Is the Bronze Age Pervert Going Mainstream?

Mother Jones; Unsplash

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.There is no way to explain who the Bronze Age Pervert is in conversation without causing the person listening to, at least for a moment, question your sanity.
“There’s this guy who posts pseudonymously under the name ‘Bronze Age Pervert,’ but he’s also no longer really pseudonymous, and has a PhD in philosophy from Yale.” What does he post about? “Like fascism and authoritarianism, and thinly veiled white supremacy, but about how hot and aesthetic the male physique is. And while everyone suspects he’s gay, he also writes homophobic stuff. He self-publishes books that a lot of people have read and he has a podcast called Caribbean Rhythms where he talks in a fake Russian accent, even though he’s from Romania. He’s got a big following, and a lot of influential far-right people are really into him. No, really,” is roughly how it goes.

Even though he sounds ludicrous and off-putting, BAP, whose real name is Costin Alamariu, is having a coming out of sorts. Yes, some guy who calls himself the Bronze Age Pervert is somehow on the precipice of going mainstream.
One of the first major media mentions of Alamariu, still then known solely by his pen name, came in 2019 when Politico reported a claim from right-wing troll Mike Cernovich that junior Trump White House staffers were fans of Bronze Age Pervert. In 2022, Nate Hochman—who was fired in July from Ron DeSantis’s campaign for making a promotional video featuring a Nazi symbol, but back then was a National Review writer—told The New York Times Magazine that “every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset,’” Alamariu’s 2018 book. The Daily Beast, Tablet, Politico, and The Atlantic all published pieces on the bizarre, fascist BAP internet persona, with the later two publications revealing his real name.
With Alamariu out of the shadows and no longer seemingly interested or able to stay in hiding behind his alter ego, more and more fans are starting to publicly support him. His new book, a version of his doctoral thesis, was published about two weeks ago under his real name, and is doing well on Amazon, briefly cracking the site’s top 25 bestsellers. His personal, real-name Twitter account, active since 2018, went from a few thousand followers to more than 20,000 roughly over the course of September.
Last week, the growing chorus of endorsers included at least two prominent right-of-center figures. As Alamariu started promotion for the book—Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy—Richard Hanania, a writer who also pseudonymously published racist screeds before amassing mainstream credentials while publishing only slightly veiled racist posts under his real name, tweeted at Alamariu that he was a fan of his new public persona. Christopher Rufo, the notorious architect of the ongoing assault on transgender rights and the broader LGTBQ community who enjoys relationships with prominent Republicans, congratulated Alamariu on the book’s impressive sales.
Hanania, Rufo, and Alamariu’s other supporters are endorsing someone who has written things like “I believe in Fascism or ’something worse’ and I can say so unambiguously because, unlike others, I have given up long ago all hope of being part of the respectable world or winning a respectable audience.” They are encouraging someone who has written about the “distinction between master races and the rest,” and criticized pro-natalism by claiming the “idea that whites or Japanese should start vomiting out six or seven children to a vagina like the illiterate slave hordes of Bangladesh or Niger is absurd.”
That Rufo and Hanania, leading intellectual lights of the contemporary right, have placed their bets on a guy who talks in a fake Russian accent could be an indication of their own dimming wattage. But the fact that they are taking BAP seriously unfortunately means the rest of us just may have to as well.