Costin Alamariu (“Bronze Age Pervert” / BAP)
Hard Right anonymous influencer; born Romania; raised Newton MA; MIT undergraduate; Yale PhD in Straussian political philosophy 2015 (dissertation: “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche”); postdoc at Emory (contract not renewed); author of Bronze Age Mindset (BAM, self-published June 2018); popular among GOP Capitol Hill staffers; “I come with tablets of hatred, and destructions for the SPLEEN of mankind”
Who He Is
Costin Alamariu is the Romanian-American academic who is the person behind the “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP) persona — a fact kept secret for years but exposed by journalist Rosie Gray. He is one of the most influential and disturbing figures of the Hard Right: a Yale-trained Straussian political philosopher who turned his credentials into the most virulent far-right influencer persona on the internet.
Field: “To look cool, you whitewash and elevate the genocidal writings of a maniac.”
Biography
Born in Romania; family emigrated when Costin was approximately 10 years old. Grew up in Newton, Massachusetts — a large Jewish community; his family is Jewish, with relatives who were interned in Nazi concentration camps. 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; Costin has kept his Romanian accent in both private life and in character.
Education: Newton South High School; MIT undergraduate (mathematics major); brief career in investment banking in New York City; Yale doctoral program in political science, where his dissertation advisers were Steven B. Smith (a Straussian Leo Strauss scholar) and Bryan Garsten (political theorist, later famous for speaking at Michigan State about students being “captured” by illiberal alternatives). Received his Yale PhD in 2015. Dissertation: “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche.”
Emory: Hired for a postdoctoral fellowship in 2015. The arrangement was a disaster: he stopped teaching classes in person and attempted to teach over email; Emory discovered he had a medical condition making in-person teaching impossible. He refused to give the human resources department his home address. Fellowship not renewed.
After Emory: Lived for some time in Brazil; more recently sighted in Japan, Spain, Hong Kong, and Iceland. His whereabouts are deliberately obscured.
Exposed: Journalist Graeme Wood — who had known Alamariu personally since their Cambridge, Massachusetts era — identified him as BAP in an Atlantic profile (August 2023). Wood had known him from a mutual friend in the Newton South High School-era intellectual clique that favored Nietzsche and Rachmaninoff. Their correspondence lasted nearly two decades before Wood let it trail off over Alamariu’s escalating slurs.
Bronze Age Mindset (2018)
Self-published June 2018; quickly became a bestseller on Amazon. Structured as a mimicry of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (four parts plus prologue). Michael Anton reviewed it in the Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2019) in an essay called “Are the Kids Al(t)-Right?” Anton had received the book from Curtis Yarvin; Darren Beattie urged him to take it seriously.
The persona: BAP writes in a hammed-up, thick Romanian accent that “ignores grammatical conventions… words are often misspelled or dropped, verbs mis-conjugated, punctuation rules ignored.” (“Wat means?”) The style is deliberately humorous and transgressive, providing cover for its most extreme content.
Core narrative of human history:
- The Bronze Age was a golden age: men revolted against the “womanly, proto-socialist age of the communal longhouse,” exerted their power, invented political order and rule
- Today: mankind has succumbed again to “gynocracy” — the “sallow night of matriarchy” — “the Longhouse”
- It is time for manly men to rise up and take action
Part 1 (“owned space”): There is no wilderness left; everything is “owned” by mankind. Boys can’t play in the wild → this explains the “supposed rise in homosexuality in the modern world.” True manliness “develops into the will to actually dominate space around oneself… this domination is not possible when space is already owned.” Modern owned space = a prison.
Part 2 (“Parable of Iron Prison”): The “iron prison” / “the Longhouse” = “the sallow night of matriarchy.” The world’s spaces are “all dominated and owned by women, and by gay men.” “The higher instincts of the spirit are being overtaken physiologically by the retrograde and prehistoric.”
Part 3 (“Men of Power and the Ascent of Youth”): Character sketches, including the famous passage comparing Mitt Romney to the Athenian Alcibiades.
Part 4 (“A Few Arrows, Programmatic”): Advice to young readers: lift weights, join the military, prepare for a takeover of the world, sow great chaos, discredit the system. Also: undertake “the great down-going” (visiting marginal communities — slums and dives — to stir up disorder that undermines the security of the liberal state). BAP is adamant that “only a fool would talk openly about their love of BAP.”
Anton’s defanging: Anton’s 2019 review focused on Parts 1-3 and minimized Part 4’s programmatic violence, treating the outrageousness as ironic cover for a serious political philosophy. Field: this is whitewashing.
The Longhouse Monologue (February 16, 2022)
A recorded BAP monologue reposted on Twitter by @proteinpilled. BAP described the Longhouse as “a type of absolutist herdism that… has put safety as its highest promise.” He claimed Covid-19 had proven his account: “You live already in a post-political post-state gynocratic order.” The gynocracy is not under the control of a secret cabal but rather “you are just enslaved by the desires of 40-something femme-cels who haven’t been fucked in years.” It is “subject to the dark yoke of female and deviant tyranny, which is darker, more hopeless and brutal than any that has existed.” Future: “a tyranny that promises horrors even worse than what Bolshevism or communism delivered.”
He explained his use of humor: to break free of “lame narcissistic self-important style,” give people cover (“you can say ‘BAP is a buffoon!’”), and because it is the best way to reach people. Then, in a different register: his humor is also his “attempts as a humble internet poster to DECLARE WAR ON ALL MANKIND.” He called for “TOTAL WAR” against the meek, the scurrying, the safety-obsessed. The clip concluded: “I come with tablets of hatred, and destructions for the SPLEEN of mankind. In hundreds of years they will say he came on a donkey with tablets of hatred for all mankind. He was a Moses to the frogs. He was a Moses to the redeemers of the world in FIRE.”
Field: “There is a parallel danger that comes with not cataloging BAP’s ‘petty thought crimes,’ as well as with presuming that there is something ‘earnest’ and ‘serious’ undergirding Alamariu’s work that can somehow be disentangled from his rhetorical faux pas. The danger there is that, to look cool, you whitewash and elevate the genocidal writings of a maniac.”
The Atlantic Profile and Going Mainstream (August 2023)
In August 2023, Alamariu was the subject of an extended profile in The Atlantic by staff writer Graeme Wood (see How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right), who had known BAP personally since the early Cambridge years. The profile named and identified BAP as Costin Alamariu — the identity he had concealed for nearly a decade. It included comments from his Yale advisors, Bryan Garsten and Steven B. Smith.
Smith — the head of Alamariu’s dissertation committee — said he 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.” Smith said he had “made his disgust known” but ultimately signed off on Alamariu’s work in 2015 because he “was his dissertation adviser, not his censor.” Field: this is “admirable.” It is also “a perfect demonstration of the natural vulnerabilities (and nobility) of liberalism”: other political orders imprison, exile, or kill their ideological opponents; the liberal “regime” gives them tassels, velvet robes, and profiles in The Atlantic.
Around the same time, Nate Hochman (a rising star on the New Right) told journalist Elisabeth Zerofsky that every junior staffer in the Trump administration had read Bronze Age Mindset.
BAP’s Platonic Reading: Thymos against Logos
Alamariu’s Yale dissertation — later published as Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy (2023) — makes the Republic the center of a Nietzsche-Plato synthesis that inverts the standard Straussian reading.
Where Strauss valorizes logos (reason, the philosopher who ascends from the Cave to see the Form of the Good), BAP valorizes thymos (the spirited part — the warrior’s honor, the will to victory). BAP’s “Bronze Age” ideal is the timocratic man — the honor-loving, spirited soul that Plato ranks second among constitutional types (Republic VIII, 547d-548b), already the first stage of degeneration from the ideal. Where Plato sees timocracy as noble but flawed (it will decay into oligarchy), BAP sees it as the peak of human vitality.
The “beast within” (Republic IX, 571b-572b): Plato describes the lawless desires awakened in sleep, when reason slumbers — the soul’s capacity for incest, murder, any act of folly. Plato wants to discipline this through education and law. BAP celebrates it: the “beast within” is not a danger to be tamed but the source of vitality that the modern liberal order has suppressed. Bronze Age Mindset is written from the perspective of the appetitive-spirited soul that Plato would educate into submission.
Philosophy and tyranny as kindred: The dissertation argues that philosophy and tyranny are not antagonists but fundamentally related — both involve the soul’s drive to transgress convention, dominate space, and remake the world according to its vision. This is the opposite of the Straussian reading (philosopher as reluctant, non-ambitious, private). For BAP, the philosopher is a kind of tyrant of the soul; the New Right’s political program is the philosopher’s tyranny externalized.
The erotic drone (Republic IX, 572e-573a): Plato describes erotic love as “a great winged drone” that occupies the citadel of the soul and drives the tyrant. For BAP, this is not horror but aspiration. His celebration of male eros, physical domination, and “owned space” maps onto Plato’s erotic-tyrannical soul — which Plato says is the most wretched of all souls (579d), and BAP presents as the most vital.
Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy (September 2023)
A month after the Atlantic profile brought his identity to light, Alamariu self-published his Yale dissertation under a new, offensive title: Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy (September 15, 2023; original title: “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche”). It briefly entered the Amazon top 100.
Core argument: The birth of philosophy was intimately connected to the idea of “breeding” — coeval with the discovery of the concept of nature (physis in Greek). Alamariu bundled the concepts of nature and “breeding” to aristocracy, contrasting these with convention, “taming,” and “fundamental democracy” or “totalitarian democracy” (reminiscent of the Longhouse). He contended that philosophy and tyranny are indelibly connected — not as antagonists but as truly kindred. He asserted that virtue is straightforwardly hereditary.
Also infused into the self-published version: raw “race science.” On page 45, Alamariu claimed that “Black Africans, in particular” are “so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries. A revelation as shocking as it is by now indisputable.” The sources Alamariu cites do not say this. Field: this is a lie.
Dustin Sebell (a Straussian scholar) published a scathing review: the book was full of muddled concepts and “Straussian lullabies” (unquestioned dogmas). Field: Alamariu “repeatedly fell prey to a particularly juvenile form of cognitive bias: the supposition that every ‘insight’ that is titillating or cruel must also be secretly true and important.”
The dissertation committee leak: Two days after Selective Breeding’s publication, someone brought renewed attention to the doctoral committee’s official commentary (from 2015) by posting it on X under the handle “TheognisOMegara.” The records — typically kept confidential — were posted publicly, and Alamariu retweeted them with the comment “Quite weird, odd … and maybe interesting?!” Field: it is hard to imagine Alamariu did not leak them himself. The committee records — which included Harvey Mansfield of Harvard — showed each faculty member praising his work, despite the clear criticisms also contained.
Mainstreaming BAPism: Reactions and Alliances
Upon publication, Hard Right sites and slices of the American far left celebrated the book. Christopher Rufo congratulated Alamariu on X. Rising right-wing star Richard Hanania expressed support. Dasha Nekrasova of the Red Scare podcast celebrated it on X; Alamariu responded in turn.
The Red Scare podcast (Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan) had already reviewed Bronze Age Mindset on their podcast in 2022 and found themselves “taken with the book — with its aesthetics, humor, and transgressiveness.” Khachiyan admitted to being jealous of BAP as a writer: “When somebody’s art is pure and good, you cannot help but be truly appreciative of them and celebrate their existence” — while fully acknowledging its “latent fascism and hard-core racism.” They had BAP on for a three-hour interview (BAP: “I talk to people from all walks of life who will listen to you at so called highest levels of American society and they love you”).
Field: Selective Breeding’s reception “shone new light on the growing relationship between the Hard Right and the so-called dirtbag left.”
Raw Egg Nationalist and Antelope Hill
Alamariu is connected to Raw Egg Nationalist (REN) — an anonymous Hard Right Twitter/X figure featured prominently in Tucker Carlson’s “The End of Men” documentary (October 5, 2022) and in REN’s Man’s World magazine. Field covered REN extensively for The Bulwark (April 2022), after REN’s “The Decline Is Real” appeared in the Claremont Institute’s American Mind.
REN publishes work with Antelope Hill Publishing — a small fascist publishing house in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Antelope Hill publishes Dr. Joseph Goebbels’s novel Michael, Testament of a Russian Fascist, and Richard Walther Darré’s A New Nobility of Blood and Soil (whose website description notes: “Richard Walther Darré, an Obergruppenführer in the SS, was the leading ‘Blood and Soil’ ideologist of Germany and served his people as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture… foundational to the National Socialist worldview”). A Daily Beast article (January 2022) called Antelope Hill “openly fascist”; a blog tracking reactionary racism labeled it “a white supremacist publishing company.” To celebrate Hitler’s birthday on April 20, 2022, it offered a discount on all its books, and an even bigger discount on a collection of Hitler’s speeches, with the discount code “birthday boy.”
REN was also on BAP’s podcast “Caribbean Rhythms” in summer 2022, where both were excited about “The End of Men” featuring REN. BAP conceded, not for the first time, that he considers himself a fascist.
BAP’s “Strictly Cultural” Pretense
During his Red Scare interview, Alamariu disclaimed any interest in serious fascist politics, saying it was “totally unrealistic and had no future.” He insisted his project was “strictly cultural.” Field: this line — “caring only for culture, not for politics” — has been a favorite of elite fascist intellectuals since the 1930s. It is reminiscent of Heidegger’s distinction between “vulgar National Socialism” and “spiritual National Socialism,” or of Alain de Benoist’s “metapolitical” ideas for “total ideological saturation” in the Nouvelle Droite.
The parallel in Alamariu’s own national tradition: Mircea Eliade, the famous University of Chicago professor whose commitment to Romania’s fascist Legionary Movement was fully exposed only after his death — because throughout his life he said he had only ever been interested in the “cultural and religious dimensions” of the movement. For Eliade (as for BAP), fascism involved mystical vitality and the myth of a “new man.” The feigned distinction between politics and culture is just a mask for totalizing politics.
Significance
BAP’s on-again-off-again Twitter/X feed alternates between “racist spewings, photographs of white muscle men posing on beaches around the world, and prowar propaganda. His life’s goal appears to be to inspire bodily and military strength among young white men, to weaken or destroy everyone else, especially women.”
Bronze Age Mindset is reportedly popular among GOP staffers on Capitol Hill — an extraordinary fact about the state of American conservatism. Graeme Wood: “BAP’s vile utterances, whether sincere or not, serve a purpose: to keep whiny leftists so busy cataloging his petty thought crimes that they overlook his more serious heresies. Meanwhile, those capable of reading him without being rage-blinded quietly learn from him and heed his advice to bond, network, and plot.”
Field’s framing: “To look cool, you whitewash and elevate the genocidal writings of a maniac.”
Cross-References
- Hard Right — the camp he defines
- Curtis Yarvin — who introduced BAM to Anton; fellow Dimes Square fixture
- Michael Anton — reviewed BAM for Claremont Review of Books (2019)
- Darren Beattie — urged Anton to take BAM seriously; close to Bannon and Yarvin
- West Coast Straussianism — his academic training (Yale, dissertation on Plato/Nietzsche)
- Esotericism — his deliberate “irony” as cover for sincere genocidal content
- Ideas First — BAM as the Hard Right’s contribution to the Ideas First paradigm
- Tucker Carlson — featured REN (Alamariu’s collaborator) in “The End of Men”
- Christopher Rufo — congratulated Alamariu on Selective Breeding; conduit between Claremont and Hard Right
- Manosphere — the masculinity-crisis ecosystem in which REN and BAP operate
- Republic — the Platonic text at the center of his dissertation; his reading inverts the Straussian interpretation
- Plato — the ancient philosopher he engages with (and against) in his academic and public work