Going into this year’s World Cup tournament, the U.S. Women’s National Team was looking to secure a three-peat—that is, win their third World Cup in a row. Now they are struggling. On Tuesday, they eked out a tie against ninth-ranked Portugal in a generally sloppy showing, and on Sunday they face a challenging game against third-ranked Sweden. For fans, this is heartbreaking. In the past two decades, the team has turned out talented players, scored a victory in the fight for equal pay, and showcased a viable model for girls to become successful athletes. It would be miserly to root against them, and yet it might be time.

While the U.S. has been shoring up its women’s soccer league, teams around the world have been taking note. The U.K. franchises have started investing in their women’s teams, although to some they may be seen as second-class to the men's teams. Women’s teams across the globe are tasting fandom and legitimacy, and to build on that momentum, maybe the world is ready for a surprise winner. There is no drama in dominance. For women’s soccer to truly become a global sensation, the U.S. needs worthy rivals.

In this episode we pose that theory, as awkward as it is, to Tobin Heath and Christen Press, who host a YouTube series called The RE-CAP Show. They’ve both played for pro teams abroad and for the U.S. National Women’s Soccer League. And they were on both of the most recent World Cup–winning teams. No surprise, they disagree with this premise.

“No, no, no. I see what you were trying to do there,” Heath says. “But, no, absolutely not. I still think the U.S. Women’s National Team are torchbearers for not just the fight to increase investment in women’s football, but for all of pay equity, globally. I think the U.S. Women’s National Team being successful is the No. 1 driver in our sport globally.”

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the interview:

Hanna Rosin: Christen, one dynamic that I’ve been watching is: at some point earlier, most of the players on the U.S. Women’s National Team came from a small pool of college teams. Now so many more of them come from professional women’s teams. I wonder how that changes the dynamic.

Christen Press: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think that we’re in a landscape that’s changing quite quickly. I remember when the first group of players decided to leave college early, or not go to college, our generation of player was shocked and horrified by that. Because we didn’t have that faith in the stability of the league quite yet.

And now it’s common, and I think that that speaks to how much progress we’re making at a league level. The NWSL [National Women’s Soccer League] is pushing really hard to set a professional standard that can put players in the position to play for their national team.

And Title IX, and the strength of the college program, was so instrumental in the success of the U.S. Women’s National team. And as that evolves, it does fall on our league to continue to help players develop and find the quality that they need to win at the international level.

Rosin: It’s kind of cool and unique to be you guys. Because you’re moving through this living history. Women’s soccer in the U.S. is changing so quickly. Women’s soccer around the world is changing so quickly. And you’re sort of watching it being built.

Tobin Heath: Yeah, I love that. Living history. It’s really true. And what I always say is [that] we’re kind of building the dream and doing it at the same time. Because a lot of the things that we’ve achieved in our careers, when we first started playing, those things didn’t even exist yet for us.

As Christen referenced now, the NWSL is in year 11 or 12, which is phenomenal. The past two leagues had failed. Hadn’t gone past the five-year mark. So, even looking at that progress, it’s really unique. Each World Cup, there’s a massive change in the landscape of women’s football—and women’s sports globally.

So we’re always curious to see what’s going to happen. I think the winner of the World Cup really dictates that as well. Between 2015 and 2019, we’ve witnessed the massive shift in the landscape. And the opportunities that you both just shared about that came out of those. This is the unique time to see what that next shift looks like.

Rosin: Wait, do you guys actually think anything can happen? Because it’s interesting, every article out there right now is about how the U.S. is going to have an uphill battle to win its third title in a row, because the other teams are catching up. And I can’t tell if that’s just juice to make the whole thing interesting.

Press: Oh, they say that every single World Cup.

Heath: Every World Cup, if you go back to any headline of every single World Cup.

Press: But it is also true. It’s both at the same time. I remember my first World Cup. The U.S. hadn’t won in a very long time, and they were still using the rhetoric: Oh, the world’s catching up. It’s going to be harder than ever to win.

And you know, now with successful leagues in multiple continents, the world is catching up when it comes to investment. And I think as the prize money continues to go up, it’ll only encourage federations to continue to invest, which is going to make the tournament better.

And ultimately the way I always felt, from my first World Cup ’til now is: Great, you want to beat the best. You want everyone to be at their best. We’re not trying to win this World Cup because we’re the most invested-in team. We want everyone to be invested. And we want to win the World Cup.

And then when you talk about the three-peat, it’s a really interesting phenomenon because it’s the same thing as when you flip a coin. Each time you flip a coin, the odds reset. But emotionally, for me, it’s unfathomable that the team could win three in a row.

Because every single World Cup, I would go in being like, It’s almost impossible for us to win. It’s so hard. You have to be perfect. You have to have so much luck on your side. You have to have so much excellence. It’s almost impossible. And then we would win, and I would be like, Oh my gosh. Like, that’s unfathomable. So to imagine doing that three times in a row, it’s overwhelming.

Rosin: Oh, you know, here’s now the big scary question. Given everything you just said, maybe it’s better—can I even say this?—I mean, I know you guys are rooting for the U.S. and I’m rooting for the U.S., but maybe it’s better for global women’s soccer for the U.S. not to win?

Heath: No, no, no, I see what you’re trying to do there. But, no, absolutely not. I still think the U.S. Women’s National Team are torchbearers for not just the fight to increase investment in women’s football, but for all of pay equity globally. I think the U.S. Women’s National team being successful is the No. 1 driver in our sport globally getting the recognition and the investment that it deserves.

I think we’re still the team, and the following, that is greatest. And I think we still affect the landscape of the sport the most. So I think, as much as we want to root sometimes for other countries, I think the best thing that can happen for the sport is actually the U.S. Women’s National Team winning again.

I think a lot of opportunity comes from that just because of who we are and what we stand for. But, like Christen said, with the three-peat, it’s crazy. It would be even more devastating not doing it, because then you go back to zero, right?

That’s like a lot of years, of history, gone. I don’t want it to reset. But yeah, we’ll see what happens. I mean, everyone says anyone can win it. I think, at the end of the day, it is the U.S. Women’s National Team’s to lose.

Rosin: Just indulge me, though, because you guys do debates on your show; give me one more round of debate. What if it was another team that won? A surprising team?

It would be so exciting. And then women’s sports would just take root all over the world, and so many people would be watching everywhere. And then even American players would have lots of places to go, and it would just establish the whole global sport.What do you think, Christen?

Press: I think the problem is you kind of need a bit of infrastructure to effect change, right? And so, England was a great example. Because the English league is doing really well, they have the opportunity to quickly move into large stadiums to capitalize on the success that the English national team had in the Euros.

And so, when you asked the question, I thought exactly the same as Tobin. We are in the position to make the most out of a win, because of the investment in the infrastructures that we have. Obviously, as Americans, we also tend to think that our news is global news. But I think the history of the team has been to fight for change. And that’s just been so ingrained in the culture of the U.S. Women’s National Team. And I do think that that is contagious and it has been contagious and other countries are inspired by the fight that we’ve been having and winning.

And at some point, we want that. The change that we’ve seen in our country, we want it to really quickly flood into all the countries. But I do think that, realistically, we’re in the best position to continue to have the biggest impact. And that’s just because of how many people cover it, how many people are watching in our country, where our league is, what stadiums we have to sell tickets and merchandise in—all of those things.

Because, ultimately, what drives the business is money, right? And that’s what’s allowed the U.S. to have the change and the impact that we’ve had—is the infrastructure and the business of it pushing everything forward.

Heath: Yeah. And I would just add that I think the worst thing that could happen actually would be if the U.S. Women’s National Team lost and, like, an England won. Just in terms of that infrastructure. Because they have the infrastructure to scale success, to Christen’s point.

And we already saw that with the Euros. The massive scale they made just from that tournament alone. With a scale of a World Cup, I think it would really revolutionize European football. And I think that would be a really competitive advantage, because, if they win, they represent all of Europe. And if we win, we represent, you know, us and our dominance. And that’s a whole other equation. That’s if we have a Part 2 of this podcast where you can get into it.

Rosin: Wait, but Tobin, are you saying it would be just as good if the U.K. teams win? Because they have this totally other model. And I know that you have some experience with that model, where they’re attached to these legendary men’s clubs, like Manchester United and Arsenal. And I also wonder about the advantages and disadvantages of that. Is that an amazing way to promote and grow women’s soccer? Or does it put them in the shadow of men’s soccer?

Heath: It’s a completely different model. I would be more concerned about it being very competitive, but a different one. And I am a firm believer in independent ownership for women’s teams. We’ve seen the success of an Angel City. I truly believe that if you’re under the same umbrella as a men’s team, inherently you’re always going to be second. That’s really hard to evolve out of.

And in the U.S., we are, for women, the No. 1 sport. And men’s soccer in our country is maybe No. 5? So I think that it’s more beneficial for us to be independent, because I think our sport for women in our country is No. 1, so why would you mimic a No. 5 sport in our country?

Rosin: Yeah.

Heath: But in the U.K., I think it’s the complete opposite. I actually think there is so much benefit for them to be under the umbrella of their men’s teams, because of the structures, because of the fan bases, because of the history of what football means in that country. And I think if they were to win a World Cup, it would be scary, the type of scale and potential that they could have within those massive structures. Because even if they’re second fiddle to their men’s equivalent, it’s a ridiculous scale.

Rosin: Oh my God, Tobin, but now I feel like that would be great. You’d have this thing overseas that’s this amazing giant-scale opportunity? We’d have our great U.S. team and go for years?

Press: Careful, it might sound like you’re rooting for England.

Rosin: [Laughs.] Exactly. You know, I’m curious, what’s the experience like from inside? I think what you’re saying, to be completely fair, is that that model works in the U.K. You can see why it works in the U.K. Our model works well for us, but what is the internal experience of being in a team that is attached to a famous men’s club versus the experience of an Angel City woman-owned team in the U.S.?

Press: Well, I will say my time at Manchester United was pre-Euros, and so I am actually hopeful that that club and most clubs have taken leaps and bounds. But I think that Angel City is also kind of a stand-alone, because it’s not just independent ownership; it’s female ownership.

And so the nature of conversations when we’re talking about player needs and team needs at Angel City—it is like nothing I’ve ever experienced, because I’m speaking to people who truly believe in my value, our value, the team’s value, and are doing the job because they want to create and amplify the value that exists in our sport.

Rosin: Wait. Can you elaborate? Like what was your sense of Manchester United’s approach versus Angel City’s?

Press: Yeah, I think that, like, to sum it up: It was this idea of investing in the women’s game because it’s the right thing to do is where I feel like a lot of male executives come from. Versus investing in the women’s game because it’s an awesome business model that’s going to create a lot of value for fans and for stakeholders.

And so, you know, Manchester United, they signed us. They knew Tobin and me. Our reputation of fighting for equity and pay preceded us there. They kind of knew what they were getting. And to be fair, they had a plan that they shared with us about building facility for the women and growing.

But it was the sentiment that we hear all the time. Oh, I’m doing this—I know it’s the right thing to do. I’m doing this for my daughter. It’s the right thing to do. And when you talk to Kara Nortman and Julie from Angel City, they’re doing it because they believe in it, because they believe it’s a great business move.

And they believe that we’re all going to rise. This tide is going to rise together.

[Music]

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: the 1999 World Cup that changed the sport. And guess what? Heath and Press were both there.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m thinking back to when you guys started. So you must have been pre-teens in 1999, during that Women’s World Cup, when there was an explosion of interest and the final was in the Rose Bowl and there were 90,000 people there, and it was a huge record. Is that the moment when you came to soccer consciousness?

Because that was a moment when it felt like everything you were describing was just going to roll out on the red carpet. It was just going to happen.

Heath: Yep, you’re absolutely right when you talk about this kind of golden generation that was part of ’11, ’15, ’19, all of those finals for the U.S. Women’s National Team in a World Cup. I was at the opening game in New Jersey for the U.S. Women’s National Team in 1999. Christen was at the Rose Bowl in the final.

If you actually speak to most of the players on the U.S. Women’s National Team, they were either at one of those games or have a really powerful story about that game. But that was the first time I think all of us opened our eyes and said: “Wow, I want to do that.”

Rosin: Wait, you were at the game?

Heath: I was at the opener; Christen was at the final. Obviously we didn’t know each other at the time.

Rosin: That’s huge. So did you think: Oh, soccer’s a career. Like, I can make money. It’s a thing I can do professionally with my life?

Heath: Yeah. It’s so funny because I was such a cocky little kid. [Laughs.] I’m still a cocky little adult. But it was the Meadowlands, and I remember being there and I came with my soccer team, and I was playing out on the grass. I had my Mia Hamm jersey on. We were playing pickup.

And I remember thinking to myself at that time—and I think I was 12 years old—something like: Wow, I’m good enough right now to be out on that field.

Rosin: [Laughs.] That’s awesome. That’s amazing.

Heath: And I think that having that level of interest and passion—when you walked into that stadium and you felt that energy and you looked out on that field and you saw an example that you believe that you could become—was so powerful.

And that’s why, for Angel City, when you walk into that stadium, gender completely disappears. And I think in that moment, what we all felt as little kids [was] that gender had completely disappeared. And this was just something amazing, and this was an opportunity that we could have in the future.

Rosin: Christen, what was your experience at the 1999 final in the Rose Bowl?

Press: Yeah, I actually have a photo of all my team and my sisters and me with my face painted. And I can see it in my eyes when I look at the photo. I was like: I can do that. I didn’t think I could do it right then; I wasn’t quite ready yet. But I thought that was the dream, that was the goal.

Honestly, when I got my first call up to the national team, I didn’t even know it was a paid job. I thought that playing for the national team was just such an honor and such an amazing thing that you weren’t even going to get paid. And it’s embarrassing to say that, but I think it’s important, because even our Players Association has come so far in educating the world on the business of sport. And the financial liberation of women is incredibly important for the social progress that we’re fighting for. And so hopefully there will never be a player that goes and has no idea that what they’re doing has financial value.

But for me [1999] was just heart eyes. Looking at women who are being fully valued, appreciated, celebrated at that level. With that many people there, it was life-changing because it was absolutely just seeing a picture that I had never seen before. And seeing the opportunity to do something, to live this dream and to have it be at that scale.

Heath: I will say, to Christen’s point, when I actually got on the national team, I wasn’t paid, because when I came on the national team, I was just starting college. So I didn’t even have that thought about being on the national team to get paid. And for me, it was just an honor. I wanted to be a part of that team and what it symbolizes, what it did. My first world championship was the 2008 Olympics, and I remember all of my teammates being so stoked that I was on the team, because that meant that if we won, they got more prize money—because I didn’t receive any as a college athlete.

Rosin: Oh my God.

Heath: So they were like, Yes. So happy Tobin’s on the roster.

Rosin: Can you actually articulate—just so people listening to this truly understand—what difference it makes when players get paid. I know that’s a crazy question, but now that you see people now getting paid, making a real living, what does it actually change?

Press: Well, it changes everything. We want the best players, the best athletes to do this job. That’s what’s going to push the game forward. And it has to be a sustainable lifestyle. You have to be able to dedicate your life to this sport and have enough money to live the rest of your life for it to be a truly professional sport.

Because when you’re in these We’re getting paid, but it’s not enough scenarios, which we’re still working through, you always have this distraction that you have to do other things or separate out your time and your days in order to make enough money to survive.

And I think that just decreases the quality of the sport. What we’ve fought for our entire careers has been that the next generation of players doesn’t need to have another job, doesn’t need to work when they’re done playing, and doesn’t need to worry when their career’s coming to an end, How am I going to continue to make money? That doesn’t have to do clinics on the weekends and appearances four hours away for a couple hundred dollars because they need supplemental income. That’s the goal. The goal is to let professional women athletes be professional athletes.

Heath: Yeah. And I think that’s kind of this new generation’s challenge that they’re going to have to navigate. I think a lot of our generation, we fought for every single thing that we got and then every single thing that obviously the future of the sport will get. And it really felt like earning something. And I know that’s a weird thing to say, but when you go from a model where you kind of start with nothing to a model where you win equal pay and now this is the first time the U.S. Women’s National Team and Men’s National Team will be paid equally before the tournament even starts, that feels like a lot of foundational earnings.

And now I look at this generation, and I think this is a new generation of professional athlete for women. And they have a new challenge because they have these individual brands, these individual endorsements, that really changed—like Christen said—the way that they are able to be as professional athletes. And this is what we’ve been pushing for, right?

But they don’t have that same kind of foundational sense of, like, earnings, which we had fought for. I think it’s going to come with a different type of mentality, and one that’s going to have to kind of evolve through this process with the U.S. Women’s National Team.

Because the whole of the U.S. Women’s National Team is greater than any part. And now the parts are becoming a lot more valuable. So how does the value of individual parts then affect the value of the whole? So that’ll be interesting—to see what that future looks like.

Rosin: Oh, I see. So what you’re saying is you guys had to fight as a team. Like, you had a reason to have this kind of solidarity, because you were fighting for such basic rights. Whereas these players are coming in with individual brands—probably social-media brands, endorsements, etc.—and so they’re very much individuals, and so their challenge is: How, then, do we have the solidarity?

Heath: I mean, individually they’ve already made, before this tournament has started, most of them have already made more money than we would have made winning 2015 or 2019. So our earnings really depended on the success of the team. And so it’s a very different mindset as a professional now, which, we’ll have to watch how that plays out.

Rosin: Right. Because you guys wouldn’t have even gotten paid unless you won. Like they would offer you bonuses, but the whole team had to win. It wasn’t about what each individual player was going to achieve.

Heath: Exactly. Yeah.

Press: And the interesting part of the conversation is: We had to win the World Cup to win equal pay, but did we need the fight for equal pay to win the World Cup?

Heath: Mm.

Press: And obviously, we’ll never know. But I think everybody that watched the 2019 World Cup could feel that we were playing for something bigger than us. That we had this external motivation that was so inspiring, so uniting, that I—I’m a spiritual person; I believe that’s why we won. I believe we won because we had a job to do on behalf of women everywhere.

Now we’re going into a World Cup and there has to be a different intangible. This tournament isn’t the fight for equal pay for the U.S. Women’s National Team. So what is it? And do you even need that external motivation to win this tournament?

Rosin: That’s really beautiful. I mean, what is it? Do you guys talk about that? Like, what is that intangible motivation that you think can bring them together?

Press: I mean, they are fighting for history with the three-peat. Yeah. I think the tricky thing is there’s what? Five players on the team that are really—

Heath: Really the three-peaters.

Press: Yeah, the three-peaters.

Rosin: So it’s they—they’ve gotta motivate everyone with their goal.

Heath: Yeah, the team’s fighting for it, but really there’s only a couple extraordinary individuals that would be winning three. Others, two, maybe one. But it's interesting. I love what you just said about fighting for something more. I think as a group and as a collective, you rally around something.

I don’t know what that something is, but I’m pretty sure we’ll see it if this team goes all the way to the final; we’ll know what that something is.

Rosin: Maybe it’s just for Megan Rapinoe. Maybe it’s just like a three-peat Rapinoe. [Laughs.] That’s good enough. It has been so much fun to talk to you guys. Basically what I wanted out of this conversation is to learn to watch these games and see this world the way you both do. And I feel like you’ve been amazing guides, and I really appreciate it. Thank you guys both so much.

Heath: Anytime.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudinee Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Our executive producer is Claudine Ebeid. And thank you to managing editor Andrea Valdez. If you like this episode, recommend it to a friend. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega

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 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.

Typically philosophy books go unread even by the philosophers’ closest friends and family. But BAP’s book, Bronze Age Mindset (2018), tumbled screeching into the world, unignorable, at one point ranking among the top 150 books in the entire Amazon catalog. “It’s still a cult book,” a former Trump White House official told Politico in 2019. “If you’re a young person, intelligent, adjacent in some way to the right, it’s very likely you would have heard of it.” His podcast, Caribbean Rhythms, has likewise won an avid following.

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.”

BAP’s relationship to Donald Trump has been curious. He refers to the former president repeatedly, almost in the manner of a Homeric epithet, as a Borscht Belt comedian, a master of yuks. To BAP, Trump’s chief virtue is destruction. He views the former president fondly, as a kindred insult comic, brazenly impious and generally right about race and immigration. The affection has been repaid in print by Michael Anton, a former Trump-administration national-security official who wrote a 2019 essay in the Claremont Review of Books sympathetic to BAP, while noting his tendency to be “racist,” “anti-Semitic,” “anti-democratic,” “misogynistic,” and “homophobic.” Anton suggested (correctly, I think) that BAP’s vile utterances, whether sincere or not, serve a purpose: to keep whiny leftists so busy cataloging his petty thoughtcrimes that they overlook his more serious heresies. Meanwhile, those capable of reading him without being rage-blinded quietly learn from him and heed his advice to bond, network, and plot.

[From the April 2023 issue: America’s terrifying cycle of extremist violence]

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.”

Nicolás Ortega. Sources: Alamy; Auguste Vinchon.

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.

[Graeme Wood: Harlan Crow wants to stop talking about Clarence Thomas]

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.”

“Do you watch X-Men ?” Vish Burra, a 32-year-old legislative aide to Representative George Santos of New York, asked me recently. He said BAP’s followers hid out in government like mutants in the Marvel Comics universe. (The leader of the mutants, Professor Charles Xavier, can put on a special helmet and scan the world for fellow mutants.) “The movement’s coagulating, connecting,” Burra said, and only at private gatherings and parties will the BAPists on Capitol Hill confess their devotion. Someday, he said, they’ll go public, with a “big reveal.” But that moment will not come until the BAPists “get in position first,” Burra said. “Why would I [reveal myself] before I’m in front of the control panel?”

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?”

For many years, we corresponded. Costin’s messages arrived irregularly, and the tone ranged from friendly and inquisitive to boorish and insulting. I went to South America on assignment. He sent long messages extolling the virtues of Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo, which is set there. A friend who reads books like Nostromo, and can talk about them, is a friend worth putting up with. When I traveled to northwestern Pakistan, he suggested that we go in on a cabin in the mountains around Chitral and “plan the freedom of the Kalash,” an Indigenous Indo-Aryan people in the surrounding valleys.

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.

BAP’s origin story begins at Newton South High School, outside Boston. Newton has an outstanding public-school system, and both he and the friend who introduced us were in a clique of edgy nerds and teenage intellectuals. In philosophy, the group favored Nietzsche; in music, Rachmaninoff; in politics, none of the above. They indulged in adolescent intoxication with ideas, especially the forbidden and obscure. This kind of extremism is a privilege of youth, because if you’re still just a kid, you can idolize Che Guevara or Nietzsche all you like, and (usually) no one gets hurt.

Newton also has a large Jewish population. BAP has said on Twitter that he is Jewish, and this appears to be true. Costin has relatives who were interned in Nazi concentration camps. His older brother works as a geopolitical strategist at an investment research firm and has no detectable accent. Costin has kept his Romanian accent in private life. While in character, he speaks in what I believe is an intentionally bad Russian accent.

After high school, Costin went to MIT, where his father worked in the technology-licensing office. The New York Times once ran a photo of Costin, wearing his overcoat with Teva sandals, to illustrate the impaired fashion sense of MIT undergraduates. Upon graduation, he briefly worked in investment banking in New York, then began a doctoral program in political science at Yale—where he was a student of Bryan Garsten’s. (I teach part-time in Costin’s old department, where Garsten is a friend and colleague. Costin had left New Haven by the time I arrived.)

Faculty and graduate students from that era describe him as clever and manipulative. He wrote caustic letters to the student newspaper and contributed to The New Criterion, a venerable right-leaning cultural journal. He disappeared for long periods. He claimed he had been living out of a van in Argentina. No one was sure what to believe. His aversion to normal human company echoed Nietzsche’s: “When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul.” When among fellow grad students, he mocked them and played tricks. One grad student took Costin seriously, only to realize, she told me, “Oh no—I’m an idiot—this guy is just fucking with me.”

Costin was always ready to talk about political philosophy, but he objected to attempts to enlist him in mundane campus politics. Others gathered signatures to denounce dictators during the Arab Spring. He humbly suggested that if petitions did not topple Hosni Mubarak, a well-attended candlelight vigil might. Yale’s grad students attempted to unionize and to pressure the university to increase stipends and benefits. One wrote to a grad-student listserv with questions about the school’s dental-insurance coverage. “My cousin Benko run Benko-Magnitogorsk Dental Emporium, he make good dental work in white van at Grand Av. and East St. in parking lot outside plumbing supplies store,” Costin replied. “You forward me small price of $100 he do work … steel teeth, gold teeth anything you want.” The email was an early exercise in refitting his character to needle and ridicule liberals.

His dissertation is a peculiar document. His adviser, Steven B. Smith, is often identified with the German-born Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, about whom Smith wrote an elegant book. Strauss argued that great thinkers have embedded hidden messages in their writing, and the apparent meaning of their books and essays often contradicts the recondite meaning that only discerning readers can decode. The upshot: Read carefully, because things are not what they seem.

Costin’s dissertation follows Smith’s and Strauss’s lead. It is eccentric even within this eccentric tradition, as Costin himself allows. He reads Plato in a Straussian style: Plato’s teacher, Socrates, was executed for doing philosophy in a manner vexing to the Athenian state, so naturally Plato would have learned from that experience and written so that only the most perceptive reader could discern his true, subversive beliefs. At least one of those beliefs, in Costin’s reading, is a doozy. Plato, taken by most readers to scorn tyrants, is read by Costin as their covert defender. “Philosophy and tyranny are fundamentally connected,” Costin writes, and their shared aim is eugenic. They seek “the breeding,” the “biological” production of genius, nobility, and virtue: a master race.

Nicolás Ortega. Source: Alamy.

“There is much in this view that is frightening and even abhorrent to us,” Costin writes. Yet he states that Plato’s claims are validated by the history of human cultures. For evidence, he offers a bizarre mix of folklore, history, and ethnography. The development of an aristocratic class, he says, demands conquest, the vanquishing of lesser races by the organized violence of the greater. As an example, he quotes Pierre van den Berghe, an anthropologist who described Rwandan Tutsis, an archetypal aristocratic elite, as “intelligent, astute in political intrigue, born to command, refined, courageous, and cruel.” His dissertation is dripping with admiration for these martial, masculine virtues, and for their feminine counterpart of beauty. He despises, in turn, farming and manual labor, the characteristics of a slave class.

One of the best ways to conceal your genocidal fascism is to write about it openly in that most unread of documents, the unpublished doctoral dissertation. The few who noticed considered it an intellectual exercise rather than an act of incipient fascism.

Costin’s advisers were not alone in failing to take his Nietzscheanism as seriously as they might have. Dustin Sebell, a former acquaintance of Costin’s from that period and now a professor at Michigan State, told me that political philosophy as a whole has been one big victory parade for liberalism for several decades now. “You have a tradition of reflection that has gone on for decades largely oblivious to these radical Nietzschean critiques,” Sebell said. “When those critiques resurfaced, many professional philosophers had little to say for themselves.”

When Costin began submitting his doctoral work, Smith, his adviser, became enraged. “I was shocked that his family would escape Ceaușescu’s Romania only for Costin to undermine the principles of [American] democracy,” Smith told me. “I view that as a shameful act of betrayal.” He said he made his disgust known but ultimately signed off, and Costin received his degree. “I was his dissertation adviser, not his censor.”

In 2015, Emory University hired Costin for a postdoctoral fellowship, on the basis of less incendiary writing samples. His time there was a disaster. He acted erratically. At one point, he refused to give Emory’s human-resources department his home address. During the spring semester, the university discovered that Costin had secretly stopped teaching his classes in person and was instead attempting to teach them over email. Further investigation revealed that Costin was medically unable to teach in person, with a vague but apparently real physical infirmity. His fellowship was not renewed. Later he lived for some time in Brazil, although he has been sighted recently in Japan, Spain, Hong Kong, and Iceland.

Within two years of his departure from Emory, Bronze Age Mindset was published—a noxious, digressive summa that incorporated the conclusions in his dissertation, and added many others too outré for any but a self-published document. It is a narcissistic, 198-page love letter to himself, or to the philosopher-as-muscleman that his BAP persona purports to be. The tone approaches at times the onanistic genius of a young Norman Mailer, but much more resentful toward the modern world. “Perversions—lame ones—are born by the thousands and haunt, like myriad cripplette midgets in halls of mirrors, they haunt the world, books, the internet. Minds are lost. If you wait any longer everything will be pounded to garbage, there will be nothing left—it will all turn, the whole world will turn to a Bulgarian rest stop lavatory,” he writes. “I declare to you, with great boldness, that I am here to save you from a great ugliness.”

The “great ugliness” is the liberal bureaucratic state. Democracy, he writes, destroys “personal freedom and initiative” by elevating an unworthy caste of subhuman creatures he calls “bugmen,” who flourish only under these debased conditions, like roaches in a pit latrine. On his podcast, BAP praises the philosopher James Burnham, who wrote that the heroic age of capitalism had passed, and that a “managerial revolution” had elevated to power bean counters and bureaucrats (think of his supposed persecutors from Emory’s HR department) over noble intellects and creators. Any person of talent or intelligence is ground down by this system, by “life under the thumb of the empowered old matriarchs and the conceptual dildoes they use to clobber the heads of young men.”

The ugliness extends to art and culture. Low dominates high. Screeching popular music drowns out Rachmaninoff. “From the point of view of real culture and refinement we’re as barbaric as the most obscure herd of the Khwarezm [an ancient Central Asian people] where the women scratch their pubes in public.”

The “Bronze Age” element of his perversion refers to the earliest days of ancient Greece—an era of virile pagan militarism, before the moderns, and even some of the ancients, were beguiled into weakness. Men performed feats of intellect and strength unknown today: memorization of names and poetry, running flat-out for miles under heavy armor to impale enemies. These men prospered under “life at its peak,” which happens “not in the grass hut village ruled by nutso mammies, but in the military state.”

Then things get weird. BAP fantasizes about a near-apocalyptic cleansing:

Here is my vision of the true justice, the justice of nature: the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds … four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns. Manhattan, Moscow, Peking reduced to ruins overgrown by vines and forest, the haunt of the lynx and coyote again. The great cesspool slums, Calcutta, Nairobi, all the fetid latrines of the world covered over by mudslides, overgrown with thick jungle, this is justice.

The beings fit to rule this rewilded landscape are the neo-warriors, men of greatness and violence. “The only right government is military government, and every other form is both hypocritical and destructive of true freedom,” BAP writes. He considers Japan during the late imperial period, when the emperor was a martial god, an ideal political arrangement, and has written elsewhere that it is “the perfect model of national political life and national identity.”

BAP styles his book an “exhortation,” and ultimately he exhorts white people to form military units with deep masculine bonds, and together annihilate lesser races or throw them under the yoke. One could more easily dismiss BAP as a political shock jock, and his racism as cheap and tasteless subversion, if this section were not so obviously heartfelt. He mentions by name the white mercenaries who toppled governments for profit and pleasure in the 20th century. “The coming age of barbarism will not be owned, as so many of you urban cucks fear, by the gangbangers and the unwashed hordes of the teeming cesspools of the world, but by clean-cut middle-class and working-class vets, men of military experience, who know something about how to shoot and how to organize. The fools who think oligarchs will be able to control these men for very long should look to the fortunes of the Sforzas”—the Renaissance clan that controlled, then lost, the duchy of Milan—“and many others, and remember that money is no match for force of arms combined with charm.”

I asked Vish Burra, the young Hill staffer, how BAP had charmed him. “The power, the vitality, the energy,” he said. “The left has stuck itself in a position of promoting a politics of sterility.” He said he didn’t agree with everything BAP said, but he loved the vision, the verve, the relentless mockery of the bugmen.

The bugmen, as Burra suggests, are terrible at countering BAP’s message. Liberals and leftists are used to sitting in a blind, watching for telltale signs of their enemies’ racism. There is no point in yelling “racist” at someone who is already yelling racial epithets at full volume. And there is, among BAP’s fans, perverse pleasure in watching their critics passionately denounce their hero, to no discernible effect.

BAPists are not supposed to talk about being BAPists, and they even have a term of abuse for those who do: facefag. “He wouldn’t appreciate a face—” Rather than utter the word, Burra sort of gestured at it, pawing the air. “He wouldn’t appreciate a guy like me, but I’m a big fan.”

BAP enjoys suggesting how close his followers are to the control panels. He posts pictures of their copies of Bronze Age Mindset next to tokens of their power, such as U.S.-government-official passports and patches, IDs, and other items from the livery of the Secret Service, Army Rangers, Department of Homeland Security, and Air Force. He allows one to wonder whether for every Vish Burra, who proudly keeps his copy of the book on the office shelf, there are others who adopt bugman camouflage. To be part of a clandestine movement, so extreme that it feels almost invisible to one’s elders, is part of the thrill. “I mentioned him in class the other day; my students were shocked that I knew who Bronze Age Pervert was,” the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen said at a conference in April.

A BAPist can take pleasure in having entered an exclusive cognitive club. One of his supporters wrote to me that BAP’s character was layered with irony, and that the ability to see the truth in BAP, and separate it from the hilarious megalomania, is a kind of Straussian test, to determine who can read and think, and who is so offended by the racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism that he is incapacitated and unable to focus on anything else, even to criticize it. “Nobody who has the IQ to listen to one hour of BAP without tuning out actually believes he recommends becoming an autistic nudist bodybuilder.”

I am not sure I pass that test. Listening to BAP, one gets the impression of florid insanity. He digresses as if not in control of his own thoughts. He barks insults and orders at subordinates in his recording studio, and one can reasonably wonder whether these figures are comic creations or psychotic delusions. He cannot possibly believe everything he says he believes.

BAP glorifies bodybuilding and devotes much of his Twitter feed to images of half-naked white hunks in the flower of youth. Allegedly this is to worship their vitality, their fitness for the aristocratic warrior class that the modern world has dishonored. He stresses that in ancient Athens, the cultivation of physical perfection was a privilege of the elite. Only citizens could train in the gymnasium. The process of creating an ideal male form was deemed beyond the station of lesser entities, such as women and slaves.

The parade of Adonises has led many to question BAP’s sexuality. Bizarrely, Costin is not the only fascist I know who has been dogged by such rumors. Richard Spencer, my chemistry-lab partner in middle school, faced persistent questions about his sexuality when he was a leader of the alt‑right. (If anyone out there can explain why homoerotic fascists keep seeking my company, please let me know.) Spencer told me, more than a little exasperated, that he thought the case for BAP’s homosexuality had been proved. “If I had posted even one photo of some guy’s ass on Twitter, do you think there would be any question in anyone’s mind?” In Bronze Age Mindset, BAP writes that the confusion of masculine bonding for homosexuality “is misunderstanding and exaggeration promoted by the homonerds of our time,” a poverty of our imagination and lack of friendship, “because we can’t conceive of such intense love between friends without some carnal or material benefit in play.”

[From the June 2017 issue: How Richard Spencer became an icon for white supremacists]

The sheer length of time BAP has held his pose makes one wonder whether more of it is sincere than his followers think. As a character sings in a Sam Shepard play, “I believe in my mask: The man I made up is me.” The breeding of a caste of supermen is not just a pseudo-comic reverie. It is the subject of his dissertation. The fantasies of killing “lower forms of life” are not funny at all, not even as a lampoon of liberal excess. And while some people know BAP personally, and vouch for his intelligence and wit, few have emerged to state with confidence that he’s not a fascist and racist. That is because he probably is one.

What might it feel like to experience the modern world as a “great ugliness”—an inverted kingdom of sniveling ass-kissers? “Society became something approaching mass concentration camp,” BAP has said on his podcast. “I’m exaggerating only a little.” His rejection of this world is matched by his rejection by it. His classmates are successful; they hold good jobs. One by one, the adolescent Nietzscheans grew up into productive citizens, and put aside childish fascinations. The person who introduced us, now decades ago, was once so close to Costin that their friends described them as sharing something almost as deep as marriage. (They did not suggest the bond was erotic.) That friend has excelled in a normal life: a job at a tech company, a family, leadership in his synagogue. At some point he chose to be normal, which means rejecting BAP.

To take a job, to toil in the modern fields among the bugs and bugmen, is the greatest betrayal. No one respectable wants anything to do with someone who tweets out messages calling for “high violence” against the “kike and nigger” scourge.

BAP has responded to this rejection with bitterness, with what Milton called “a sense of injured merit.” I find his message melancholic. Recently he posted a video of himself in Rio de Janeiro’s Botanical Garden, following around a wild bird. “Yes, hello,” he says. “Do not run from me. Come back. I love you.” I do not see much space for true love in the world he has built for himself, whose components are war, purification, and mutual masculine admiration ever fearful of its eros.

Fixation on BAP’s monstrous qualities has, I think, led even his fervent admirers to overlook the most unexpected aspect of his philosophy, which is a literal belief in the transmigration of souls, as described in Eastern religions and the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. If this life fails, another will come. When the ironic pose drops, when the outrageous Boratism subsides, this conviction is what remains. “I believe reincarnation is fundamentally true,” he writes, in a section of his book that does not appear to be for laughs.

“I think that is the deepest layer of his outlook,” Dustin Sebell, at Michigan State, told me. “He believes in an esoteric version of metempsychosis, that our truest selves live on after death and take on different forms. He is profoundly unwilling to accept his own mortality.”

No humans receive praise higher than what BAP lavishes on noble animals like jaguars and birds of prey. He is taken, however, with the diminutive Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. In midlife, Mishima took up bodybuilding and raised a squad of erotically intertwined neo-samurai warriors. When it became clear that Japan’s managerial revolution had extinguished its imperial spirit, he attempted to overthrow the Japanese government and restore the power of the emperor. After that failed, he ritually disemboweled himself.

In Michigan, when Bryan Garsten made his comment about the seductions of illiberalism, BAP was like the ghost at the banquet, cackling from the rafters at his professor’s consternation. But the remarks went on longer, and they were also searching, and self-critical. Garsten told his listeners that they—he—may have failed to cultivate students’ imagination. His illiberal students, Garsten said, had learned why the Greeks admired Achilles, the fiery warrior. But they neglected the Greeks’ admiration for Ulysses, a subtler and greater model of manhood. Ulysses’s greatness emerged not from his rejection of this world, but from his mastery of its constraints. He owed myriad debts to those around him: to his men, to his son, to his wife.

The students romanticized the tyrant, while assuming that liberalism bred sloth and laziness. “Life in a liberal democracy is full of demanding moments,” Garsten said at the conference. I had the impression that he was addressing BAP apostrophically, delivering a warning he wished he had delivered in person. “As far as I have read, life under tyrants is full of lassitude, selfishness, duplicity, betrayal.”

One could feel, over the course of these discussions, the stirrings of dormant liberal passions—as if the mere invocation of BAPism, after many years ignored, had inspired a counteroffensive. Another political theorist, a former Marine and a Brookings Institution scholar named William A. Galston, piped up to remind everyone that when liberalism had come under mortal threat in the Pacific theater, “Americans as a whole found it in themselves to do something.” Specifically, his fellow Marines charged, shot, and bayoneted their way from island to island until illiberalism, in the form of Japanese fascism, begged them for mercy. “Is there really an opposition between the open society and the virtue of courage?” Galston asked.

The defeat of imperial Japan illustrated the point nicely, I thought. But it also raised a much stranger question, about how liberals acquired such a reputation for sissydom in the first place. The Battle of Iwo Jima wasn’t that long ago. But in certain spaces—academia, elite journalism—liberalism’s victory had been so overwhelming that for generations it grew soft, flabby, and unaccustomed to the hard work of defending itself from a vigorous challenger. As such challengers left universities and newspapers, those institutions became self-congratulatory monocultures, inhospitable even to conservatives far less nutty than BAP. By now, a ranting nudist poses a real danger—of poisoning politics, splitting apart societies, and persuading otherwise talented people to spurn the modern world’s greatest achievements, which are peace, tolerance, and prosperity.

The great Straussian Allan Bloom predicted doom for liberalism when these challenges disappeared. “The most essential of our freedoms, as men and as liberal democrats, the freedom of our minds, consists in the consciousness of the fundamental alternatives,” he wrote. An unchallenged liberal democrat, he argued, ceases to want to improve, unless he confronts his enemies in their most potent forms. Those forms will shock and humble us, he wrote, and have “the added salutary effect of destroying our sense of our own worth and giving us higher aspirations.”

To Costin personally, I have never been more grateful. His last message came during the pandemic. I asked how things were looking in Brazil. “Not bad,” he reported, with laconic caginess. He had not yet veered, as he later did in his public statements about COVID-19, into outright conspiracy theory and extended roasts of Anthony Fauci. Since then, I have come to think of BAP’s performances in immunological terms: a gnarly virus that had lain dormant for decades in circles of philosophers and their unread books. Now that it’s loose in the human population, it is a vicious kick to the liberal immune system. And that is not entirely bad. Unchallenged, liberalism’s defenses waned, and liberals forgot, temporarily, why their cause was worth defending. The antibodies are stirring.

This article appears in the September 2023 print edition with the headline “The Rise of Bronze Age Pervert.”