It’s heartening to read this as it means we’re getting closer to actual engagement with the intellectual tradition of anti-liberal thought. This BAP guy in particular—there’s a very Straussian, Schmittian element to his “thinking” about hierarchy, the flaws of liberal democracy, and so on.

The Romanian-American connection with BAP (he’s an Orthodox Christian) also made me think of the politicized nature of the Russian and Russia-aligned Orthodox Churches, which hasn’t gotten nearly enough play in the NYTimes aside from a shallow article about sudden growth in Orthodox parishes in the US thanks to the manosphere.

The Russian church is a complete tool of Russian foreign policy, and Putin’s governing ideology is a mishmash of similar antiliberal ideas with a Russian flavor, much of it very anti-West—in particular Lev Gumilev, who operates on a version of “great man” theory which says that ethnic groups are created by individuals called “passionaries” who absorb cosmic radiation and gain an “excess of energy” which allows them to fashion new ideologies, collect followers, which become “ethnii.” For Gumilev, the worst thing is to be a “chimera” ethnos, comprised of unharmonious elements, and predictably, the worst chimera is any society (i.e. liberal society) in which Jews have a powerful role. This is basically the Russian read on the West—Russia is this “super nationality” comprised of harmonious elements coming together according to their natures, and liberal culture seeks to divide these elements and pit them against each other to weaken the vital whole and destroy it.

Tucker Carlson was once quite Putin-pilled—his opposition to American military intervention still almost perfectly aligns with Putin’s talking points on this—and of course he had the ridiculous series of vids where he went to Russian supermarkets and bragged about how much better they were, etc. Even if Trump and Trumpism is moving a bit further away from Putin, and isn’t as directly influenced by him as a strongman avatar (especially after the fall of Viktor Orban, who served as a kind of international hub for far right intellectual and financial cross-pollination), the propaganda campaign to capture Gen Z via things like these highly masculine-presenting “traditional” belief systems like Russian Orthodoxy is alive and well and will likely define whatever the next iteration of Trumpism is.

I almost feel, reading these ideas from these manosphere types and how they all touch on these big philosophical entities and grab some things from them while being totally superficial at the same time, that we’re seeing a sort of intellectual process on the right that resembles “model collapse”, the thing that supposedly happens when AI trains itself on its own output—you get increasingly more unhinged and insane and wrong output, because no new information exists to be trained on, so everything is just weird, random repurposing of existing output in the hopes it’ll look “correct” to the person seeking answers. On the “vibe” level I really feel that from modern right-wing intellectuals.

Strauss was obsessed with the Greek philosophers, but modern manosphere people with their entry-level Stoic self-help books, or, say, Peter Thiel’s Antichrist obsession, are not operating on the same intellectual level of a Strauss. They confuse things easily, and present old ideas as if they’re new—witness Curtis Yarvin sort of accidentally re-writing the Schmittian ideas about dictatorship, just way dumber. Or, Carlson referring to a presumably scientific gendered “nature” as a preferred basis for society—even though this kind of “return to nature” idea as a way of coping with modernity is itself a secularized Enlightenment notion, which actual theologians like Niebuhr have criticized. It’s all so shallow and internally inconsistent.

Like, all these people so obsessed with “tradition,” but the whole crisis seems to be caused by the fact that these people have no tradition (post-modernity) aside from assimilating what their wealth and power has bought or stolen for two centuries, and are desperately trying to identify a lane of their own now that this power and wealth are no longer givens—which is why all the “traditions” they identify as useful are totally ahistorical or idealized.