How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right
Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega
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In 2014, the actor B. J. Novak, best known as Ryan, the weaselly temp from The Office, went on the Late Show With David Letterman and confessed to a small role he’d played 17 years earlier in the history of the American far right. The significance of this role could not have been obvious at the time, either to Novak (who was in high school) or to its victims, the bewildered patrons of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Novak had recruited a Romanian classmate with a deep voice, and together they’d recorded an audio tour for the exhibition “Tales From the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years of Chinese Painting.” With the help of friends, they then slipped cassettes containing their tour into the museum’s official audio guides.
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.
Exit Novak from the stage of American fascism. (His last known political donation was $1,000 to Hillary Clinton in 2016.) But the Romanian has kept in character, complete with the peevish attitude and hammed-up accent. About the time Novak went on Letterman, the Romanian began posting on social media as “Bronze Age Pervert,” a mad-in-both-senses weirdo who had escaped the Museum of Fine Arts and now aimed to take over the world. His message, delivered in tweets, podcasts, and a self-published book, mixes ultra-far-right politics, unabashed racism, and a deep knowledge of ancient Greece. He has never shown his face or admitted his real name. But I know Bronze Age Pervert, and have known him almost as long as B. J. Novak has. He’s an MIT graduate who grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. His name is Costin Alamariu.
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
