An internet personality who espouses fascism, racism, and bodybuilding has won influential converts.
Art lovers must have wondered about the thick Eastern European accent that greeted them, over the twang of a Chinese string instrument. The Romanian soon became opinionated (“Personally,” he said, “I think this painting is a piece of crap”), then deranged. He alluded to his “disgusting anatomical abnormalities.” He called his listeners “decadent imperialist maggots” and confessed a desire to smash a glass case with a sledgehammer and “rip [a] scroll to shreds with my teeth, which, by the way, are extremely long and sharp … more like fangs than human teeth.” At last he offered an interlude of “idiot music” while he fumbled with his script. “This should keep you occupied, you drooling imbecile!” he bellowed at the listeners, by now either amused or complaining to management. The last several minutes were a cha-cha by Tito Puente.
Exit Novak from the stage of American fascism. (His last known political donation was $1,000 to Hillary Clinton in 2016.) But the Romanian has kept in character, complete with the peevish attitude and hammed-up accent. About the time Novak went on Letterman, the Romanian began posting on social media as “Bronze Age Pervert,” a mad-in-both-senses weirdo who had escaped the Museum of Fine Arts and now aimed to take over the world. His message, delivered in tweets, podcasts, and a self-published book, mixes ultra-far-right politics, unabashed racism, and a deep knowledge of ancient Greece. He has never shown his face or admitted his real name. But I know Bronze Age Pervert, and have known him almost as long as B. J. Novak has. He’s an MIT graduate who grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. His name is Costin Alamariu.
It is hard to convey precisely what BAP believes, in part because his views are so outlandish that even when stated simply, they sound like incoherent ranting. America’s civic religion holds that all humans have inherent and equal worth, that they should not be graded according to beauty or nobility, and that they should not aim to destroy one another. BAP says this orthodoxy is exactly wrong. He argues that the natural and desirable condition of life is the domination of the weak and ugly by the strong and noble. He considers American cities a “wasteland” run by Jews and Black people, though the words he uses to denote these groups are considerably less genteel than these.
The modern state, he says, has been designed to empower the feebleminded and the misshapen at the expense of their betters. The strong and noble must humiliate and conquer their tormentors and destroy their institutions. On Twitter, where he has more than 100,000 followers, BAP posts images of seminude Aryan beefcakes, usually in tropical settings, to celebrate the physical perfection of the warrior element of the race that he hopes will someday be restored to dominance.
The world, or at least parts of it, has been more receptive to BAP than one might think. By now he is a leading cultural figure on the fascist right—among both elites, who have cottoned to his political philosophy, and non-elites, who love his brio and aspire to his erudition.
I consider myself a connoisseur of brilliant lunatics, and I have a high tolerance for their lunacy if it has compensating virtues of, say, humor or ingenuity. But even I find BAP worrisome. What starts as comedy can become something more sinister—and BAP’s shtick, while sometimes hilarious, shows every sign of transforming into a new mode of far-right radicalism, with fans in positions of responsibility and power.
Typically philosophy books go unread even by the philosophers’ closest friends and family. But BAP’s book, Bronze Age Mindset (2018), tumbled screeching into the world, unignorable, at one point ranking among the top 150 books in the entire Amazon catalog. “It’s still a cult book,” a former Trump White House official told Politico in 2019. “If you’re a young person, intelligent, adjacent in some way to the right, it’s very likely you would have heard of it.” His podcast, Caribbean Rhythms, has likewise won an avid following.
Only the most incautious admit their devotion. BAP tells his young disciples to burrow into government, to deny him publicly, to wait. Matthew Kriner, with the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, monitors the social-media activity of groups that are trying to ignite race wars and revive fascist movements. Their accounts have unsubtle Teutonic names such as Atomwaffen. “Bronze Age Pervert is across the vast majority of them,” Kriner told me. Moreover, he has an odd crossover appeal—among both extremely online misfits and figures with real-world influence. BAP, Kriner said, “represents that bridge to get you from really not-acceptable content to maybe ending up in someone’s legislative activities, within a very reasonable amount of time.”…….