Bronze Age Pervert

Bronze Age Pervert, also known as BAP, is a pseudonymous far-right Internet personality, associated with the manosphere. (born May 21, 1980), a Romanian-American, as the person behind the pseudonym.

In his writings on X, his podcast Caribbean Rhythms with Bronze Age Pervert and in his 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset, BAP advances reactionary ideas influenced by Nietzschean philosophy, promoting what he considers the heroic ideals of classical antiquity and denouncing modern society as decadent. He has a dedicated cult following in Western right-wing political circles.

Identity In 2023, Politico identified the writer Costin Alamariu as the person behind the pseudonym, making reference to other articles and podcasts that had previously identified him. Alamariu was a classmate and friend of B. J. Novak, In 1997 the two of them, along with Novak's brother Jesse and Peter Owen Nelson pranked visitors at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by replacing the guided tour with a fake performed by Alamariu, which slowly but steadily became more surreal and profanity laden.

After graduating from high school, Alamariu majored in mathematics at MIT, and studied philosophy as a graduate student at Columbia University.

Work

X (formerly Twitter)

BAP is an active X user but has posted under multiple handles, and on multiple sites. The earliest identified posts by the "Bronze Age Pervert" persona appeared on now-defunct web forums in 2010. and developed links to Curtis Yarvin before the account was banned in February 2017. BAP joined Twitter again in March 2017 under the handle @bronzeagemantis. As a result, BAP switched to using Telegram until he was later reinstated on Twitter. After the reinstatement of his account by Elon Musk, BAP's Twitter following continued to grow and "restored structure to a movement that commonly refers to itself as the 'authentic' right-wing Twitter." A separate account with the handle @costin_eats is used by Costin Alamariu when not writing under the 'BAP' pseudonym. and his posts are a mix of post-ironic far-right memes with images of bodybuilders. The images are often considered homoerotic in nature but Josh Vandiver suggested that "[BAP] and his followers regularly celebrate images of handsome and muscular young white men. (...) The images depict men in typical ways for Western masculinities: active, in motion, subjects shaping the world, not sexual objects. BAP posts images of virile young men on beaches or surfboards in tropical locales—including the Caribbean and Baja California—with captions stating they are 'conquering' or 'cleansing' such territories. These are geopolitical visions, a form of popular geopolitics calling for expansion and conquest of the global South."

The account is part of Frogtwitter, a group of pseudonymous online writers with a highly negative view of contemporary American society. This group mythologizes an aristocratic past while engaging in racism and antisemitism, often through memes laden with heavy irony. BAP and his acolytes are at odds with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his groypers, and Fuentes has claimed that Curtis Yarvin and BAP are "at the forefront of a rising Thiel-funded faction of the Right."

A number of right-wing politicians have been criticized for following or interacting with BAP on Twitter, including former White House speechwriter Darren Beattie, Minnesota state senator Roger Chamberlain, vice president of the United States JD Vance, and US Senate candidate Lauren Witzke. Technology investor Peter Thiel has on more than one occasion referenced BAP in speeches to conservative audiences. In February 2017, Curtis Yarvin sarcastically claimed to The Atlantic that Bronze Age Pervert was his White House "cutout / cell leader".

Josh Vandiver of Ball State University observed that Bronze Age Pervert's "cult" following seems to be global in nature with images appearing on social media of "readers holding the book aloft before beaches and mountains across the world". Bronze Age Pervert's followers often imitate elements of his Twitter account, his writing style, and repeat catchphrases such as "SUBMIT!" and "ghey". Vandiver uses the example of the last term to explain "hen accused of being 'ghey,' [BAP's] preferred spelling of 'gay' – one of many insider code words, partly necessitated by social media censors – BAP accuses his accusers of being themselves hopelessly effete, often by way of comparison to imagined forefathers from a more virile, 'bronze' age". as well as self-publish their own 'BAPish' books, memes and writings that BAP will generously crosspromote via retweets.

Bronze Age Mindset

Bronze Age Pervert self-published the book Bronze Age Mindset via Amazon in June 2018. The 77-chapter "exhortation" is written with intentionally poor grammar, mixing Nietzschean philosophy with criticisms of modern society. Elisabeth Zerofsky in the New York Times calls the book "a pseudo Nietzschean critique of modernity" written "in a style that mixe a kind of faux-caveman brutishness and message-board pidgin with classical references". Book reviewer Inga-Lina Lindqvist of Swedish Aftonbladet cautions readers that despite the often impenetrable fever-dream style, "to simply dismiss BAP as yet another internet maniac who read Nietzsche and misunderstood Homer's humanistic intentions does not fly. He's too educated, too funny and too influential for that." BAP's thinking is marked by deep anti-egalitarianism. Andrew Marzoni in Aeon Magazine is less impressed and calls the book "Nietzschean pastiche", "a tedious commentary on classical philosophy", an unoriginal, basic paleoconservative call to action after "100 pages of manipulating Empedocles and Heraclitus into refutations of evolutionary biology, civilizational progress, the liberation of women and LGBTQ groups, and the contemporary effeminisation of men (much of which omits definite articles in mock imitation of a caveman)". Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs magazine writes that BAP in Bronze Age Mindset does not attempt to make (any) logical arguments, hides behind a mask of irony and compares the book to Hitler's Mein Kampf multiple times, finally concluding that "all of this ultimately does restate Mein Kampf, albeit with fewer (not zero) references to Jews and the absence of a particular narrative about avenging Germany's national humiliation at Versailles."

In 2019, conservative essayist Michael Anton reviewed Bronze Age Mindset for the Claremont Review of Books. Bronze Age Mindset was first given to Anton by Curtis Yarvin, creator of the neoreactionary movement, and Darren Beattie encouraged Anton to read it.

Tara Isabella Burton in her discussion of Bronze Age Mindset in her own book Strange Rites highlights BAP's tirades against the "bugman", a concept of a human analogous to Nietzsche's and Kojève's idea of the wretched "last man". According to Burton, BAP spends most of Bronze Age Mindset deriding progressive men of the twenty-first century, whom she describes as beta males denuded of their strength by modernity. According to the conservative National Review, the podcast uses a narrative style that highlights the great man theory. Almost every episode starts with an excerpt from Strauss's "Blue Danube Waltz." Most episodes feature other pieces from the classical music canon during segment breaks, like works from Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Bach and more.

James Noel Ward at the American University of Paris describes BAP as "a combination jester, mad prophet, comic character, and Rabelaisian oracle" and highlights BAP's frequent use of slapstick humor (among various other forms) on his podcast: "[BAP] interrupts his podcasts with fantastic pauses as he receives attacks by Israeli commandos, insidious malign agents, exotic carnivorous animals, biting tropical insects, and unseen vampiric forces." and challenges contemporary Western morality by celebrating Nietzschean ideals of strength, aristocracy, and tyranny over modern constitutionalism and democracy. Upon launch it briefly cracked Amazon's top 25 bestsellers.

Political scientist Matthew McManus points out that the work of Alamariu/BAP is influential in, and part of a wider far right philosophical project to reform modern society with natalist and eugenic ideas and ultimately policy. Which McManus summarizes as: "he idea is essentially that our society has become excessively effeminate, weak, compassionate (...) and what [the hard right] want to do is breed or elevate an aristocratic class that's going to be masculine, violent, not necessarily motivated by, let's call it empathy."

Reception Economist Tyler Cowen wrote some brief comments on the book on his blog Marginal Revolution and questions the premise of Alamariu's book that the sexual marketplace is indeed "the pinnacle of every other market" noting that people spend a lot of time not having sex. Further he notes that socialization and not purely breeding plays an important role in how next generations are constituted. Furthermore he argues that Alamariu's core thesis—that virtue and philosophy arise from hereditary breeding rather than education and socialization—is not sufficiently historically substantiated by Alamariu and internally contradictory. writing in The New Statesman that "BAP's image of male predation, rapine and pillage is the fantasy of an aspiring teenage gang member in a disintegrating modern city" and "is adolescent philosophy will soon be forgotten." Political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, who was one of BAP's Yale thesis examiners, argues that "[BAP is] a deliberate seeker of what is vulgar and what is uncivilized, or on the edge of civilization. [BAP] wants to make a point of the dirty necessities of politics and of founding (...) as people are on the edge of beginning civilization. That might be where the greatest truth or the greatest insight into the need for violence is most obvious."

Political science professor C. Bradley Thompson has criticized BAP's illiberal, anti-equality, anti-American, anti-rationalist stances and considers Bronze Age Pervert and his writings to be more or less fascist in nature. Other (Christian) right-wing critiques, like those of Dan DeCarlo, tend to focus on the "empty aesthetics" of the youthful "BAPist" movement and it being "a deeper recrudescence of paganism", Evan Myers also points out that the brand of "vitalism" that BAP promotes is a neopagan and illiberal ideology. Robert P. George names BAP as a noteworthy example of a novel trend of "conservative neopagan decadence" on the American right-wing. Jesse Russell notes that fundamentally, the right wing critique of "BAPism" differs little from the critique by the conventional right of the alt-right movement during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Political scientist Matt McManus writes that "BAP is not really a conservative or even a reactionary. In fact, [BAP] despises conservatives almost as much as he detests the Left" and argues that BAP's adherence to Nietzsche's "aristocratic radicalism" makes him better understood "as a kind of ultra-fascist of the Julius Evola stripe: someone for whom classical fascism is too democratic, too populist, and too vulgar." An old Yale classmate claims that BAP aspired to become a sort of 'Slavoj Žižek of the Right', meaning a respected and influential intellectual but with a distinct popular appeal. Blake Smith of the University of Chicago points out the strong influence of conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss on BAP's thinking. Journalist Katherine Stewart documents the Straussian Claremont Institute's ongoing intellectual flirtation with BAP and broader New Right ideology in Money, Lies, and God. Nicolas Truong in Le Monde and Octave Larmagnac-Matheron in Philosophie Magazine make note of the close ideological proximity between BAP and the neoreactionary movement (NRx) led by Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. Nicholas Low of Harvard Divinity School connects "BAP's impious brand of pseudo-philosophy" and effective accelerationism (e/acc) as ascendant strains of reactionary pseudo-Nietzschean thought that "enshrine visions of superhumanity at the heart of their worldviews: both revolve around outlandish dreams of superhuman life".

Vassar College's Pharos project, whose mission is "to document appropriations of Greco-Roman culture by hate groups online", claims that BAP is providing the "traditionalist right wing" with a tailor-made "mythic" narrative that depends "on a toxic blend of misogyny and white supremacy, with the ancient world as its archetype and source of prestige." Political scientist Josh Vandiver writes that the broader alt-right and the manosphere, both of which he considers BAP to be a prominent member of, According to BAP, as a self-described 'anti-xenoestrogen activist', the modern food industry is "full of harmful chemicals" that "slowly destroy your essence". which refers to a lifestyle centered around nude sunbathing and weightlifting. which is a broader trend on the post-liberal populist right wing. In the contemporary "based and red-pilled" iteration of late 19th century German vitalism "the natural vitalist home for the mind is not the body, however chiseled by Bronze Age weightlifting, but the machine, more perfected still."