ABSTRACT
How do radical right ideas go mainstream? The masculinist figure known only as “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP) provides a signature case study. Inconceivable without Twitter, BAP and his rise evince features shared by innumerable anonymous right-wing social media accounts during the 2015–2016 US presidential campaign, especially those associated with the Alt-right. Yet, in a crowded social media space, BAP managed to stand out and gain a sizeable following. How did he do it? How did he become a master in the cultural hothouse of the online radical right? And how are new communications technologies dictating the development of the radical right? In line with the emphasis on the far right’s concept of metapolitics in this volume, this chapter argues that BAP adopts a multipronged metapolitical strategy with both near- and long-term elements. In the near term, he both communicates a highly gendered metapolitics and is able to motivate followers to engage in masculinist metapolitics of their own. In the longer term, he presents a vision beyond himself and his epigones, a broader metapolitical strategy for the contemporary radical right. Overall, the aim is to analyze key features of the metapolitical spaces—spheres, if you will—which BAP seeks to contest and even create, especially with respect to masculinity.
