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Notes -
Costin the Jew, Israel and Me
or
Bronze Age Zionism
In the Atlantic last week, a profile of Costin Alamariu, listless MIT graduate, former investment banker, itinerant philosopher, schizoposter, dissident right fixture and, of course, 'Bronze Age Pervert'. And, it seems, Romanian-American Jew, likely one of many whose exit was bought in the final years of Ceaușescu's dictatorship by Israel (in exchange for cash, arms and loans).
I once argued extensively on the previous iteration of this forum that it was extremely unlikely that BAP was Jewish (even though he occasionally said things to this effect, he also sometimes claimed he was joking, and in any case non-gentile-white (especially Jewish) ancestry is a meme in dissident right circles). While BAP's more extreme antisemitism was clearly performative, and his 'racism' often as hostile to sedentary, fat American whites as it was to other groups, it was more viscerally (if not intellectually) radical than that of most Jewish far-right antisemites, like Ron Unz. I referred to various posts and comments, and even his appearance in what was at that time one of the only leaked pictures of him. In this article, the author all but confirms that Alamariu is, in fact, actually Jewish, which means I was wrong. I extend a mea culpa to those who disagreed with me.
It is hard to say for sure that BAP is 'the' central figure in the modern dissident right, although I struggle to think of a more prominent personality among online, English-speaking dissident rightists (MacDonald is much less well-known and comes across in many cases as a dull academic, Fuentes is a clown, and Spencer is a laughing stock within the movement even if he is likely still more famous outside of it), but he is certainly one of them. Jewish far-rightists (whether they are open about their ethnic identity or conceal it) are nothing new; Jews are overrepresented, as Sailer has joked, in every intellectual endeavor except perhaps golf-course architecture. The British-Jewish writer Tamara Berens, writing in Mosaic (a more religious sister magazine to Tablet) briefly describes BAP's Jewishness and his feud with Nick Fuentes in a 'report' on dissident right antisemitism, though she does not really engage with his ideas as regards his Jewishness. Discussion of Alamariu's political identity as distinctly Jewish is largely nonexistent beyond the occasional tweeted insult directed at him by detractors on the far-right since his identity became widely known.
We might distinguish here (in a way BAP could reject) between purely genetic and cultural identity. Raised in a first-generation Jewish immigrant family in the heavily Jewish community of Newton (in 2002, almost 40% of Newton's population was Jewish), with a best friend who - The Atlantic reports - is now in a position of "leadership in his synagogue" and with numerous Holocaust survivor relatives, Alamariu seems in many ways to have grown up in a substantially more Jewish milieu than many secular Jewish-Americans, myself included. At university, he seems to have been profoundly influenced by the work of Strauss, one of the more famous Jewish-American philosophers of the late 20th century (certainly on the right).
So is BAPism, incoherent and unfocused though it is, particularly Jewish in a way that even most theories of political philosophy established or contributed to by Jews are not? I think it might be.
Alamariu's political philosophy fits most neatly into the early Zionist, post-Nietzschean climate of a subset of early 20th century Jewish intellectualism in Central Europe. Early Zionism, particularly in the Germanic world, was extremely heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Herzl himself paraphrases him several times. The Nietzschean new man became the New Jew, the Israeli. Large aspects of BAP's discussion of both gender identity and Jewish identity (when he is being serious) paraphrase the work of the German-Jewish writer Otto Weininger, with the notable exception that Weininger considered Christianity the 'antidote' to the ideas he dislikes, while BAP considers it a descendant of the same philosophy. BAP's extreme misogyny is also largely taken from Weininger. This connection was noted in some cases long before BAP's own Jewish identity was widely confirmed. Both consider Jewishness as a quasi-metaphysical state of being distinct from the ethnic reality of being Jewish; to some extent this is a rejection of the hard HBD group-selection stance of MacDonald or even (arguably) Ron Unz, though the latter's views are somewhat fluid on this question.
Jewish dissident rightists face a unique obstacle compared to their gentile peers, which is that they must square their politics with Israel. Consider that to the modal white nationalist, the mythical Western European or North American overtly ethnat twenty-first century state is a fantasy; like Wakanda, hidden from colonialists in the deepest jungle, it can be imagined without compromise or concession to reality. For the Jewish reactionary, Israel is an impossible obstacle because it actually exists. This separates the modern Jewish dissident rightist even from his late-19th or early-20th century equivalents. BAP's writing on Israel is limited, but his most significant commentary is in this piece from 2019, in which he explicitly links western wignat identity and Israeli 'religious zionism', and condemns them both as essentially vapid, empty ideas. The piece is rambling and contradicts itself multiple times, but in it one can see (perhaps) a uniquely Jewish contempt for modern Israel grounded in the above German-Jewish philosophy.
I will now expand on this second point.
To be a Jewish rightist is for me to look upon Israel as an impossibly profound disappointment. A fetid, desert shithole full of ugly, functional, modernist architecture, a tiny, valuable tech and export sector propping up a vast population of fecund religious peasants who dress like 18th century Polish fur traders and who lack the slightest inclination to high civilization or even to the defense of their homeland (and who indeed consider it religiously illegitimate), assorted barbarians, and Slavs with 1/8th Jewish ancestry. To the left, generic Western globally-homogenized secularists. In the middle, the Mizrachim and Sephardim, dull and largely irrelevant beyond electoral politics and clinging to their religion. And then the 'religious zionists', ironic quasi-descendants of Jabotinsky, not-quite-shtetl dwellers practicing a bizarre form of nationalist socialism in which their mission under God is to build more razor-wire-fenced ugly Arizona-esque suburban architecture on the hills outside East Jerusalem taken from Arabs in the belief that this represents the height of their potential contribution to the world.
Where once early Zionists considered themselves in the Nietzschean mold, establishing an outpost of European civilization in the Middle East that could - with the help of Jewish ingenuity and intelligence - perhaps eventually become a best-case example of Western civilization, a great European state that belonged to the (Ashkenazi) Jews as the other European states did to their respective peoples - by the mid-late 20th century Zionism had become a debased form of nationalist socialism in the German fashion, in which the only thing that mattered was the preservation of Jews as a tribe in the most vulgar way. Or, as BAP writes:
In Israel, high culture is irrelevant in part because when the only important thing is racial identity and racial survival, nothing else matters. Israel represents the ethnostate as it is in practice, the worship of the lowest common denominator provided he is "one of us". Ethnonationalism, for BAP, is an inherently debased ideology because it elevates the worst of a people on an arbitrary basis. As Kevin Williamson argued upon Trump's election, not every poor white Appalachian deserved to succeed in modernity, even if Donald told them every failure wasn't their fault; the same thing should apply to Israel but does not, for there an imbecile or lowlife is still, "at least" Jewish, still belongs and so must be accomodated and even (as Alamariu's family was) intentionally retrieved. Ethonationalism as slave morality, in other words. Survival is not enough, birth rates do not in fact detemine civilizational greatness, or Niger would be the finest nation on earth. @SecureSignals once asked about my view on ethnonationalism, I guess this is it: that you can lose even if you win, and that it can be a path to the worst kind of tolerance of the worst aspects of your own people.
It is here, then, that the Jewish roots of BAP's ideology and identity might lie behind the Greco-Roman LARP, in the yearning for a grand national project that never quite worked the way it was hoped to. There is a deep mourning for a 'European' Ashkenazi Jewish state, one that goes far beyond the right. One sees it everywhere in remaining diasporic fiction and culture, sometimes even in Israel, but its most notable (or famous) example is in Michael Chabon's 2007 book 'The Yiddish Policeman's Union', which imagines a fictional Ashkenazi state carved out of Alaska, in a world in which Israel in its Middle Eastern incarnation collapses into anarchy and war just a few months into its existence. The plot itself is largely a thinly-veiled attack on George Bush's policy in the middle east; Chabon is a leftist anti-zionist who opposes Jewish in-marriage (ie. encourages Jews to marry gentiles for the sake of diversity). Still, on the left as well as the intellectual right, then, the unsatisfactoriness of Israel is a mounting disappointment. A state built to serve the weakest members of a tribe cannot turn around and build a culture that worships strength, success, or achievement. Discussion of the failure of Zionist utopianism is now commonplace, even as those who grasp at it fail to understand why it happened.
So the Jew leaves the shtetl, where in some form (whether in Judea or elsewhere) he has lived for millenia, accomplishing almost nothing of note. He changes the world, and for a brief, glorious period it appears as if he is capable (at least) of true greatness, of something approaching eternity, of a new, maybe even greater, civilization, grander than what has come before. And then he fails to build it as he returns to the desert, so he restores the shtetl (so kindly brought over wholesale by the chareidim) and disappears into mediocrity, into nothingness. Terminal decline. The fear of this desert haunts me as it seems to do Alamariu because Israel, really, is the graveyard of Jewish exceptionalism. Perhaps it is better to gamble on the future of the West than to accept fate and be swept beneath the sands of the Negev where one might disappear from history.
At the end of the day, Costin comes back to the same problem - if you're good enough at being a mercenary-warrior-pioneer, your kids will not be. Was it Jefferson who spoke of studying warfare so his children could study mathematics?
And in some ways, Israel does maintain a level of exceptionalism. They do not scurry and tremble over what other nations think of them (as is so common in the UK), nor are they ashamed to admit that their country isn't obligated to take in non-jews. Again, in the UK, we are unable to bring ourselves to deny the lowliest supplicant. We force ourselves to talk endlessly about how immigrants built this country, and carefully insert black people into depictions of historical events. If the Jewish nation aspires to survival, that at least is more worthy than aspiring to a long suicide.
Jews were treated as different by Europeans for so long. It is not to be wondered why they would then keep Europeanism at arm's length. But modernity advances by one path or another. You study warfare, your kids study mathematics, and their kids study gender theory.
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Is it the Atlantic that first published his identity and ethnicity? There seems to be a trend of mainstream legacy media outting public personalities that publish under a pen name. BAP, Libsoftictock, Scott. They clearly have an axe to grind here, even though they hide behind the some notion of journalism and a fig leaf of newsworthiness. What is there to be done? Nothing. Its asymetrical. Add it the list of reasons I find journalists lower than lawyers and slightly higher than pedophiles. I hope to one day be introduced to a journalist so that I can laugh in their face when they tell me their profession.
The name has been public for a while. Pseudonyms and revealing their authors has been a thing for centuries, every side does it. It's only asymmetrical in that the center has moved very far to the left relative to the past, so there are more attacks from the left, but the methods aren't at all different.
Yes, I'd say the primary difference is that in the West, there is pretty much zero need for a radically leftist author to write under a pseudonym. They may still do so for privacy reasons, but it's not to protect them from cancellation.
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I understand that perspective, and I agree that some journalists can be pretty nasty about it, going over the top with it and using it exclusively to destroy an adversary, but that's the game man. You don't start writing under a pseudonym because you are a paranoid schizophrenic who is autistic about privacy, you do it because you want to say things you know will upset the establishment. It's part of the trade off you make when you take on a professional pen name - the price of anonymity is trust, the more anonymous you are the less you can be trusted.
You give up the chance to be a household name, your ability to network is hampered dramatically, and even the outfits that will publish pseudonymous works are cautious about it, as they should be. But in return for forfeiting your legacy, you get held to the public's standards of journalist ethics, which can be gamed much more easily than any media organisation's. You get to write however you like, and cater your material to the audience you want, instead of what the outfit wants. And you get to speak the truth as you see it, any and every truth, no matter what anyone else thinks. It's a good trade off I think, as a former pseudonymous journalist (feel free to laugh in my face, if I met younger me I would too.)
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The greatest qualities of the Jews have resulted in their survival as a diaspora among the West. That does not mean those qualities are amenable to building a European nation, much less one with a Nietzschean, Greco-Roman spirit. They are not Greco-Romans. The same qualities that have enabled Jews to survive are the same qualities that have caused Israel to not meet the Western ideal as held by you or BAP.
It's a contradiction of Jewish Nationalism. "Shtetl-optimized" doesn't mean Nietzschean Greco-Roman, it means clannish, religious, wandering merchants. But that's also the reason they've survived and thrived, and the same reason they can never build a nation in the mold to which you or BAP want. It's not who they are.
Neither are most of the people in history have tried to recapture the Greco-Roman spirit (including Nietzsche himself).
As the Critical Theorists love reminding us, we are colonizers and conquerors. We have for thousands of years engaged in a pattern of behavior of conquering continents, subjugating the previous inhabitants, imposing civilization and order and law. Guilty as charged. This is a pattern of behavior that emerged in the Bronze Age, in which Neolithic European populations were only the first to be subsumed, but it's a force of being that reached all continents of the world. Rome is only one example of a civilizational modus operandi that has been endemic to "whiteness" since the Bronze Age. It is who we are.
The Jewish story since the Bronze Age has always defined its identity relative to some struggle with its host hegemon, whether it's Egypt, Rome, Europe, or the United States. What is Jewish Nationalism absent such symbiosis? It's Israel.
BAP wants the Aryan Bronze Age spirit to be transplanted to the Jewish spirit. It's a fine aspiration, but it's a contradiction with the Jewish spirit.
TLDR: We wuz Romans, "you're looking at them, asshole."
The conditions that allowed a few thousand Englishman to enthrall great India no long exist. It was one thing to be a merchant-explorer-conqueror in an age of petty feudal kingdoms and isolated despotisms. You might still get away with such a thing in the poorest and least stable corners of the world. A few thousand people could easily impose their will in Haiti. But then there is nothing of value there, and it's hardly embodying the warlord spirit to live off of UN aid packages in a hovel.
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This post reminds me a bit of Sartre and his defense of jews and some of the issues inherent to the identity of jews.
Sartre had all his life been ugly and short. He was keenly aware of this and it became a part of his identity and philosophy. He saw in himself a marginalized person because of this. And he saw in that marginalization a commonality with other marginalized people. A sort of proto-bioleninism. The most prominent of these were jews.
Sartre wrote an entire book on anti-semitism and jews. Only to later state that he did in fact not know a single thing about jews and judaism, but was instead just describing and defending himself. But the defense stuck. The book has been tirelessly praised by jewish scholars as capturing the essence of being jewish, and is often quoted by leftists as refutation of anti-semitism. Full of the typical scathing psychoanalytic remarks on the psychological and philosophical deficiencies that would drive one towards a dislike of jews.
How could a man who knew nothing about jews defend them so accurately and valiantly? In what turned out to just be a sort of reverse Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, there were one too many things that added up. Despite being fiction it hit a little too close to home.
A part of jewish identity is being marginalized. A part of jewish identity is being on the outside. And in the sense that Sartre elucidated, jewish identity is being weak, neurodivergent, depressed and ugly. As horrid as it might sound. You can say that these are not true and point to beautiful well adjusted jewish people and I would agree. But to that end I would argue that these people, in Sartre's definition of jews, are less jewish than the ugly ones.
BAP seems to want to step outside this bear trap of jewish identity. He wants to be beautiful, strong, happy and healthy. A celebration of idealistic normalcy where there is no revenge of the nerds because there are no nerds. In that sense it's not just a rejection of Sartre's jewish identity but the typical American secular jewish identity.
To that end I think he, along with any aspirational dreams regarding the state of Israel, run into the problem of just becoming Nazis. Not in some abstract sense but a literal one. All of this stuff has been written out before. Be eugenic, be happy, healthy and strong, be a people to be proud of. Strive for something greater. And in an inverse of Sartre, they need to turn away from jewishness for the same reason Sartre was drawn towards it.
Bah. Woody Allen is not somehow the ideal Jew. He is a stereotype which was popular (and like most stereotypes, not without truth) for a while, that's all. None of that is essential to Jewish identity.
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Reading this crystalized something that has been bouncing around my head for a while. The conception of "Jews" as a coherent ethnicity apart from the religion of Judaism is a mistake. You can't have Jews without Judaism.
When you read the Old Testament or listen to the rabbis, it becomes clear that the purpose of many, if not most of the mitzvot, are to clearly delineate the Jewish people from the gentiles. Whenever the Jewish people start drifting away from Yahweh, the first thing that happens is that they take foreign wives. When you read the New Testament, there is tension between the Jewish Christians and the gentile Christians. What happened to these Jewish Christians? We don't know for sure, but there's really only two possibilities. Either they stopped being Christians, or they stopped being Jews.
It is in this manner that any secular Jewish state will be inherently fake. The secular state of Israel occupying the biblical Land of Israel is hilariously fake. Where the fuck is the Third Temple? How come 56 years after gaining control of the Temple Mount the holiest place Jews are allowed to pray is a 2000-year-old wall? This is just sad. The Jews had more freedom to practice the authentic Jewish religion under Persian, Greek, and Roman occupation than they do today under the Global American Empire.
Well, where the fuck is the Messiah? Are you one of those guys who thinks that Schneerson was him?
Where does it say Messiah has to come before the temple can be rebuilt?
Nothing in Judaism is without dissenters, but it's a widely held position.
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The kind of mind that is capable of brilliant modern scientific and technological feats like maintaining the sort of nuclear program and advanced army that allows you to control a piece of land that a bunch of people want to remove you from is generally not compatible with the kind of mind that genuinely cares about building a Third Temple. I think that is a big part of 2rafa's point.
Renaissance Europe is a very obvious example of a civilization which was both very scientifically/technologically advanced, and also deeply interested in religious/devotional matters. This is a culture that pioneered advances in architectural theory in order to construct some of the best churches and temples the world has ever seen. This dichotomy you seem to continually insist on drawing between backward religious/nationalist societies vs. forward-looking secular/globalist societies is very obviously fake and I have no idea why you’re so committed to it.
Intellectual work in renaissance europe was very different from today, the primary mode of argumentation was appeal to authority: they "knew" earth was spherical because aristotle said so, they "knew" it like they "knew" that nerves connected to the heart (not the brain), that planets were carried by large solid spheres of quintessence and that heavy objects fell faster.
They were doing "science" (the word is anachronistic in this context, but whatever) the same way they were doing theology: commentary on a small corpus of approved authors that were assumed to be nearly infallible and to contain the totality of all possible knowledge. It's no wonder that intellectual work and religiosity was compatible.
The cathedrals are beautiful but they are also not designed by intellectuals but by semi-literate head masons. And, tbh, when you understand why all the flying buttresses are really there they start to look kind of ugly.
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Just because it worked in Renaissance Europe does not mean that it works now. Clearly it is possible for people to be both religious and very intelligent. It is easy to find thousands of examples. However, just as clearly, in today's world there is a correlation between high degrees of religiousness and scientific/technological/organizational backwardness. I do not know why the correlation exists, but I see that it does exist. And of course even today it would be easy to find individual counterexamples, but that does not mean that the correlation does not exist on a group level.
In short, I am committed to the dichotomy in part because to me it does not seem fake. I also largely agree with 2rafa's idea that nationalism is antithetical to Darwininan meritocracy. The question of whether nationalism is still justified for moral reasons is, however, a separate one. Just because there exists a Darwinian rat-race of various nations that compete with each other over who can build the most advanced economies and instruments of destruction so that they can defend themselves from each other and expand their own power does not necessarily mean that for the sake of winning such competition we should throw some of our countrymen to the curb. That is a very different question.
That said, you would be right if you perceived that my distaste for religiousness is in part driven by unpragmatic motivations. I just find, say, Christianity to be false on a literal level the same way that I find Scientology to be false on a literal level, so it offends my intellectual conscience. I am not a physicalist reductionist. I do not think that consciousness can necessarily be explained in terms of matter. I find much to be repelled by in simplistic materialism and in dogmatic scientism. But the truth claims of all organized religions have little appeal to me, although I can see that some individuals are capable of compartmentalizing their religiousness and their truth-seeking and thus doing brilliant scientific work despite also believing in the literal truth of some religion.
I’m interested to know: how many Mormons have you spent time with? I ask because I know many - half of my family is LDS, as are several of my very close friends - and I think that they’re a brilliant illustration of the dichotomy falling apart. The juxtaposition of the profound irrationality - at least, from an epistemic/historical/materialist perspective - of many of their beliefs with their evident success within the modern technological/financial rat race could not be more pronounced. The remarkable success and spread of the LDS faith is especially surprising when you imagine what sort of people, in terms of neurotype and personality, must have been attracted to Joseph Smith’s preaching (and in many cases obvious confabulation) in the first place. From extremely inauspicious beginnings, this religious community of hardscrabble pioneers and gullible converts grew into one of the most successful religious/ethnic groups in the world. I understand that they are only one example of many, and that there are plenty of counterexamples, but I do want to point them out as an example of a modern people who clearly illustrate that there is no necessary inverse correlation between falsity of religious beliefs on one hand, and ability to thrive in the modern world on the other.
The exact kind of intelligence and uncompromising desire to understand everything that discovered evolution, physics, and modern civilization is the thing that undermined religion. Believing in grand religious moral claims requires you to care less about the above. It'll also make it harder to understand, respond to, shape, or fight future technological and social developments that'll clash with our current rough understanding of morality - whether that be transhumanism, AI, gene editing, or just the ambitions of technological civilization. Believing something like 'it is God's Truth that Man And Woman must Marry' is both confused and actively harmful if AI takes over, or even rejecting embryo selection or gene editing because it's not God's Plan when that happens. It's like believing in the traditional divination for the time to plant your crops ... after you've discovered irrigation.
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I have not personally known any Mormons. I acknowledge their ability to thrive in the modern world but I think that they are an outlier that does not invalidate the existence of the correlation that I have written about.
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There is precedent for a brilliant ethnicity collapsing into irrelevance - the ancient Greeks. One can see hints of their eventual greatness in the Minoan civilization, but after the collapse of that civilization at around 1400 BCE the Greeks returned to obscurity until about 600 BCE, at which point they steadily began to punch above their weight and contribute a disproportionate amount of the world's intellectual and artistic triumphs. Like modern Jews, the ancient Greeks too had a widespread diaspora, with far-flung colonies and a cultural impact hugely out of proportion to the population size of the actual ethnic group. They left their Hellenic stamp on much of the Near East and, even after having been conquered by the Romans, still were punching above their weight in literature and science. But then, at some point around 300 AD or so, their disproportionate influence steadily began to decrease. They returned to being just an ethnic group among others, not particularly distinguished in any way. Byzantium, as far as I know, was not rich in important intellectual or artistic innovations. There is little sign these days of what the Greeks, for a few memorable centuries, once were.
1400 BCE is about when actual Greek starts being used as the administrative language, instead of the Minoan language. The actual collapse is 300 years later. Though, the new hybrid culture is a rougher, more militaristic one, exemplified in the Iliad.
The Hagia Sophia puts every pagan temple before it to shame. The Latin west wouldn't make cathedrals or art nearly as beautiful until around the time of Constantinople's fall.
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This ignores the fact that there is little genetic or ethnic continuity between the 'Greeks' of 1600 BC (Minoans), the 'Greeks' of 300 BC ('Achaeans') and the modern 'Greeks'.
Minoans were pre-Indo-Europeans, who survived the invasions of the 3rd millennium BC, of mostly Neolithic Farmer/Anatolian extract.
The Achaeans were descendants of the Myceneans, who were themselves heavily diluted genetically, but still largely culturally, Indo-European. They were relatively genetically similar to the pre-IE population (i.e. Minoan-like) of Greece, with a minority admixture of Indo-European.
The modern Greeks (with the caveat that there is high variance between e.g. remote island populations and areas like Macedonia/Salonika) are descendants of those Achaean Greeks PLUS huge population exchanges in the Roman period (from Syria, from Africa, from Germania) AND large Slavic admixture in the Byzantine-Ottoman period.
In the classical period, similarly to India, Indo-European admixture decreased as you went south down the peninsula. If we think of Classical Greek ethnicity as essentially Indo-European culture sitting on top of a 1/3 Proto-Greek/IE, 2/3 Minoan-like genetic base, ironically modern Greeks are closest to the northern Mycenaeans- this is due to thousands of years of Slavic admixture (especially during the Middle Ages) increasing the IE/EHG/Steppe Herder genetics.
Picture looks something like:
Age 1, Minoan and Minoan-like 'Greeks': culturally Non-Indo-European, genetically mostly Neolithic farmer, non-Indo-European
Age 2, Mycenae->Classical Greece: culturally Indo-European, genetically 25% IE, 75% 'Minoan'
Modern Greeks: culturally Christian Orthodox/Southern European, genetically similar 33% IE/66% Non-IE
I don't think there is a ton of meaningful sense in which this is one ethnicity. The Greece of Aristotle has been wholly subsumed as a small part of the mixture of Slavs and Levantines and Anatolians, and the culture is gone. It was only really revived as a LARP by Philhellenes of the early 19th Century.
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I suppose you're referring to that these-communities-deserve-to-die article?
I am.
I see. Unfortunately I think that Derbyshire's criticism of that piece is entirely valid.
Seems like a weak criticism. “Oh, he didn’t criticize non-whites enough”, yeah maybe, but black people don’t vote for conservatives and aren’t on the right, and so aren’t relevant when discussing who Republican voters choose as their presidential candidate. Besides, as even Derbyshire acknowledges, it’s likely Kevin isn’t particularly well disposed to dysfunctional underclass people regardless of race, so it’s a strange line of attack.
The one salient criticism is that most Trump voters aren’t Appalachian drug addicts, and this is true, with some minor exceptions in the suburbs Trump’s voters do look much like George W Bush’s or Mitt Romney’s. But Williamson was describing a phenomenon of euphoric Trump support in the white American underclass (who do vote, at least in some numbers), not every Trump voter.
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Your comment about "how you struggle to think of a more prominent personality among online, English-speaking dissident rightists" than BAP actually got me thinking about how I don't think I've ever seen any of the local far-righters reference BAP, in any way, or even acknowledge his existence.
There's a plenty of American nationalist/anti-immigration figures who have influenced the Finnish far-right, which is only natural, since American everything influences everything; for instance, Jussi Halla-aho, the most influential anti-immigration political figure here, used to recommend several writings by Fred Reed and Steve Sailer, and the more hardline racist/fascist types have even referred to George Lincoln Rockwell, of all people, as an inspiration. Before Covid the ethnonationalists held a couple of conferences with, for instance, Jared Taylor and Kevin McDonald as speakers. And so on. However, insofar as I've seen, BAP might as well not exist.
It might be something of a stylistic issue, since BAP's bombastic, meandering style is basically in complete conflict with general Finnish understated, just-the-facts style rhetoric. (It says something that last week a presidential candidate got pilloried when he said, in his campaign announcement, that he's running for president because he thinks he's better than the other candidates.) I find it basically unreadable, myself, and have never really understood what other see in him.
I always saw him owing his existence to a white right wing masculinity crisis in the US. Similar to a political Dan Bilzerian or other types of Instagram celebs. Where the typical figures of the right wing sphere are more dweebs and nerds than manly leaders. But they all recognize that being swole would be a much better look. So they adopted him as a sort of proof of concept.
But outside of that the guy seems to exist only in blogs, on twitter and allegedly in the heads of aspiring young Republicans. Similar to a Curtis Yarvin if he took steroids and tried to find meaning in flexing. But on that end I've never read a word the man has said.
Yeah, to me a lot of these right-wing influencers' masculinity comes off as hilarious overcompensation. It's like seeing someone who learned everything he knows about masculinity by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies but does not have enough of a sense of a humor to understand how most of those movies were in part making fun of themselves. It's people who think that they have to do something to become men rather than just being men by virtue of having been born men, hence the interest that sphere has in the idea of rituals that supposedly turn boys into men and in the idea that "women can just be, but men have to do". Which there is a grain of truth in, perhaps, but what is sometimes missed is that, while rituals and gym muscles can surely help, what grants a man confidence probably more than anything else is a combination of accomplishing things in the real world and also expanding his awareness, including about the nature of his own insecurities. And you can replace "man" with "woman" in the previous sentence and I doubt that it would become any less true. Ironically, there might be some parallels to transgenderism in the concern with having to become a man rather than just being a man.
If you're actually interested in greco-roman philosophy, the emphasis on weight-lifting and bodybuilding is real and serious. Plato, for instance, is actually a wrestling nickname that he got for being so broad and buff rather than his original name. I'm not so sure that you can qualify this as overcompensation, because if someone is legitimately attempting to follow the beliefs and practices of the classical philosophers one of the requirements is actually getting into incredibly good shape and wrestling people (getting a cool wrestling nickname like "The Rock" or "Plato" is optional though as far as I can tell).
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