The Re-Enchantment of Men

Rummaging on the forbidden bookshelves again

Cover art for Esoteric Trumpism, by Constantin von Hoffmeister (Arktos, 2025)

If you post a lot, as I do, it’s hard to predict what will follow you around. Some years ago, I said on X that I thought the pseudonymous internet personality Bronze Age Pervert was a genius media artist. It’s true: BAP is among the earliest pioneers of online personae as cultural artefacts, a phenomenon now so pervasive that the internet historian

Katherine Dee

has taken intermittently to publishing reviews of such entities (read her on Nancy Mace’s X account here). In this field BAP stands out as an early, impactful, and organic (ie not incubated by elite patronage) innovator, a fact that remains true whatever you think of his opinions, his persona, or his political impact.

Some on the more swivel-eyed Left have since latched onto that one word “genius”, which now periodically gets dusted off to imply that I must agree with everything this persona has ever posted. This claim is too obviously stupid to engage with, but inasmuch as it has any meaning at all it’s in the context of what BAP stands for, as a cultural phenomenon: the moral rebellion of men.

Much has been written lately about the masculine pivot to the Right, all hand-wringing about “incels” and “radicalisation” and “Andrew Tate” and all that. In the wake of the Trump landslide, too, I gather the American Democratic Party is now puzzling over how they can entice men back into their fold, maybe with some kind of woke Joe Rogan or as yet undiscovered form of bodybuilding that’s Healthy At Every Size.

I won’t rehash the usual nostra any further here, except to say that the pivot was visible from space, for years, and yes: lots of it is influenced, for better or worse, by BAP and others of his ilk. In what follows I want to suggest that some form of this rebellion was inevitable - because it’s entangled with another contemporary phenomenon I’ve written about recently: re-enchantment, the return of a mythic, poetic sensibility to mainstream culture as a byproduct of the digital revolution.

In the interests both of making this case, and perhaps also giving the eye-swivellers something else to yell about, below I’ll read BAP’s influential 2018 self-published “exhortation” Bronze Age Mindset against another, more recent book from the tut-tut bookshelves of edgy publisher Arktos: Constantin von Hoffmeister’s Esoteric Trumpism. Taken together, these two texts both illustrate how deeply bound up this poetic sensibility is with a return of the heroic, not simply in words but in action: a reality whose concrete sequelae are now visible everywhere in American political headlines.