Bronze Age Pervert


Bronze Age Pervert, also known as BAP, is a pseudonymous far-right Internet personality, associated with the manosphere. The media has identified Costin Vlad Alamariu, 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. According to Politico, neither Alamariu nor BAP responded to requests for comment, and Alamariu did not deny being BAP when the association was previously made. Graeme Wood of The Atlantic has also identified him, claiming he has known Alamariu for many years.
Alamariu was born in Romania in 1980 and immigrated to the U.S. with his family at the age of 10. He attended Newton South High School near Boston, majored in mathematics at MIT, and studied philosophy as a graduate student at Columbia University. He graduated with a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, with a 2015 dissertation titled The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche. At the universities he attended, he was active in criticizing the perceived left-wing bias of academia.
Alamariu was born to a Romanian mother and a Jewish father, and was baptized as an infant in the Romanian Orthodox Church.

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. The Twitter account @bronzeageperv then joined Twitter in November 2013 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. On August 4, 2021, Twitter suspended BAP again. 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.
BAP's original Twitter biography stated: "Steppe barbarian. Nationalist, Fascist, Nudist Bodybuilder! Purification of world. Revolt of the damned. Destruction of the cities!" It later described him as a "Free speech and anti-xenoestrogen activist." The banner above BAP's Twitter profile was a close up photo of Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 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 " 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 frequently condemns alt-right leadership figures, such as Richard Spencer. 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". In addition to right wing politicians, the broad group of political influencers, bloggers, and podcasters known as "anti-woke leftists" or "dirtbag leftists" have received criticism in the press for discussing and engaging with BAP and the broader far right on Twitter, most notably Anna Khachiyan of the Red Scare podcast.
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,' 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". Additionally, Bronze Age Pervert's Twitter followers will "post images of their own physiques, sometimes under the hashtag '#frogtwitter,' seeking BAP's approval and coveted retweet" as well as self-publish their own 'BAPish' books, memes and writings that BAP will generously crosspromote via retweets. By 2023 Vandiver notes that "espite multiple instances of deplatforming from social media, BAP’s following is now large and we can identify 'BAPism' as a masculinist subculture" and that BAP's influence and essays can be found in and on multiple zines where "masculinist identitarians move feverishly between high theory and jocular memetics, metapolitical musings and geopolitical ambitions."

''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.
The book centers on BAP's ideal vision, the eponymous "Bronze Age Mindset", which he defines as "the secret desire… to be worshiped as a god!" and which he calls a state "of complete power and freedom". The book's main theme argues against the concept of human equality. BAP discusses classical figures, including Alcibiades, Periander of Corinth, and the heroes of the Homeric epics. In particular, BAP argues that the historical figures of the pirate and soldier of fortune are heroic ideals and asserts that classical education is wasted on both liberals and conventional conservatives. Although BAP does not provide sources, notes or formal references in the book, he mentions Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and pre-Socratic thinkers like Heraclitus very frequently.

Reception

The New Republic describes the book as "rambling", "dizzying", displaying "prose … artfully penned" but "arguments … fractured and incoherent". The Economist echoes the "rambling" classifier. 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 ". Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs magazine writes that BAP in Bronze Age Mindset does not attempt to make 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 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. Anton claims that the book's provocativeness makes it successful and popular among right wing youths. Bronze Age Mindset was first given to Anton by Curtis Yarvin, creator of the neoreactionary movement, and Darren Beattie encouraged Anton to read it. The Straussian Claremont Institute subsequently published a symposium on the review in their online publication The American Mind, including a response essay from BAP in which he compared "the anti-male and anti-white rhetoric of the new left" to anti-Tutsi propaganda before the Rwandan genocide.
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.
Bronze Age Mindset gained a following in right-wing circles, including staffers of the Trump White House and on Capitol Hill, according to anonymous sources described by Politico. National Review writer Nate Hochman claims that many of his peers who read the book and Anton's review of it ended up interning at the Claremont Institute, and asks, "Why did every junior staffer in the Trump administration read 'Bronze Age Mindset?' There was something there that was clearly attractive to young conservative elites." In the summer of 2018 it was among the top 150 books sold on Amazon sitewide, which is notable according to Anton and Dan DeCarlo since it was achieved without the aid of a publicist or book deal. In October 2019, it was still ranked third in Ancient Greek History and #174 in Humour on the Amazon best-seller list.