Part Two: The History of American Masculinity Grifters

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards – Part Two: The History of American Masculinity Grifters

Introduction

In "Part Two: The History of American Masculinity Grifters" from the podcast Behind the Bastards by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts, hosts Robert Evans and Miles Gray delve deep into the evolution of male grifters in American history. This episode explores how these individuals have exploited societal insecurities surrounding masculinity to profit from selling various self-improvement schemes, from early fitness programs to modern-day cultural conspiracies.

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Charles Atlas and the Birth of the Male Grifter

The episode opens with a historical overview of Charles Atlas, one of the pioneering figures in the world of male grifting. In the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, Atlas emerged by targeting young, insecure men through advertisements in Popular Mechanics and later, comic books. His campaigns mocked scrawny physiques, promising to transform men into muscular heroes within seven days.

Notable Quote:

"He was the guy who was like, I'm just going to use body dysmorphia to make all of my money to make money."
— Robert Evans [05:26]

Atlas's approach was groundbreaking. By embedding his ads within comic books, he directly targeted impressionable youth, leveraging their insecurities to sell his fitness regimen. His iconic "97 Pound Weakling" ads depicted underweight protagonists mocked by bullies, who later transform into muscular adversaries after following Atlas's program.

Notable Quote:

"Look at these bags of bone. Absolute embarrassments."
— Miles Gray [15:18]

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Evolution of Male Grifting: From Fitness to Culture Wars

As decades passed, the tactics of male grifters evolved. Robert Evans draws parallels between Charles Atlas and contemporary figures like Andrew Tate, highlighting a shift from purely physical transformations to engaging in broader cultural and ideological battles. Modern grifters not only sell supplements and fitness programs but also embed themselves in ongoing cultural wars, such as debates over seed oils.

Seed Oil Conspiracy: A Modern Grift

One of the episode's key discussions centers around the current panic over seed oils, propagated by influencers like Carnivore Aurelius on Twitter. These modern grifters claim that seed oils are toxic and part of a grand conspiracy to undermine men's health and masculinity.

Notable Quote:

"One can pause and note why the Gary Coopers, Cary Grants, Clark Gables and Spencer Tracys continue to play romantic leads opposite girls young enough to be their daughters. It's obviously because so few of the younger male stars can project a convincing sense of masculinity."
— Robert Evans [41:40]

Evans critiques these modern conspiracies as simplistic attacks that fail to address the complex nature of societal changes and individual health.

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Masculinity in Crisis: Historical Context

The hosts delve into the historical crises of masculinity, particularly focusing on the 1950s. They reference Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s influential article "The Crisis of American Masculinity," which lamented the shifting roles of men and women in society. Schlesinger argued that as women entered professional fields previously dominated by men, it led to a perceived emasculation of the male role.

Notable Quote:

"The pre-democratic world was characteristically a world of status in which people were provided with ready made identities... the great vacant spaces of egalitarian society can become a nightmare filled with nameless horrors."
— Robert Evans [58:06]

Evans and Gray discuss how these historical anxieties laid the groundwork for contemporary male grifters, who exploit similar insecurities to maintain their influence and profitability.

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Modern Male Grifters: Case Study of Jack Murphy

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to analyzing Jack Murphy, a modern male grifter who epitomizes the ongoing crisis of masculinity. Murphy, with qualifications from prestigious institutions like George Mason University and Georgetown School of Foreign Service, presents himself as a champion for traditional masculinity. However, his actions, such as mismanaging charter schools in majority Black districts for personal gain, reveal a pattern of exploitation and hypocrisy.

Notable Quote:

"This guy's a fun one. This guy's a fun one."
— Robert Evans [55:47]

Murphy's attempts to monetize masculinity through coaching services and rebranding as a "gunfluencer" mirror the tactics of past grifters but are marred by personal inconsistencies and ethical breaches.

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The Psychological Underpinnings of Male Grifting

Evans and Gray explore the psychological motivations behind male grifters, positing that these individuals often come from privileged backgrounds but struggle with deep-seated insecurities. The freedom and social mobility of modern society can be both a boon and a burden, leading some men to exploit others' vulnerabilities as a means of asserting their own identity and significance.

Notable Quote:

"They have freedom... and they see... some people take this freedom that exists in our society and... they're angry and jealous because they don't have the courage to find or make themselves in the same way."
— Robert Evans [59:18]

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Conclusion: The Persistent Cycle of Male Grifting

The episode concludes by emphasizing the cyclical nature of male grifting in American society. From Charles Atlas's exploitation of physical insecurities to modern influencers' manipulation of ideological anxieties, these grifters adapt to the changing landscape to sustain their influence and profitability. Evans underscores the importance of recognizing these patterns to mitigate their impact on societal perceptions of masculinity.

Notable Quote:

"But I will give Arthur credit. There's a paragraph in his piece that absolutely describes Jack and a lot of these guys to a T."
— Robert Evans [59:07]

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Final Thoughts

"Part Two: The History of American Masculinity Grifters" offers a comprehensive exploration of how societal shifts and evolving notions of masculinity have been exploited by opportunistic individuals throughout American history. By tracing this lineage from early fitness grifters to contemporary cultural conspiracies, Evans and Gray provide listeners with a nuanced understanding of the forces shaping modern masculinity and the persistent vulnerabilities that enable grifters to thrive.

Key Takeaways:

• Historical Continuity: Male grifters have long exploited societal insecurities, adapting their strategies to contemporary contexts.
• Cultural Integration: Modern grifters engage in broader cultural debates, embedding their narratives within prevailing societal issues.
• Psychological Drivers: Underlying insecurities and the quest for identity drive both past and present male grifters.
• Awareness and Mitigation: Recognizing the tactics of male grifters is crucial in addressing their influence on perceptions of masculinity.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• "He was the guy who was like, I'm just going to use body dysmorphia to make all of my money to make money."
  — Robert Evans [05:26]

• "Look at these bags of bone. Absolute embarrassments."
  — Miles Gray [15:18]

• "One can pause and note why the Gary Coopers, Cary Grants, Clark Gables and Spencer Tracys continue to play romantic leads opposite girls young enough to be their daughters. It's obviously because so few of the younger male stars can project a convincing sense of masculinity."
  — Robert Evans [41:40]

• "The pre-democratic world was characteristically a world of status in which people were provided with ready made identities... the great vacant spaces of egalitarian society can become a nightmare filled with nameless horrors."
  — Robert Evans [58:06]

• "They have freedom... and they see... some people take this freedom that exists in our society and... they're angry and jealous because they don't have the courage to find or make themselves in the same way."
  — Robert Evans [59:18]

• "But I will give Arthur credit. There's a paragraph in his piece that absolutely describes Jack and a lot of these guys to a T."
  — Robert Evans [59:07]

---

This detailed summary captures the essence of the episode, providing listeners with a thorough understanding of the discussions on the history and tactics of American masculinity grifters.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media. Welcome back to behind the Bastards. I'm doing my Halloween voice. Cause this will probably come out pretty close to Halloween. Yeah, Miles, and it's. Have you ever poisoned. Have you ever poisoned candy?

[Miles Gray]

Have I ever poisoned candy?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, anyone's candy. Have you ever poisoned a child's candy, Miles?

[Miles Gray]

No. I used to poison mine to get out of school though.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we'll leave that a maybe. Miles, are you ready to get back into part two here? Miles Gray, host of the Daily Zeitgeist.

[Miles Gray]

I'm so ready. I'm so ready because like I said, I feel like. I feel like mans are going to turn it around.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Some men are going to fluence themselves into a healthier place. I feel like it's going to happen. I hated that.

[Miles Gray]

We've got. Look, we've got manfluenza over here.

[Robert Evans]

I hated that also influenza. Concerned about. Concerned about men, including both of you.

[Sloan Glass]

Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloan Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. Listen to American homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Stephen King]

From. Audio up, the creators of Stephen King Strawberry Spring Comes the Unborn. A shocking true story.

[Robert Evans]

My babies. Please. My babies.

[Stephen King]

One woman, two lives and a secret she would kill to protect.

[Unknown]

She went crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids, tried to burn her house out.

[Stephen King]

Listen to the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Unknown]

It's been 30 years since the horror began.

[Robert Evans]

911.

[Unknown]

What's your emergency?

He said he was gonna kill me. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended, but what if we were wrong?

[Miles Gray]

Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you.

[Unknown]

Listen to the Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jack B. Thomas]

Hey, I'm Jack B. Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black lit. The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature. Black lit is for the page turners. For those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll Explore. Explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Blacklit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dani Shapiro]

Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello? And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets. Listen to season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

So I'm going to start this episode by returning to the distant past and the next era of man masculinity gurus to come around. After the stock market collapsed, one of the first guys through that particular door was a man that you probably heard his name, Charles Atlas, who in 1930 started running a series of ads in Popular Mechanics, bragging, let me prove in seven days that I can make you a new man. Now, Atlas was obviously not the first guy to promise insecure men that he could make them huge and that in doing so, he would solve every problem in their lives. But he was probably the most muscular of the first generation of these guys. As the depression faded and the war years came, Atlas was also the first to realize that magazines meant for mature adults like Popular Mechanics weren't the best place to target insecure young men. To do that, you had to reach them in comic books. Charles placed ads in every comic under the sun because this was a hungrier era in general. He didn't tend to focus on, like, trying to get men, you know, to lose weight or whatever. That really wasn't a thing, right? Trying to convince them that, like, they're fat and out of shape. That wouldn't really work in this era because everyone's starving. So instead, he mocked them for being too skinny. This tactic culminated in his famous 97 pound weakling ads. Here's an early example, right? And to think they called me skinny. Give me 15 minutes a day and I'll give you a new body. And then we see a very. A very oily Italian man, right? I mean, just as shiny as the day is long, leopard pint undies, shining portion of that painted on him. There's a little box underneath him right above his knees that says, charles Atlas, holder of the title, the world's most perfectly developed man. That you're wondering, where does that title come from Free Internet. Free Internet. Who made up that? Who decided that? We'll talk about it. He did.

[Miles Gray]

He did.

[Robert Evans]

Now, what really made Charles stand out in a crowded field of fitness gurus was his laser focus on fucking with the self confidence of boys and young men reading his ads. Right? He was the guy who was like, I'm just going to use body dysmorphia to make all of my money to make money. And he really did it. Probably the first guy I saw doing it in a really organized way that I've found that's really unhealthy in a very modern way where he just wants you to feel bad about your body. Right. His most popular 97 pound weakling ads were comics themselves. So he is really targeting kids to make them hate their bodies. And the premise of like most of these was that a bully at the beach mocks our protagonist for being scrawny. In the comic I have here, he's saying, hey, skinny, your ribs are showing. Don't let him hit you, Joe. Watch what you say, fella. Shut up, you bag of bones. And then the muscular guy hits our hero who takes Charles Atlas getting jacked, course becomes swole and then goes back to the beach to beat the shit out of this guy and presumably take back his woman. Right, right.

[Miles Gray]

That's how it works.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. After he beats up the beach bully, his girlfriend says, oh, Joe, you are a real he man after all.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, Jesus, thank you for winning me back.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. This comic does not pass the Bechdel test. I did not enjoy that. Thank you. No horrible stuff. Now, it's not going to surprise you to learn that Charles Atlas was not his real name. Oh, really? That's not anyone's real name. What is funny is that his real name also sounds fake. He was born Angelo Siciliano, which sounds like what J.K. rowling would have named an Italian wizard, not a real person's name.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. Angelo Sicilianus.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, Sicilian Thomas Italian wizard. Now, before he was a muscle salesman, he was a poor kid in Brooklyn who couldn't afford a YMCA membership and tried several fad workouts of the day without results. Siciliano thus fell for the con before he got in on it himself. Treating Bernard McFadden's physical culture magazine as the Bible and hassling strongmen at weightlifting competitions to learn their secrets. He would later claim that the infamous 97 pound weakling story had its orig and his real life, that that was a thing that actually happened to him as a kid, that he had sand kicked in his face by a bully. And then my favorite part of this is because there were no Charles Atlas classes to take when he was bullied as a kid. He went to the zoo where he studied, found out the secrets of muscle growth by watching a lion because his whole program was like calisthenics based. He was like, well, lions have muscles and they don't lift weights, so it must be a calisthenics problem.

[Miles Gray]

Holy shit.

[Robert Evans]

Also, I do love that logic.

[Miles Gray]

He just like ran down like muscle men from the circus to be like, hey, what's your secret? What's your secret?

[Robert Evans]

What's your secret? He would go to like muscle shows and then would like annoy them afterwards being like, hey, man, how'd you get so big? How'd you get so huge?

[Miles Gray]

I don't know, Lifting a shit ton.

[Robert Evans]

Of weight, ate nothing but beef steak and picked up everythings, bro. It was like the 19 teens, just.

[Miles Gray]

Raw ground beef, man. Room temperature raw ground beef.

[Robert Evans]

Just shoveling it in their mouths.

[Miles Gray]

Icarus.

[Robert Evans]

Now, whatever his real secret, Siciliano did figure out how to get swole. And he made his living as a circus Strongman until in 1922, he met a homeopathic doctor who'd written for Physical Culture and hired him to author a fitness course he could sell in magazines. He changed his name to Charles Atlas and the rest was history. Now I looked into the case of like, who declared him the world's most perfectly developed man. And Wikipedia says there's no evidence that he ever won this. This is just a thing he declared himself. But I found another source that I trust implicitly. Barbend.com which offers a free arm training ebook to readers that claims with citations that he did in fact win a most handsome man contest held by Bernard McFadden and a subsequent America's most Perfectly Developed man contest held also by Bernard McFadden. So, you know, maybe it's kind of legit. Although he was sort of working for the guy. So right now, Atlas was absolutely a grifter. But he came far enough back that he was at least fun, right? In his day, it was enough to be huge and make kids feel bad about their bodies. Today his descendants, guys like Andrew Tate have to do that. And you know, they also have to sell like supplements and shit, right? They have to, they have to get into all this culture war shit, right? It's not just you can't just pose naked and offer health and dieting trips tricks anymore, right? You have to have a place in the culture wars, right? You have to find a Way to, like, make people think that by listening to your. They're part of like a great and vicious struggle. Right. Otherwise there's just nothing like you kind of get lost by the wayside without that. And I don't know why. I think some of this has to do with the fact that in Charles Atlas Day, they didn't really know how people got big. Right. They generally knew that you had to lift heavy things. But there was a lot of. Lot less was known about sports nutrition and the like. A lot less was known about how to work out in order to maximize muscle growth. And steroids weren't really a thing. Right now we have. Thank God, steroids.

[Miles Gray]

Thank God the anabolics came online, baby.

[Robert Evans]

It's easier. People can get swole pretty easily if they have time and money nowadays. Right.

[Miles Gray]

And the back acne is free.

[Robert Evans]

And the back acne is free. Right. As is the HGH gut. You too can look like Joe Rogan.

[Miles Gray]

Hey. I like to call it organ enlargement. All right. Don't call it an aid. That's what's happening. My organs are becoming oversized in my body.

[Robert Evans]

He has the massive guts of a healthy man. Yeah. Now I want to. Yeah. So it's like think about that guy who compared himself to the Rock before getting his legs butchered. Right. Just the fact that you're shredded isn't going like, people aren't confident at all as a result of that anymore. It doesn't bring you the same. It used to be if you were huge, maybe that was enough to feel like a big man. Nowadays, it just really makes you feel like one of the herd. So these guys who are essentially doing the same thing Atlas was, they have to sell themselves as like culture war icons too. Right. In part because these men are struggling for something that gives them meaning. Right. And war is a force that gives us meaning. So they want some sort of thing to fight for and some sort of leader to take the reins. Right, Right. And a good example of how some guys do this is the current panic among right wing masculinity influencer types over seed oils. Now, one of the major sources of the seed oil panic, and the idea is that seed oils are toxic and they're stopping you from like being muscular. They're killing you. They're basically killing you as a man. They're rendering you infertile, you know, and it's a conspiracy. Right. That's kind of the insinuation that the spread of seed oils in cooking is part of a conspiracy to destroy men, you know? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[Miles Gray]

It's easier to do that than really zoom out. Yeah, it's the seed oils, man.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, man, that's it. Girls don't like it because all the seed oils. That safflower oil is really fucking you up.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, man. Safflower. Oh, I'll pray for you.

[Robert Evans]

I'll pray for you.

[Miles Gray]

I'll pray for you.

[Robert Evans]

It's gotta be olive oil, right? Or is olive oil a seed oil? I don't think so. I hope not.

[Miles Gray]

I mean, I guess it comes from the olives themselves. Whatever. I'm all fucked up on seed oils, man.

[Robert Evans]

You know?

[Miles Gray]

What do you want me to do?

[Robert Evans]

All I know is my brother says that there's to eat avocado oil. And he's a doctor, he says to eat avocado. Oh, there you go.

[Miles Gray]

I hear that too. It also has a high smoke point. Higher smoke point than olive oil. So if you're doing high temperature cooking, I'm like, I can second that.

[Robert Evans]

See, as a masculinity influencer myself, Miles, I cook only with diesel fuel, you know?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

If it's good enough to W30 motor oil. Yeah. 10 W30. Well, I just put that on some bread, you know, a little bit of salt in there, not too much. You don't want to. You don't want too much sodium. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Ugh. Vegemite. Gross. Dip my bread in 10W30.

[Robert Evans]

So one of the big names in the seed oils community is Carnivore Aurelius, a Twitter account with more than 300,000 followers that he's done a few things. He was one of these guys just my brain take pictures of old buildings from the classical era and be like, why can't we make these anymore?

[Miles Gray]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

I mean, we could, bro. We just have other ways of making houses than having Minhugan for 1,000 years. I don't know. We have better materials. Have you ever had to walk around on a floor made out of fucking marble when it's raining? Like, we have other ways of building things now.

[Miles Gray]

If you do that now, you're going to break your little extendo femur bone that you paid 75 and you're not going to be able to keep balance on that.

[Robert Evans]

So he is one of the big guys who is pushing this idea that seed oils are responsible for all of the woes of modern life. And I don't think I need to waste time breaking down why he's wrong. But I will show you a post of his From August of 2023, which I find interesting. As a mirror to the Charles Atlas ads that we started this episod with. Before seed oils were invented, everybody was hot and healthy. Less than 10% of people were obese. Less than 40% today. And CBD was non existent. But in the last hundred years, seed oil consumption has increased 20 times, and so has disease. Here are studies showing why I don't eat them. And then his evidence is this picture of Atlantic beach in 1908. Look at that. Look at all these. And what I find interesting here is that if you look at the men in this, they're like, for one thing, a lot shorter than men today tend to be. And also pretty skinny as a general rule. And this same picture in 1908 would have been used by Charles Atlas as evidence of how scrawny the average men is and why they need his workout program. They're all wimps. Look at these wimps. They're all gonna get sand kicked in their face.

[Miles Gray]

Look at these bags of bone. Absolute embarrassments.

[Robert Evans]

They are like Chuck Atlas, he just sees targets there, sand kicking targets. Like that boy on the left right there with the. You could see him in the left side, bottom side of the picture in the wife beater black shirt. Like, that guy's getting sand kicked right in his face.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So is the guy. Do we call them wife beaters anymore? Is that offensive these days?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, I think you're supposed to call them tank tops.

[Robert Evans]

Wow. Tanks. So the military industrial complex is fine, Miles.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, I guess. I don't know, man. Look, I don't make the rules, man. I don't make. I'm just here to sell seed oils, man.

[Robert Evans]

I did, like, when I was a kid. That was the only thing people ever called those shirts.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

No adult was ever able to explain to me, like, why are they called white beaters?

[Miles Gray]

No, the other one you heard was it was a guinea tea.

[Robert Evans]

Are the other ones and like guinea tea?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, those are like the alternatives. And like, there were no good options.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Like, to the point now I remember needing one. And I said it offhandedly. And my partner, Her Majesty, is like, yo, that's that. That's not.

[Robert Evans]

Can't call him that.

[Miles Gray]

I'm like, no, that out loud. Yeah. I don't want to say that in.

[Robert Evans]

A store in the small town I grew up in. Yeah, they were definitely always called wife beaters. And it was because it was like a shirt people than trailer parks would often wear. And I think probably my mom didn't tell me why it got that name, because all of my Friends were kids in trailer parks. She didn't want to talk shit about their dads, but it was like I didn't really evaluate that until just now that like, oh, yes, it is kind of messed up to call a T shirt that.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, these are strange times we were dealing with.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We're all growing every minute anyway. Also, we don't have enough black tank tops in our society. It's not a bad look. Not a bad look on those kids. I'm sure they're dead now, but they look nice in a picture.

[Miles Gray]

You never know. Photos taken 1908 and 1908.

[Robert Evans]

Dead as. They're dead as hell.

[Stephen King]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Hey, they're making some worms happy though.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah, probably. Or at least we're like 70 years ago. Yeah, yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Unless they cremated, which is a better way, but hey, hopefully.

[Robert Evans]

Well, we'll see. We'll see. So, yeah, this is. I just found it funny that like, the same picture that is being like, portrayed as this is like, how much, ah, men used to be real men. Back when all of those men were alive. They were being told, you're far too skinny.

[Miles Gray]

But it's the same way, even with like, who's raising our kids right. It's like, the men should be there with the kids. And now it's like, you hear people be like, women are.

[Robert Evans]

They're not raising the kids. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

I would never hire a man to babysit. That's just wrong. And you're like, wow, whatever. It's a funhouse mirror. Depending on where your life's at and where society is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. A certain chunk of the population are just always going to be assholes who need to find a reason why whatever other people are fine with isn't okay and is ruining their lives because usually they want to make money off of it. You know, like, that's just the reality of human beings. And the sooner you make peace with it, the sooner you can just daydream about those people getting hit by buses. So, yeah. So anyway, I want to read a quote about the fake seed oil Crisis by Rolling Stone's E.J. dixon just to kind of give you some context on this fun little piece of our culture at the present moment. Carnivore Aurelius is an account dedicated to restoring our ancestral meat loving lifestyle. Its website also sells a branded bag of beef liver crisps for 89.99. Like other proponents of the Carnivore diet, like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, Carnivore Aurelius frequently advocates for traditional family values. Tweeting about how feminism is a scam or idyllic photos. Beautiful blonde moms with babies with the caption, ladies, there's nothing wrong with you. If you want this over becoming a partner at a law firm. It has also devoted much space to pushing the evils of seed oils. My favorite thing about this is so he has to claim. He's claimed that seed oils are the most destructive force in the world today. And cutting them out of the diet, your diet will change your health. And some of his evidence for that is canola oil is literally made from seeds of the rape plant, named after what it will do to your health and. Okay, I feel like, again, I shouldn't need to say anything here, but I will. Which is that rapeseed, which is the unfortunate name of the plant that cannoli grows.

[Miles Gray]

I always thought it was misspelled. Whenever I had seen it, I was.

[Robert Evans]

Like, no, it is an unfortunate name, but it has nothing to do with rape. The thing, right? It comes from the Latin word rapum for turnip because it's related to the turnip plant.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, thank God.

[Robert Evans]

Just unrelated.

[Miles Gray]

I thought just some sick fuck was just like, you know what we're gonna name this one again?

[Robert Evans]

Could we have called it rap? See, probably. Yeah, probably would have been a better idea, but scientists never listen to what I think things should be named.

[Miles Gray]

And I keep telling. I keep telling them, and I keep telling the, you know, the local police. I'd say it's a misunderstanding. It's a misunderstanding. He's got good ideas.

[Robert Evans]

Listen to him. Yeah. Speaking of calling the local police. Don't do that. Listen to these ads.

[Sloan Glass]

Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind. Who did this and why? And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the Where. Where the crime happened. I'm journalist Sloan Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide. Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders. And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story on American Homicide. We'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness. And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets. So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. Listen to American homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Stephen King]

In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy. Akron seemed to have it all. A whirlwind romance, a new Home and twins on the way. What no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret so shocking it would tear their world apart.

[Robert Evans]

91 One Response. What's your emergency? My babies. Please. My babies.

[Stephen King]

One woman, two lives, and the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine.

[Unknown]

They had her as one of the suspects, but they could never prove it.

[J]

You're going to go to jail if you don't come with us right now.

[Robert Evans]

Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling myself, nobody's that crazy.

[Miles Gray]

Crazy.

[Stephen King]

Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything. A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest seeking.

[Unknown]

She went batshit crazy. Shot and killed all her farm animals. Slaughtered them in front of the kids. Tried to burn her house down.

[Stephen King]

Audio presents the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[J]

Is your country falling apart? Feeling tired? Depressed? A little bit revolutionary? Consider this. Start your own country.

[Robert Evans]

I planted the flag and just kind of looked out of like, this is mine. I own this.

[J]

It's surprisingly easy.

[Robert Evans]

We have 55 gallons of water for 500 pounds of concrete.

[J]

Everybody's doing it.

[Robert Evans]

I am King Ernest Emmanuel.

[J]

I am the Queen of Ladonia.

[Miles Gray]

I'm Jackson I, King of Capperburg.

[Robert Evans]

I am the supreme leader of the Grand Republic of Montonia.

[J]

Be part of a great colonial tradition.

[Robert Evans]

Well, why can't I trade my own country? My forefathers did that themselves.

[J]

What could go wrong?

[Robert Evans]

No country willingly gives up their territory. I was making rockets with a black.

[Miles Gray]

Powder, you know, with explosive warhead. Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

What is that? Bullets? Bullet holes? We need help. We need help. We still have the off road portion to go.

[J]

Listen to Escape from Zakistan.

[Robert Evans]

And we're losing daylight fast.

[J]

That's Escape from zaqistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Unknown]

It's been 30 years since the horror began.

[Robert Evans]

911.

[Unknown]

What's your emergency?

Someone. He said he was going to kill me. Three decades since, our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.

[Miles Gray]

Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.

[Unknown]

In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino beach became the hunting ground of a monster. No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth. While fear grew, gripped us tighter with every body that was found. We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong?

[Miles Gray]

Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you.

[Unknown]

Listen to the Murder Years, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Jack B. Thomas]

Hey there. I'm Dr. Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist who studies human behavior. On my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, I marry science and storytelling to better understand how to navigate the big changes in our lives.

[Unknown]

It was like a slow nightmare, you know, because every day you think, oh, surely tomorrow I'll be better. And I would dream of being better. At night, I would dream that my face would was quote, unquote, normal or back to the way it was, and I'd wake up and there'd be no change.

[Jack B. Thomas]

I also speak with scientists about how we can be more resilient in the face of change.

[Robert Evans]

You can think of the adolescent brain as like the social R and D engine of our culture. That they're something that looks like risky and idiotic to us is maybe their way of creatively trying to solve the problem of having social success and fewer of the things that bring you social failure.

[Jack B. Thomas]

Listen to A Slight Change of plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. So we are again. I'm not going to spend a lot of time fact checking Carnivore Aurelius Twitter count in part because his fans won't listen to this show. They can read.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, I mean, I know about it, but like, maybe offline. You can just tell me why I shouldn't be tripping about it. Cause I threw out all my.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, no. You should be very scared of sea love. Absolutely. But it's okay. I have a solution for you. Great. I have pure chicken liver that did not come from KFC. Just for $300 a pound. I will send it to you via the mail. Do they have that at kfc? They used to have it at kfc. Do they? Not anymore. I haven't got a KFC in a very long time. They had chicken liver at. They had fried chicken livers and it was pretty good. Wow.

[Miles Gray]

I had no idea.

[Robert Evans]

I like liver. I'm like the liver king.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You frankly put more jacks. Thank you. Thank you. It's because of all the steroids.

[Miles Gray]

Oh.

[Robert Evans]

Going back to our journey through time, you might expect the post war era, right. The late 40s through the 50s, to have been a time where, like the masculinity in crisis thing wouldn't have found much purchase. Right. If any period of time men were actually confident in themselves. It must have been the post war years. Right. These guys went and they kicked some Nazi ass and they came back and they bought houses for $13. Right. Like what? There was never a better time to feel like a man than this. As long as you were white, Right?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. PTSD as a concept didn't really exist. There's no.

[Robert Evans]

You're just drinking your way through that, you know? Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Like, oh, that guy. That poor fucker. Shell shocked.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Scared of war.

[Miles Gray]

Why do I scream at my kids every night?

[Robert Evans]

Just go back home and hit your children like the rest of us. Come on now. So this was, however, a time of crisis for masculinity, like literally every other period of modern American history has been. And specifically, it was a time in which American intellectuals first really started to write in a modern sense about the crisis of American masculinity. Now, the fact that this happened makes sense when you put a few more things together. The 1950s is the era in which hyper violent men's magazines first become really popular. We've done some episodes with Margaret Killjoy where we read through a few of those, but these are like, you see them made fun of on the Internet today. Magazines where the COVID will be a guy fighting a bunch of crabs or wrestling a bear or something while a half naked woman looks on. Right. And if you read interviews with writers of that era, some of them are pretty open about the fact that they saw their audience as primarily frustrated men who'd been in the military during the war years but never seen combat. And so they just kind of permanently felt like they'd missed out. This thing that would have made me into a man and made me confident I didn't get it was kind of stolen from me.

[Miles Gray]

Right, right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Isn't that kind of what Jarhead was about?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, yeah, yeah, I guess so. Cause like, you know, Desert Storm wasn't really a war. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Or am I misremembering that? I felt like that was like a.

[Robert Evans]

Big part of them being like a long time.

[Miles Gray]

I needed to see the Pink Mist.

[Robert Evans]

Man, and I wasn't enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Kind of thing anyway.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you only get that experience that a guys who didn't see the Pink Mist, but I guess that makes sense. Yeah. So Witkowski points out that the 1950s was not so much a real crisis of manhood because again, the average white man in America was doing pretty well in that decade, but instead it was a crisis. And all of these articles about crises in masculinity were the result of a crisis in self confidence among the kind of men who wrote about culture for a living. Right. These were guys who overwhelmingly hadn't fought right. These are guys who felt insecure about their position as cultural elites. And this is when you started to also see analysis of films and TV shows and what they had to say about masculinity. One of the shows that really scared these men writing these articles at the time was the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which poked fun at male authority figures and had competent, witty female characters. And there was a certain kind of public intellectual who was terrified by this. And I'm going to read a quote again from Witkowski's paper. In a fascinating look magazine article entitled the American why Do Women Dominate him, author J. Robert Moskin opined with harm, it is certain that as women grow ever more numerous and more dominant, we will have to invent new meanings and myths for maleness in America because as psychiatrist Dr. Irene J. Rosalind warns, we are drifting toward a social structure made up of he women. And she mentioned Moskin believed men coped with this situation, at least in part through a set of gendered consumption activities. They drank regularly in commuter cane bar cars, watched televised baseball at home, played golf on weekends, and went on all male fishing trips at work. Their expense accounts paid for meals at fancy restaurants and when traveling for spacious suites and lavish entertaining. Moskin's article clearly focused on the lives of middle class men like himself. He was senior editor at look magazine at the time. And that is such a part of all of these, all of these male panic articles is that it's just the thing that you, the guy who was born into wealth and privilege and is the head editor at Esquire, it's just what you are scared of, right?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Because you know that you don't have a real job, right? Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

What do you do? It's like I rank bow ties and then talk to guys who just served in a combat zone.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I tried to scare men who lived through the SS attacking them about Ozzie and Harriet.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

Survivors of B.O. i try to get to freak out about girls in movies. Awesome stuff, man.

[Miles Gray]

I know how to speak their language, man.

[Robert Evans]

Part of why this is so funny again, my grandpa did all of this stuff, went overseas, fought in wars and then came back home and would have been the first to tell you that he took every dime he ever made and handed it over to his wife who managed all of the family finances because he had an 8th grade education and she was really good at math. Right, right. He never felt like less of a man as a result of it either.

[Miles Gray]

No, Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that I think especially that generation was offered, like, in that sense, because so many served. Yeah, they come back and maybe just come back. Like, you know what I realized? I don't know shit about math. So here, man, just to take these checks. Just keep me fed and I'll be okay.

[Robert Evans]

So Moskin was a major advocate of the idea that the increasing visibility of gay men, and remember, this is 1950 goddamn 8. Was a sign that American men were losing their potency. Now, as opposed to the crisis of manhood around the turn of the century or the 1920s, the chief fear here wasn't that women were ruining young boys. Instead, now it had moved on to a feeling that in a world of more liberated women, men might have to work harder to find companionship. Now, the manfluencer who sailed into this breach was kind of ironically, the least toxic guy we're going to talk about in these episodes, Hugh Hefner. And I'm not saying he was a very toxic man. Right?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Playboy actually offered, in addition to a new vision of manhood, it offered a new vision of, like, womenhood that was in some ways less poisonous than what had come before. Right. In part because women were not seen in Playboy as a threat. As opposed to women, being interested in you was shown as a sign of vigor and success. Right. There's a lot that's toxic about that, but it wasn't telling men you should be scared of women because they're working. Right, Right. It was more telling them that your ability to be interesting to these new liberated women is what defines you as a man. You know? And again, there's toxic stuff there, but it's less poisonous than some of the stuff we've talked about outside.

[Miles Gray]

But at least it's centered. It's like, no, man, you're less than and can be better. It's not them you need to improve.

[Robert Evans]

And you need to meet their new and expanded interests, too. By changing and largely by bias. Right. By having a bachelor pad, by purchasing these kind of luxury items, having multiple.

[Miles Gray]

Rooms that were just gigantic mattresses where untold horrors befell people.

[Robert Evans]

But, yeah, Hugh Hefner is not doing this because it's the good thing to do, but it is less poisonous than women are corrupting your children because they're inherently raising them. Yeah. Right. Now, Playboy helped ignite a market for a new kind of content aimed entirely at men, as the men's adventure magazines were, but focused on cultivating an image of class and refinement by selling Designer clothing and high end stereo equipment to guys with disposable income. And I also think it's a little less toxic to be like, spend your disposable income on like, gym shit or getting taller as opposed to like, at least you got a stereo. If you buy a nice stereo, maybe it won't actually help you pick up a lady, but at least you've got a stereo, right? Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

And maybe a grandkid comes across that amplifier and is like, hey, this is a sweet amp. I can sell that for drugs, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yes, for the new sign of masculinity. Now, one of the magazines that came from this moment was esquire, which in 1958 published an article you will see cited in every history of American masculinity. If you read any of these modern day, like, published in the last year or two articles about our current crisis of masculinity, they will all reference an article called the Crisis of American Masculinity by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Now, Arthur was kind of the Platonic ideal of an east coast intellectual elite. His mom's family had come over on the Mayflower. His dad was a Prussian Jew who'd converted and sent him to Exeter Academy and then Harvard. Over a long career as a political writer, he laid down the definitive first biography of JFK's White House. He convinced RFK to run for president. He then wrote a definitive book about rfk. After he was assassinated, he invented the term the Imperial Presidency. So he's a guy people listened to and also, I will wager, a guy who knew very little about how the average man in the US felt about masculinity. Right. He was not a guy who talked to a lot of blue collar laborers. His friends are all wealthy and influential elites. In 1958, he decided to write an article that reflected their fears about manhood. Because this was the late 50s. It ran into Esquire next to one of the better cigarette ads I've seen. Miles, does this make you want to Paul Mall? Because I'll tell you what. Oh, shit, man.

[Miles Gray]

Wait, how do I. How do I get that flavor?

[Robert Evans]

Nothing like lobster and tobacco. Two great tastes that go great together.

[Miles Gray]

Look, I'm always. I've always said there's nothing that goes together like North Carolina, North Carolinian tobacco and shellfish just mixing in my mouth.

[Robert Evans]

Look, look, look. When you're eating the shellfish in Atlantic City, it's been rancid for up to 72 hours before it hits your plate. You need a Pall Mall to coat your Throat. That's just a protective effect, you know?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. That's how you. Yeah, you fight off the bacterial infection.

[Robert Evans]

It's the only way to survive. Eating Atlantic City shellfish.

[Miles Gray]

What a fucking lifestyle. It's like, you want this, bro? We know you want to have a fucking cigarette in one hand, bunch of fucking shrimp sucking down 70 degree fresh shrimp.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. No, man, that's not the way to advertise these things. Hey, boys, wanna not eat for days?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. Cigarettes, yummies. Yeah, your ribs are showing now, fella.

[Robert Evans]

I do find it interesting too, that ad uses the term smoked out. No, dry, smoked out taste, but in a very different term to how we use smoked out today. Miles. Wow.

[Miles Gray]

But now I'm like, hold on, Paul Mol, what are you saying?

[Robert Evans]

I'm back. Fascinating.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Schlesinger's article is still deeply influential today, in part because it seems so modern. When he lists archetypes of masculinity, they're all characters from books or movies. And a huge amount of his conclusions on this crisis are based on media. Hemingway's later books, for example, he cites as evidence that men have become. Men in general have become preoccupied with proving their virility. And like, I might suggest that Hemingway's lack of self confidence as he aged might have more to do with why those books were the way they were than how the average American was in 1950. I don't know, maybe that makes a little more sense to me.

[Miles Gray]

It's not a me problem.

[Robert Evans]

It's not a me problem. Yeah. Obviously the average, like Hemingway, was channeling Joe Schmoe in these books he wrote 14 seconds before blowing his brains out. You know, clearly just fascinating conclusions that he came to here. Now it becomes clear a few paragraphs in that Schlesinger is personally upset with some of the same things that had worried men a generation early. While men design dresses and brew up cosmetics, women become doctors, lawyers, bank cashiers and executives. Women now fill many masculine roles, writes the psychologist Dr. Brunel Bettelheim, and expect their husbands to assume many of the tasks once reserved for their own sex. They seem an expanding aggressive force seizing new domains like a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive, are hardly able to hold their own and gracefully accept assignments from their new ruler. Yeah, they're new rulers. Women ruling everything in 1958.

[Miles Gray]

How did they see the future?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Fascinating stuff.

[Miles Gray]

Down went patriarchy to men are making perfume now.

[Robert Evans]

Now, as a liberal intellectual, I will say Arthur doesn't let himself go too far down this Road he does pivot by. First off, he says that we can't turn things around. Once women have gotten a taste of freedom, they're just going to keep being free and we just have to accept. And he does point out, he also makes a note that obviously there's a chance that a man who helps out with cleaning the house might just be super confident in his masculinity. Right. Maybe a man who literally stabbed SS men to death with frozen icicles doesn't feel emasculated by sweeping. But then we get this line. But there is more impressive evidence than the Helpful Husband that this is an age of sexual ambiguity. It appears no accident, for example, that the changing of sex, the Christine Jorgensen phenomenon, so fascinates our newspaper editors and readers, or that homosexuality, that incarnation of sexual ambiguity, should be encouraged. Enjoying a cultural boom new in our history. Now, we've talked about Christine Jorgensen on the show before. She was probably the first transgender woman on American television. You know, she was kind of the first public transgender celebrity in, like, American life. And she was in part because she was seen as kind of singular as opposed to a symbol of a community of people. I think she actually got a lot less attacked than we currently see today in the right wing anti trans culture war. Right. She was kind of described, she was often seen as like, this is one person who has this peculiar thing about them or having on them on TV to talk about it, as opposed to something broader. But it is interesting to me that in this foundational work of American male insecurity, Schlesinger picks on a trans woman. Right. Like, that is kind of, kind of fascinating.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And he's not the only guy doing it, but he does so in a way that's like, very familiar to the modern era. It's like she's a sign that men in general are less confident in being men. Just like calling homosexuality a sign of sexual ambiguity. And like man, there's nothing ambiguous about being gay.

[Unknown]

Pretty clear.

[Robert Evans]

Pretty clear.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, I know what I want.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. But I do consider it worthwhile to draw the connection right now. If you can tolerate the way that Schlesinger writes, and that is a big if, his article is extremely funny. At points. There's a long segment where he frets over homosexual male characters in fiction and how they suggest men are rejecting normal female desire for full and reciprocal love. And then he writes this incredible paragraph. One can pause and note why the Gary Coopers, Cary Grants, Clark Gables and Spencer Tracys continue to play romantic leads opposite girls young enough to be their daughters. It's obviously because so few of the younger male stars can project a convincing sense of masculinity. Yeah, man. That's why. Yeah. That's why, bro.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Not a thing that's gonna keep happening for all of the time that movies exist. Yes.

[Miles Gray]

Holy shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. It's just that these young bucks can't compete with the sex, the masculinity of a Carrie. Gary Cooper, you know?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

Fucking hell. Yeah. Wow. So funny.

[Miles Gray]

I love that.

[Robert Evans]

That's so funny.

[Miles Gray]

Bottle that up. I love that. Yeah, man. It's because these guys can't get their dicks up.

[Robert Evans]

It's not because a lot of men like very young women. It has to be because of this. Absolutely. Just nuts. You know what else is crazy, Miles? The deals that our advertisers will guarantee you absolutely so out of their mind that they have been 5150 and are currently being held in a psychiatric facility against their will. It's really a problem.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. They're wearing grippy socks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sloan Glass]

Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind. Who did this? And why? And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the Where. Where the crime happened. I'm journalist Sloan Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide. Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders. And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story. On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness. And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets. So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. Listen to American homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Stephen King]

In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy Akron, seem to have it all. A whirlwind romance, a new home, and twins on the way. What no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret so shocking it would tear their world apart.

[Robert Evans]

911 response. What's your emergency? My babies. Please, My babies.

[Stephen King]

One woman, two lives. And the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine.

[Unknown]

They had her as one of the suspects, but they could never prove it.

[J]

You're going to go to jail if you don't come with us right now.

[Robert Evans]

Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling myself, so nobody's that crazy.

[Miles Gray]

Crazy.

[Stephen King]

Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything. A story of the lengths we go to Protect our darkest secrets.

[Unknown]

She went batshit crazy. Shot and killed all her farm animals. Slaughtered them in front of the kids. Tried to burn their house down.

[Stephen King]

Audio presents the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[J]

Is your country falling apart? Feeling tired? Depressed? A little bit revolutionary? Consider this. Start your own country.

[Robert Evans]

I planted the flag and just kind of looked out of like, this is mine. I own this.

[J]

It's surprisingly easy.

[Robert Evans]

55 gallons of water for 500 pounds of concrete.

[J]

Everybody's doing it.

[Robert Evans]

I am King Ernest Emmanuel.

[J]

I am the Queen of Ladonia.

[Miles Gray]

I'm Jackson the first, King of Capper.

[Robert Evans]

I am the supreme leader of the grand reform republic of Montonia.

[J]

Be part of a great colonial tradition.

[Robert Evans]

Well, why can't I trade my own country? My forefathers did that themselves.

[J]

What could go wrong?

[Robert Evans]

No country willingly gives up their territory. I was making rocket with a black.

[Miles Gray]

Powder, you know, with explosive warhead. Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

What is that? Bullets?

[Miles Gray]

Bullet holes?

[Robert Evans]

We need help. We still have the off road portion to go.

[J]

Listen to Escape from Zakistan.

[Unknown]

And?

[Robert Evans]

And we're losing daylight fast.

[J]

That's Escape from zaqistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Unknown]

It's been 30 years since the horror began.

[Robert Evans]

Nine. One. One.

[Unknown]

What's your emergency?

Someone. He said he was gonna kill me. Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.

[Miles Gray]

Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.

[Unknown]

In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino beach became the hunting ground of a monster. No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth. While fear gripped us tighter. With every body that was found. We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended. But what? What if we were wrong?

[Miles Gray]

Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you.

[Unknown]

Listen to the Murder Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey there, my little creeps. It's your favorite ghost host, Tereza. And guess what?

[Robert Evans]

Haunting is back.

[Unknown]

Dropping just in time for spooky season. Now, I know you've probably been wandering the mortal plane wondering when I'd be back to fill your ears with deliciously unsettling stories. Well, wonder no more, because we've got a ghoulishly good lineup ready for you. Let's just say things get a bit extra. We're talking spirits, demons, and the kind of supernatural chaos that'll make your spooky season complete. You know how much I love this time of year. It's the one time I'm actually on trend. So grab your pumpkin spice dust off that Ouija board, just don't call me unless it's urgent, and tune in for new episodes every week. Remember, the veils are thin, the stories are spooky, and your favorite ghost host is back and better than ever. Listen to haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, we're back. So Arthur does come, despite some very, very silly lines, to a decent enough conclusion. I will say this is not like a hateful article. It's just deeply out of touch. And his conclusion is that there's no, like, recovering the old style of masculinity. Things have changed. Women now have much more freedom than they do and that that's not going backwards. Right? So. And he specifically states, I'll give him credit for this. He's like trying to go back to the old style of masculinity is as foolish as trying to bring back white supremacy. Right. He describes both as the neuroses of an immature society. And then he goes on to suggest that men need to remake themselves. And this is again where you get to, well, you're just a deeply out of touch coastal elite. Where he's like, and obviously the way for men to make themselves is through satire and politics. Right? Men should write funny articles for the New Yorker to recover their masculinity.

[Miles Gray]

How many smoking jackets gets to you.

[Robert Evans]

All get into politics. He writes a virile political life will be definite and hard hitting, respecting debate and dissent, seeking clarity and decision. Basically, he's like, to solve the crisis of masculinity, we need to redefine masculinity as like writing pithy articles for a living in political columns. You know, which is exactly what he does. Arthur Schlesinger, a man who is not at all insecure about his manhood, does for a living.

[Miles Gray]

But I comment on it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I just find that so funny. Now, obviously, Miles, in our modern era, where men still control most of the wealth and power in society, one of the best ways to profit off the masculinity crisis is to sell guys like Arthur Schlesinger, who himself was not again, not going to make fun of his appearance, but if you look at a picture of him, not an imposing figure, right? No, to sell guys like that an image of masculinity they want to copy. And as we sort of started the episode with the model is very consistent across all of the grifters today. Right. And it's a guy who looks like a Navy SEAL in a movie from the mid aughts. Right? It's like a dude. Yeah. Right. And to give you an example, they all look kind of like this, right? If there's a phenotype for manfluencers, the most common one by far. And like Andrew Tate doesn't match this, but a lot of them do, right? Yeah, it's this guy. He's got like kind of a military style haircut, he's got a big beard. He's either wearing a tailored suit, workout gear, or like combat gear. Right? Right. Ye. All of like 80% of the dudes.

[Miles Gray]

In a specific or tailored tack gear.

[Robert Evans]

Or tailored tack gear. Right. Too skinny of a tie, personally. Too skinny of a tie, you know, beard clearly dyed, but whatever. Now there's a million of these guys out there, but the particular guy whose photo I just showed you is named Jack Murphy. Now, Jack came up in a similar social status to Schlesinger and his peers. He graduated George Mason University and then went to Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where he earned an MA and International Affairs. He has talked about his childhood as being extremely difficult and abusive. Maybe that's true, I don't know, because this man's a liar. I'm really not gonna get into it much. This is not a full BTB on the guy, but either way, he goes to Georgetown and he gets an MA in International Affairs, Right? He gets a job consulting. This is not a poor person. This is a guy who gets a job consulting on two different charter schools in the D.C. area and eventually winds up running two charter schools. Barbara Smith, who work and eventually wrote a book about the experience, claims that he fired off staff in order to collect two executive directors salaries, making like a million dollars in change in the few years that he's there right now. During his time in power over these schools, they had the lowest family return rates for any charter schools in the district. Cool. And by the way, he is working in a majority black district. So this is a white guy who came into a majority black district, basically took over, gutted two charter schools, fucked them up, seriously. And pocketed them. Right? That's Jack.

[Miles Gray]

School choice, man. We need school choice though.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Critically important, not just a way to empower these freaks. Yeah, yeah. In 2015, the year after Gamergate, Jack realized there was an even better con out there blogging about masculinity. He wrote in one article that year, quote, it is our duty as men to save the feminists from themselves. Therefore, I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch. This guy. Yeah, you may have heard about him. He got a lot of. He kind of broached into the mainstream a little bit when he wrote that, because people were very angry about it. Unfortunately, it doesn't really hurt guys like this. We'll talk about what hurts guys like this, because the good news is that Jack is no longer a major figure in the right wing right now. This guy's whole life is like a conservative fantasy, right? He cashes in on hurting black kids, particularly, and gets rich off of, like, running charter schools into the ground. That's their dream, right? But despite this, he pretends to have been a Liberal and in 2018, writes a book titled Democrat to Deplorable. An attempt to take advantage of the fact that right after Trump's election, certain kinds of journalists, particularly at the Times, were starving to platform guys like him. And his hope was, I write this book, they'll all do to me what they did to J.D. vance, right? Where I'll suddenly get all this mainstream legitimacy for explaining why very reasonable people used to be very liberal, are now voting for Donald Trump. We just got forced to right now. Unfortunately for Jack, he was a little late in this. If this book had come out in spring of 2017, he might have really had something here that would have been the ideal time to launch this grift. 2018 is a little late, for one thing. It's after Charlottesville, right? Right.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. That's kind of the window.

[Robert Evans]

That's kind of the window. You were just a little bit too late, man. I know publishing is a slow process, homie. Like, I get it. It's tough. It's tough to make those deadlines. To his credit, he saw the future of monetizing. Being a guy like this, though, was in selling coaching services. And so he launched the Liminal order, where, for $100 a month, young men could learn to stop being beta males. And this is almost the same graph that Andrew Tate has set up. Right? Like, it's this whole thing where, like, you pay me a monthly salary to get access to a chat room where I will coach you in being, you know, a better man, a stronger man. Right. And I think.

[Miles Gray]

Or how to traffic women, if it gets.

[Robert Evans]

How to traffic women. Right. I don't know if Jack would have gotten into that, probably, if you'd given him enough time. He also started trying to rebrand as a gunfluencer and posing in badly Set up tactical gear. This just is not how you do it. You don't put the gun there, man. You don't put the gun there. You want to draw your fucking sidearm and shoot yourself in the shoulder, homie? Is that what you're looking for, bro? What is he. What are you doing? What are you doing?

[Miles Gray]

He looks like.

[Robert Evans]

Who did you see holding a gun that way?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, I mean, it just clearly, it's like I saw a video game cover that looked like this, and that's what I'm impersonating.

[Robert Evans]

We have, at this point, a couple of hundred years of men wearing guns professionally. And everyone agrees somewhere around the waist, right? We could debate the position around the waist, but somewhere around the waist, not your sternum, you know?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

What are you doing, man?

[Miles Gray]

Oh, I just clocked that. What do you have, like, a Glock on his clavicle?

[Robert Evans]

Glock at his fucking clavicle.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, sorry, Mike. I didn't. I had to turn up the contrast on my screen to be like, fucking hell.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

[Miles Gray]

You know, when you pull that thing out, you want whoever you're aiming that at, they're like, dude, this thing smells like your armpit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's the right way to fucking carry a gun. My God. I know. So Jack launched a podcast where he hosted guests like Mike Cernovich and Jack Basobic, men who had been moderately more successful than him in cultivating an audience and followers with variations of the same grift. And then, near the end of 2021, disaster struck. Some of his fans found that back in 2015, he'd done something besides blog about feminism. He'd written about his love of being cuckolded. It.

[Miles Gray]

That's rough.

[Robert Evans]

This guy's a fun one. This guy's a fun one. Now, being cuckolded is a perfectly fine fetish in which a man has his girlfriend or wife or whomever pick up other men and fuck them in front of him. As far as things people do in bed go, we would call this pretty vanilla where I come from.

[Miles Gray]

But on the right, I watch someone have sex.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right. Okay, sure, whatever. On the right wing in 2021, Cuck was maybe the single most popular insult. So it coming out as you're trying to brand yourself as an influence in this space, that you are literally a cuck. Not gonna go over. Well, right after this comes out, Jack gets interviewed by the Blaze, and he's asked about his fetish. In a Medium post, Jonathan Poletti summarizes what happened next. He exploded at the female host I'm not gonna talk about this. And basically, you know, fuck you for bringing this up right here and right now. Why are you doing this to me? Talking to social media, he tried to get the hosts of the interview fired. It was perceived as so unhinged as to fuel curiosity about his past. Right wingers found themselves on a Russian porn website watching amateur masturbation videos done in 2018 for a gay audience called Big Bad Bear 1000. Here was Jack, naked on camera, calling himself hetero, flexible, and talking about his history of male. Male sex. I like men. I like men and I like boys.

[Miles Gray]

Wow, great.

[Robert Evans]

The boys part. Great stuff, bro. Yeah, yeah.

[Miles Gray]

No, that's not great.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

I mean, again, when this poor guy. You didn't have to almost blow your armpit off with a gun or any of this other stuff, you could have just lived your truth. You could have just probably lived a much happier life.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. You still could have written a bad book. You know, gay people can write terrible books too. Everyone can.

[Stephen King]

Everyone can.

[Robert Evans]

That's your right as an American. Yeah, yeah.

[Miles Gray]

No, don't get that now. Get that pistol away from your shoulder. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Still carry a gun that way. You shouldn't have a gun at all, Jack.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now there are more influential far right. And by the way, this guy was a fellow at the Claremont Institute, so great stuff. There are more influential far right masculinity grifters, but I think Jack represents the pulsing insecurity at the heart of every one of these dudes. He is a human embodiment of what these crises of masculinity really are at their core and always have been. Boring men from privileged backgrounds working high paid but useless jobs that don't make them quite enough to paper over the deep yawning void at the center of their soul. I've been pretty critical of that Schlesinger piece this episode, and I think with good reason. But I will give Arthur credit. There's a paragraph in his piece that absolutely describes Jack and a lot of these guys to a T. The pre democratic world was characteristically a world of status in which people were provided with ready made identities. But modern western society, free, equalitarian, democratic, has swept away all the old niches in which people for so many centuries found safe refugees. Only a few people at any time in human history have enjoyed the challenge of making themselves. Most have fled from the unendurable burden of freedom into the womb, like security of the group. The new age of social mobility may be fine for those strong enough to discover and develop their own roles. But for the timid and the frightened, who constitute the majority in any age, the great vacant spaces of equalitarian society can become a nightmare filled with nameless horrors. Yeah, all right. Yep.

[Miles Gray]

Didn't miss on that one.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he didn't miss on that one. I think that really gets. I think that gets a lot of what's going on with these guys is there's this. They have freedom. They could be whoever they wanted to be.

[Miles Gray]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And they see. I think this is part of. It's not all of, but it's part of, like, why trans people are such a constant focus for them. They see some people take this freedom that exists in our society and that, to some extent, was increased by the coming of the digital age. And. And they're angry and jealous because they don't have the courage to find or make themselves in the same way. And so they want to attack those people who are authentically creating themselves. Right, right.

[Miles Gray]

And it would be much less risky to be like, yeah, I like being a cuck.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, whatever. Yeah, that's who you are, Jack. You could have just been that.

[Miles Gray]

Right, Right. Yeah. Wow, that's such a great point to see people where the stakes are so much higher in terms of society's acceptance of them. And, like, you have these other guys just like, I just want to be, like, a nerd or something. Yeah, yeah. That manifesting or metastasizing into that kind of anger is. Yeah, yeah. Frightening.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Frightening, bad, sad. But, you know, kudos to Steve Bannon for realizing this was going on and how to fucking profit off of it.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, man, that sweet Seinfeld money, too. My Gav was playing his cards right, baby.

[Robert Evans]

Not the most toxic person involved with Seinfeld. We'll say that.

[Miles Gray]

I know, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, Miles, that's the end of the episode. You got anything to plug before we roll out here?

[Miles Gray]

Check me out if you want to hear me talk every day about news, politics, and the like on the Daily Zeitgeist. And look, if you also want to blow steam off and hear me talk about trash. Reality show with Sophia Alexandra, who's been a past guest on here. I'm on 420 Day Fiance. Those are the. Those are the spots. You can check me.

[Robert Evans]

We'll check that out. And, you know, as Miles says, every year. Yeah. And, you know, anyway, once we do that, we can take back our country. That's what you always say, Miles.

[Miles Gray]

That's what I'm saying. And I ain't backing down, man.

[Robert Evans]

No backing down. Hell, yeah, brother. Hell yeah, brother. Yeah. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Gives me the hell yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Frightening ever so. Anyway, look up Miles's new fertilizer bomb recipe at. Miles, I don't even know what to call that website. Miles, thanks for coming on. Check out fertilizer.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, we're done. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Sloan Glass]

Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloan Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. Listen to American homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Stephen King]

From. Audio up, the creators of Stephen King Strawberry. Spring Comes the Unborn. A shocking true story.

[Robert Evans]

My babies. Please. My babies.

[Stephen King]

One woman, two lives and a secret she would kill to protect.

[Unknown]

She went crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids, Tried to burn their house down.

[Stephen King]

Listen to the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Unknown]

It's been 30 years since the horror began.

[Robert Evans]

9, 1 1. What's your emergency?

[Unknown]

He said he was going to kill me. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong?

[Miles Gray]

Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you.

[Unknown]

Listen to the Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jack B. Thomas]

Hey, I'm Jack Be Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black lit. The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature. Black lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Blacklit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dani Shapiro]

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time. He didn't even say hello. And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets. Listen to season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.