The Modern Far Right Canon

Sequels aren't exactly famous for their high quality. For every Before Sunset or Mad Max: Fury Road there are dozens of Fast and the Furious 10s, and 11s and 12s. So I was a little wary of writing a followup to my earlier article "The Far Right Canon." People seemed to have enjoyed it. Why mess with a good thing? But I received a large amount of thoughtful feedback expressing disappointment the article largely refrained from engaging with modern figures. This seemed an especially strange choice given the waxing popularity of many far right intellectuals, who nevertheless largely remain unknown to liberal audiences. My usual response was to point out that the article was already a hefty 6000+ words, meaning most people probably required a coffee break to get through the thing. But the general point stuck and I decided a followup was warranted. 

The general theorizations and observations made about classical far right thinkers largely still apply to their bastard offspring. Like the original it isn't intended to be fully comprehensive. For instance I will say very little about contemporary Silicon Valley "rationalists" like Eliezer Yudkowsky or "Nietzschean Liberals" like Richard Hanania. These figures hammer home many of the same racial fixations and snobbery but in a more Enlightenment-influenced idiom, and they are often contemptuous of MAGA-style populism for its tribalism and stupidity. The hope is that what is presented will give readers a sufficient taste of what is out there, and remind everyone why it is putrid. 

The modern far right 

The classical thinkers of the far right wrote in a very different time than contemporaries. From De Maistre through Heidegger and Evola there was a well established line of reactionary right agitation that wielded considerable cultural currency. Moreover the enduring presence of aristocratic authoritarianism, volkish and racial nationalism, and entrenched patriarchy through the 19^th and early 20^th centuries typically gave the classical far right a more nostalgic, even small-c conservative quality. One could claim to speak for the establishment and hierarchical counter-revolutionary restoration even when, a la De Maistre, casually musing that millions would have to die to accomplish it. It was still possible then to see in the not so distant past a hierarchical social order that could be restored. Intimations that this might no longer be possible—that democracy, emancipation, and abolitionism were the future—began to creep into the pessimism of Carlyle and the anxieties of Calhoun. But it was probably in Nietzsche's writings that far right thinking first displayed its now-patented sense of counter-cultural agonism. For Nietzsche, egalitarian, democratic and liberal ideas had become so hegemonic that nostalgia was a waste of time. Nor was there much of anything worth "conserving" in the depraved era of the Paris Commune and women's suffrage movements.  As he put it in The Gay Science:  

We 'conserve' nothing, neither do we want to return to any past periods, we are not by any means 'liberal'; we do not work for 'progress'; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place singe of the future: their songs about 'equal rights,' 'a free society,' 'no more masters and no more servants' has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth… we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventure, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery—for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.

By the mid-20^th century this sense of cultural pessimism coupled with the felt need for radical change had become the staple characteristic of the far right. Fascism had been utterly defeated and disgraced, flushing the reputation of the far right deep into the toilet for generations. Conservative authoritarian states like Franco's Spain or Salazar's Portugal increasingly looked like freakish holdovers from a bygone era. The Soviet Union was at the apex of its prestige and Communist parties could attract millions in Western states like Italy. The great colonial empires were in the midst of breaking up, thus freeing what Spengler had called the "colored world" from white dominance. In the United States the Civil Rights and women's liberation movements were gaining steam. Everywhere the far right looked it saw decadence, decline, failure and Robin Di Angelos. Many agreed with Evola in Ride the Tiger when he proclaimed that "every organic unity has been dissolved or is dissolving: caste, stock, nation, homeland and even family." 

Punk rock is calling the cops 

As a consequence of this history, alongside felt or real state suppression and cultural marginalization, the contemporary far right is much more willing to consciously style itself as an insurgent movement against power. This is true even when a core claim of the far right is that the rich and powerful just aren't quite rich and powerful enough (at least the non-liberal ones). In Right Wing Revolution Charlie Kirk describes himself as a "young punk." Which given the  far right's standards is an amusingly un-self aware designation from a thirtysomething bro in favor who spent his life taking oligarch money to argue for tax cuts for billionaires and calling the police on minorities. As Matt Rose notes in A World After Liberalism the far right sees itself as

young, countercultural, and dismissive of conventional opinion, these conservatives have fomented debates that will seem esoteric to outsiders. They range from a recovery of ancient paganism to defense of the medieval papacy. They promote theories of elite dominance and rules for grassroots radicals… If this postliberal landscape sounds bizarre, you are not alone. Its arguments are rarely discussed in mainstream publications, and certainly not in the legacy media. They are found in self-published books, pseudonymous podcasts, and short-lived websites, all publicized through anonymous social media accounts.

Very frequently this counter-cultural disposition combines with a relentlessly indulgent capacity for self-pity and a sense of persecuted victimization. No one feels sorry for themselves quite like the contemporary far right. Beneath all the noble and heroic camp is a constant sense of whining and moaning.  This is coupled with the far right's relentless self-conceit as harbingers of deeper, more spiritual, more vital and heroic wisdom and the conviction becomes that they've been dispossessed of an aristocratic status. The combination of self-pitying melodrama and bloviated egoism is a characteristic tone, and extremely tempting for a typically younger white male base. Professor Gad Saad—brown nose to Elon Musk, vigorous Islamophobe, and proponent of the "Great Replacement" thesis— distills the rhetoric in less than rarefied form in his The Parasitic Mind: 

Most people recognize the gargantuan courage that is required to speak my mind in the manner that I do (especially so as an academic and public figure). There isn't a sacred belief that I'm unwilling to critique, and yet whenever I implore people to get engaged, I am at times flippantly told: 'But professor, you are protected by tenure.' Tenure is not an all-encompassing magical shield that repels all the threats and harmful consequences that can come from being an outspoken defender of reason.

Amongst the most interesting thinkers on the modern far right, this sense of counter-cultural victimization has led them to look into the critical theories of the left. This must be understood properly. It is neither counter-intuitive, nor some indication of "horseshoe theory" (which remains one of the worst ways to understand the political spectrum in my opinion). There are some on the far right who gravitated there from the far left, with the common thread being an enduring disdain for liberalism and political democracy. Nick Land comes immediately to mind. But more often the lessons they want to learn are formal and not substantial. As Corey Robin notes in The Reactionary Mind the right can be a learned student of the left. Many on the far right have internalized critical theoretical points about the need to resist liberal hegemony through cultural agitation, since as Andrew Breitbart quipped they hold politics to be downstream of culture. To fight this battle effectively, the more original right wing thinkers seek to learn combative techniques from Gramsci, Foucault etc. 

But their ambitions for what is to replace liberalism and leftism are radically right wing. The far right is utterly contemptuous of the left's aspiration for a society more committed to liberty, equality, and solidarity for all than what we have now. And it certainly is not interested in "conserving" liberalism. More often than not those on the illiberal right see liberals as unwitting dupes engaged in a "dance" with Marxists who inevitably drag them further left over time. Curtis Yarvin put the point metaphorically when he insisted Cthulhu swims slowly, but he always swims left.

With these summative points out of the way I will begin my discussion of the contemporary far right's core thinkers. As mentioned this list is by no means exhaustive; especially in 2025 when new influencers and voices rise and fall faster than Trump's tariffs. But with one exception all the thinkers listed are very much still alive and devoting their thought to the conscious promotion of uncritical thoughtlessness on the part of the masses. 

Alain de Benoist 

When it comes to specifying the values particular to paganism, people have generally listed features such as these: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; an ethics founded on honor ("shame" rather than "sin"); an heroic attitude toward life's challenges; the exaltation and sacralization of the world, beauty, the body, strength, health; the rejection of any "worlds beyond"; the inseparability of morality and aesthetics; and so on. From this perspective, the highest value is undoubtedly not a form of "justice" whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but everything that can allow a man to surpass himself. To paganism, it is pure absurdity to consider the results of the workings of life's basic framework as unjust.

Alain de Benoist, "On Being A Pagan"

Alain de Benoist was born in 1943 in Saint-Symphorien, France. Like many on the far right he sometimes claims to have transcended the binaries of the political spectrum. This self-aggrandizing kind of rhetoric is so common on the far right it has even spawned a series of memes. But de Benoist has more claim to the label than many. An erudite man, he has extensively studied the thinking of the far left and far right and is an exemplar of reworking the language of the former to service the latter. As Jean-Yves Camus notes in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right De Benoist's "core values are those of the French New Right, which he embodies." 

A good example is his famous defense of pluralism and identity in opposition to cosmopolitanism and universalism. Many on the left, often inspired by French post-structuralism, have wrongly assumed that pluralism and an emphasis on identity are inherently emancipatory when juxtaposed against imperialist forms of universalism. While this can be true of crude abstract universalisms, De Benoist demonstrates how the language of identity and difference are in many ways deployed far more comfortably on the right. After all there is no clearer sense of treating people differently than treating them unequally. He also showcases an adeptness at repurposing progressive philosophers for right wing purposes, contributing to the emergence of things like right wing Gramscianism. 

For De Benoist, the egalitarianism of Christianity and subsequently liberalism and socialism at the root of their levelling tendency to want every society to be the same. This includes encouraging multicultural rights for minorities and immigration, which would ultimately lead to the dissolution of what makes communities distinctive. This will of course mean privileging members of one's own group over others, but as De Benoist insists in "On Being a Pagan" if "all men are brothers…then no one can truly be a brother." In 2000's Manifesto for a European Renaissance he demanded the restoration of "clear and strong" identities while stressing this would require a revolution in values away from modernist universalism towards a kind of post-modern polytheism. 

Patrick Buchanan 

Where equality is enthroned, freedom is extinguished. The rise of egalitarian society means the death of the free society. 'Liberty by its very nature…is inegalitarian,' writes Jude Dougherty, dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at Catholic University. 'Men differ in strength, intelligence, ambition, courage, perseverance and all else that makes for success. There is no method to make men both free and equal.' When we consider the revolutions dedicated to equality—the French Revolution of Marat and Robespierre, the Russian Revolution of Lenin and Trotsky, the Chinese Revolution of Mao, the Cuban Revolution of Castro and Che Guevara—are the Durants not right? Is Dougherty not right? 

Pat Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower 

In Far Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism historian John S. Huntington notes that American "ultraconservatives abhorred the centrist pragmatism which congealed around the remnants of New Deal liberalism, and their rhetoric about communists in government amplified, and at times served as a surrogate for, structural critiques of liberal governance. Though they demonized the liberal state as a destructive force, far right activists and politicians came to view state power, when wielded by conservatives, as a skeleton key for unlocking right-wing political victories." No one embodied this strategy better than Republican operator and Presidential candidate turned intellectual Pat Buchanan.

Buchanan is widely credited with announcing a fierce new phase of the "culture war" in his 1992 speech at the RNC convention. At the time he was considered something of an anomaly, but time has been kind to his reputation. Buchanan railed against the creeping egalitarianism he corrosively thought was destroying America from within. This included the feminist movement, which is censored harshly in Suicide of a Superpower. Buchanan dismisses the "contention that men and women are equal as a piece of "feminist ideology not human nature. Men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive. That is why men commit crimes and are imprisoned at a rate of ten to one over women. That is why men fight wars, lead armies and build empires. Men's intelligence levels range higher and lower than those of women. Men reach heights of achievement in mathematics, science and philosophy few women obtain…in the Old and New testament are all people equal?"

While many of his targets were right wing stock in trade, Buchanan was innovative in targeting migrants for special ire. In Death of the West he fretted anxiously about "demographic change" and railed about the "invasion" of "America's once sleepy thousand-mile Mexican border" which was "now the scene of daily confrontations." While initially dog whistley in describing these anxieties in racial terms, by 2012's Suicide of a Superpower he anxiously declares that "no matter how many immigrants come or from where they come, white America is an endangered species." These demographic and eugenic concerns overlap with Buchanan's anti-feminism. In The Death of the West Buchanan cautious that while "most American women do not harbor so bitter and hostile a view of marriage and family" as the average feminist millions remain "influenced by feminist ideology and its equation of marriage with prostitution and slavery, and that ideology has persuaded many to put off marriage and not to have children. If the preservation of peoples of European ancestry, and of the Western civilization they have created were up to the feminists, Western Man would have no future." In this respect Buchanan was foundational in laying the seeds for Trumpist white identity politics. 

Buchanan shared Breitbart's cynical understanding of politics as downstream of culture, and worked hard to help push the far right back into the Overton window. In Churchill's War Buchanan made the case that getting involved in the Second World War was an error, and the best option would have been to have allowed Hitler to have conquered the east and eventually the Soviet Union. The book is cagey in acknowledging Hitler's crimes while subtly commending aspects of his statesmanship and deflecting some blame for the atrocities of the Second World War onto the Western allies. It also doubles as a rather cute eulogy for the good old days of Western imperialism, with Buchanan lamenting that the Second World War brought about the collapse of longstanding European empires. 

Alexander Dugin 

Americanism (liberalism, 'planetary idiocy') and Communism (Soviet Bolshevism) are the opponents of fundamental ontological transition to another beginning, both being the extreme expressions of Western European metaphysics…Therefore, only the return of the End's phenomena to their end i.e., the final destruction of Liberalism and Communism, will be the manifestation of mankind authentically taking the leap into another Beginning and the dawn of Being's return.

Alexander Dugin, Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning 

Alexander Dugin is Russian fascist who has gained a considerable following on the American right. His fans include Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. This is in spite of Dugin's longstanding apocalyptic anti-Americanism, which has softened very slightly with the election of Trump. 

Like all fascists Dugin projects an enormous amount of significance onto what scholar Roger Griffin calls the "ultranation." The ultranation is identified with the source of meaning and transcendence—vindicating Benedict Anderson's quip that nationalists have a strange habit of demanding intensely big feelings towards small ideas. The ultranation is typically regarded by fascists as caught in a cycle of decadent decline and fall brought about by liberals, socialists, feminists, and woke Superman movies. This requires a form of palingenetic rejuvenation by a populist fascist movement which nonetheless remains authoritarian. For Dugin this "ultranation" is the Eurasian super-empire he imagines will triumph over the Atlanticist forces of the liberal west. As Gerald Toal observes in Near Abroad fascist mystics like Dugin aim to "create a red-brown coalition that would promote a 'new order' of space, identity and power in Russia. Dugin found an effective geopolitical imaginary for this project in the writings of early-twentieth-century Russian émigré scholars: Eurasianism. A mega-geographic signifier that could be bent to the purposes at hand, Eurasianism was, above all,  a vehicle for the construction of imperial Russian nationalist visions of Russia."  There is a populist quality to this which will require the volkish Russian people or "narod" to enthusiastically embrace its "destiny.". But as fanboy Michael Millerman notes in Putin's Brain: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin  for Dugin the "single ones" get to choose what this destiny will be. Dugin's work is pervaded by sneering contempt for the mediocrity of the "swarming masses" whose job is to do as they are told.  

While Dugin's early work became famous for resurrecting geopolitics in the service of ultranational imperialism, his writings have always drawn on an eclectic array of sources. From The Fourth Political Theory onwards Dugin has attempted to create an alternative ideology to liberalism, communism, and fascism—even while admitting the way from the third to the fourth political theory is a lot shorter than from the first or second. This fascist rebrand has meant drawing heavily on the older canon of far right thinkers, most notably Heidegger, about whom Dugin has written voluminously. In Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning Dugin argues Heidegger was right to diagnose the West as in a process of terminal decline towards liberal "planetary idiocy." But he was wrong to suppose Germany was destined to play the role of defeating this global nihilism. Instead (you guessed it) Russia is to play the role. His conspiratorial style and syncretism have become very popular on the global far right, though like many fascist intellectuals Dugin is megalomaniacal and prone to overstating his influence on Putin's policies. His actual importance to the regime has been the subject of considerable debate and speculation.

Samuel Francis 

Whites exhibit 'an abiding sense of reciprocity, a conviction that others have rights that must be respected,' but the modern expression of this trait in such institutions as democracy, free speech, and the rule of law are grotesquely distorted or exaggerated versions of the original and natural impulses. The 'sense of reciprocity' as well as the rule of law are no doubt reflections of the Aryan concept of Cosmic Order, a view of the universe that holds that both nature and man behave according to universal, perpetual laws or regular patterns and in which rights and duties are in balance. But the concept of Cosmic Order did not imply an egalitarian or homogeneous social order in which everyone is equal and there are no distinctions between groups, classes, sexes, races, and nations. Indeed, early Aryan society was hierarchical, organic, and aristocratic; the natural form of Aryan government was an aristocratic republic in which distinct classes and social groups participated and expressed their views and interests freely, and a high level of political participation was necessary for such dynamic and restless populations of independent, armed free men as the early Aryans.

Sam Francis, Essential Writings on Race 

Samuel Francis can be understood as Patrick Buchanan on steroids, with all the resigned groaning that entails. He began his career as an up and coming philosopher on the right flank of the Reaganite coalition, publishing respected collections like Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. As the title suggests, Francis agreed with Russell Kirk that the right were by and large the losers of history. Never one to draw the right lessons from anything, the early Francis saw this partially as a consequence of American conservatives being insufficiently radical. In the titular essay he lamented how Reaganism, despite its achievements, had been coopted by neoconservatism and libertarianism. This meant that its goals were "not conceptually distinct from those of the progressivism and liberalism athwart which the American Right at once time promised to stand…" At least not anymore. 

This sense that liberalism was a very tough nut to crack consumed Francis and inspired him to study Marxists like Antonio Gramsci and reconstructed leftists such as James Burnham. In his posthumously published opus Leviathan and Its Enemies Francis argues that a revolution had taken place across the world, replacing an older bourgeois order with a managerial one. Purportedly committed to liberty, equality and reason, in fact the expert managers were really committed to nothing but themselves. They used liberal and left ideology as a hegemonic tool to advance themselves by delegitimating the old ruling class and replacing it with themselves. There is a distinctly amoralist quality to Francis, for whom moral issues are always secondary (if they are important at all) to the question of who gets to wield power to advance their interests. 

In essays like "Message from MARS" and the lumbering Leviathan and Its Enemies Francis hypothesizes that a new coalition of "middle American radicals" may form to overthrow the managerial coalition. As John Ganz put it in When the Clock Broke Francis provided a "grand—grandiose even—political theory and strategy to make the Reagan Revolution permanent." The agent of his will would not be the working class or the less well off, as in Marxist theory, but neither will it be the ruling elite. By the time he published Essential Writings on Race with a glowing introduction by white nationalist Jared Taylor, Francis made it clear that he meant white people. He ended his career writing extensively about the glories of the "Aryan race" and how it was dispossessed by inferior non-whites. Unlike many contemporary "race-realists" who'll cagily suggest they aren't arguing for white supremacy, just descriptors of human "biodiversity" Francis was also proudly willing to go to town for the Aryan nation.   Francis theorized introducing a new form of segregation, where non-whites would possess minimal rights and virtually no political agency. A "a white reconquest of the United States would mean the supremacy of whites in a cultural sense, or in the sense of what is nowadays called ''Eurocentrism.'" 

Curtis Yarvin 

You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was… Hitler. Have you read Hitler? I have. (The Table Talk is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler's talents—I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job.

Curtis Yarvin, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations 

Curtis Yarvin began his political career in a shroud of anonymity. Writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, he ran the blog Unqualified Reservations before deciding to bless the world with his direct thoughts via the Substack Gray Mirror. Despite the fact that some on the contemporary far right see him as a has-been, his reputation has only grown since the 2000s. Yarvin is something of the court philosopher to Peter Thiel, who in "The Education of a Libertarian" came to the conclusion that a libertarian could probably not support democracy and the empowerment of too many ordinary people. After all it was his world and we were lucky to be living in it. Yarvin moves in many of the same Thielverse spaces as Vice President J.D Vance amongst others. 

Yarvin draws from several theoretical springs. This includes the older reactionary tradition; in Moldbug on Carlyle Yarvin praises the 19^th century anti-democrat and characterizes himself as Carlyle's disciple. This extends to calling for something like a corporate monarchy or dictatorship. But he was also profoundly influenced by right-wing liberals and anarcho-libertarians like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. This might seem odd for a thinker who has long called for the restoration of authoritarian monarchical rule. But for Yarvin the expansion of democracy has contributed to the expansion of the state to service the needs of the masses, while at the same time imposing limitations on the freedom of John Galt types like Steve Jobs and later Elon Musk. The solution to this is to end democracy and establish a state that is "small" in terms of regulating entrepreneurs' activity but very strong and heavy handed in imposing law and order. In "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" Yarvin muses that there is "no reason at all that a libertarian, such as myself, cannot favor martial law. I am free when my rights are defined and secured against all comers, regardless of official pretensions. Freedom implies law; law implies order; order implies peace; peace implies victory." In other words he is yet another figure whose profoundest insight is that America's biggest problem is the wealthy and powerful aren't yet quite wealthy, powerful and revered enough.

Perhaps Yarvin's most famous contribution is his now-widespread "Cathedral" metaphor. Like De Benoist and Francis, he is something of a right-wing Gramscian—but with a knack for a catchy neologism. As fanboy Auron MacIntyre put it in The Total State, the reason liberal egalitarianism remains hegemonic is "a decentralized network of organizations and individuals responsible for manufacturing a cultural consensus that [Yarvin] calls the Cathedral. To be clear, the Cathedral is not some conspiracy of Illuminati members. Yarvin does not believe such a conspiracy exists. What he means are those players responsible for crafting and popularizing ideas, mainly the news and entertainment media, the public education system, the permanent bureaucracy inside the federal government, and, most importantly, the universities." It is a testament to the impressive egos of transparently unimpressive right wing intellectuals that they credit themselves with inventing the idea of hegemony centuries after leftist critical theorists developed it in far more realistic and interesting ways. But it has gained serious cultural clout on the far right, with Yarvin calling for activists to take the red pill and wake up to how billionaires like Thiel are the true oppressed class. 

Bronze Age Pervert/Costin Alamariu

I never thought the problem of modernity or the problem of man in general is primarily economic or will ever have an economic solution. But I will say in brief: that America or the West is "hypercapitalist" is one of the most absurd claims floating around now. I don't want to enter these debates very much because it would make me take, however temporarily, the side of "classical liberals." I don't believe in liberalism of whatever kind because it is, as Nietzsche says, itself a path to the herd-animalization of man. I believe in Fascism or "something worse" and I can say so unambiguously because, unlike others, I have given up long ago all hope of being part of the respectable world or winning a respectable audience. I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics. I am indifferent to economics as long as economic activity is subordinate to the interest of this caste and their project.

Costin Alamariu, "Communittar Fools"

The pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert is one of the younger and more recent influencers to appear on the far right, bursting onto the scene with 2018's Bronze Age Mindset. Since then he's become something of a "punk" icon to young MAGA bros convinced the biggest social problem our plutocratic class just isn't quite rapaciously selfish enough yet. There was considerable speculation about BAP's real identity until he was revealed to be Costin Alamariu; an ivy league grad with a longstanding fascination for hierarchy and misogynistic trolling. Alamariu has since published his doctoral dissertation Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy under his own name. It presented an eccentric Straussian reading of Plato who wanted to breed a class of strong aristocrats to dominate the week, insisting that Plato couldn't have been serious in stressing the priority of justice since the arguments for it are so weak on Alamariu's reading. 

BAP's writings are very clearly aimed at the groyper crowd, with their foamy mixture of anti-feminism and proudly toxic masculinity. In Bronze Age Mindset women are subjected to a litany of tedious put downs and their influence is blamed for the lack of heroism in modern society. But one shouldn't draw too much attention to his misogyny, since BAP is also very close to a misanthropist in dismissing most of humanity as "bugmen." Underpinning the layers of shock jock insults about vaginal "roasties" is a vitalistic Nietzschean philosophy that laments the lack of heroic violence and aristocratic assertion amongst today's soyboys. In this respect BAP echoes a familiar refrain of the now very online far right. In his popular essay "The Longhouse" for First Things, Lom3Z chastised the "denmothers" of the world for enacting a kind of cultural neutering. Our effeminate society

distrusts overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist.

Beyond the requisite whinging about victim culture, BAP does articulate a familiar and consistent political outlook. This can be hard to see under the layers of dissociation, Eminem-style put downs, and irony in his work. But in his essay "Communitar Fools" BAP clarifies that he is a fascist or something worse echoing Nietzsche's insistence in The Will to Power that he was not an individualist but a philosopher concerned with orders of rank. BAP isn't especially concerned with how these orders of rank are obtained. Nevertheless BAP is very much a post-modern kind of fascist who is very plugged into the very online right's interests. While militantly anti-liberal, like many on today's far right he has something of a soft spot for right-wing libertarianism. In his essay "The Populist Moment Never Happened" he applauded the election of Javier Millei, insisting that "libertarianism in Argentina would be de-facto white supremacy"—which of course is to be commended. For BAP Millei is the "latest in a series of last-ditch" efforts to halt the "logic of democracy." Like so many on the far right, BAP's "noble" thinking often sounds like so much Karenesque petit-bourgeois whining about taking from the productive and giving to the unworthy poor. The more things change…

Conclusion 

The contemporary radical right is enjoying a moment of ascendance, and it is important for liberals to understand why. We are long past the point where it is sufficient to simply describe what is happening as "weird" and hope the genie goes back in the bottle. Without a doubt the far right is a very weird place: replete with discussions of denmothers, roasties, getting Tolkien-Pilled, so very, very many demographic tables, swapping not reading Von Mises for not reading Nietzsche etc. Much of it is very, very funny and will become more so as far right fantasies inevitably run up against the most determined of their liberal enemies: reality itself. 

But the far right speaks to the need for a sense of heroism, transcendence and meaning which sclerotic neoliberalism has never been able to offer. Certainly not to the hundreds of millions of people who are told to accept bullshit jobs and have no voice in the workplace, culture, or society. The right's emotional response to these is to offer easy targets aimed downwards in lieu of actually fixing real problems. The Achilles heel of the far right has always been that, bombast aside, their ideals remain small and insular. They ultimately believe that justice can only ever be the purview of a few, if that. More often than not the world is one where the strong simply prey upon the weak. It is a deflating vision made all the more amusing in how desperately they try to balloon it to magnificent size. 

Liberals can respond if they have the will to. What is needed is to offer an ethically higher and more demanding project which can answer the widespread yearning for greater meaning and community, but orient these affects towards a more positive and rational form of justice. 

Featured image is "The School of Athens," Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino 1511. Lightly edited.