How a fascist bodybuilder captured the imagination of the far right
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.
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.
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.”
Anton wrote that BAP “speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite.” Anton, who was once a graduate student in political philosophy, ended his essay by prognosticating a BAPist future: “In the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAPism is winning.”
BAPism, for all its emphasis on bodily perfection, began as an intellectual phenomenon, and its first victories came in intellectual circles. They were so subtle that even the guardians of those circles recognized their enemy only after he was already within the gates.
Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.
But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.
Some at the conference countered that these illiberals might have just not done their homework. “Your students need to become better readers,” said Diana J. Schaub, a political-science professor at Loyola University Maryland. But Garsten’s illiberal students were good readers. Their deficiencies lay elsewhere, possibly everywhere but there.
Many of the participants knew that Garsten was talking about the threat posed by Bronze Age Pervert, though his name was uttered with great reluctance. Partly this reluctance came from political philosophers’ unwillingness to admit that they browse the Twitter feed of a genocidal nudist. Partly it was their worry that they had unwittingly been complicit in BAPism’s spread by sending their students to intern in Washington, and to staff offices on Capitol Hill and in conservative institutions such as the Heritage Foundation.
From there, BAPism reached members of the right who lack philosophical training—young men whose main interest is not in the rise or fall of the American civic religion but in something more primal, an urge they themselves hardly understand, let alone control. “There is a level of self-loathing, chronic-masturbating anger out there among adolescent and early-20s fucked-up males,” one Republican operative told me. To them the world is dry, purposeless, and designed for the flourishing of anyone but them. Conservatism in the old way—not Bronze Age old, but Reagan old—does not satisfy them. “BAPism essentially involves re-enchanting the world and giving purpose to these young guys,” the operative told me. “And for some reason we can’t.”
After the museum prank, almost 20 years passed before BAP’s politics emerged into the light. And just as it did, the Romanian himself shrank vampirically into the shadows. No one seems sure where he is, or how he spends his days. But a sufficiently colorful and idiosyncratic personality is its own guarantee of detection. When I heard his podcast, it took me about 10 seconds to identify him.
Costin Alamariu is in his mid-40s, and he has never publicly admitted that he is BAP. (He did not reply to requests for comment for this article.) I met him only once, two decades ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a mutual friend intuited that we might enjoy each other’s company. Costin appeared one night wearing a dramatic overcoat—the kind whose wearer is begging for those around him to make a comment. I resisted. He had emigrated from Romania, he said, when he was about 10. That explained the Dracula note in his voice.
We spent that evening striding around Cambridge, having what I vaguely recall as a conversation that started with philosophy and then roamed widely over history, ethnography, and literature. Notably absent from our discussion was mathematics, then Costin’s undergraduate major at MIT. He had a gift for finely titrated offense—just enough to appall me but keep the conversation going. He learned that I was studying Persian, and I said the grammar was startlingly simple, because its use as a lingua franca over several centuries had shorn it of many of its complexities. “Is it like Spanish,” he asked, in a mischievous deadpan, “where every time you say a word, you feel your brain shrinking?”
About 10 years ago, he took to calling my friends “fags” and exhorting me not to “be a faggot.” At some point he had begun bodybuilding, and he sent me a picture of himself shirtless, with the message “Do you like this pic of me.” (He had asked me to keep our messages between us, and I continue to honor that request, with the exception of offhand remarks, comments he has repeated elsewhere, and publicly available facts. He must have sent the seminude thirst pic to others, because I have not shared it, but it has surfaced on social media.)
Eventually I decided that the book recommendations and ethnographic whimsies no longer made the slurs worth enduring. I let our correspondence trail off. I wrote to him when I discovered his BAP persona, and then it was he who stopped replying to me.
