The academic job market is cutthroat at the best of times, and perhaps even more so for conservatives — especially in the febrile atmosphere of the Trump years. “Being a right-winger in political science during the Obama years was pretty easy because history had decided we were extraneous,” Alamariu’s former classmate said. But it was different under Trump, when many liberals began to view the right as not just wrong or an oddity but actively dangerous. “Costin was always kind of a fringy character anyway,” this person said. “But certainly once the ‘oh, this is an amusing curiosity’ quality went out, I can see it not going well.”

As Alamariu was building his short-lived career in academia, the Bronze Age Pervert persona was already taking shape online. An account with that name became a regular poster in 2010 — while Alamariu was in the middle of graduate studies at Yale — on anonymous Internet forums Salo and The Phora, which are now defunct. Early posts show that the ingredients for Bronze Age Pervert were already in place.

On April 16, 2011, BAP, whose profile photo was a muscular young man pulling his tank top to the side to expose a hairless, defined pectoral muscle, pitched a “radical new proposal” to other Phora users.

“From a eugenic point of view, we should accept and encourage the so-called ‘gay liberation’ movement,” BAP wrote. He believed, he wrote, that “it is very likely that the majority of human males are homosexual.” Furthermore, “it is better to encourage them to be so, in order that the few (2-3%) of men who are alpha by nature should impregnate most of the women. There will be social chaos and an era of destruction upon us, but human nature will benefit as the majority of men, who are homos, will no longer breed.” This proposal presages a key plank of modern BAPism: the denigration of family life and the valorization of the male “alpha.”

BAP’s posts on Salo, where his profile picture was a fully nude male figure shot in black and white from behind, sometimes amount to juvenile “shitposting.” “Oboma [sic] won because i masturbated,” he posted Nov. 7, 2012. His posts show an interest in the same themes that continue to animate his career today: which men are gay and how not-gay he is, bodybuilding, genetics, nationalism, beauty, etc.

They also reveal glimpses of a person who struggled with the expectation of partnership and marriage. In a post from 2015 on Salo, BAP indicates that he had left the U.S. He described seeing women from different countries in a cafe where he now lived and being taken with the beauty of the Brazilian women but disgusted by the American women, who to him were “animals” and “dog women.” “Probably the worst part of living the US is this experience of never being carried away by desire for a woman in this way, because none of them are capable of inspiring it,” BAP wrote. He was 34 at the time he wrote the post. In 2016, BAP chimed in to a Salo discussion about marriage and the advantages of “mail order brides.” “No one is worth marrying,” BAP wrote. “Marrying is inherently a bad deal for men. This is why bachelorhood was illegal in early Rome. … Marriage is a social and political institution, that men had to be coaxed in by law and by being given tremendous legal privileges (ownership of the wife and family, including often power of life and death). But even with those privileges it’s hardly worthwhile. This is why I say I would only consider marriage to a very rich woman.”

That same year, Alamariu’s byline began popping up around the internet in right-leaning journals. In July 2016, he wrote a column in Taki’s Magazine, a publication known for publishing far-right and white nationalist writers like Richard Spencer and Gavin McInnes, defending Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin. “The same international vampires who raped Russia and who hate Putin for stopping their schemes are now shaking with fear that an American can stop them at home,” he wrote.

The next year, he wrote again for Taki’s about South American politics and race and wrote essays on his Medium page. In one article, Alamariu lambasted global elites’ supposed turn toward “matriarchy” and a system that favored incompetent bureaucratic functionaries comparable to historical “court eunuchs,” a class of servant in ancient history who had been castrated and, without any ability to establish their own dynasty, was thus seen as less threatening to those in power. Written shortly after Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March, the piece argued that the march happened because privileged women “didn’t get the matriarch they believed was their due” because of a sense of entitlement they had been afforded by a corrupt elite full of “weak-minded, and therefore easily-controlled, mental and spiritual cripples.”

Alamariu’s work shows a deep suspicion of democracy that ties into his views about male supremacy and hearkens back to his graduate work on tyranny. The modern meritocratic state, he argues, doesn’t work because of its focus on consensus-building and equality, which prevent real achievement and empower the weak; society functions better under the rule of leaders like Putin and Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro who govern like real men, without regard for public opinion or fairness.

Alamariu’s writing under his real name is sophisticated, but turgid. “The issue at hand has to do fundamentally with the fitness of the post-war liberal order — specifically the elites promoted through the educational and electoral system — to manage modern economies and modern states,” he wrote in the Bolsonaro article, echoing the argument in his 2017 Medium piece about the character of the ruling classes. In this article, Alamariu described himself as “an on-and-off resident of Rio for some years.”

But if Alamariu still had one foot in mainstream respectability and polish, Bronze Age Pervert didn’t — and he was taking off because of it. Anonymity, and the creation of a strange and compelling persona, turned out to be the key to getting people to listen. The book was spreading by word of mouth, and in influential circles.

Yarvin “literally held it up over his head with two hands like it was some kind of talisman,” Anton told me about when he was given the book. “He said, ‘Behold, Bronze Age Mindset.’” Anton read it also at the urging of Beattie, another former Trump White House aide. Beattie told him he needed to read it if he “really wanted to know what was going on among younger people.”

Edward Luttwak, the writer of books on military strategy and history, heard from Bronze Age Pervert through intermediaries several years ago. BAP had read a 2012 essay by Luttwak in the London Review of Books about a spate of recent translations of The Iliad and what it said about the epic’s lasting appeal. Luttwak wrote that The Iliad, with its valorization of men who were braver and nobler even than the gods, “offers a vision of uncompromised human dignity which was very rare indeed over much of human history,” of “human dignity at its fullest, undiminished by piety or deference to gods or kings.” Catnip for BAP.

“He has admirers, he has intense admirers who did everything to connect him to me,” Luttwak said. These, he said, were a “group of people involved in the Washington political scene” who share BAP’s Nietzschean worldview. BAP called Luttwak from Spain, Luttwak said.

“As a classicist, he’s very serious,” Luttwak said. BAP’s “ideology reflects a very deep interest and a sophisticated understanding of the Bronze Age.” Luttwak believes that European cultures are dying out because of the abandonment of a Bronze Age ideology that once made them great. “Once you don’t have young people, you don’t have young energies, and you just have cautious old people, society cannot be vigorous intellectually, culturally, or in any other way,” Luttwak said.

Modern people must cooperate, be sensitive, avoid conflict; modern men must treat women as equals. But “women love warriors,” Luttwak said. And the Bronze Age concept of individual freedom “was antithetical to anything social, was antithetical to society. It was truly individualistic. And the Greeks were happy with that. But the central fact about it is the affirmation of, of life as an individual, artistic act.”

I pointed out that most men nowadays won’t have the opportunity to die in glorious combat. Luttwak countered that he himself had volunteered for three different wars with the Israeli armed forces, “so I experienced it. And I felt totally exhilarated and totally empowered by it.”

“The Bronze Age Pervert is raising the fundamental question before European civilization and its American extension, which is, are you willing to admit and acknowledge this kind of life-affirming ideology, which is what this is,” Luttwak said.

BAP’s many critics have pointed out the LARPing (live-action role-playing) nature of much of this. Is it helpful for men to imagine themselves as Achilles, or just a form of escapism?

“This is just a retreat from reality, a very unmanly retreat from reality I would add, and just an embrace of fantasy and unreality that isn’t really going to help you become a better man, become a better person,” said Jack Butler, a conservative writer who wrote a critique of Bronze Age Mindset for National Review earlier this year. “It will further ratify you in this little niche that you’ve created for yourself and for your friends. With the exception, I guess, that if you take some of the lifting advice seriously, you’ll get some gains.”

Butler agrees with BAP’s assessment of modern society as “deprecating authentic masculinity.” But he doesn’t think the answer is “this nostalgic fantasy of what a man should be at a time when there were fewer people in the world and more cities to conquer.”

Butler highlighted BAP’s disdain for family life, which sets him apart from the other more mainstream masculinity-crisis preachers on the right, such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who see a recommitment to family life as the solution to what ails the modern man.

Anton now teaches at Hillsdale, the conservative college in Michigan that has become a key institution in the Trump/post-Trump right. Among the students he sees, Bronze Age Mindset is as popular as ever.

“It seems to be more popular with younger people on the right than any kind of conventional conservatism. … I can tell you that as a teacher,” Anton said. “In a number of programs, I come across a lot of people under 25, or, you know, in that area, and the majority of them, at least the males, and some of the women, … have read the book. Whether they agree with it, whether they ultimately accept it is another question. But there’s a sense that, if you’re under a certain age, and you’re in the conservative world, you need to read it.”

Anton thinks this is attributable more to the book’s outrageousness than its content. This is a book that calls developing countries the “Turd World,” full of “zombi [sic] hordes” living in filth and hardly better than animals; it’s a book that argues that “the true environmentalism is racism and has a racist foundation.” BAP uses the word “f—-try” freely, calls everything gay and argues that women should have no role in political affairs. It’s the kind of material that would fit in on 4chan.

“We live in a particularly oversensitive age in which people just want to get offended about everything,” Anton said. “And I think that just heightens the natural enjoyment that younger people take in offensive content. And it’s acted as, to use national security jargon, a force multiplier on the book.”

If you’re a lonely young man on the Internet who hates “woke” stuff, it won’t take long to get to BAP. The question is what you do when you get there. Alamariu’s former classmate from Yale remembered finding BAP’s appeal mystifying, and polling younger men to explain it. “It was described to me as, the level of nihilism and dissociation among young men, especially young white men of the middle and lower middle classes, is extremely high,” this person said.