To judge by current trends in the white nationalist ‘manosphere’, toxic masculinity, as apotheosized by Ernst Jünger’s War as Inner Experience and Ernst von Salomon’s The Outlaws, is back in fashion. Its leading champion is Costin Vlad Alamariu, aka ‘Bronze Age Pervert’, a Romanian-American with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Yale. Among incels and ‘neo-reactionaries’ (Curtis Yarvin, a self-described ‘techno-fascist’ and leading champion of ‘dark enlightenment’ was one of Alamariu’s early champions) Alamariu sky-rocketed to notoriety, in 2018, with Bronze Age Mindset: a self-published, grammatically-challenged paean to the bloodlust and inhumanity of pre-Socratic Heldentum, as filtered through the lens of Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht, especially, the concluding passages on Züchtung and the entitlements of Herrenrassen. His 2022 sequel to Bronze Age Mindset was a Nietzsche-inspired treatise on Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.

Alamariu’s obsession with hygiene recalls National Socialism’s views on Erb- und Rassenpflege. His visceral misogyny is merely the flip-side of his glorification of hyper-masculinity. Alamariu’s denigration of feminism recalls Talk Radio agitator Rush Limbaugh’s tirades against ‘feminazis’. His unabashed misogyny distinctly anticipated the Trump administration’s pronatalist fantasies: $5000 ‘baby bonuses’ and required menstrual cycle classes for women. As a popular white supremacist mantra boasts, ‘It’s all about the birthrates!’ Tucker Carlson’s documentary film exploration of manliness-in-crisis, ‘The End of Men’ (2022), demonstrates that Alamariu’s discourse of cisgender ressentiment has “penetrated” the citadels of mainstream American conservatism. It is, therefore, not surprising to learn that Vice President JD Vance is one of Alamariu’s followers on ‘X’, formerly known as Twitter.