Pushkin.

I am Graham Wood, and I wrote how bronze age pervert charmed the far Right for the Atlantic, and it's the story of the week.

Back in twenty sixteen, I interviewed Milo Uanapolis in his apartment in London.

Milo was then the troll leader of the alt right.

He wrote all these articles for Breitbart that advocated ideas that horrified anyone who is in power.

So I asked him why he went to events with the white supremacist Richard Spencer.

He said, I don't see it as a bad thing that I surround myself with edgy people because they're interesting.

I'm not gonna not hang out with someone because the New York Times calls him racist.

To my surprise, I found out in those few days Milo was funny and well read and host I kind of enjoyed being around him, even though I hated every single horrifying thing he said to me.

My article was called Milo Yanopolis is the pretty monstrous face of the alt right.

Milo is so thrilled with that article that he texted me for years afterwards, inviting me to hang out.

I never did, partly because I didn't need to.

Soon there would be so many Milo's that you could not avoid them.

Writing is hard.

Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy trying to dijon stand So it turns on a mic made the twitles enough because a journalist Trand has got in that gigle jobs single Stormy.

Just listen.

The smart people speak.

Conversation.

Film information is the story.

Mile Anapolis has since faded into obscurity, so much so that the last time I heard about him he was working for Kanye West's presidential campaign.

But the far right has gotten themselves some new philosopher kings.

These guys, and yes they're all guys, call themselves the Dark Enlightenment.

They're unapologetically racist, sexist, and authoritarian.

Graham Wood wrote about one of their leading thinkers, who calls himself the Bronze Age Pervert for The Atlantic magazine.

I did some pranks in high school, but I didn't go to high school with the comedy writer and the guy who played Ryan on The Office, bj Novak.

So what was bj Novak's great high school prank?

Bj Novak's greatest accomplishment before he became famous for the Office was going to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and he saw that there were these tours that you could take audio tours to tell you what you were looking at, why it was important, and so on.

And he realized that if you took that out, that you could put in anything you wanted.

And so he and a couple of his friends they got a classmate of theirs to record a tour of the exact same exhibition that was at the Museum of Fine Arts, only narrated by a total madman, a guy who claimed that he was lev Da Vidovich Brunstein, which is the birth name of Leon Trotsky, and who, instead of just narrating what the paintings were, divulged his own crazy opinions, saying personally, I think this is a piece of crap, and saying have to resist the urge to take sledge hammer, break open and rip this scroll to shreds with my teeth.

I feel like they read PALFI, like, how else do you come up with that idea?

Yeah, it's brilliant, doesn't it.

And you know, the people at the Museum of Fine Arts, they think back pretty fondly about that that prank, But.

They also forgive you for a prank when you become famous.

Who was the other guy, the one who did the Eastern European accent that you so expertly imitated.

It turns out that it was a Romanian classmate of bj Novak, and this Romanian his name was unknown until pretty recently.

Is that his real speaking voice or he's doing a bit.

It's pretty close to his actual speaking voices.

So, oh, okay, he speaks.

With an accent, but he is a highly educated, highly literate, fluent speaker of English when he wants to be so the more he wants to screw with you, the stronger he will put on the accent.

Okay, what's his name?

His name is Kostin Alamaru and he had immigrated from Romania at the age of roughly eleven.

And you eventually come to meet this guy.

Well, the whisper network of nerds finally reached me, I guess because we had a friend in common who said to me a number of times you got to meet my friend Costin.

The guy knew him from high school.

And this is while you were at Harvard.

Yes, that's right, this is in my junior year of college at Harvard and Coston at that point was a math major at MIT.

It's like an intellectual blind date.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's the two of us, and I think we spent the next two hours or so just walking around Cambridge, Massachusetts and talking about whatever came to mind, which I think was basically his hobby.

Did you like him?

I did?

I mean he was fun.

He really knew how to push people's buttons, say things that were outrageous, say things that might offend someone.

You hear a lot of things that you don't hear every day.

What do you mean, what kind of things you don't hear every day?

Well, like at the time, I was studying Persian.

You know Persian, I would say, the easiest language for an English speaker to study that has quiggly letters, So it is just unbelievably simple.

And I described that to him, and he said, is it like Spanish where every time you speak a word you feel your brain shrinking?

What does that even mean?

I think what he was implying was that there are certain languages that are so simple that you don't feel that your brain is being nourished by speaking to them.

I'm on year four of Spanish due lingo, and I still can't even come close to understanding it.

Besides testing you and being kind of intellectually fun.

Did he seem really smart?

He was clearly smart.

He was clearly well read.

The things that he was interested in were not the things that you learned by taking classes, certainly not MIT.

We're talking about nineteenth century social science, ancient Greek and other subjects.

He had a kind of old school interest that he was nourishing on his own.

And for me, as someone who you know, I like to think had curiosities on my own, I wanted more of this guy, and I wanted to hear more of what he had to say.

And there's a picture of him backwardings in college in the New York Times.

Right, Yes, that's right.

He was ring a trench coat with Teva sandals.

He had a black bar over his eyes so he couldn't be identified because he was being used to illustrate how badly MIT undergraduates dress.

So to protect his safety and future employment prospects or something, they were saying, we shouldn't identify this guy.

Little did they know that that wasn't gonna be the thing that kept him from being employed.

So did you keep in touch after your blind eit?

I went traveling pretty soon after that.

So we didn't really hang out, I think ever again.

Actually in person, we did trade emails quite a bit, but that didn't last for too long.

Wait why didn't it last?

Well?

He would say increasingly offensive things that were offensive at the time, but I knew that he was testing, and so I didn't take the bait.

And occasionally, though, he would note that some of my friends had said something that displeased him.

I was friends with various journalists and they'd write their political opinions and he says, stop being such a and then he used a slur against gay people.

But eventually I thought, I'm not sure I need this in my life anymore, and I stopped responding to him.

What's the weirdest thing he sent you?

At one point he sent me a picture of himself and he was shirtless.

He had clearly been working out, and he wrote, do you like this pick of me?

And I don't think I replied to that at all.

And I think the purpose of sending it was because it would be befuddling.

He loves to befuddle.

He's good at it.

Really, it sounds I am not at all fuddled.

That seems just like a thirst trap.

Yeah, it's objectively a thirst trap, but he may also been trying to fuck with you, and the latter is actually the same character with who he is.

Okay, so you lose touch with them.

What happens to him after he graduates from MITA.

After he went to MIT he became an investment banker briefly, and eventually he ended up in a graduate program in political science at Yale University.

Is that you teach at Yale?

Is that the department you teach in?

Yes, just by chance, we didn't overlap at all, but in exactly the same department where I have been teaching since twenty fourteen.

He was a graduate student.

I feel like this is like fight club, and we're going to find out at the end that he is here.

That would be the worst news that I've had in quite some time.

Okay, So he gets his PhD from Yale, and while he's there, he's still doing this kind of bj Novak era prank character, like in emails and other places.

Right.

Yeah.

I spoke with people who were grad students during his time there, and they said, oh, yeah, that guy.

He would constantly be pushing our buttons.

You know.

He would write these notes to the graduate student email lists.

They would say, oh, you know, our graduate student insurance doesn't cover dentistry.

Can you help me with that?

And then he would write back my cousin Benko run Benko Magneto Gore's dental emporium.

He make good dental work in white Panic Grand Avenue, East Street, in parking lot outside plumbing supply store.

You formed me small price of one hundred dollars.

You do work steel gold, did anything you want.

He was fucking with everybody all the time.

And what was his dissertation like for his phha pem.

It was pretty weird and it would be alarming if it weren't in a dissertation, which means that nobody reads it.

When I say alarming, I mean it was about eugenics and tried to suggest that philosophy in Plato's mind was closely associated with eugenics, with biologically creating an elite.

Wait wait that like Plato wanted to build a master race like Hitler did.

That's exactly right, that's what That's what he claimed.

That does not come up in the republic.

For my memory, I would think at like a very liberal place like yeah, that your dissertation supervisor is not going to be into that that's true.

I mean, toward the end, I spoke to his advisor, Stephen Smith, who's a very distinguished political theorist, and who told him straightforwardly that, look, this is shameful.

The idea that your parents would take you away from Romania and escape tyranny and totalitarianism so that you can write that eugenics is the way to go was disgusting.

Oh, his parents literally escape Cechescu.

And then then he writes this insane piece about authoritarianism as is dissertation that can't make parents happy.

No, if, like Costin's parents, you have fled the most tyrannical Eastern European country, and then what do you find your kid doing going to one of the best schools in the United States and then writing about how tyranny is actually good and by the way, also having some of your family exterminated in the Holocaust, and then writing that, yeah, eugenics is also good.

This was I think probably pretty embarrassing to his parents.

Right because he's also Jewish.

Okay, so they give him the PhD.

What does he do afterwards?

He did get one of the very few jobs on the market, which was a postdoc at Emory.

That's a roll of the dice for Emory though after the eugenics dissertation.

So how long does he last at Emory?

Not very long at all, but for reasons that were pretty weird.

He started teaching some classes and then at some point other members of the department heard from students that, oh, that guy Costin is teaching us.

He never shows up for his classes, and he's announced that he's going to be teaching by email instead.

So his senior colleagues asked him, Hey, what the hell's going on here?

But apparently he had some physical ailment that prevented him from regularly being in the classroom.

Okay, so then he leaves Emory.

Apparently he's said he's living out of a van in Argentina.

How does constant enter your consciousness again?

He re entered my consciousness because he had started to record a podcast.

He had written a book.

It's always very alarming to discover that someone has a podcast.

We're not proud people.

So when I heard the podcast, it was the same Museum of Fine Arts voice a little deeper, but he was doing that stick and whatever slyness that he had in direction about his views about fascism, and his dissertation had disappeared completely and it was one hundred percent fascist monarchists, insane.

Racism, full on eugenics and into racial purity.

Just he'd gone full bor.

On this in the dissertation.

You know, you have to ask yourself only once you've understood the paragraph.

Is he saying what I think he's saying.

The only thing that you have to plow through in the case of his podcast is can it be possible that I should take any of this seriously given that he's speaking in this outlandish accent.

But the words themselves leave no doubt the guy was an out and out fascist of a really antique variety.

Like we're talking about nineteenth century race science.

Like measuring people's heads to determine how smart they are by their race, Right, I.

Think, well, that's the origin of this, But I think he considers the head measuring portion of this subtled science.

Okay.

And he's not using his real name.

He's pseudonymous because he's saying these really upsetting things.

So what name does he go under?

He was recording under the name the Bronze Age Pervert.

But why Bronze age and why pervert, Like, why isn't he the Iron Age normal dude, Like, where does he come up with this?

Yeah?

So, Costin believes that Western civilization is a terrible error, the belief that humans are all equal, they have equal worth, that politics means compromise that individuals have by virtue of being human beings rights.

These are things that didn't exist before this tradition made them up.

And he believes that in the Bronze Age there was an age of man where people of great virtue, nobility, beauty were doing amazing things.

They were physically stronger, they were mentally stronger, and so we need to go back to that age to create that those conditions.

Again, the pervert part, I have no idea.

And from the bits I've listened to and read, it feels like some kind of bodybuilder who's also like Travis Bickell from Taxi Driver, who wants to destroy all the cities and wipe away the dirt all kind of by way of Nietzsche.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

It's a guy who has combined extreme narcissism when it comes to creation of a perfect body, which is also part of his view of the Bronze Age.

He thinks that you need to cultivate your body lift and read the philosophers who have discovered the wayward nature of modern man and then turn that upside down.

The Bronze Age Pervert is popular, not just onlike the dark parts of Twitter, but in Ivy League grad departments, like how is that possible?

So those grad students, they've all read the Bronze Age Privert, they all know what he stands for, but they notice that their professors don't talk about him.

They maybe even effect not to know who he is, but they do.

And the reason for that is that, first of all, he's funny, so people listen to him because he's amusing to hear.

But also he is attacking the very foundation of Western civilization and he's talking about something completely different where the strong are in charge and they crushed the week.

That's not something that anybody has been arguing for politically in any American department for quite some time.

So I think that there was this forbiddenness about what he was saying.

And there is also the fact that he was arguing a position that nobody remembered how to rebut it was just it was so old that it was new again.

And that meant that people were defenseless against it, and they were fascinated by what they were hearing.

And it's not just the podcast.

He's self published as a book.

You said, in the summer of twenty eighteen, it was among the top one hundred and fifty books on Amazon.

I don't know where your book was on the list.

The ranking of my two books didn't have the same number of digits as that.

Yeah, yeah, I have to say the same.

I mean, somehow, if you publish your own book and you write it in the diction of Borat, and you write the worst possible things that you could think, then people want to read it.

After the break, we'll hear about the people in power who follow the Bronze Age Pervert and how they're planning a revolution.

But first, our advertisers are going to make you an amazing offer on a ring light for achieving that perfect shirtless selfie for your totally straight fascist friends.

How popular is this book?

And Bronze Age Pervert in general just tweets his podcast with people who have actual power in the Republican Party.

So the Bronze Age Pervert who goes by BAP, he tells his followers don't tell people that you're a bat follower, use your non accounts, which it seems like pretty obvious advice, given that he's constantly using you know, the end word and saying things that suggest that you want to destroy the United States and you know, all of Western civilization.

Surprisingly enough that there are a few people who follow him and say so openly and they know not to tell people.

But we're in high office.

We're staffers for members of the House of Representatives.

And Bapp himself loves to post on his Twitter feed images of his book next to the uniforms of the people who love him, which are you know, sometimes officers uniforms in the US Marines, or official passports from diplomats.

I don't like that.

That reminds me of what happened in Germany, with all those people trying to attempt to coup in various places in the military and the police and government.

That it gets scary at that point.

Right, Yeah, once you get people who are working for the government, we know that's not good.

But the very fact that this being underground means you can't quantify it.

And you talk to some of them.

I know Michael Anton, who worked for the Trump administration in the National security he's written openly about liking the bronze age pervert.

I think, like has Steve Bannon and Peter Teel also done the same, or have they've been quiet about it.

They've been more quiet about it.

But there within the orbit of bronze age pervert, we'll call them bronze age pervert appreciators.

I mean Michael Anton he reviewed for the Claremont Review of Books, the Bronze Age Mindset.

That's Bronze age Pervert's book, and I would say he was respectful toward it.

He noted the things that are most odious about it.

He noted the racism, the misogyny.

But he said, look, this guy's got something going.

And he diagnosed the state of conservatism just by saying it's bab versus Reaganism, and bat is winning.

This is the future of conservatism.

I think he ran like a bank of some kind, right, Like he's a powerful member of society.

Yeah, I mean, he was a Deputy National Security Advisor during the Trump administration, So yeah, this is a person who has had very very important roles in keeping the international order alive and keeping Americans safe.

And he had kind words for the Bronze Age Privert.

And you talk to this guy, Vish Burah, who is a fan of BAP, who's hey.

Vish Burah is a colorful figure who works for an even more colorful figure who is representative George Santos of New York.

I was interviewing Vish about something else, and I noticed that there was a copy of the Bronze Age Perverts book behind him.

So I asked him why you just saw it in the wild.

Yes, that's right.

So I asked him why what's this for?

And he said, basically that the Bronze Age Pervert is funny, he's a brilliant mind, and that there is quietly a crew of people who think that he's their guide.

There's all these guys out there, men and women by the way, who are followers of the Bronze Age Pervert, and we have figured out ways to find each other, to meet it at parties, and to recognize each other's each other as like minded fans of the Bronze Age Pervert.

We're out there, and we're not going to announce ourselves until we're actually at the controls.

We're not there yet.

That's what he wants them to do him all these darken lightmanc guys.

There's this guy menshus Moldbug who's also Jewish and also really smart, and they're part of this group that wants everyone to keep quiet about the fact that they think these things and follow these people until the revolution's about to happen.

Yeah, they've seen what happens when you announce that you hate black people.

You lose your job really quickly, and so they say, just shut up about it for a little while and then you'll get into a position of authority and then you'll do what you need to do.

And this is the strategy like that you see with all those type of the frogs on Twitter, which is you don't give out your real name, you don't give out your real face.

And in fact, he's really hostile to people use their name or their face.

Yeah, I think the idea is that if you show your face and name, then you're doing that for your own glory, and what you should be doing is quietly making some friends and then infiltrating high office.

If you can do that, then you'll actually be working for the nobler aim of subverting Western civilization.

Have you listened to his podcast?

Is it better than this one.

I do listen to his podcast.

I will tell you.

I wouldn't tell just anyone that I listened to his podcast, but he remains really entertaining.

I think that a lot of people who are just horrified but by what he says, would like him also not to be funny.

It would be much a much simpler world if you were not funny and smart.

I listened to a bunch of it.

It's amazing.

If you listen to him, you will learn things about the world.

So, okay, we were going to play a clip of the podcast if you Will, If you Will indulge US American's food revolutions.

There is interesting article from City Journal two thousand and nine enjoyable read on how American food culture accelerating.

That's something I'm inherently interested in.

Actually, that wasn't the kind of stuff I usually hear from him, But I'm interested in hearing about like turtle soup or whatever he's about to talk about.

He's digressive and he's interested in a lot of things.

What can I say?

He doesn't immediately go toward the politics that will make you cringe, and he knows what he's doing, so he has thoughtful views on American cuisine.

I'll listen to that absolutely.

I heard him go off out of nowhere talking to someone on like ancient Greek etymology, just as a digression, and I was like, he knows a lot.

Yes, and he's someone who is disillusioned by your education.

You can listen to this guy and it's like a combination of comedy and politics and just learning about the world.

And in between you'll get things like recipes for carrot salad and all sorts of crazy stuff like that.

Now, it's actually very difficult to also overlook that it's filled with odious racist orseshit.

Yeah, I had to stop listening at some point when he got onto something that was it was so awful and like fourth grade dead baby joke kind of like dumb awful racism, so retrograde.

And he also spends so much time telling you how he's not gay.

Yeah, I got of nowhere.

I wonder why not, because I think that he's gay, but I think that the curiosity about his sexuality, about his physical body, it keeps people listening.

And he will constantly on social media, you know, on Thursdays he posts pictures of semi naked mostly men.

And you know another person I knew in my youth, Richard Spencer.

He's my lab partner in middle school in Dallas, Texas and later became the leader.

Yeah, so the most famous white supremacists, maybe after David Duke in this country.

Richard Spencer was your lab partner in middle school.

That's correct.

Richard Spencer in Dallas, Texas was randomly assigned to be my lab partner at Saint Mark's School in Dallas, Texas.

Are you a magnet for like racist fascist eugenesis?

How does this happen to one person?

As I say, I was randomly assigned Richard Spencer.

I was not randomly assigned cost In.

This was a little random.

But this is starting to become a trend.

So if anyone can can help me with this problem, then please get in touch.

In any lab partnership, there's someone who carries all the weight.

Was it you or Richard Spencer?

I was a better science student than Richard Spencer.

Yeah, okay, making sure, I.

Don't want to toot my own horn here.

But yes, he's better at white supremacy.

You were better at science.

This all makes sense.

But Richard Spencer, you know, he was plagued with gay rumors for a long time when he was the leader of the all Right and I wrote to him about the Bronze Age pervert and asked him, so what do you think about all this stuff?

Do you think he's gay?

And Richard was a little testy with me.

He said, if I were posting every Thursday pictures of naked guy's asses, do you think anyone would have any doubt that I'm gay?

But somehow the Bronze Age pervert gets a pass.

But yeah, he spends a lot of time thinking about male physiques in a way that I think people find awfully suspicious.

And I think he also just knows that if he does this, people stick around.

There's the fascination that he either has or pretends to have, is something that gets clothed, asses in the seats, you know, And this is this is what he wants.

Both more more people listening, maybe all kinds of asses, clothes, unclothed.

So do you think this guy's actually dangerous?

In the end, I don't think he's dangerous.

I think he's I think he's actually good.

What what do you mean?

Look, he is arguing for a politics that would be the result results of it would be the deaths of millions, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people.

That is bad.

That is bad if it is successful, I don't think it will be successful.

What it will do is remind its opponents of the form that this argument once took.

The fact that there are seminar rooms filled with political philosophers who don't remember the reasons why we have the political system that we have, why we have the tolerance that we have, is a problem.

We want those people to be in fighting form, and they can only be in fighting form if you've got someone who is testing them.

I like the optimism, but I'm looking at votes in all kinds of countries, including this one.

It doesn't seem like this thing is being combated.

It seems like it's gaining speed, this anti democratic totalitarian impulse.

Yeah, it's easy to find reasons for pessimism.

Like Google imaged costin.

I get like one picture, but you've seen them shirtless, so you know the big question I wanted to ask smash or Pass.

I'm told by others who have seen him that he was Spindley.

When I saw him, it was kind of ripped by the way smash or Pass did I answer that correctly?

I'm not sure if I know the nomenclature there.

Does that just mean is he hot or not?

Yes?

Okay, but once you refer to as nomenclature, it's we've passed the fun of it.

Graham Wood, you wrote how bronze Age pervert charm far Right for The Atlantic and it's the story of the week.

Thank you so much for coming on and for writing the story.

Oh thanks for having me for my book.

In Defense of Elitism, Why I'm better than you and You're better than someone who didn't buy this book.

I interviewed Tucker Carlson.

During that interview, he said something to me which was really shocking, which is impressive when you're already psychologically prepared to interview Tucker Carlson.

He said this, there weren't any democracies between the fall of Rome and the United States.

Why is that it's possible that in the country moving towards four hundred million people pretty fast, it's hard to come to wise decisions in a democracy.

You don't practice democracy for its own sake.

You practice it because you think it works best.

It's possible it doesn't really work at this scale.

Wow, you'd have to be pretty arrogant to think that you'd be one of the very few people who's ever thrived in a society without democracy.

But maybe that's what happens when you're the first one voted off of Dancing with the Stars.

At the end of the show, what's next for Joel Stein?

Maybe you'll take a naper book around online.

Our show today was produced by Kate mccauliffe and Nishavenka.

It was edited by Lydia jen Kott.

Our engineer is Amanda ky Wang, and our executive producer is Catherine Shira dah And.

Our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton and a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer Laurence Alasnik.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Joel Stein and this is the story of the week.

The catchphrase that he uses on Twitter is submit.

What does that mean?

Joel?

Did you mind if I not take that one?

That's going to be complicated to explain it.

I feel like my producers are clapping right now.