichean view of American society: that the country stands at a crossroads, and that only decisive, dramatic action in the immediate future can rescue it from irrevocably descending into a socialist abyss. What's required, some of these figures suggest, is a different kind of figure running the country, one who is capable of taking that kind of decisive action.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of some popular figures in this world.

The extremely online

Bronze Age Pervert first appeared online in 2017, in the form of a Twitter account featuring a shirtless man gazing out at an oceanic horizon.

Over the next few years, the account built a following, using ironic caveman grammar to argue that efforts to achieve greater equality and respect for diversity has corrupted and weakened American society.

BAP, who some outlets have identified as a Romanian-American Yale Ph.D named Costin Alamariu, is emblematic of a certain type of extremely online right-wing influencer. His opinions range from the bizarre to the self-avowedly fascistic; it's difficult to tell what's real and what's a wink to those in on the joke. He says he wants a military government, and posits that decadent elites have created generations of "bugmen;" weak and nihilistic people incapable of striving for higher values, waiting to be swept aside by those possessing a true Bronze Age Mindset

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BAP has gone far since 2017. Trump White House staffers reportedly passed around his 2018 manifesto; the influential, deeply conservative investor Peter Thiel referred to BAP in a recent interview as an example of a "right-wing Nietzschean" who rejects the idea that past historical wrongs impose obligations on the present. Claremont Institute fellow and former White House official Michael Anton praised BAP's book in a lengthy review as speaking out about "imposed" equality that "publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite."

The oddest thing about BAP may, however, be that there are more like him.

Take the similarly constructed persona Raw Egg Nationalist. Though there are fewer Nietzsche references, this Raw Egg has the same shirtless avatar, the same declaratory three-word name, the same ungrammatical appeal, and has landed on similar beachheads of influence: Tucker Carlson cited Raw Egg Nationalist in a documentary titled "End of Men," both BAP and Raw Egg Nationalist earned X follows from vice presidential nominee Vance.

There's a lot here that's constant winks to white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But the focuses are different: where BAP has an interest in, perhaps, political thought, Raw Egg Nationalist spends more time on what you might call a mixture of nutrition and anti-immigrant demagoguery. He exhorts his readers to avoid factory and monoculture farming ("cook good"), while claiming that the same elites that drive negative nutrition are also conspiring to pull off the Great Replacement.

REN also runs a magazine called Man's World, which features writing in the current issue from, among others, Noor bin Ladin, the pro-Trump activist who is also the niece of Osama bin Ladin. Man's World is published by Passage Press, itself a project aimed at creating parallel, far-right cultural output.

Separately, Passage Press published a collection of short fiction stories titled After the War: Stories From the Next Regime.

BAP, REN, and others, like Claremont's Michael Anton, wrote for the collection. It's a window into the mindset: Anton wrote a story called "Float 93" analogizing a sinking ship to the influx of undocumented immigrants; BAP wrote a story about a group of physically fit soldiers marooned on a tropical island after a nuclear war who ratify a "Constitution based on the American Anti-Federalist papers" after coming across a group of Amazons.

From there, the portal opens up to dozens more short story authors included in the anthology, with similar noms de plume: Endlessbonerz, Barbaric Disciple, Golgi Apparatus, on it goes.

The theorists

To make sense of it all, you may need to turn to another writer: Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug.