Ezra Klein

Which I like about Donald Trump.

Right.

Like, I actually I'm not dissing on him here, but so much of these people are engaged in a very Judith Butlerian level of gender performance.

It is the most like cis gender performance of heteromasculinity you could possibly imagine.

And Trump, I think in some ways what makes him appealing is he's got some of that, but he's got the other thing, too, because he's actually not at his core like an insecure, thwarted, like little goblin.

So let me take it here, because, again, I want to try to run through some of these ideas.

I think of one of the founding fathers of this in the New World is this guy, Bronze Age pervert.

Can you describe who that is?

Yeah, it's very much the way I described the book, which is aesthetically interesting, even if I think it's intellectually becomes a bit tedious.

But it has this really like Nietzsche for gooners quality.

It's very, very, you know, like romantic poetry, but like filtered through 4chan lingo.

Maybe it's worth, I want to play a clip of this interview he did with Michael Malice in 2024, talking about the problems of modernity.

So the reason I think that clip is useful, and, you know, this book, Bronze Age Mindset, got written up in the Claremont Review of Books.

There are reports that most young staff in the Trump administration had read it.

It had become like a piece of code passed back and forth, samizdat.

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.