Ezra Klein

The reason I think that clip is interesting is it combines the two things the book does, which is this sense that there is something more than mere life, right?

He says, "...the preservation of life at the expense of things that are exciting, great, and free."

With the kind of campy provocateurism, like, oh, it makes me so excited to hear you say middle-aged, sterile women.

What's this idea about privileging safety and mere life over things that are exciting and great and free?

I think the LARPing point of that is, I think, very important because it is a bunch of intellectuals and elite competition with other intellectuals, a bunch of humanities academics.

I mean, Bronze Age Pervert went to Yale, was it?

Yeah.

This is an elite overproduction problem.

One thing that I find interesting about the modern right is it can't seem to decide on when its nostalgia is for.

So there's a dimension of it that's for the 1950s.

I think of that as more where Donald Trump has based his remembrance of politics, and he was around for that, so fair enough.

But then you have people who seem to be looking back to earlier in the country's history, but it has stretched way beyond that now, all the way, and we'll talk about Bronze Age Burford, which is a nom de plume of one of these folks, who is trying to bring back a sort of pre-modern, much more directly pagan view.

There's a lot of primitivism in all of this, a lot of societies filled with chemicals and endocrine disruptors, right?

It connects to the Maha movement in that way.

But this question of when were human beings human, when were men men, when were women women, there actually isn't agreement on it.

The liberation of women was a false flag operation.

The true goal was the liberation of libertine men.

And in our day, this was a goal that has largely been achieved.

These were men who wanted the benefits for themselves that would come from easy divorce, widespread abortion, mainstream pornography, and a promiscuous dating culture.

The early 20th century was characterized by the Christian wife.