Unfortunately, we have to talk about Bronze Age Pervert.

The pseudonymous writer, widely identified as a Romanian-American political theorist named Costin Alamariu, has become a popular influencer among very online young conservatives. BAP’s worldview is crudely Nietzschean: decrying women, minorities, and the rule of liberal “bug men,” he urges young conservative men to lift weights and assert their natural dominance in a weak and effeminate America. He has described his politics as “Fascism or ‘something worse,’” and indeed they are.

I generally find BAP’s work “something worse” than offensive: stupid. For all his claims to natural superiority, Alamariu’s writing is shallow and poorly reasoned — full of absurd generalizations and empty provocations. While he has readers in high places — including high-ranking Trump officials like Michael Anton and Darren Beattie — he doesn’t have ideas worth the name.

Yet this week, BAP published something that is actually interesting: a far-right critique of the economic nationalism animating Trump’s tariff policies.

The core argument is that trying to revive American manufacturing through heavy-handed industrial policy like the tariffs is ceding the future to China — a policy argument I associate more with libertarians and the center-left than frothing neo-Nietzscheans. Yet in this case, the call is coming from inside the house: BAP is attempting to argue that his enemies on the right — specifically economic nationalists like American Compass’ Oren Cass and Catholic postliberals like Vice President JD Vance — are advancing an economic vision that is essentially a betrayal of what Trumpism is really about.

“The mental universe of the postliberal intellectual is populated by mostly half-truths and talking points,” BAP writes. “It’s not really Trumpism, but something that saw its chance to piggyback on Trump.”

I have my doubts about this: Tariffs are about as core to Donald Trump’s worldview as anything. But the piece is interesting less for the quality of argument than for the way it provides a window into how factional infighting works in the Trump era — and the kinds of arguments that could actually matter under our current malformed government.

“What a strange reality we live in, where a BAP essay has greater potential to influence American foreign policy than any editorial published in the Wall Street Journal,”

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