“How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right”
Author: Graeme Wood
Year: 2023
Genre: Longform journalism (profile)
Publication: The Atlantic, September 2023 issue (published online August 3, 2023)
Subtitle: “An internet personality who espouses fascism, racism, and bodybuilding has won influential converts.”
Core Argument
Graeme Wood — who knew Costin Alamariu (BAP) personally for nearly two decades — argues that BAPism represents a genuine and underestimated danger to American politics. BAP is not a shock jock or an ironic provocateur; he is a sincere fascist with a coherent philosophical vision (built on his Yale dissertation) who has embedded followers in government positions while instructing them to deny him publicly.
Wood’s central claim: liberalism’s unchallenged dominance in elite intellectual spaces (academia, journalism) left it defenseless against a serious illiberal challenge. “An unchallenged liberal democrat ceases to want to improve, unless he confronts his enemies in their most potent forms.” BAP is “a gnarly virus” that is “a vicious kick to the liberal immune system” — not entirely bad, in Wood’s framing, but potentially transformative in dangerous ways.
Biographical Information on Alamariu
This article is the most detailed biographical source on Costin Alamariu:
- Origin: Born in Romania; family emigrated to Newton, Massachusetts when Costin was approximately 10 years old. Wood knew him from this era through a mutual friend.
- Family: His father worked in MIT’s technology-licensing office. His older brother has no detectable accent and works as a geopolitical strategist at an investment research firm.
- Jewish: Alamariu has identified as Jewish on Twitter, and Wood confirms this is true. He has relatives who were interned in Nazi concentration camps.
- Education: Newton South High School; MIT undergraduate (mathematics major); brief career in investment banking in New York; Yale doctoral program in political science.
- Yale: His dissertation adviser was Steven B. Smith (a Straussian Leo Strauss scholar). He was also Bryan Garsten’s student (the Yale political theorist who later spoke at Michigan State about students being “captured” by illiberalism). His dissertation was titled “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche.”
- Emory: Hired for a postdoctoral fellowship in 2015. Disaster: he stopped teaching classes in person and attempted to teach over email; eventually a medical condition was cited. His fellowship was not renewed.
- Whereabouts: Has been sighted in Brazil, Japan, Spain, Hong Kong, and Iceland. Refuses to give institutional addresses.
- Personality: Faculty and grad students describe him as “clever and manipulative.” Wrote caustic letters to student newspapers. Disappeared for long periods. Claimed to have lived out of a van in Argentina. “When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself” (Nietzsche, his self-description).
The Dissertation
The dissertation — which became Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy (self-published September 2023) — argued that philosophy and tyranny are “fundamentally connected” and their shared aim is eugenic: the “breeding,” the “biological” production of genius, nobility, and virtue. His reading of Plato: Plato is a covert defender of tyranny; the philosopher’s aim is the production of a master race through selective breeding.
Smith’s reaction: “I was shocked that his family would escape Ceaușescu’s Romania only for Costin to undermine the principles of [American] democracy. I view that as a shameful act of betrayal.” He made his disgust known but ultimately signed off: “I was his dissertation adviser, not his censor.”
BAPists in Government
The article’s most alarming reporting: BAP has followers embedded in government who deny him publicly while building networks privately.
Vish Burra (32-year-old legislative aide to Rep. George Santos): compared BAPists to mutants in X-Men — hiding in plain sight until they “get in position first.” “Why would I [reveal myself] before I’m in front of the control panel?”
BAP posts photos of his followers’ copies of Bronze Age Mindset next to government credentials: U.S. government passports, Secret Service patches, Army Rangers IDs, Department of Homeland Security badges.
Matthew Kriner (Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism): BAP’s accounts appear “across the vast majority” of groups “trying to ignite race wars and revive fascist movements.” BAP “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.”
Nate Hochman: “Why did every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset?’”
Michael Anton’s Role
Anton’s 2019 Claremont Review of Books essay (“Are the Kids Al(t)-Right?”) is described as a gateway document: sympathetic to BAP while cataloging his racism and anti-Semitism, Anton’s review argued conservatives needed to understand what BAP was saying to disaffected youth — and ended with the ominous prophecy: “In the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAPism is winning.”
Wood: “BAP’s vile utterances, whether sincere or not, serve a purpose: to keep whiny leftists so busy cataloging his petty thoughtcrimes that they overlook his more serious heresies.”
Liberal Self-Criticism
The article ends with Yale professor Bryan Garsten’s self-critical speech at a Michigan State conference on liberalism: he had failed to cultivate students’ imagination, not just their reason. His students had learned why the Greeks admired Achilles (the fiery warrior) but not Ulysses (the wily, constrained, obligation-bearing man). “Life in a liberal democracy is full of demanding moments.” The liberals, confronted with BAP, began to remember why their cause was worth defending.
Relationship to Other Wiki Pages
- Major source for Costin Alamariu — provides biographical depth unavailable from Furious Minds
- Confirms and enriches Michael Anton’s “BAPism is winning” analysis
- Connects to Esotericism — BAP’s irony as Straussian concealment
- Connects to Hard Right — the BAPist-to-government pipeline
- Laura Field cited in Zerofsky’s NYT Magazine article as a critic of Claremont; here Wood independently converges on the same concerns about BAP’s influence
Contradictions and Tensions
Wood is more charitable to BAP’s intellectual seriousness than Field is: he finds genuine philosophical content in the reincarnation belief and the Straussian reading of Plato. Field’s counter-position (Furious Minds): “to look cool, you whitewash and elevate the genocidal writings of a maniac.” The Wood/Field disagreement about whether BAP’s irony conceals something worthwhile or is simply dangerous is unresolved in the wiki.