Strategic Culture and the Masculinist Right: The Popular Geopolitics of Man’s World

Strategic Culture and the Masculinist Right: The Popular Geopolitics of Man’s World

Josh Vandiver

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Keywords: geopolitics, strategic culture, masculinity, manosphere, right-wing bodybuilding

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Cadences, unmistakably, of a neoclassical Augustan restoration: “A new man is rising. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”[1] The annunciation appears in the lead article of the first issue of Man’s World, an eccentric right-wing “small magazine”—indeed, a men’s magazine—a hotbed of politics and culture on the masculinist Right.[2] Notably promoted by Ezra Pound in the aesthetic realm, small magazines in the twentieth century were also crucial vehicles for many a political avant-garde.[3] Rarely offering a viable business model, not a few during the Cold War relied on alternative revenue streams in the West, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[4] It is not clear where Man’s World receives its funding. Offering men “safe spaces to be men … without supervision or infiltration from the so-called fairer sex,” it emerged in 2021 within milieus adjacent to the American alt-right and European Identitarian youth movements.[5] While later issues became progressively tamer, initially Man’s World mixed a heady brew: a right-wing amalgam of Playboy, the neoclassical body beautiful cult of a Physical Culture, and the Victorian imperialist brio of the Boy’s Own Paper.[6]

Figure 1: Man’s World, no. 1 (2021), cover.

The founding editor—and perhaps only staff member—of Man’s World is the pseudonymous Raw Egg Nationalist (REN), a British national, social media influencer, and author of books on gastronomic resistance to left-wing globalist plots like the Great Reset.[7] A partisan of male physical culture and bodybuilding, he and other practitioners of “bro science” (an effort to reverse deleterious effects of industrial society upon the health and well-being of men) were celebrated in a 2022 documentary hosted by the American media megastar Tucker Carlson, whose focus on national-populist issues often veers rightward into topics like the Great Reset, the Great Replacement, and the End of Men.[8]

“One should dissociate the ideas of experiment and of significant achievement,” declares Pound.[9] Small magazines are experimental, whereas popular twentieth-century magazines like Playboy and Physical Culture were about achievement (that is, circulation and profit). Man’s World will likely never achieve as did those magazines. But both types of men’s magazines can explore politics and geopolitics, thereby creating a civic space among their readerships. In addition to commentary, Playboy interviewed figures across the political spectrum including George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party.[10] Thereby, Playboy reshapedboth masculinity and politics. On the experimental scale of a small magazine, Man’s World has the potential to do the same—and to shape how the contemporary right conceptualizes foreign affairs.

Man’s World is unusual among Anglophone right-wing publications for its breadth, heft, and regularity. Published quarterly online with select articles reprinted annually in a glossy hard-copy edition, issues frequently weigh in at hundreds of pages.[11] Twelve issues were published in this format before exclusively print editions with Passage Press began in 2024. Thousands of images, memes, and photographs, primarily of svelte male models and sculpted bodybuilders, nestle alongside dozens of fictional narratives, think pieces by “anons” (anonymous right-wing figures online), and extracts of European writers from revolutionary conservatives like the German author Ernst Jünger to fascists like the French writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle—with the Japanese nationalist Yukio Mishima also oft-featured.  Furthermore, the masculinist right analyzed here differs from many right-wing factions in its attempts at levity. The Augustan passage above suggestively conflates a political hour of arrival and decision with other forms of arising and climax. Such innuendo comes as no surprise: Man’s World magazine hearkens back to risqué twentieth-century men’s magazines fixated on “sex, booze, and fags.”[12] Yet, as with the middlebrow Playboy and Physical Culture, men’s magazines are also “read for the articles,” which can span high culture, domestic politics, and geopolitics. Ultimately, they proffer visions of virility.[13]

Figure 2: Man’s World, no. 2 (2021), 14

Man’s World evinces a distinctively middlebrow popular geopolitics.[14] Popular geopolitics mediates formal and practical geopolitics—as articulated by theorists and policymakers, respectively—with the lived experience of broader audiences.  The present analysis situates these masculinist geopolitical visions within the metapolitics of the Euro-Atlantic radical right.[15] It is indebted to, and seeks to advance, the research paradigm of strategic culture.[16] It also pursues the “man question” first posed by feminists, re-evaluating how matters once thought irrelevant or epiphenomenal to global politics and international affairs—sex and gender—may in fact be integral to core phenomena like geopolitics. Within international relations, feminists have led such questioning sometimes in the face of a studied obtuseness on the part of disciplinary colleagues.[17] The Augustan annunciation quoted above, for all its masculinism and sexual insinuations, heralds the renewal of Western expansion, empire, and virile manhood, all three and all at once. It was not supposed to be like this: Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, the global triumph of liberalism and the egalitarian Last Man, was at hand.[18] Whence do such ominous cadences come? How do they call out to men in Europe and the United States? What do they reveal about the shifting stratagems of the right?

In the following, I argue the masculinist right manifests a strategic culture that offers disaffected male readers a distinctive metanarrative. Celebrating a geopolitics of the colonial frontier and a cult of bodybuilding, this metanarrative heralds a new era of spatial expansion. In its idiosyncratic argot, the masculinist right promises victory in the face of “globohomo” or “the Longhouse”—a suffocating liberal (or neoliberal) order that is undermining not only nationality and ethnicity but also virility itself. Furthermore, while overtly invoking sex and gender throughout, Man’s World also clearly constructs race. The magazine addresses itself exclusively to men attracted by certain Eurocentric masculine ideals fused with geopolitics of the colonial frontier and in certain cases anti-Western, pro-Putin advocacy.[19] 

In the first section, I introduce two camps within the masculinist right, both impacting European and American male cultures, but with differing metapolitical and geopolitical visions. Man’s World is a signature product of one of these camps. In the second section, I reflect on how the research paradigm of strategic culture, first developed within defense think tanks in the Cold War and later applied to the global war on terror, can be deployed when studying rhizomatic movements like the masculinist right. In subsequent sections, I utilize one element of the strategic culture paradigm, metanarrative, to delineate how Man’s World generates a sense of belonging amongst its male readership, offers them a masculine habitus for structuring their lives, and articulates a friend-enemy distinction for conceptualizing contemporary conflicts like the war in Ukraine. I conclude by noting how right-wing masculinist networks seek to capitalize on contemporary discontents in the Euro-Atlantic home front and link calls for Augustan restoration at home with foreign adventurism.

Figure 3: Man’s World, no. 5 (2022), 29

From Metapolitics to Geopolitics in Two Masculinist Camps

The present analysis adapts from the discipline of strategic studies a specific research paradigm—strategic culture—for interrogating the masculinist right and its intentions with a magazine like Man’s World. Such a paradigm enhances understanding of the highly metapoliticalcharacter of the Euro-Atlantic radical right. Metapolitics is a domain in which the occupation of culture, as opposed to the occupation of territory (the domain of politics and geopolitics), is ventured.[20]  In conventional usage, strategic culture denotes the culture of strategists in state militaries and affiliated organizations like defense think tanks, as well as that of nonstate actors.[21] Right-wing metapolitics, on the other hand, denotes the strategy of culture adopted by the radical right since the fall of the Third Reich, a third way which eschews both parliamentary politics and violent extremism.[22] 

Of late, the right appears to be pivoting towards a gendered metapolitics. As delineated elsewhere, masculinist metapoliticians can be divided into two camps: Apolloniansand BAPians. Apollonian masculinists associate with men like Richard Spencer, the most prominent leader of the American alt-right (which now styles itself the Dissident Right), and the mythographic work of his longtime collaborator Mark Brahmin (a pseudonym) as developed on his website, the Apollonian Transmission.[23] BAPian masculinists, including REN and many Man’s World contributors, unite around the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert (BAP). He identifies as “a nude bodybuilder and a fascist” and wields influence through Twitter, his 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset, and ongoing Caribbean Rhythms podcast.[24] The BAPians are the focus of the present study.

As geopoliticians, both camps are Eurocentric, each espousing forms of expansionary Aryanism—variously Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, and Teutonic.[25] Both unabashedly celebrate European empires and settler colonies from Rhodesia and South Africa to Australia and the USA. Both dilate on the dangers of liberal globalism to manhood and virility. Domestically, both evince ambiguous stances toward nationalism and populism. Some praise men like US President Donald Trump, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Russian President Vladimir Putin; others criticize such leaders. Key differences include the so-called “JQ,” the Jewish question: Apollonians fixate on identifying and combatting a vast Jewish conspiracy in global politics and culture; BAPians, while relishing other conspiracy theories, do not. Man’s World avoids the topic. Another key difference, discussed below, emerged in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Apollonians like Spencer pivoted to a staunch pro-NATO position: “Ukrainians are not only fighting for their physical existence, they’re fighting to become a part of a United Europe … And they’re doing this against all odds and while sacrificing enormously. This is something that should inspire all of us and awaken camaraderie among European nations and peoples.”[26] BAPians, as seen in Man’s World, revel in pro-Putin advocacy.

Grandiose geopolitical visions orient both camps of the masculinist right. But both believe metapolitics an essential prerequisite to such geopolitics. If the masculinist right hopes to influence geopolitics, it intends to do so through metapolitics working at the level of male subcultures. Specifically, it aims to cultivate geopolitical ideas within cultural spaces frequented by men, especially the so-called manosphere of social media, blogs, and online magazines.[27] Such ambitions differentiate the movement from radicals on both the right and the left whose programs, however far-reaching, do not seek to influence the strategic exercise of geopolitical power. As in the Cold War, the contemporary Euro-Atlantic radical right pursues geopolitics throughs metapolitical stratagems, a means to influence and a method for making sense of the West as a strategic actor.[28]

Figure 4: Man’s World, no. 3 (2021), 137

Strategic Culture, Masculinity, and Metanarrative

In Europe and the United States, strategy historically took shape within hypermasculine spheres. Fathered by defense intellectuals, strategic culture itself emerges as a research paradigm in the 1970s at RAND, a defense think tank in Santa Monica, California. Founded in the 1940s, RAND initially pursued research on nuclear rivalry with the USSR in the emerging Cold War. RAND strategists developed signature approaches to nuclear conflict, many highly influential among American policymakers.[29] However, these defense intellectuals blithely ignored sex and gender—both as aspects of their foreign adversaries and as reflexive features of their own strategizing.

Defense intellectuals launched research into strategic culture in the 1970s as perceptions emerged that “Soviet man”—that is, Soviet foreign policymaking elites—conceptualized strategy differently than Western conceptions of “rational man” would suggest. The danger of mirror-imaging the enemy, viewing him as thinking and acting as would Western policymakers themselves, motivated the development of strategic culture. But despite naming the enemy in such a way, as Soviet man, the research paradigm elided sex and gender entirely. Consider the initial RAND publication on “the Soviet strategic culture,” in which Jack Snyder launched the comparative study of strategic culture:

Strategic culture can be defined as the sum total of ideas, conditioned emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior that members of a national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other … the body of attitudes and beliefs that guides and circumscribes thought on strategic questions, influences the way strategic issues are formulated, and sets the vocabulary and conceptional parameters of strategic debate.[30]

Subsequently, strategic culture leapt from the world of defense intellectuals to academia. Strategic culture went through three generations of scholarly development, each fraught with conflict and confusion over how to conceptualize culture and whether its study could satisfy the changing methodological strictures of social science in the period.[31] One major criticism of strategic culture emerged: appropriation of cultural studies from disciplines like anthropology and history often drew upon outdated research frameworks.[32] 

The critique appears valid. For instance, such disciplines have long analyzed male cultural spaces in empirical and theoretical research.[33] Yet we find the doyen of Anglo-American strategic studies, the English academic Colin S. Gray, still giving in 1999 a definition as sexless and genderless as that of Snyder decades prior. Strategic culture, according to Gray, simply consists of “the persisting socially transmitted ideas, attitudes, traditions, habits of mind, and preferred methods of operation that are more or less specific to a particular geographically based security community.”[34] 

Such obtuseness applies reflexively. Observe the hypermasculine culture of midcentury American strategists, as described by a self-professed “feminist spy” who attended a professional summer program on nuclear strategy at Cornell University in the 1980s: lectures were “filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay downs, deep penetration, and the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks.”[35] The strategists, “white men in ties discussing missile size,” were unaware of how their arguments, concepts, and theories appeared to outsiders—how their strategic culture was conditioned by visions of male sexuality and vigorous manhood.[36] Already in 1964, director Stanley Kubrick lampooned the identification of male sexual potency and nuclear weapons in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In 1968, such identifications were wholeheartedly affirmed, or camply parodied, by the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice: “We shall have [our manhood] or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.”[37]

In an era of transnational “gender-based explosions,” the discipline of strategic studies stands to gain a great deal if it adapts and refines analytical tools for the study of men and masculinities.[38] Enhanced by such a paradigm shift, strategic studies provide rich resources for analyzing men as strategic agents. In early decades, analysts focused primarily upon statesmen, particularly the elite strategists and policymakers of the great powers, as opposed to subaltern men in state institutions or those in nonstate and substate organizations. Increasingly, the discipline treats strategic actors across the state–nonstate spectrum, from imperial statesmen to insurgents and rebels, as adaptive and dynamic agents engaging in a complex interplay of strategic thought and practice. Such strengths can only be enhanced by attention to sex and gender.

In the decades since World War II, strategic analysts produced a sophisticated body of work focused upon Communist, anticolonial, and Islamist extremists.[39]  Research concepts and heuristics adapted over time. Threats shifted from midcentury guerrilla and revolutionary warfare to fourth- and fifth-generation warfare and global insurgencies in the third millennium. Eventually, such research took up the paradigm of strategic culture. In particular, the post-9/11 global war on terror motivated analysts to probe the strategic cultures of transnational nonstate and substate actors like al-Qaeda and its affiliates.[40]

In an empirical exploration of al-Qaeda and its strategic culture, Jerry Mark Long, a former US Air Force intelligence analyst, outlines a sophisticated framework that we can designate the Holy Trinity of strategic culture:

Take “strategic culture” to indicate an ideational milieu, one that makes important assumptions about the fundamental values of the community, the nature of the enemy that threatens those values, and the role of war in defending the same. These fundamental values coalesce in what we will term a meta-narrative, the overarching story that situates individuals in a distinct community, provides a cognitive roadmap by which they are to live, and that motivates members to protect the community against its enemies, even in the face of death. Within this larger narrative, elites rank order strategic options about how best to defend and promote the community through warfare. Then, in the messy details of contingent circumstances, decision makers act to achieve those valued ends.[41]

In light of this contribution, we can define the Holy Trinity of strategic culture as consisting of metanarrative, strategic preferences (“rank-ordered options about appropriate defense measures”), and behavior (“operationalized defensive measures constrained by culture and exigency”).[42]  Altogether, it constitutes a useful framework for structured analysis of strategic culture.

The next three sections outline how the metanarrative component of this triune framework can be applied to the masculinist Right, as seen in Man’s World.  Metanarrative consists of action-justifying and identity-forming discourse that structures or overcodes history, rendering it useful for motivating members of a strategic community. Long cites the Epic of Gilgamesh as an example, suggesting metanarrative can involve mythmaking or storytelling regarding conflict and war. He argues the metanarrative of al-Qaeda begins with an existential division between the “house of Islam” (dar al-Islam) and the “house of war” (dar al-harb): an example of what the twentieth-century German geopolitical theorist Carl Schmitt designated the “friend–enemy distinction.”[43] Utilizing this essential division, the al-Qaeda metanarrative elaborates key historical events, both defeats and victories, in terms of Islam’s geopolitical conflict with the West—whose power and success is coded as a gender-specific humiliation, a crisis for Muslim manhood.[44] As one Marxist commentator on the distinction explains, “The ‘enemy’ is the central orientating co-ordinate of strategic action; as the stark embodiment of potentially catastrophic defeat, he concentrates the mind in the sphere of the political.”[45] We will see below how BAPians conceptualize the enemy. Metanarrative begins, however, with an invitation to belonging.

Globo Uomo: A Form of Belonging

Inaugural issue, cover image: the young French film star Alain Delon sits outdoors at a cafe table in a white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled to reveal tanned forearms. With a piercing gaze, he looks skeptically into the distance. Whom does he espy? Friend? Foe? Suave and sophisticated, Delon was chosen for the cover because he had also served as a marine rifleman in the colonial war in Indochina.[46] Masculinist metanarrative overcodes history, rendering certain men invisible while elevating others as exemplary of an imagined past and alternative futures. To addressees, metanarrative makes a threefold offer: a sense of belonging, a roadmap for living, and a motivation to defend against an enemy.

Delon represents the “Globo Uomo” or the “New Handsome Nationalist,” the cover proclaims. Male readers of Man’s World are invited into a masculine community, offered belonging through processes of interpellation—to deploy the terminology of French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser.[47] Through images and text, readers are “hailed” by this masculinist ideology, which “calls out” to them on the planes of sex and gender. As noted above, race is also an explicit feature of this interpellation. Sexuality is mostly absent from later issues of Man’s World, however. This lacuna appears to be the result of reader preference. The first issue had dedicated a section to 1980s vintage softcore pornography of young women. Reader response was intensely negative: such images are debauched and decadent. REN issued a mea culpa in his editorial preface to the second issue. Henceforth, images of nude women, which served to hail heterosexual readers, in imitation of earlier men’s magazines like Playboy, no longer appear. Indeed, women almost never appear. The exceptions are photographs or advertisements in which women serve as adjuncts to the main focus of the image: either a man or an object like an automobile or other form of advanced Western technology.

Ultimately, two forms of belonging are proffered to the male audience of Man’s World. First, membership in a dissident political culture, its boundaries demarcated by an obscure metapolitics evinced especially in memes: Man’s World is a vast memetic enterprise. Across thousands of pages laden with rich intertextual references to obscure subcultures, the magazine will appear deeply opaque to outsiders—like most successful memes.[48] “Globo uomo” itself is a concept laden with jocular, memetic self-referentiality. It inverts “globo homo” (two words), the effete and effeminate product of “globohomo” (one word), liberal globalism. Self-definition flows from defining the enemy, Schmitt muses.[49] BAPian masculinists, admirers of Schmitt, conceive belonging through an inverted concept of enmity.[50] The second form of belonging proffered is an identity rooted in virile visions of European geopolitical projects involving exploration, empire-building, and martial prowess—projects in need of real men to renew them.

Figure 5: Man’s World, no. 1 (2021), 52

World historical figures are thrust forward for admiration and imitation. Manly exemplars include the classical Greek general and philosopher Xenophon, the Portuguese explorers Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan,[51] the British colonial officers John Smith and William Hodson, and the German soldier and literary stylist Ernst Jünger. To again adduce a Schmittian connection: the geopolitical theory of the European Age of Discovery and imperialism advanced in his 1950 Nomos of the Earth is used to frame the maritime focus of issue two: “As a continent, Europe has perhaps been defined more than any other by its maritime position. For the last ten thousand years, its coastal geography has determined not only its internal politics but also, in more recent centuries, the fate of the entire globe. Carl Schmitt described the European turn to the oceans after Columbus’s voyage in 1492 as ‘the first complete space revolution on a planetary scale.’ ”[52] Schmitt is a thinker utilized by both Apollonian and BAPian masculinists. The Anglophilia of BAP, however, leads him to avoid certain Schmittian views, as we will see.

The only non-European frequently featured is Mishima, whose postwar call to restore imperial rule in Japan inspired and united his paramilitary Shield Society. His final public interview before committing ritual suicide, along with four other Shield Society members, is highlighted in issue one:

Yes: due to the denunciations that strength merits in our days, the ethics of those who aspire to be strong are despised. That is why I cannot think of anything other than the rebirth of strength. No matter how hard-headed you may consider me, I will not stop stating that my mission in this life is the rebirth of strength.[53]

In the rest of the interview, Mishima appeared both as a traditionalist and a masculinist: he called for a divinely favored restoration of the emperor, urges Japan’s revival as a Great Power, and exhorted his followers to a dissident ethic of strength and physical culture.[54] Mishima announced the revolutionary “justice” of his vision of sovereign manhood, the sovereignty of a higher man of the truly virile type: “Put plainly: at this moment I am an anti-political being. All I want to make now is a movement for justice. And I say this knowing that maybe someone will laugh. My goal is to promote justice in today’s world. Yoshida Shōin’s lifestyle. Indeed, I don’t think there is any other way to promote justice.”[55] This vision evinces similarities with more readily identifiable right-wing European figures like the Italian esoteric Traditionalist Julius Evola.[56] Partly due to precisely such legibility, Evola is not cited by BAPians—who aim for illegibility, as discussed in the next section. Yet featuring Mishima is itself Evolian: he often flagged non-European examples in constructing his metaphysical traditionalism of the right.[57] All told, such figures model forms of dissident belonging as “men among the ruins” of great empires, awaiting restoration.[58] 

Right-Wing Bodybuilding: Masculine Habitus

Man’s World heralds grandiose geopolitical visions, a revival of the modern European epoch of discovery and empire. Claiming Aryan and Indo-European precursors, BAP argues the “ranging, exploratory, conquering mindset of the West, which it shares with many of the peoples of the steppe almost uniquely, was simply transferred from there, from the Great Earth Sea, to the great Ocean.”[59] BAP seeks to explain the “maritime beginnings of the Anglos and the Americans,” naming the geopolitical naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan as a late exemplar, and draws the oft-invoked parallel to classical Athens. He thereby avoids the hostile thrust of Schmitt’s view of the English as a “sea people” alien to the telluric Continental powers.[60] BAP also shifts the Aryanist continuities claimed by thinkers like Joseph Pomeroy Widney—who saw the conquest of the American West as an extension of the steppe conquests in Eurasia millennia before—from the land to the sea.[61] Through such moves, BAP valorizes maritime geopolitics for the Anglosphere, a position with consequences for Euro-Atlantic geostrategy, as it suggests disengagement from the Continent and Eurasia more broadly. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, disengagement surfaces as an explicit strategic preference, as discussed below.

Figure 6: Man’s World, no. 2 (2021), cover

Through the example of Mishima, there are hints of more: a restoration of divinely sanctioned imperial rule at home as well as abroad. From a similar position, Evola was able to critique both Italian Fascism and the Third Reich from a standpoint further to the right.[62] But no concrete plan is offered for how such visions could become real. Instead, the masculinist metanarrative proffers a habitus, a roadmap for living.[63] Both Mishima and Evola call for followers to become virile in an absolute or metaphysical sense. The interregnum may be long and dark. At least in the near term, the masculinist right adopts an Evolian strategy of apoliteia, a strategy of survival, electing to “ride the tiger” of the present age—the Kali Yuga, or final dark age in a long process of decline—until its sinister forces exhaust themselves.[64] How to survive? Initially, through a metapolitics of bodybuilding. Mishima insisted upon masculinizing forms of physical culture, a cult of the body beautiful.

Lift weights: the first recommendation in Man’s World. The others are to read old books, including “pre-political-correctness-era history, history unblemished by spiteful revisionists,” with the classical historians Thucydides, Herodotus, and Livy named; to develop additional sources of income so as to avoid being a “wage-slave” to ideologically-hostile megacorporations; to spend time in nature, meditating, walking, and away from social media; and to pursue friendships with “frens”—BAPian argot for men of a similar bent. Such a roadmap is given life in the magazine as a whole, with most content devoted to these five practices, modes of surviving in a liberal (or neoliberal) “clown world” which is “viciously anti-masculinity.”[65]

Globo uomo stands firm against globohomo by cultivating his physique: manhood against un-manning. Each issue includes dozens of detailed photographs of champion male bodybuilders, chiefly from the Golden Age of the 1960s and 1970s, in sections with titles like “Eternal Physique.”[66] Right-wing bodybuilders are to imitate such exemplars, reshaping public culture in both their physical and online vicinities, shaming lesser men, and asserting claims to space through their muscular physiques.[67] This metapolitics of bodybuilding inevitably involves denigrating men deemed lacking in virility through memes like the “soyboy/consoomer,” a “metapolitical archetype,” one contributor insists, of the effete modern man who consumes rather than acts—and, furthermore, consumes vegetable-based products deemed deleterious to manhood.[68] Man’s world: a world of true men, real men, a world which belongs to them and them alone. 

“Muscles matter.”[69] The cult of the male body beautiful in Man’s World functions through many a sly wink to its reader. Consider an advertisement deep in issue two for Herculean Strength, a fitness coaching service. Employing an image of the Argentinean bodybuilder and model Julián Arroyuelo, the advertisement draws attention to an online fitness coaching service with an all-too-obvious neoclassical reference to the Greek demigod Hercules, whose divine body Arroyuelo’s own form is doubtless meant to invoke. The wink comes in the choice of this particular model, who sports a tattoo on his beefy right trapezius of a well-known classical Spartan saying, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ, “Come and take them.” Thought to have been uttered by King Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae against the invading Persians, the phrase may refer to Spartan weapons. Whatever its meaning for Arroyuelo himself, placed in the right-wing context of Man’s World, the Spartan utterance takes on many new referents, including European Identitarian resistance to Muslim immigration and US militia movements—indeed, the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ also appeared at the United States Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.[70]

Figure 7: Man’s World, no. 2 (2021), 80

Returning to the image of the muscular sailor on the cover of issue 2, in addition to the maritime geopolitical implications discussed above, the cover promises readers they too can become real men through service at sea. In the twentieth century, sailors were often featured in men’s magazines like Physique Pictorial, but their prominence in Anglo-American popular culture goes back to the nineteenth: “Navy slogans, such as ‘Men Make the Navy … The Navy Makes Men,’ reinforced the idea that the Navy would solidify masculinity,” a promise comporting with the burgeoning “muscular Christianity” movement.[71] Muscular Christianity emerged within Broad Church circles in the Church of England—more liberal and open to emerging scientific developments than either Anglo-Catholics or evangelicals—before spreading to the United States and other British colonies.[72] Its most famous proponent was Charles Kingsley, whose novel Westward Ho! celebrates the swashbuckling sailor Francis Drake’s exploits on behalf of Elizabethan England. The phrase “muscular Christianity” was first coined by a critic, however, whose parodic description of Kingsley could almost describe the average right-wing masculinist today:

His ideal is a man who fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours—who, in the language which Mr. Kingsley has made popular, breathes God’s free air on God’s rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker around his fingers.[73]

Intriguingly, Westward Ho! is dedicated to Sir James Brooke of Sarawak, a sea captain who ends up reigning as “white rajah” over his own southeast Asian kingdom—a key inspiration for BAP himself, as we will see below. Coincidence?

The BAPian habitus for masculine living initially appears as a kind of de-Christianized form of muscular Christianity. But its individualistic focus on bodybuilding and sharp critique of the contemporary West contrasts sharply with the team athletics and exultant patriotism of muscular Christianity.[74] In comparison, the BAPian habitus appears quietistic. No movement organizing is suggested, no formation of groups with a membership or leadership. No bellicose activism is called for, no marching in the streets with flags and chants. No violence is urged, neither coordinated nor lone-wolf attacks. Instead, BAPian masculinists are given the five admonitions: lift weights, read old books, become financially independent, commune with nature, and cultivate male friendships with those of like spirit.

How to make sense of this specific set of practices and the bewildering range of allusions and obscure references in Man’s World? In part, they appear designed to disorient the state. In a discussion in which he invokes the political anthropologies of Pierre Clastres and James C. Scott, Raw Egg Nationalist argues dissident figures should strategically aim to render themselves illegible:

I think we could see these dissident spaces as places where individuals attempt to make themselves illegible to the state, principally through anonymity, but also by other means. It’s not so much that the state isn’t there, but that it doesn’t necessarily know what to think or how to “read” these people. Of course, the state has its own pre-existing categories that it tries to fit these people into—“white supremacists,” “incels,” “domestic terrorists,” “extremists,” etc.—but these labels very seldom fit.[75]

In line with his interest in diet, REN also attempts to enlist the anthropologist and political scientist Scott to bolster his gastronomic arguments for eating raw eggs and other forms of animal protein, like “hunter-gatherer ancestors,” as opposed to the consumption of grains historically favored by despots as a means of controlling subject populations—a form of “unfreedom.”  Such eccentric brews of appropriated scholarship in an attempt to articulate an illegible type are characteristic of the masculinist Right, a highly rhizomatic movement.[76]

“Hidden Worm Rulers of the West”: The Friend–Enemy Distinction

Having explored the first two metanarrative components, what of the third?   What is the nature of the enemy? Ultimately, the enemy extends far beyond globohomo. BAPians interpret decline in light of a cyclical longue durée. This, too, is an essentially Evolian move: reframing contemporary phenomena within a grand historical metanarrative.[77]The suffocating effects of globohomo have been seen before: namely, in a time which preceded the Bronze Age invasions of Europe by Aryans. Globohomo is an atavistic return to a pre-Aryan state. In this metanarrative, Aryans appear as hypermasculine warriors descending upon effeminate indigenes. Such representations have a modern imperial pedigree, as seen in representations of manly British imperial administrators and soldiers juxtaposed with Indian subjects.[78]

Prior to the Aryan invasions, the neolithic farmers peopling Europe were confined to “the Longhouse”: a stifling gerontocracy in which young men are dominated and figures like the “Earth Mother” reign.  The concept has appeared in First Things, a mainstream publication addressing religion and public affairs—a sign of the attention BAPian masculinists increasingly garner on the right:

[The Longhouse] refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance; but also to wokeness, to the “progressive,” “liberal,” and “secular” values that pervade all institutions … More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.[79]

Examples given by the author of societal feminization include female dominance of professional-managerial positions, especially in human resources; weak commitment to free speech, with certain speech viewed as actual harm; an ideology of “Safetyism” manifesting in calls for “trigger warnings,” fears of “microaggressions,” and lockdowns, masks, and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. Above all,

The Longhouse distrusts overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself in 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.[80]

Virility and vitality involve striving for mastery of space. The root of BAPian discontent is “owned space,” the disappearance of ungoverned space both domestically and globally.[81] In his book and on other platforms, BAP urges men to form very small groups of allies and seek out cracks within, or edges beyond, the liberal hegemony—spaces where piratical or mercenary sovereignties can emerge. This is the core of BAPian masculinism.[82] But how does this metanarrative link to geopolitics?

In geopolitics, war brings clarity. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the first 2022 issue of Man’s World, prepared prior to the full-scale Russian invasion, included a long article on Russian attacks on the Donetsk Airport in 2014–15, one front in a broader war as “pro-Russian forces organized themselves to defeat Kievan and EU imperialism.”[83] After the 2022 invasion, in issue six, BAP quickly declared his total opposition to the EU–NATO–US position and urged rightists across the Euro-Atlantic to unite in supporting Russia and Putin: “The greatest national interest is in the end of NATO, and of the occupational elites of the USA and the EU, goals with which we are aligned with Russia. This is why we support Putin in this venture … Putin at least says he’s Christian, he’s pro-family, and he’s pro-European.”[84] Putin himself is portrayed as a paragon of sexy and sophisticated masculinity in a doctored image. The image hearkens to the construction of Putin by allies in Russia, as “fantasy and desire inevitably fuel breath-stopping narratives of a national leader’s exceptional endowments and achievements.”[85]

Figure 8: Man’s World, no. 6 (2022), 82

To have force, the pro-Russian and pro-Putin strategic preference of the BAPians must be expressed in accordance with the overall strategic-cultural metanarrative they long labored to construct. Putin himself is made to conform to the vision of virility Man’s World cultivates. The pre-invasion article on Donetsk Airport immediately follows a preening advertisement for a mastic resin gum, “Tough on your jaw so you can be easy on their eyes.” Right in the middle of the article is a two-page spread, “Welcome to Man’s World,” exhibiting hundreds of apparent mug shots of individuals falling short of the Man’s World ideal, denizens of the Longhouse. The accompanying text invites the reader to despise and dispose of them: “This is the age of the yeast life. Life at its lowest level. Undifferentiated. Ugly. A train of flesh. But another way is possible. A path of cleansing fire. Do you have it inside you to burn bright?”[86] The juxtaposition makes clear Putin’s Russia is such a cleansing fire, inviting the Western reader to join in.

BAP himself sees the conflict as a civil war celebrated by a secretive and sinister cabal, a worm in the heart of the West:

When I look at this terrible brother war, and the way not only Russians and Ukrainians are fighting, but also, in a kind of online parody of the real carnage, the various factions of the right among themselves, I can only think of the cheering in the coomer lactation rooms at Langley; I can think of a trannie apparatchik cackling to himself in Virginia or the other schizo Claire Danes type trannies at NATO “cyber campaigns” quarters in Europe.  Maybe I can think of their masters among the families and organizations that have treated Ukraine like a trafficked sixteen year old cargo container kidnapee from Mariupol, whored out by goldchain Sabra pimps to Qatari scatologists. I can think of the hidden worm rulers of the west, at once desperate that one of their main bases of operations and plunder is endangered; but also so relieved that in this outburst of hysteria they’ve managed to unite much of popular sentiment in a way they were unable during the WuhanGRIDS and St. Floyd fakeries.[87]

Obviously, such a statement is not for outsiders. Precisely in its arabesque of radical and masculinist metanarrative—invoking obscure canards, conspiracies, memes, and tropes developed over years online, a metapolitical project of which Man’s World is but one example—it stands as a true instance of right-wing strategic culture.[88] Here is the moment in which metanarrative shows its power. At the Schmittian moment of decision, BAP asks, “Who is your real and greater enemy, Russia or NATO?” Readers are to affirm a concrete strategic preference spoken, ex cathedra, by the metanarrative master: The enemy is NATO, tool of the “hidden worm rulers of the west” who usurp sovereignty from its peoples and pursue the Great Reset, the Great Replacement, and the End of Men—a threat greater than Russia, or China.[89]

Networked Masculinism in a Multipolar Age

As discussed above, strategic-cultural theorists see metanarrative coordinating loose networks, as in al-Qaeda-like groups, each node responding to the metanarrative as suits their strategic contexts.[90] In a similar way, the masculinist right operates as a network, decentralized and rhizomatic, in its operational modalities and organizational structures.[91] Yet rhizomatic movements need to find ways of operating with some degree of strategic coherence—otherwise, their behavior will remain aleatory and uncoordinated. Metanarrative provides a degree of strategic coherence. Masculinist strategic culture takes shape across a vast network of figures, platforms, and publications. To focus only on the BAPians: along with Man’s World, one could point to the journal Asylum, the webzine American Sun, numerous books published by small presses, and prolific social media by right-wing bodybuilders and their admirers. Normalization occurs through more mainstream publications.[92] Regarding the Ukraine War, we have seen how metanarrative serves to legitimate one set of anti-Western, pro-Putin strategic preferences—the second element of the Holy Trinity of strategic culture. Corresponding behavior by followers—the third element in the Holy Trinity—may yet be seen.

Overall, the masculinist metanarrative is clear: European men once bestrode the world, but their descendants now face sophisticated attacks from forces within their home societies that result in their declining political and physical well-being. In order to resist such attacks, BAPians urge a masculine “care of the self,” an inner-directed habitus, joined with geopolitical visions for the reassertion of Western martial virility. Foucault is an obvious referent here, for like most of the classical elites whose writings have come down to us, the subjects of his Care of the Self are primarily men—more specifically, men conceptualizing how to live in late imperial conditions, those of perceived internal decay and decline, a point of commonality with the BAPians and their salvific habitus.[93] However, unlike national populists who call for a restructured international order centered on sovereign states, BAPians look to an anarchic multipolar planet—rather like Identitarians, but with a neocolonial twist.[94]

Multipolarity provides interstitial space for virile action. BAP himself outlines four prospects for martial virility, all in colonial (or neocolonial) space.[95] First, and most often, he invokes mercenary activities of the type undertaken in late-twentieth-century Africa by men like Mike Hoare and Bob Denard.[96] Second, more rarely, he recounts the assumption of independent sovereignty over a foreign power of the type undertaken in Sarawak by Sir James Brooke.[97] Third, he entertains covert activities with support of intelligence agencies of the type undertaken in Europe by Operation Gladio, a collaboration between the CIA and European right-wing groups intent on resisting the spread of Communism.[98] Fourth, and most rarely, BAP considers infiltration of military services in Euro-Atlantic states, a possibility he views with extreme skepticism.[99]

To return to where we began, liberal triumphalists typically fail to remember that the End of History thesis comes with a caveat lector. Liberal democracy will attain hegemony in the Euro-Atlantic and then spread ever outward. But in the lands of its birth, where it is known first and best, rebels may arise who vehemently resist. Fukuyama feared liberal democracy would be “subverted internally.”[100] Yet again, as in strategic studies more broadly, careful attention to gender is needed. Throughout this work, Fukuyama deploys the classical Greek concept of thumos to denote the fierce ambition, aspiration, and pride beating in rebel hearts—along with megalothumia, greatness of spirit, which rejects egalitarian and equalizing liberal democracy. But he entirely fails to recognize the deeply gendered character of the concept. Thumos is the heart of classical virility,not humanity (as Fukuyama seems to think).[101] Charles Kingsley, the father of muscular Christianity, evinces a better grasp of the concept when he speaks of “manly thumos, which Plato saith is the root of all virtue.”[102] One of the leading scholars of muscular Christianity describes thumos as “a deep, central force from which manly action flows and through which virtue, sexuality, and masculine primacy are reconciled and reiterated.”[103] Little surprise, then, that we findin Man’s World an advertisement for Will2Rise—an outgrowth of the Rise Above Movement (RAM), a Fight Club–style alt-right group—featuring a muscled member with thvmos tattooed on his bare chest.

Figure 9: Man’s World, no. 7 (2022), 79

RAM, originally based in Southern California, was one of the earliest and most prominent alt-right men’s groups. It emphasized bodybuilding and mixed martial arts (MMA) as masculine habitus.[104] The group’s subsequent career encapsulates the conflation of domestic discontent and foreign adventurism, which Man’s World cultivates. Several RAM members traversed state lines to march in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, a venture for which they would be charged under the federal Anti-Riot Act. Their case went before the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which produced a landmark ruling on the Act, known as Rundo II, named after a lead plaintiff, RAM founder Robert Rundo.[105] In a federal criminal complaint, Rundo and other RAM members are said to have traveled to eastern Europe to train with the right-wing Azov Battalion, a paramilitary unit incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.[106] Yet, in this example, we also see the limits of metanarrative in strategic culture: it does not dictate a specific strategic preference will be followed. The pro-Putin preference of Man’s World is rejected by the RAM men in favor of Ukraine. These limits may make identification of such groups and movements more difficult for defense and security policymakers, even when a unifying metanarrative has been identified through strategic-cultural analysis.

Ultimately, Fukuyama is only partially correct: Euro-American rebels may arise, but many will not care for us or our regimes. Ultimately, despite the classical cadences and imagery, Augustan restoration at home does not interest many on the masculinist right. They evince little concern for reforming the Euro-Atlantic home front, which they view as hopelessly corrupt, decadent, and degenerate. They decamp for the steppe and the anarchic frontier. They yearn for geopolitics “beyond the line.”[107]

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[1] Raw Egg Nationalist, “Who Is the Globo Uomo?” Man’s World, no. 1 (2021), 4. On the ambiguities of the “restoration” effected by Caesar Augustus in the transition from republic to principate, see the magisterial Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939).

[2] Issues of Man’s World are available at Man’s World Online, https://mansworldmag.online, and on Chadnet, https://wiki.chadnet.org/mans-world.  On masculinism as an emergent ideological form, especially but not exclusively on the right, see Josh Vandiver, “Alt-Virilities: Masculinism, Rhizomatics, and the Contradictions of the American Alt-Right,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 21, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2020.1763319, building upon the “morphological” conceptual analysis of ideology advanced by Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

[3] Ezra Pound, “Small Magazines,” The English Journal 19, no. 9 (1930), https://www.jstor.org/stable/803043; Adam McKible and Suzanne W. Churchill, eds., Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007).

[4] Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, 2nd ed. (New York: New Press, 2013), 184–185.

[5] Raw Egg Nationalist, “Welcome, frens!” Man’s World, no. 1 (2021), 2. On the alt-right, see George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). On Identitarianism, see José Pedro Zúquete, The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018); José Pedro Zúquete and Riccardo Marchi, eds., Global Identitarianism (London: Routledge, 2023). On masculinity in German and Austrian Identitarianism, see Alice Blum, “Men in the Battle for the Brains: Constructions of Masculinity within the ‘Identitary Generation,’ ” in Gender and Far Right Politics in Europe, eds. Michaela Köttig, Renate Bitzan, and Andrea Petö (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

[6] On politics in Playboy, see Laura Saarenmaa, “Candid Conversations: Politics and Politicians in Playboy Magazine,” Media History 23, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2016.1207508. On the neoclassical cult of the body beautiful, see Maria Wyke, “Herculean Muscle! The Classicizing Rhetoric of Bodybuilding,” Arion Third Series 4, no. 3 (January 1997), 59–61, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163635; Peter J. Miller, “The Imaginary Antiquity of Physical Culture,” Classical Outlook 93, no. 1 (2018): 21–31, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26506530. On the Boy’s Own Paper, see Patrick A. Dunae, “Boys’ Literature and the Idea of Empire, 1870–1914,” Victorian Studies 24, no. 1 (1980), https://www.jstor.org/stable/3826881.

[7] Raw Egg Nationalist, Raw Egg Nationalism in Theory and Practice (2020; n.p: Antelope Hill, 2021); Raw Egg Nationalist, The Eggs Benedict Option (n.p.: Antelope Hill, 2022). On the Great Reset, see José Pedro Zúquete, “Against the Global Prison-Society: The Far Right’s Language of the Opposition to the Great Reset,” in Far-Right Newspeak and the Future of Liberal Democracy, eds. A. James McAdams and Samuel Piccolo (London: Routledge, 2024).

[8] Tucker Carlson and Scooter Downey, “The End of Men,” Tucker Carlson Originals, aired October 5, 2022 on Fox News. On Carlson and his influence, see A. James McAdams, “Masters of Contemporary Newspeak: Tucker Carlson, Marine Le Pen, and Jordan Peterson,” in Far-Right Newspeak and the Future of Liberal Democracy, eds. A. James McAdams and Samuel Piccolo (London: Routledge, 2024). On national populism, see Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 2018). On the Great Replacement, see Zúquete, Identitarians, 146–155.

[9] Pound, “Small Magazines,” 699.

[10] Frederick J. Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 112–113.

[11] See, for example, Raw Egg Nationalist, ed., Man’s World Annual: 2021 (n.p.: Antelope Hill, 2021).

[12] Tim Edwards, “Sex, Booze and Fags: Masculinity, Style and Men’s Magazines,” Sociological Review 51, no. 1 supplement (2003), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2003.tb0360. On the role of pornography in constructing male spaces (both private and public) see the feminist analysis of Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

[13] Throughout, my analysis is indebted to emerging empirical and theoretical research on men and masculinities; leading works include R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

[14] On popular geopolitics, see Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Jason Dittmer and Nicholas Gray, “Popular Geopolitics 2.0: Towards New Methodologies of the Everyday,” Geography Compass 4, no. 11 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00399.x.

[15] On right-wing metapolitics, see Roger Griffin, “Between Metapolitics and Apoliteia: The Nouvelle Droite’s Strategy for Conserving the Fascist Vision in the ‘Interregnum,’ ” Modern & Contemporary France 8, no. 1 (2000), https://doi.org/10.1080/096394800113349. On the “imperialism” of the trans-Atlantic right and its metapolitical impact on mainstream right-wing politics, including the administration of US President Donald Trump, see Christopher Vials, “Empire after Liberalism: The Transatlantic Right and Identitarian War,” Journal of American Studies 56, no. 1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875821000517. By “Euro-Atlantic,” I refer to a primarily European phenomenon, but one that also spans the Atlantic to the settler colonies of the US and Canada.

[16] Strategic culture as developed in strategic studies is introduced in a later section. For one prominent view, see Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 5: “Strategic Culture as Context.” Overviews of strategic studies include Thomas G. Mahnken and Joseph Anthony Maiolo, eds., Strategic Studies: A Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014); John Baylis, James J. Wirtz, and Jeannie L. Johnson, eds., Strategy in the Contemporary World, 7th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

[17] Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, eds., The “Man” Question in International Relations (London: Routledge, 1998); Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, eds., Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations (London: Zed Books, 2013); Terrell Carver and Laura Lyddon, Masculinities, Gender and International Relations (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022).

[18] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

[19] On race in global politics and international affairs, see Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, eds., Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, Interventions (London: Routledge, 2014); Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). Regarding the complex intersections of sex, gender, and race on colonial frontiers in North America and Oceania, see Robert Hogg, Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Jason Pierce, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016).

[20] Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (London: Arktos, 2011). On Faye, see Stéphane François and Adrien Nonjon, “Guillaume Faye (1949–2019): At the Forefront of a New Theory of White Nationalism,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring 2022), https://doi.org/10.53483/WCJT3535.

[21] Colin S. Gray, “National Style in Strategy: The American Example,” International Security 6, no. 2 (1981), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/446680; Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Jeannie L. Johnson, The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture: Lessons Learned and Lost in America’s Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018); Edward D. Last, Strategic Culture and Violent Non-State Actors: A Comparative Study of Salafi-Jihadist Groups (London: Routledge, 2021).

[22] Josh Vandiver, “Masculinist Identitarians, Strategic Culture, and Eurocene Geopolitics,” in Global Identitarianism, eds. José Pedro Zúquete and Riccardo Marchi (London: Routledge, 2023), 177–178.

[23] Josh Vandiver, “‘Apollo Has Saved Us!’ Global Ambition and Metapolitical Warfare in Alt-Right Religion,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 16, no. 1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.14321/jstudradi.16.1.0135.

[24] Josh Vandiver, “Metapolitics, Masculinity, and Technology in the Rise of ‘Bronze Age Pervert,’ ” in Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, eds. A. James McAdams and Alejandro Castrillon (London: Routledge, 2021); Josh Vandiver, “Constitutional Conspiracism: Aryans, Alpha Chads, and White Nationalists,” in American Conspiracism: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, ed. Luke Ritter (London: Routledge, 2025), 224–225.

[25] On European forms of Aryanism, see Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic racialism in early American expansion, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). In the twentieth century, Joseph Pomeroy Widney, Race Life of the Aryan Peoples (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1907), was a prominent American Aryanist publication, while Nordicism motivated both Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), and Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920) as examples of the importance of such figures to the alt-right, as noted in Richard Spencer, foreword to Conquest of a Continent: Or, the Expansion of Races in America, by Madison Grant (Abergele: The Palingenesis Project, 2013).

[26] Richard B. Spencer, “For Ukraine, for Europe,” Alexandria, February 23, 2023, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/for-ukraine-for-europe, accessed July 23, 2025.

[27] On the manosphere, see Debbie Ging, “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere,” Men and Masculinities 22, no. 4 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X17706401.

[28] Mark Bassin, “ ‘Everything Is Revealed in Maps’: The European Far Right and the Legacy of Classical Geopolitics during the Cold War,” Geopolitics  (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2022.2078709.

[29] Colin S. Gray, “What RAND Hath Wrought,” Foreign Policy, no. 4 (1971), https://doi.org/10.2307/1147739.

[30] Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1977), 8–9.

[31] Lawrence Sondhaus, Strategic Culture and Ways of War (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–13.

[32] Iver B. Neumann and Henrikki Heikka, “Grand Strategy, Strategic Culture, Practice: The Social Roots of Nordic Defence,” Cooperation and Conflict 40, no. 1 (2005). The refusal by many anthropologists and other cultural researchers to engage with strategists and policymakers in defense institutions no doubt deepens such critiques. Cf. Nicola Perugini, “Anthropologists at War: Ethnographic Intelligence and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan,” International Political Anthropology 1, no. 2 (2008).

[33] Confining ourselves to the intersection of such disciplines with men and masculinity studies, for example, one can point to the anthropological work of David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and, in history, Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). To add philosophy, see Bonnie Mann, Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[34] Gray, Modern Strategy, 131.

[35] Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12, no. 4 (1987), 693, https://doi.org/10.1086/494362.

[36] Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” 692.

[37] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, [1968] 1991), 84. On Cleaver’s left-wing masculinism, see Josh Vandiver, “Plato in Folsom Prison: Eldridge Cleaver, Black Power, Queer Classicism,” Political Theory 44, no. 6 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716650715.

[38] Maleeha Aslam, Gender-Based Explosions: The Nexus between Muslim Masculinities, Jihadist Islamism, and Terrorism (New York: United Nations University Press, 2012).

[39] John Shy and Thomas W. Collier, “Revolutionary War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, eds. Peter Paret, Gordon Alexander Craig, and Felix Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (Minneapolis: Zenith, 2006); Aaron Karp, Regina Karp, and Terry Terriff, Global Insurgency and the Future of Armed Conflict: Debating Fourth-Generation Warfare (London: Routledge, 2008); Donald J. Reed, “Beyond the War on Terror: Into the Fifth Generation of War and Conflict,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31, no. 8 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100802206533.

[40] Jerry Mark Long, “Does Al Qaeda Have a Strategic Culture?” in Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Culturally Based Insights into Comparative National Security Policymaking, eds. Jeannie L. Johnson, Kerry M. Kartchner, and Jeffrey A. Larsen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Last, Strategic Culture and Violent Non-State Actors.

[41] Long, “Does Al Qaeda Have a Strategic Culture?” 204.

[42] Long, “Does Al Qaeda Have a Strategic Culture?” 204, figure 13.1.

[43] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1932] 2008).

[44] Long, “Does Al Qaeda Have a Strategic Culture?” 207; cf. Aslam, Gender-Based Explosions.

[45] Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2005), 261.

[46] Raw Egg Nationalist, “Who is the Globo Uomo?” 4.

[47] On interpellation and masculinity, see David Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2013), 35–39.

[48] On the key features of viral memes, whether political or apolitical, the best empirical and theoretical introduction is Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production,” in A New Literacies Sampler, eds. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).  

[49] Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 55–56.

[50] In addition to Schmittian citations and allusions in Man’s World, several analyzed below, BAP has discussed Schmitt on his Caribbean Rhythms podcast, as in episode 136 (May 2023).

[51] Native name, Fernando Magalhães.

[52] Raw Egg Nationalist, “The Sea! The Sea!” Man’s World, no. 2 (2021), 22; cf. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, [1950] 2003). 

[53] Yukio Mishima and Takashi Furubayashi, “Last Rites,” Man’s World, no. 1 (2021), 35.

[54] There is a certain irony in featuring Mishima, considered by some a “gay icon,” on whom see Jonathan Mackintosh, “The Homo Cultures of Iconic Personality in Japan: Mishima Yukio and Misora Hibari,” in Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture, eds. Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). On the imperial cult, see Kazuyoshi Kawasaka, “Mishima Yukio and the Homoeroticisation of the Emperor of Japan,” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2, no. 2 (2018).

[55] Mishima and Furubayashi, “Last Rites,” 36. Shōin, a military strategist and nationalist intellectual, inspired men who would terrorize Westerners in Japan, fight for the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and play prominent roles in the Meiji Restoration—many under the banner of his sonnō jōi thought: “Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians.” Kirihara Kenshin, “Shōin and Changing Worldviews in the Late Tokugawa Period,” in The Tokugawa World, eds. Gary P. Leupp and Demin Tao (London: Routledge, 2021).

[56] Paul Furlong, Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (London: Routledge, 2011). 

[57] Julius Evola, Revolt against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions International, [1969] 1995).

[58] Julius Evola, Men among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions International, [1972] 2002). BAPians likely also avoid references to Evola due to his critiques of biologistic masculinities and his greater emphasis on spiritual elites in the traditional tripartite constitution of priests (and sacred kings), warriors, and producers. See Josh Vandiver, “What Do Masculinists Want? Virile Vanguards, Identitarians, and Evolian Political Theology,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 19, no. 2 (2025), https://doi.org/10.14321/jstudradi.19.2.0135.

[59] Bronze Age Pervert, “The Open Steppe of the Sea,” Man’s World, no. 2 (2021), 24, 28.  

[60] Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1938] 2008); Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation (Candor: Telos Press, [1942] 2015).

[61] Widney, Race Life of the Aryan Peoples.

[62] Julius Evola, Fascism Viewed from the Right (London: Arktos, [1974] 2013); Julius Evola, Notes on the Third Reich (London: Arktos, [1974] 2013).

[63] On habitus and masculinity, see Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford University Press, [1998] 2001).

[64] Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions, [1961] 2003). Cf. Griffin, “Between Metapolitics and Apoliteia.”

[65] Orwell N. Goode, “The Clowning of America,” Man’s World, no. 1 (2021), 12, 7.

[66] Man’s World, no. 1 (2021), 20.

[67] On the idealized male body and its claim to space, a claim which renders illegitimate lesser bodies in space, see Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities, chap. 6.

[68] Goode, “The Clowning of America,” 7, emphasis in original. Cf. Ruth Clemens and Becket Flannery, “ ‘Soy Boy,’ Ecology and the Fascist Imaginary,” in Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

[69] Connor Heffernan, “State of the Field: Physical Culture,” History 107, no. 374 (2022), 143, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13258.

[70] Stephen Hodkinson, “Spartans on the Capitol: Recent Far-Right Appropriations of Spartan Militarism in the USA and their Historical Roots,” in Classical Controversies: Reception of Graeco-Roman Antiquity in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Kim Beerden and Timo Epping (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2022).

[71] Kel R. Karpinski, “The Iconography of an All‐American Icon: Sailors, Homoeroticism, and Mid‐Century Queer Cultural Politics,” Journal of American Culture 45, no. 4 (2022), 445–446, https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13419. On Physique Pictorial and similar magazines, which were far more homoerotic than any issue of Man’s World, see Wyke, “Herculean Muscle!” 59–63.

[72] Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

[73] Quoted in Donald E. Hall, “Muscular Christianity: Reading and Writing the Male Social Body,” in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7.

[74] Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, 195.

[75] Raw Egg Nationalist and Stone Age Herbalist, “Eggs and Drugs and Rock ’N’ Roll,” Man’s World, no. 3 (2021), 73. The cited works are Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: Zone Books, [1974] 1987); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

[76] Vandiver, “Alt-Virilities.”

[77] See, for example, Evola, Men among the Ruins; Evola, Ride the Tiger.

[78] Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); cf. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

[79] L0m3z, “What Is the Longhouse?,” First Things, 16 February 2023, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/02/what-is-the-longhouse.

[80] idem, “What is the Longhouse?”

[81] Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset: An Exhortation (San Bernadino, Calif.: n.p., 2018), 65, emphasis in original.   

[82] In contrast, the root of Apollonian discontent is “owned media,” in the sense of the representation of norms and values—emanating from an imperial center—in art, myth, and religion. Such Neoplatonic visions are masterfully theorized by Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres II: Globes, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, Calif.: Semiotext(e), [1999] 2014), ch. 5; cf. Vandiver, “ ‘Apollo Has Saved Us!’ ” 149.

[83] Stilicho Americanus, “A Swansong for the Cyborgs: The Battle for Donetsk Airport,” Man’s World, no. 5 (2022), 240.

[84] Bronze Age Pervert, “Know Your Enemy,” Man’s World, no. 6 (2022), 52–53. This short article is similar to a longer exposition previously published in American Sun, a publication friendly to BAPians, analyzed below.

[85] Helena Goscilo, “Putin’s Performance of Masculinity: The Action Hero and Macho Sex-Object,” in Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (London: Routledge, 2012), 183–184.

[86] Man’s World, no. 5 (2022), 242–43.

[87] Bronze Age Pervert, “Ukraine, the European Right, and Freedom,” American Sun, March 14, 2022, https://open.substack.com/pub/theamericansun/p/bap-covers-ukraine-the-european-right-freedom (accessed 23 July 2025). 

[88] Needless to say, to fully contextualize and unpack each of these canards, conspiracies, memes, and tropes is well beyond the scope of this work.

[89] Bronze Age Pervert, “Ukraine, the European Right, and Freedom.”

[90] Long, “Does Al Qaeda Have a Strategic Culture?” Predating 9/11, the rise of networked nonstate actors was cogently analyzed by the RAND defense intellectual David Ronfeldt, Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework about Societal Evolution (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1996). Right-wing strategic cultures occasionally draw on research by state-affiliated institutions like RAND. For instance, Ronfeldt’s publication is used by the Australian ethnonationalist Andrew W. Fraser, The WASP Question: An Essay on the Biocultural Evolution, Present Predicament, and Future Prospects of the Invisible Race (London: Arktos Media, 2011), 380–381.

[91] Roger Griffin, “From Slime Mould to Rhizome: An Introduction to the Groupuscular Right,” Patterns of Prejudice 37, no. 1 (2003), https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322022000054321; Vandiver, “Alt-Virilities,” 161–165. 

[92] Critical engagement with the BAPians occurred first in Claremont Institute publications. See Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t)right?” Claremont Review of Books 19, no. 3 (2019), https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/are-the-kids-altright/, which was followed by several pieces—both critical and pro-BAPian—on the Institute’s webzine, The American Mind. More recently, discussion of this continues in mainstream publications like First Things, as noted above.

[93] Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, [1984] 1986). 

[94] On Identitarian geopolitical theories regarding multipolarity as a condition for “ethnopluralism,” see Zúquete, Identitarians, ch. 4.

[95] Bronze Age Pervert, “The Abuse of War,” American Sun, July 29, 2022, https://open.substack.com/pub/theamericansun/p/bap-on-the-abuse-of-war (accessed 23 July 2025).

[96] Cf. Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset, 157–161. On Hoare, see Scott Fitzsimmons, Mercenaries in Asymmetric Conflicts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 3. For an effusive romanticized depiction of Denard, see Samantha Weinberg, Last of the Pirates: The Search for Bob Denard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994).

[97] Bronze Age Pervert, “The Abuse of War.” Even for BAP, such an aim seems outlandish.  As recounted by Sir Arnold McNair, the question Brooke’s example posed—whether a British subject could assume independent sovereignty over a foreign power, in this case Sarawak—exercised the highest levels of the UK’s Foreign Office, who turned multiple times to the Law Officers for their considered judgement. Ultimately, the answer was negative. Arnold McNair, “Aspects of State Sovereignty,” British Year Book of International Law 26 (1949), 29–41.

[98] Bronze Age Pervert, “The Abuse of War.” On Gladio, see Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005).

[99] Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset, 177–179. Cf. Josiah Lippincott, “Infiltration Won’t Work,” Man’s World, no. 8 (2022), 52: “The American Right is filled with those, like me, who are descendants of Scots-Irish, German, and Anglo settlers: all groups that are notoriously bad at spying, doubletalk, and lying.”

[100] Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 314.

[101] This feature of the concept is emphasized by Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 85, 206–208. Indeed, the concept is the root of the “self-legitimating structure of manhood that Mansfield outlines so beautifully,” in the words of the feminist philosopher Mann, Sovereign Masculinity, 181.

[102] Quoted in David Rosen, “The Volcano and the Cathedral: Muscular Christianity and the Origins of Primal Manliness,” in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 30.

[103] Hall, “Muscular Christianity,” 11. Setting aside these conceptual appropriations by Kingsley and Fukuyama, for a thorough explication of the concept in Plato’s thought, see Josh Wilburn, The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

[104] Jack Hynes, “Knights without Amour,” Arena no. 21 (2025), 19–22.

[105] Alex Krasne, “Applying the Anti-Riot Act: From Antifa to Insurrectionists,” UIC Law Review 56, no. 1 (2022): 141–179.

[106] Francesca Laguardia, “Considering a Domestic Terrorism Statute and Its Alternatives,” Northwestern University Law Review 114, vol. 4 (2019), 1075.

[107] On this early modern European demarcation of global space—European civilization on one side of the line, in which international law and norms applied, and non-European space beyond, in which they did not—see Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, 92–99. Mikkel Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (London: Routledge, 2010), demonstrates how this Schmittian concept can enhance analysis of political violence in American “frontierlands”— from the nineteenth-century Western frontier itself, to the twentieth-century domestic ghetto, to the post-Cold War global “anarchy” envisaged by counterterrorism experts.