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- [00:01]
Derek Barris
Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway.
- [00:21]
Matthew Remsky
Carvana, give it a whirl.
- [00:23]
Derek Barris
Love ya. So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it.
- [00:26]
Julian Walker
Sell your car today on Carvana.
- [00:29]
Matthew Remsky
Pick up. Fees may apply.
- [00:30]
Derek Barris
Last night you spent two deciding what to wear to the party this morning. It'll take you two minutes to list
- [00:36]
Julian Walker
it on Depop and make your money back.
- [00:39]
Matthew Remsky
Just grab your phone, snap a few
- [00:41]
Derek Barris
photos and we'll take care of the rest. The sheer dress and platform heels you'll never wear again.
- [00:46]
Matthew Remsky
There's a birthday girl searching for them right now.
- [00:49]
Derek Barris
Your one and done look is about
- [00:50]
Matthew Remsky
to pay for your next night out. Or at least the ride home. Your style can make you cash.
- [00:57]
Derek Barris
Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste.
- [01:12]
Julian Walker
Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
- [01:24]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Matthew Remsky.
- [01:25]
Derek Barris
I'm Julian Walker.
- [01:26]
Julian Walker
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually over on Blue Sky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality. You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. Just note that will not give you access to all the episodes ad free. Either way, as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
- [02:00]
Derek Barris
New Yorker writer Charles Bethea recently decided to attend men's retreats. Well, at least those who would admit him. His expose on the modern men's movement got us thinking about what's happening over those very expensive three day weekends. As well as the inspiration behind these groups dating back to the 70s. And even how a movement tracing back to the work of Robert Bly was co opted by the right wing alpha male crowd. Today we discuss Bethea's article in the context of modern men's groups. Where they come from, what function they serve, and what they might get wrong and horribly wrong.
- [02:45]
Julian Walker
While I was still on Twitter, I remember seeing this dude named Nick Adams posting as the alpha guy and it was so over the top I just couldn't tell if he was serious or not. It was just felt like parody. But no, of course not, because men who posture as alpha males can only sound like parody. It seems a former conservative politician in Australia who couldn't find much success there. He did what all aspiring alphas do. He moved to America and became a Trump supporter, which of course he was rewarded for. Trump positively tweeted about two of Adam's Adams's books. And then he wrote the Forward. Well, someone wrote the forward for Donald. For Adams 2024 book Alpha Kings, Trump nominated Adams to be the ambassador to Malaysia, which was dropped due to his extremist views. And then Trump invented a role just for Adams called the Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, exceptionalism and values, which Adams currently hold holds. I just want to give you a taste of his tweets over the last few years. So here are a couple.
- [04:02]
Derek Barris
You may not like it, but I sit with my legs spread wide open. Deal with it, accept it, move on, alpha male. Ouch.
- [04:11]
Matthew Remsky
Does that mean, like, out? You're. You're out in the open. You've come out of the closet. You're admitting to your alpha maleness because you're manspreading on the subway. He's not taking the subway, though. What's he talking about?
- [04:21]
Julian Walker
Are you serious?
- [04:22]
Matthew Remsky
Serious about what? He's not. No, he's not going to be on the subway.
- [04:25]
Julian Walker
Oh, out just means I'm out of here. It's like a mic drop. I'm out of here.
- [04:28]
Matthew Remsky
I'm out. Oh, okay.
- [04:29]
Derek Barris
Yeah, like over and out.
- [04:31]
Matthew Remsky
Oh, alpha male out. Mic drop out. Okay, all right. Okay, so the next one is. Alpha males watch football at hooters and play 36 holes of golf with the boys. Beta males play nine holes with their wives and go to chili's for the two for $20. Deal. There's a lot going on in that one.
- [04:48]
Julian Walker
There's a lot of golf ones, I should note, but I had to choose between many golf one, but also Chili's black bean burger back when I was a vegetarian. Excellent. So fuck him.
- [04:59]
Derek Barris
Being a straight white alpha male is the toughest job in America.
- [05:03]
Matthew Remsky
Okay, this is a good one. Keep your communist oat milk out of my coffee and we won't have any issues. It's like somebody's threatening him with a pitcher of of oat milk at his table or something like that.
- [05:17]
Derek Barris
That's laced with estrogen.
- [05:19]
Matthew Remsky
How is that the communist thing is that, like, if it's not dairy, it's got to be. It's related to soy or something like that.
- [05:26]
Julian Walker
I chose you to read that one Matthew because I thought you could explain it to us.
- [05:30]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, no, I'm sorry. That is. I mean, I'm fairly well read. I do. I can't make the connection there.
- [05:36]
Julian Walker
Adams also once tweeted, put down the Fortnite, pick up a Bible and a Hacky sack. What?
- [05:43]
Matthew Remsky
Like, I.
- [05:44]
Julian Walker
As a former serious hacky sacker in college, I did most. That's where I spent most of my class time. That's why I thought all this was parody. Yeah.
- [05:53]
Matthew Remsky
I think Fortnite is an appropriate target target for these guys because it really embodies kind of like, a full cultural anarchy that I don't think they can really understand. Like, I don't know if you guys know Fortnite, but they collaborate with every bit of every IP they can, from, like, anime to DC Comics, Disney, whatever's trending on Spotify. And so players can literally be anyone through the purchase of an infinite number of skins and accessories. And people are switching gender all the time. So it's. It's this very. Like, if you were one of these dudes and your kid was playing this thing, they are in a very unstable environment. If. If you're a controlling dad. Right.
- [06:37]
Julian Walker
My old friend was the lawyer who helped to broker DJ Marshmallow in Fortnite. And when that happened years ago, that was like, something like 10 million people showed up to this event.
- [06:47]
Derek Barris
Right.
- [06:47]
Julian Walker
And that was the first time that I really was like, what is going on inside of these games? I had no idea about the game infrastructure.
- [06:54]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [06:54]
Julian Walker
So when that event happened and he told me about it, I was like, this is. This is crazy.
- [06:58]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. Fortnite is an incredible sort of cultural mashup. It's basically, you are watching the entire world unfold in front of you in terms of, you know, cultural artifacts and commodities. It's crazy.
- [07:12]
Julian Walker
Well, I bring up Nick because that's how New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea opens his article on alpha males. While Bethea attends some of the alpha male retreats that he writes about here and is actually rejected, affected by more that he applied for, he looks at this cottage industry and some of its main influencers. Now, while Adams doesn't run retreats, at least not yet, he serves as yet another white man failing upwards simply for kowtowing to power. He writes that Trump is a, quote, study in peak alpha masculinity for the ages.
- [07:47]
Derek Barris
Oh, so obvious. Why do you even have to say it? Clearly, I know. Exactly.
- [07:51]
Julian Walker
Exactly. As crazy as some of the tweets that you guys just Read Sound Adams does has him have influence. He has 637,000 followers on Twitter. He has a mind numbing 2.1 million on Facebook, which is obviously the place where true alpha males gather.
- [08:09]
Matthew Remsky
Right.
- [08:10]
Julian Walker
A couple of weeks ago I recorded a brief comparing Corrine Lowe's book Having it all, what Data Tells Us About Women's Lives, and Getting the Most out of Yours, which is a book written for women, but which I argued that I Men should read. And then I compared it to Scott Galloway's male focus book Notes on Being a Man, which Matthew, you did many episodes about really breaking that down. And that's why the New York New Yorker article jumped out at me. Because one thing Bethea minds without necessarily naming it, is the lengths that men are going to to be men right now and how that compares to men that women want to be with, because that's usually one of the main things they talk about. Yeah, reminds me of these memes that are going on right now. They're comparing the male gaze. And Matthew, you brought up the fact that traditionally this is like men being aggressive towards women. And women are rethinking and sort of co opting it in a positive way because they're saying, men, you think this is what we want, but this is what we actually really want. And they call it the female gaze, which is usually something like Ryan Gosling looking sweetly into the camera or Pedro Pascal petting a dog. Or last week there was all these ones from the pit when the night shift came in and they're like this, these are the men that we actually want. So I thought this article would be a good opportunity for us to discuss and analyze this new wave of men's retreats and put them in the context of the work of men like Robert Bly and Michael Mead, who presented very different versions of masculinity in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And perhaps this will lead us into some of our main beat conspiracy theories, because even in Bethea's article he tugs at how male misperceptions of reality create this paranoid sense that the world is against them. And it could offer some insights into the right leaning male driven half of the term conspirituality. The article covers a lot of familiar territory for this podcast in regards to our work on the manosphere. I've dropped a link in the show notes if you want to check it out. And there are two aspects that I want to touch on in this first segment. First, the term alpha male. Now, the concept can be traced back to Rudolf Schenkel's observations of capt wolves in the 1940s, which was then used by biologist L. David Mech in his 1970 book The Wolf. But the mainstreaming of the term is largely due to primatologist Franz de Wall, which is where Bethea focuses his energy. His 1982 book Chimpanzee Politics ended up becoming required reading for the Republican congressman in 1994 due to Newt Gingrich's fascination with the idea that alpha chimps were strongest and mightiest, a concept that was already in circulation during Reagan's pro pro business tenure and which Deall spent the rest of his career pushing back against and trying to correct. Yeah, Gingrich, like the manosphere figures leading the boot camps that we're going to discuss, buys into the strong, aggressive, dominant alpha male myth. I want to play Franz Deall explaining the concept shortly before his death in 2020.
- [11:35]
Matthew Remsky
Social animals have social hierarchies. If you put six puppies together, they will fight over who's the highest ranking. If you put six goslings together, if you put kids together in a daycare
- [11:48]
Julian Walker
center, they will do the same thing.
- [11:50]
Matthew Remsky
All young animals, they will try to establish their rank order, but usually the first position is the most important one, and that's the one that they compete over. People sometimes ask me what, but what
- [12:02]
Julian Walker
does it take to be an alpha male?
- [12:03]
Matthew Remsky
And they think the answer from a primatologist would be, what it takes is to be the strongest and the meanest and the most intimidating. But that's not really what an alpha male usually is. An alpha male is usually also admired. They protect the underdog, they break up fights. They have a high level of empathy. So, yeah, you may want to be an alpha male, but. But if your surrounding people don't see you as that, it's not going to happen.
- [12:33]
Julian Walker
That part where he talks about young kids just hit me because I remember in kindergarten, we used to make Lego trucks and then ram them into each other and see who would get destroyed first. And I would make these really big ones, but that weren't very stable. And my friend Chris, who ended up becoming like a math genius, he scored like 800 on the math SATs and ended up going into engineering. He would build these short compact cars that would destroy everyone else's. And it was, it was just an amazing display of understanding physics, I guess, which is why that was never my field.
- [13:05]
Derek Barris
I have to ask you, Derek, where you got that clip and why it has that music? Because the music is very triumphant, right?
- [13:12]
Julian Walker
So he, he was on big Think, which was one of my former columns, and it was just the beginning. They took a collection of what he was saying. So I couldn't get all that together without the music.
- [13:23]
Derek Barris
Yeah.
- [13:24]
Julian Walker
So it's a much longer video. And what de Waal brings up is what Gingrich and Manosphere influencers often miss. Strength is a component in the alpha male, but so is leadership, cooperation, collaboration, and empathy, which are all equally important.
- [13:38]
Matthew Remsky
So I don't know much about de Waal or this thesis at all, but this. This premise that, you know, you put six kids into kindergarten and they're going to survive for ascendancy and somebody's going to be the leader, but all of these other qualities have to be in place. I would bet that part of the cooperation and collaboration and empathy aspects are also about identify who within the group has skills that normally aren't emphasized or are normally invisible, and who can be sort of encouraged or can be, you know, brought out to offer their gifts to the rest of the group, too. Because we're also talking about, like, a great variation in terms of, like, skills and neurotypes and, you know, all kinds of variations in kids. So I wonder if that's there, too.
- [14:30]
Derek Barris
Yeah. And it seems like the main point he's making and that you're referencing here, Derek, is that it's not. It's not being the most domineering that tends to. That tends to get you into that elevated status. It actually has a lot to do with social empathy and the capacity to interact and communicate and collaborate and be the one that people end up admiring and seeing as either competent or a good protector of the weak or qualities like that.
- [15:00]
Matthew Remsky
Well, that's the most interesting part. Right. Is that the person is valued because they can break up. Up fights or they can. They can champion for the underdog, which suggests that leadership in. In those terms is really about, like, what benefits social cohesion more than anything else. Not like, who's going to decide what everybody's going to do. Yeah. But who is best at figuring out, well, how can we best work together? Right.
- [15:25]
Julian Walker
Well, in the. All those 80s John Cusack movies, we know where the bully ends up every time. So that's. That's important, too. Now, what de Waal is referencing, too, kind of echoes what Charles Darwin himself went through. Biologists latched onto the concept of survival of the fittest, which was actually coined by Herbert Spencer. Darwin only included it in the fifth edition of on the Origin of Species. And even then, Darwin was a little reluctant to use it because he thought it dumbed down the multivariate conditions of evolution. And in fact, Darwin's 1871 book the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex argues that beauty is just as important of a driver of evolution as strength. But the male dominated field of biology kept laser focused on natural selection until only recently. And honestly because a lot more women have gotten into the sciences and started looking at the material. De Waal himself published his last book, which was called Mama's last hug, in 2019, in order to detail the empathy and cooperative complexity of primate life over the dominance and power framing that had lodged itself in the public imagination. It's not that strength doesn't matter, but it's not all that matters.
- [16:43]
Derek Barris
Yeah, and to go back to the Darwin reference, I feel like too during that the initial period of his ideas gaining a lot of traction, you had equal parts misinterpretation and over emphasis on natural selection and survival of the fittest.
- [16:56]
Matthew Remsky
Right.
- [16:56]
Derek Barris
Where there's a kind of social Darwinism that emerges where people misuse the concept to suggest that almost in a eugenicist kind of way and then vice versa, there's a lot of maybe people with a more religious orientation to say, oh no, this is a, this is a justification for being amoral or for enabling cruelty because it's quote unquote natural. And none of that is what Darwin is actually saying.
- [17:20]
Julian Walker
No, the religion, I mean we'll leave religion aside for now, but the. All of the biologists at the time having to tiptoe around religion was problematic. Interestingly, Darwin himself was probably more eugenicist in terms of, of humans than he assigned to other animals because he thought that different races had levels and orders. That was a personal feeling of his.
- [17:45]
Matthew Remsky
Did not know that.
- [17:46]
Julian Walker
And there was also probably about 20 years between him publishing his original essay and the book on the Origin of Species. And the only reason that he published it was because other people were starting to catch on that that there was such a thing as evolution and natural selection at the. So he even felt rushed in publishing it. So there was a lot of dynamics that were. He never really felt satisfied with anything that he published because he always thought there were more components to bring in, which probably is also why he suffered from such bad stomach aches that he had to spend days at a time laid up on the couch because he was just always. He was a very stressed person is what I'm saying.
- [18:32]
Derek Barris
Sure, sure.
- [18:33]
Julian Walker
Now all these complexities get flattened in the men's camps that Bethea attends. Now he does mention a number of them. But he ends up focusing on two. Here's his take on the first.
- [18:44]
Derek Barris
Each had paid $3,000 to take part in a three day program called Rise, which stands for ruthless integrity and simple execution. It offers men an opportunity to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and, as its website puts it, change your story to unfuck your life. The van band's speakers played a high volume mashup of construction sounds. Jordan Peterson lectures, Marine Corps drills and mumbling voices.
- [19:14]
Matthew Remsky
Oh, so that's just like audio torture. So construction sounds, what, like band saws?
- [19:18]
Derek Barris
And I said this a couple weeks ago on something that we did. But this is another one of these descriptions that could easily be part of. Wait, wait, don't tell me. On npr, where it's like they give you three different scenarios and you have to guess which one is actually true because they all sound equally ridiculous and like a parody.
- [19:33]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [19:33]
Julian Walker
In an interview with npr, Bethea says he couldn't distinguish between these men's camps and military boot camps. And Rise's site and social media handles certainly give off that military vibe. Their tagline is where greatness is hunted. Arise was founded by crisis consultant and motivational speaker Brendan King to get a taste of the group's marketing ethos. I got a clip of King recording while he was driving and he was heading out into the mountains somewhere, talking the application process to attend a Rise retreat.
- [20:08]
Matthew Remsky
See, what's funny is we always get a number of folks that will fill out an app, and it's always, you know, and it's, it's the hate. It's the haters. It's the, it's the guys that are just, you know, keyboard warriors and, like, it's to be expected. But what's so funny is that when those men come in and I offer them a free spot at one of our events, none of them take a up on it. None of them. And it's not because they couldn't get through what we do. It's not the fear of taking that step to better themselves. And raising their standard is not something they're prepared to do. So I'd ask you, are you one of those men who, who dreams of living at a standard of excellence within yourself, or are you just a man that just wants to sit on the sidelines? Is he talking about people who are trolling the application process? People who are writing and saying, that sounds like a real loser program. I would rather gnaw my arm off.
- [21:17]
Julian Walker
Or comments on their feeds? Or comments on their feeds? He gets pretty triggered, it seems, by People who just criticize what he's doing.
- [21:26]
Matthew Remsky
Right. And then he's surprised and he turns it into a thing that they don't want to attend the thing for a free tuition. Yeah, but they've already indicated that that's just making contact out of anything, right? Like, yeah, that's so weird.
- [21:39]
Julian Walker
Yeah, but it's also. It also just speaks to him, just being like. But if you're a real man, you'll want to attend. Right? That's the whole thing. And you can hear so many echoes of alpha male maleness here. The haters won't understand or engage. But you. You man listening. You're not a keyboard warrior. You want to be out in the wild with us, shirtless in the snow, blindf carrying logs up a steep path for who knows fucking why. Now, this is pretty straightforward compared to some of the other programs Bethea stumbled across.
- [22:10]
Matthew Remsky
Okay? Quote, other programs sell teens on Christ like manhood, which includes learning basic auto repair. That's 2,000 bucks. So this is just like LLM stuff. Like, they just. It's just maga. We just plugged it into some AI search engine and came up with a description. Okay, so the blog for the art of manliness has a primer on how to poop like a samurai.
- [22:35]
Derek Barris
Come on.
- [22:36]
Matthew Remsky
Legs free is good. Legs free and armed is better. Is that referring to the pooping posture? Yeah.
- [22:43]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So it's like squatting, squatting, squatting, squatting, but also holding your squat.
- [22:48]
Matthew Remsky
No, but you're. You're using your legs. Legs free. What's. I don't.
- [22:50]
Derek Barris
You're free from the support of a. Of a toilet seat of a throne.
- [22:55]
Matthew Remsky
Okay. The Men of War crucible offers to forge modern day warriors and restore the masculine warrior spirit as typified by the Knight Templar. One industry observer told me, they just beat the shit out of you for days on end. It's alpha as fuck. Warrior Week advertises an acceptance rate similar to that of an Ivy League school. You must find a way in. The program's site warns. I DM'd Warrior Week's head coach, who calls himself the Reverend of Truth and has said, transformation is not theory. It's war. Asking to visit a session, he called me brother. In his response, which ended in a rejection, an automated message from another program, which also denied me, read, thank you, warrior. So I get also why the other guy doesn't like Fortnite is that he really wants everybody to sound like they're in Call of Duty. That's what's really going on. They don't want the little songs. They just want straight up like first person shooter dialogue through all of their interactions. That's what they want.
- [23:59]
Julian Walker
And I just realized when you were reading it, the person who, who wrote you must find a way in. I guarantee they watched a Kurosawa movie where the acolyte wanted to study with the master and had to wait outside for days. That's absolutely where they got that.
- [24:14]
Matthew Remsky
And also perfect their legs. Free pooping samurai squat while holding a sword, right?
- [24:21]
Julian Walker
Bethea goes on to write about the modern day Knight Project created by former Fit Body Boot Camp founder Bedros I don't know and I don't care Cullian. While the program ended in 2024, he then launched something new, which I think is a good frame for the rest of this episode as it really nails the misreading of what an alpha male entails.
- [24:45]
Derek Barris
Q Ian more recently founded the Squire program, which now trains teenaged boys in six states. It is marketed as a rite of passage for your son as he becomes a man or a savage servant as C and calls righteous men capable of ass kicking knights. Head squires had helped them prepare their arm, horse and weapons for war, Culian told me, and the Squires had the knights as examples of healthy masculinity. Squire's website portrays its work as essential to saving America. The opposition is on a mission to weaken masculine societies and turn them into soft, confused, unsure, passive aggressive, feminized Betas. It goes on. Imagine how much easier it is to have great control over a society when you have a country full of young men who are doctors.
- [25:33]
Matthew Remsky
So at the same time that this is really sort of ominous with regard to, you know, father son relationships. This is also where I think the, I don't know, the fragmentary nature of these programs shows through. I think it was some of the best moments of the reporting of this article came through this stuff about the Squires program and it really made me wonder how much, first of all, how much the boys are in trouble. Panicked is a sublimation of like parental and then maybe even marital alienation. Like the whole vibe that Bethea records is one in which fathers are seeking mentorship from these very dodgy sources on how to relate to their sons as if they are totally clueless. They're total beginners and you know, the dynamics end up being really scattershot. There's no real coherent guidance. There's one dad during one of the fitness things that's helping his kid with a pull up in a supportive way and then there's another one doing the same thing, but he's shouting at his kid, let's go, fat boy. And there's no sort of like opprobrium about that. There's no guidance around, like, this is the way you're going to talk to kids, or this is the best way of motivating them in either direction. Like, there's no standard affect that the dads are encouraged to adopt. So I think, you know, anything that seems to connect between father and son, whether it's toxic or not, is the goal. Like, they're at that very basic level of trying to just relate to each other. And then I just wanted to highlight, highlight two sort of things that were disturbing in this zone for me. One was kind of funny, which was, I said disturbing, but this one's kind of funny. There's a lot of like divorced dad energy going on in the Squires program. There's this quote where they're asked to introduce each other at the beginning of the Squires program. And one of these guys says, man, we're just here to literally be intentional about getting him his man. Hood Chad, a dad from Dallas, told the room, gesturing to his gangly 15 year old son, Will. Later, Will told me, quote, I'm mostly just here for my dad, unquote, literally. Which is perfect. It's just perfect. Yeah. So I don't even know what that means. We're going to be intentional about getting him his manhood. It's just sort of word salad. Like, dad is there and Will knows that this is for his dad. Then the second one was a little bit more troubling because it featured a homeschool boy who's turning into like a manosphere influencer. Okay, quote. Eckart had come with his homeschooled 14 year old son, Tyson, who shook my hand while making penetrating eye contact. Oh. Tyson, who was training to be a UFC fighter, was there to model manhood and sonhood for the aspiring Squires. So I don't know whether Tyson's being paid for this or, you know, he's on the coaching staff. There were 10 teenagers who traveled from around the country with their dad ads. The parents had each paid $900. Most had found Squire online. They all wore black and white Squire uniforms. Some sons look stoked, others looked like hostages. Tyson Eckert, the 14 year old lectured about character. So this is a kid and he's giving a lecture now to the other kids about character, competence, confidence, capability, credibility, competitiveness and courage. All C words, right? And then he says, you need to lift, he told the class, displaying a shirtless photo of himself and a quote attributed to Socrates that extolled the beauty and strength of the male physique. And Bethea does a great job there of just letting that homoerotic illusion just hang in space, waiting for somebody to pick it up. So what I'm not seeing like this is not good. When we have a homeschooled 14 year old who's like making penetrating eye contact and who wants to be Andrew Tate, not good. But I'm also not seeing any kind of like systematic or sustained mentorship model. Like these are really encounter experiences, mainly for the dads. And I don't know what the sons are going to get out of them. I'm hoping that some of them are gathering out in the woods and doing their own thing on off hours.
- [29:44]
Julian Walker
I mean, when you were just reading that, it reminded me again of Scott Galloway's TED Talk where he showed a shirtless photo of himself while he made fun of fat people during the talk. And like there's no distance between that 50 something year old man and the 14 year old man doing the same thing.
- [30:00]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, it's, it's about the same, it's about the same thing.
- [30:03]
Julian Walker
When you brought up the encounter experiences, that's one of the biggest criticism of these boot camps because they promise transformation when in reality everyone knows you're not going to change your life in three days. You might truly get inspired by what you experience. I don't want to deny that, but it's kind of like a psychedelic trip. A flash of insight can be empowering, but the real work is done in day to day sobriety.
- [30:31]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Nomi Frye.
- [30:32]
Derek Barris
I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz.
- [30:34]
Matthew Remsky
And we are Critics at Large, a
- [30:36]
Derek Barris
podcast from the New Yorker.
- [30:37]
Matthew Remsky
Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of
- [30:41]
Derek Barris
our culture and try to figure something out. That's right.
- [30:43]
Matthew Remsky
We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend and we expand it across culture
- [30:53]
Derek Barris
as kind of a pattern.
- [30:54]
Matthew Remsky
Or join us on Critics at Large
- [30:56]
Derek Barris
from the New Yorker.
- [30:57]
Matthew Remsky
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [31:01]
Derek Barris
So there's an interesting genealogy to trace around men gathering in self help groups to find themselves and chart their course through the world. Today's rise movement, as we've just been discussing, is clearly MAGA positive. It's Catholic reactionary. But if we Go back to the early 1970s. A group of male feminists were publishing articles and books, books on the negative effects of traditional male stereotypes on both men and women. And this was the dawn of a decidedly progressive men's liberation movement led by thinkers like Jack Sawyer, author of On Male Liberation, but also Warren Farrell, who, from within the National Organization for Women, became coordinator of NOW's task force on the Masculine Mystique and began a network of more than 200 men's consciousness raising groups throughout the U.S. but then, by the late 1970s, this men's liberation movement had fractured into pro feminists focused on the cost of male gender roles to women on one side, and on the other, those leaning into male grievance against society and women. The latter group was led by Warren Farrell and others and would become the men's rights movement. And the men's rights movement is primarily concerned with how men are discriminated against in divorce and custody proceedings and things like having higher suicide rates than women doing the most dangerous jobs fighting in wars. They claim that men are seen as disposable. They're incarcerated at higher rates, suffered the routine infant trauma of circumcision, and are presumed guilty when accused by women of rape. They claim that male power in society is actually an illusion. Illusion. And it is in fact, men who suffer unfair discrimination while women hold the power. And then once we entered the Internet age, various men's rights forums emerged, and all of those talking points became part of the online misogyny culture we very recently discussed with regard to today's manosphere, whose male grievance, misogynist attitudes towards women, and the weaponized seduction tropes of bad evolutionary psychology all took aspects of men's rights rhetoric as foundational truths that one realizes upon taking the Matrix's red pill.
- [33:27]
Matthew Remsky
You know, I'd really like to know more about that original schism and more about Farrell himself and what actually happens between, like, liberation and rights. Because I'm betting there's all kinds of, like, personal stuff going on there as well, where, you know, a certain number of people grow up, a certain number of guys grow up in the men's liberation movement and then go through diffic life changes and feel like maybe their, their politics aren't, aren't, aren't serving them anymore, even though they might be actually more ethical. It's very, very bizarre schism there.
- [34:02]
Derek Barris
Yeah, I mean, so much of this is driven by a culture of grievance that is looking for scapegoats, right? Who's to blame for the Fact that my life has turned out this way or the fact that I perhaps have bad relations skills and if I spent
- [34:16]
Matthew Remsky
10 years actually thinking about what it meant to be a more feminist person, then personally, when the hit the fan of my own life, did that actually help me with regard to custody issues? Right. Like it's like a category, I don't know, confusion probably.
- [34:33]
Derek Barris
Yeah, that's right. That's right. But then running parallel to all of this was something referred to as the mythopoetic poetic men's movement that was closely associated with the 1990 publication of Robert Bly's book Iron A Book About Men. And Bly was an award winning poet and a prolific translator of poetry from other cultures. He played a major role in popularizing poets like Hafiz Kabir, Pablo Neruda and Rumi amongst English speakers. Although there is some controversy about how much translating he actually did and how faithful he really was in his renditions of those poems. And how much of this is cultural appropriation.
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Matthew Remsky
Right, well, yeah, because was he really an expert in Arabic and Spanish and everything else?
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Julian Walker
Right, well, same goes with Coleman Barks.
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Derek Barris
Yeah, exactly.
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Julian Walker
Yeah, exactly.
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Derek Barris
They're all part of the same group and they all used translators and then said, well, we want to make this a little more poetic sounding and infuse it with our own creativity.
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Matthew Remsky
Yeah. And they also, I believe they also quoted Ezra Pound pretty consistently in saying that what you really have to do is you have to translate for the language of the tribe. Right. Like you have to intuit what the poem is, trying to sort of communicate its original language, even if you can't speak it, but then see how it
- [35:47]
Derek Barris
speaks to your own heart. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Julian Walker
I mean that's what that you could basically make the argument for anyone trying to translate the Bible today. And when they try to use it to say it means this, it's the same phenomenon. We just like to try to pretend that modernity is, is not changed over hundreds or thousands of years in any capacity. And so the way that I feel about it is the way the text must be, be, must have been presented at that time.
- [36:13]
Matthew Remsky
That said, there are people who actually know the various iterations of Greek. They actually learn Aramaic, they, you know, they. Stuff like that. But it's, it's a little bit, it's a little bit looser in the poetry world.
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Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah, I definitely wasn't talking about them because like, what's his name, Mark? The Bible guy that we all love Escaping me like. Yeah, no, those, those that is definitely not who I'm talking about scholars and academics who can really contextualize it are the people we should be listening, listening to.
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Derek Barris
In his other work, Robert Bly and his prose, he incorporated many ideas from Jungian psychology and world mythology, and he went pretty deep in this regard. He collaborated with prominent Jungian analyst Marion Woodman. He was friends with Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who is a famous author of Women who Run with the Wolves, kind of a parallel text to his, in whatever way they may have influenced one another. He was also married to a Jungian analyst named Ruth Counsel. And his career in the early 70s was actually focused on protesting the Vietnam War and supporting the anti colonial hungrialist poet activists in India. He also organized something called the Great mother conference in 1975, where nine days of poetry, music and dance were used to examine human consciousness. It was the 70s, guys. The idea here was that honoring and reawakening respect for the Great Mother archetype might be some kind of cultural antidote to what the Vietnam War represented culturally. Bly's central hypothesis then in his most prominent book, Iron John, was that men suffered the wound of an absent father, either physically or emotionally, and that men lack both the physical markers most women experience like menstruation, childbirth and menopause. And that we, we, we've lost the pre modern male initiatory rites of passage into adulthood. So he argued that men often remain in a kind of arrested development, unable to meaningfully accept adult responsibility and often repeating the cycle of then becoming absent fathers themselves and thereby wounding the next generation of boys.
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Matthew Remsky
Did he have some theory about why pre modern rituals got abandoned?
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Derek Barris
I don't know. You know, a lot of this does it for me, it does sort of resonate with this romanticization of the past and that somehow through modern eternity we've lost touch with something really essential that connected us to the earth and to the tribe and to our traditions and that, that, you know, it's, it's sort of in the lineage of the Joseph Campbell, you know, who also was a big fan of Jung notion that, that we've lost some deep mythic wisdom that connected us to the cycles of life and that men especially suffer from that because we don't have as many of the biological markers.
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Julian Walker
I don't want to ascribe this specifically to Bly or Campbell, but in these conversations industrialization is us pointed to as the moment that that started happening. I think that's partly romanticized as well, because you need to pick a point historically like, oh, that must have been it. But that is where they usually pointed to.
- [39:25]
Derek Barris
Yeah. And, you know, what's often missing in a lot of this kind of romanticization is the brutal and traumatizing reality of many traditional rites of passage for young boys and what actually happens to them as they're sort of taught how to
- [39:40]
Julian Walker
be warriors, basically, or what agriculture actually entailed. Machinery started coming in and making the process at least a little bit easier. So it's, you know, it's very, it's, it's the 19. It's the Republicans. 1950s was the best time ever argument over and over again.
- [39:57]
Derek Barris
Yeah. And then for people who are maybe more on the progressive, anti Vietnam War side of the aisle, it's, it's like, oh, we've, we've lost touch with the Great Mother, we've lost touch with the earth and with indigenous spiritual wisdom. So his diagnosis of the problem with men did have some overlap, sadly, with more conservative views in that.
- [40:18]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, that becomes important. Right?
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Derek Barris
Yeah. So he talked about soft males who'd lost their ability to exhibit strength, but also creativity. But he also talked about hyper masculinity as a kind of over compensation that ends up being very toxic. That's an important point. Rather than blaming feminism, he was very careful not to in his writing and, and he would talk about this or encourag reactionary misogynist grievance. Bly's prescription relied more on these Jungian ideas of mythopoetic descent into the underworld so as to grieve, to confront the shadow, to get back in touch with embodied and primal wildness. He also championed men having more supportive and positive collaborative relationships. So maybe not saying, do it, fat boy, or whatever we were talking about earlier. To this end, Bly, along with figures like Michael Mead and Robert Moore, created men's gang gatherings and retreats that incorporated drumming, singing, poetry, storytelling and sweat lodges. All of which, of course then made them an easy target for mockery in the media.
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Matthew Remsky
And all of which also made it, you know, created a kind of aesthetics and a series of rituals that were very easy for people like Aubrey Marcus to cosplay later on.
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Derek Barris
Absolutely.
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Matthew Remsky
With, you know, so there's this political wateriness at the center of it.
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Derek Barris
All.
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Matthew Remsky
Right. That can just be appropriated and go in any direction.
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Derek Barris
Well, yeah, that's one of the major criticisms of Bly actually from a lot of people is that he went from actually being quite politically engaged to creating a movement where, you know, I think in times when there were times he was asked about it, he said, no, we're not doing something that's really political. This is more right for all men.
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Matthew Remsky
He got old, he got old, he got old, he got tired out, man.
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Julian Walker
I also wouldn't put a straight line there just simply because anytime any movement scales, people come in and co opt it like this happens sure, historically everywhere. So I found Bly's work through Michael Me, who I was fortunate enough to share lunch with at a mythology conference that we both spoke at in Atlanta in 2004. His book Water and the Men of Life was very influential for me at that point in my life and it really was my introduction to the concept of men's groups. I came across this passage from his book Fate and destiny, the two agreements of the story soul, now 50 year old me is not as struck by this given my general analytic nature and the passage is ambiguity. But the Derek that was half my age whose life was steeped in mythology would certainly have appreciated the poetry. So I'm just sharing this as an example of how far the mythopoetic movement is from what Bethea encounters while he was reporting for this article. Quote, all meaningful change requires a genuine surrender. Yet to surrender does not simply mean to give up more, to give up one's usual self and allow something other to enter and redeem the lesser sense of self. In surrendering, we fall to the bottom of our arguments and seek to touch the origin of our lives again. Only then can we see as we were meant to see from the depth of the psyche, where the genius resides, where the seeds of wisdom and purpose were planted before we were born.
- [43:35]
Matthew Remsky
So it's so beautiful, Tarek. And like how different do you guys think this is from any other kind of essentialist? Like you have to find your original purpose framework. Because I hear that and I'm like, you know, the Derek that's half your age I can imagine as coming in as an empathetic guy who has a working class background and like you have this strong connection to all of your sort of local people and your family and community and you know, you're not going to spin that, that out into Aubrey Marcus world, right? Like you're, you're not going to take that in a particular direction, but you could.
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Julian Walker
No, I wasn't, I wasn't born with millions in oil money like Aubrey. You weren't?
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Matthew Remsky
No.
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Julian Walker
Okay. The 50 year old me would say that any original purpose framework is. And in fact on Saturday Julian and I will be discussing Nick Chader's book the Mind is Flat, the context of Marc Andreessen on the brief. And we sort of get into this. The how we're constantly contextualizing, creating reality as we go go. And yet we pine for this original idea. So, yeah, when I read that, I'm just like, there is, there's a poetic sense that feels good.
- [44:48]
Derek Barris
Right.
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Julian Walker
But if you actually, like I always say, just, just transcribe Russell Brand, don't listen to him and just read the words and you're like, what the. This makes absolutely no sense. And there's, there's a little bit of that in this for me, but not nearly as gross.
- [45:03]
Derek Barris
Well, that's the thing.
- [45:04]
Matthew Remsky
We're just talking about matters of degree, Right? Because I, I listen to that and I'm like, I'm transported back to being years old and thinking, wow, that's amazing guidance. That really feels great.
- [45:14]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [45:15]
Matthew Remsky
And then you can hear, you could hear some, you know, Jordan Peterson, lap dog, say the exact same thing.
- [45:21]
Derek Barris
Funny you should say that.
- [45:22]
Matthew Remsky
Right?
- [45:23]
Derek Barris
It's funny you should say that because these are, you know, quite different versions. And maybe by matters of degree, as you're suggesting, Matthew, of what we might call men's work. But then in 2016, along comes one Jordan Peterson striding in his self conscious suits onto the digital stage with a passionate synthesis of anti feminism, anti trans panic, reactionary, if cryptic and obscurantist Christianity at first, and his own more reductive and performative take on Jungian maps of meaning. It's Peterson who goes viral on YouTube for objecting to transgender people being added to Canadian human rights law. And then for videos in which he destroys feminist incident viewers. It's Peterson who writes the banal 2018 bestseller for young men called 12 Rules for Life and who then cries on TV about the plight of incels. So I see Jordan Peterson really as the prominent cultural figure who combines conservative politics and spirituality for a whole new demographic of men aggrieved at woke feminism who are now filtering into retrograde alpha male organizations like Rock Arise in search of some lost sense of meaning and community.
- [46:38]
Julian Walker
I mentioned Corinne Lowe's book earlier, and she has an entirely different take on men's work, at least in the framing of how it would help in a marriage to a woman. I don't think I've heard any of these groups we've discussed so far talking about doing the dishes or doing laundry or nursing an infant. And low rates that mothers get trapped in this cycle. Maternity leaves are generally longer than paternity leaves, and so the mother takes on a lot of child rearing skills. Then the father often says, oh, well, you know what she's good at that. So she can continue to handle that even after maternity leave ends. So the woman is now working again and has picked up most child rearing skills.
- [47:18]
Derek Barris
Yeah, it's such a good observation. I, I can't help but imagine the early iterations of male feminism that we were talking about before were discussing things like this. But yeah, it definitely gets deprioritized in this other framing.
- [47:31]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean anything thing in life, the good at that happens when you do a repetitive task over and over again. But the men weren't ever really going to do them to begin with. So while Low doesn't write about men's groups, I imagine any of them would be served by having a woman do some of the programming. And to be clear, some of them might do this already. I, I'm not indicting them all. I, I truly don't know that we're only covering a small selection, but a lot of what I see is men, as I mentioned earlier, carrying logs up head hills, not carrying diapers to a bin. And I'm guessing the latter is a lot more meaningful to their wives if they want to maintain a healthy relationship, which apparently, according to a lot of what we've been reviewing, is what they say they actually want.
- [48:15]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, well, the, the maternal burden starts with like pregnancy, labor, giving birth, nursing, so I'd say none of which the
- [48:23]
Derek Barris
man can actually take over.
- [48:24]
Matthew Remsky
Right. So regardless of maternity leave, which a lot of women don't get, and also the US doesn't mandate paid leave at all. Like I was looking it up and it's like the law in most places is that you'll have your job reserved for you pay free for 12 weeks, which is incredible to me. So anyway, the helping out framework, it has to be active, it has to be investigative. Like you have to take a serious inventory of all the domestic labor the woman partner is doing prior to, to this massive unpaid burden of social reproduction. And then, you know, if you have a good relationship, you somehow attempt to replace it with your own work if you really want equity. But I'll just ping Silvia Federici here again from a couple weeks ago, talking about Ballerina Farm to mention that like that type of calculus is pretty repressed and invisible because if it's well broadcast, we would really have to reevaluate the cost cost of social reproduction in the economy that produces new human beings, more workers, more consumers. And I think everybody would discover that the core work of giving humans life is unpaid for. And so in my opinion, the surface cultural work of the men's group self concern about men are really having a problem is to recenter men as core subjects after feminism begins to extract concessions from patriarchy. Just a few anyway. But I think a deeper work is to further bury just how much essential work women have always done.
- [49:56]
Julian Walker
To your point there in, in the brief where I'm reading Low and I'm reading Galloway, one of the most stark contradictions between them or differences between them is that Galloway says, don't keep score because that's just going to make you bitter. Low says, actually you should keep score Spreadsheet. Keep a spreadsheet of duties and of finances and all these things. And I have to say my wife and I did this a few years ago and it really changed my relationship to homework, like the work around the house. And we started splitting up three nights a week. We cook like, I mean, she cooks three, I cook three. We started splitting labor because we had a sheet to track it. And that was, that was really honestly a very helpful thing to our relationship. So I, again, I'll just reiterate, Men should read Corinne Low's book, even though it's written for women, because you're going to learn something about yourself.
- [50:46]
Matthew Remsky
And the thing that Galloway is doing with that, which is, which is don't keep a spreadsheet, don't keep accounts, is that he's doing exactly what Federici is warning about, which is don't like. We very easily invoke love and a kind of vision of a non transactional relationship that winds up bending its way towards who already has the power. And that's just constant. So, you know, I think this was an entertaining piece from Bethea of immersive journalism with, you know, decent fieldwork. I'm left a little bit with a Louis Theroux manosphere taste in my mouth, you know, and I think just going forward, I'm always going to be asking for more out of these pieces because they take up a lot of resources, a lot of attention. You know, there's a lot of editorial decisions that go. So here's my sort of critical take. Like I think, I think he made a decent effort at creating links between various men's movements of the past that you've just reviewed, Julian, and there's a thread of material causes for various waves of male anxiety through the generations. But the overall glue that he defaults to is psychological and it's also tautological like that for whatever reason, men are suffering in unique ways that are essentially about the problem of being men. And it's very mysterious. Right. And I don't think think that Robert Bly and Michael Mead answer that question either. Like what is the deep mystery of the problem of manhood? And so that's been hanging, I think, in the culture for a long time. I don't think that particular focus is Bethea's fault because the movements that he bullet points as historical precedents, they all explicitly leaned into the psychosomatic wounding of men qua men. So he talks about 10 Teddy Roosevelt's Western cure, like let's pretend that we're cowboys, which was a remedy for feminization in the late 1800s because this has always been a problem. Obviously he had something called the Boone and Crockett Outdoors Club. There was the Boy Scouts who emphasized weaning boys from their moms the whole age of fraternities in the 1920s, and then, you know, these later softer psychologies of Bly and Mead. But the main focus is on the mysterious essence of masculinity. He does have one main materialist explanation that he leans into, which is his gloss of Richard Reeves. And speaking of Galloway, Reeves calls or sorry, Galloway calls Reeves his yoda on boy sciences. So this is Bethea summarizing reeves quote. In 2022, the social scientist Richard Reeves published of Boys and Men, which describes how men are falling behind in contemporary society. In the past 40 years, men's wages have decreased as a percentage of overall family income, while broader wealth inequalities and insecurity have grown. Girls now perform better than boys in high school and are more likely to enroll in college, setting them up for better careers. Men today are five times likelier than they were in the 90s to say that they don't have any close friends. They are also much less likely to receive mental health treatment than men and four times more likely to die by suicide. So I did a brief episode on Galloway's Lost Boys podcast, which he put out with Anthony Scaramucci. And so I'll, you know, let link to that. But a chunk of it reviewed like Reeves's credibility as Galloway's Yoda. And Reeves isn't credentialed in sociology or gender studies or child psychology. And his data, when it's looked at by discipline experts, gets picked apart to show that he exaggerates educational gaps, he misrepresents GPA trends, and then he conflates proportional changes with widening disparities between boys and girls. So a lot of his argument and status as a father son whisperer relies on this notion that boys, boys, educational outcomes are worsening but if we look at just one claim, for example, which is girls now perform better than boys in high school and are more likely to enroll in college, setting them up for better careers. This is obviously a panic button statement for a lot of parents. Like, boys are being left behind. And, you know, we have two boys here. And I look at that and I'm like, huh, okay, what's really happening? And the thing is that girls do outperform in some benchmarks tasks, but they have always done so. This has been a constant for a century.
- [55:12]
Derek Barris
It's worse than we thought, Matthew.
- [55:13]
Matthew Remsky
It's worse than we thought. It goes back a century. But Reeves whole deal is that it's getting worse, right? So where Reeves says that the GPA gap has widened with A being the most common high school grade for girls and a B for boys, what's actually happening is that both grades grew proportionally and the girls crossed the threshold. One good thing that Reeves pushes for, even if the reasoning is flawed, is that he wants to see more men go into primary school, school teaching. And he thinks this would be better for boys for reasons that are kind of vague. But they're about representation, they're about modeling. I think there's something there. But what I really agree with is that more men in caregiving labor makes for just a more feminist culture. I think so. I mean, I think Bethea maybe was told by the editors that we need some sociology in there. But it is kind of frustrating to watch Reeves's kind of like, Arrogance Airport book become this key source. But it's not Bethea's focus, you know, likewise, his attention isn't on like, deindustrialization or union decline or the gig economy or the opioid epidemic or any of these, like, material things that, like, are slamming men in, you know, material ways. So I get this unfocused picture. There are standard ugly themes of misogyny, pseudo three therapy, pseudo religious discipline, manufactured authenticity, cheap ritualism. But I just keep asking, like, what does it all connect to? Right? Like, Butthea flags a relationship between these themes and the overarching structure of MAGA masculinity. And he does this at the top through this rogues gallery of officials. So he talks about Hegseth and his tattoo tattoos. He talks about RFK jr's workouts. The shadow of the UFC is over everything. They're going to have, you know, fourth of July on the White House lawn fight. He talks about Musk's fondness for leather and Zuckerberg's masculinity. Glow up. He opens by noting that Trump, you know, wrote the forward for Adams's book, as Derek said. But like, I'm left with this. These questions, which, which are, like, how do these cultural movements intersect with the clear state patriarchy that Bethea is pointing to? Like, are these groups, for instance, feeding into ice because, you know, where they're trying to hire like 50,000 new officers over the next couple of years? Because, like, I think that would be a solid measure of the difference between a kind of nasty but diffuse and reiterative cultural movement and something that has real political legs. And I think this is the issue that's the subtext of the article, given the timing. He makes these references to the White House team. But I don't know the extent that these movements are growing, coalescing with, transcending their workshop retreat economies to support MAGA and inspire its masculinity. Like, how do they intersect with the prerogative to fascist militarism? So sub. You know, at the same time, I'm coming across all of this other research in journalism that gets at those very questions by looking at a different types of a type of men's group that is emerging. I don't know if you guys have heard of active clubs, but these are mostly male fitness groups that train members in MMA tech techniques for literal fascist street fighting and a future race war. And they do this while throwing in some of the self management and hygiene tips that you would find on the Rise Weekend in Canada. Here there's an excellent independent journalist named Rachel Gilmour who just published an investigation into the Frontenac active club in Montreal where there's like a dozen guys who have been meeting after hours in the gym. And they got led in by one of the members of the gym who worked there. He's a former Olympian in boxing coach, and they do these training exercises, you know, through, you know, at midnight sessions for fascist street fights. And the gym owners, gym owners didn't know and when they became aware because of the reporting, they fired the coach and they shut it down. But some of these active club guys here in Canada have been charged with like, terrorism offenses. So, you know, this is a thing. There's 200 active clubs globally. There's 30, 30 in Canada, there's about 80 in the States. Over a couple dozen states. There's an extremism researcher named Alexander Ritzman who talks about how some active clubs have been bragging about tactical casualty care training, which is, you know, code for shooting events. So I think there's probably Some overlap with gun culture, you know, because, you know, if you. During casualty care training, you're talking about evacuating wounded people from violent confrontations. So there's probably a paramilitary crossover. And then there's the obvious piece that we know that ICE is actively recruiting white nationalists. DHS ads include references to the 1978 book which Way Western man, which is standard reading for neo Nazis. And, you know, it's also a recruitment song that is very beloved by blood and soil racists. So, yeah, there are these connections and resonances between Bethesda Bethea's study and more organized influences on maga. And I kind of want to see where those gel together a little bit more.
- [60:50]
Julian Walker
So, you know, this is a really good analysis of how you would have written the article, I think, if you had listened to Bethea's interview on npr. You know, he initially thought of the, the germ of the piece was coming across Nick Adams on Twitter and being like, huh, how did this is guy really have influence? But then what drew him in was really understanding how an individual man gets pulled into this. Like the person in his 50s who's out of shape and just is trying to find his legs again and maybe has some lack of confidence.
- [61:19]
Matthew Remsky
Sure.
- [61:20]
Julian Walker
And so what is that? So he, just to be clear, he wasn't concerned with the state level of this, which is fine. If you're looking at a narrative analysis of how men go through this, what you're presenting is a much different piece, which would also, I think, be very effective in its own way for a study on that aspect of it.
- [61:42]
Matthew Remsky
He is pointing to it though, right? Like, he does do this rogues gallery at the top. He says, he says this is influencing our politics at the top level. And then that stuff gets kind of dangled. And I think that I, I mean, I can imagine in editorial you'd say, okay, well, what's the wider framing? Like, what's, you know, if, if you zoomed out what, what are the other sort of political markers here? And then you would come up with Hegseth's tattoos and Bobby's workouts and stuff like that. So I'm just like, looking for. Because I, I, yeah, I am genuinely genuine, genuinely interested between this, because we have this kind of, I don't know, wellness fitness club retreat workshop structure that is culturally supporting something that has a more stable state, politics, and there's got to be a relationship there. And. Yeah, yeah.
- [62:31]
Julian Walker
And what you're doing is a very good job of highlighting that relationship. All I'm saying is what you're kind of asking for is a book, not an article.
- [62:43]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:43]
Derek Barris
Y.
- [62:45]
Julian Walker
And so I don't want to ding Bethea for not taking that frame because I think he did a good job within his frame. And I also appreciate you taking a different frame and looking out at it, which I think is the purpose and point of analysis.
- [62:58]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. Well, speaking of books, the book that I think gives me a sense of where the cultural and state intersections would become really functional and efficient is this book that I'm reading called Male Fantasies by Clark Klaus Tevilite. And it's his history of the German Freikorps, which is the volunteer soldier army that preceded the rise of Nazism. So you can think of ice in a lot of ways.
- [63:31]
Derek Barris
Right.
- [63:33]
Matthew Remsky
Except that their funding was a little bit dodgier. It was more sort of under the table. Wasn't exactly clear who was hiring them and stuff, but they were the shock troops of the post war governments in Germany and they were mainly tasked with putting down the communists. That was their primary job. And they were mostly unemployed World War I trench veterans with PTSD. They had been humiliated by the post war Versailles arrangement and they were all in on military brotherhood, on nationalist duty and warfare over personal relationships or intimate intimacy. And they had very particular attitudes towards women which I think are very resonant here. They saw women with a mixture of dread and indifference, which is resonant throughout Bethea's article as well. Right. Like the women are, you know, there's one guy who's carrying a little weight up the hill that's representing his trauma and it just says ex wife, you know. And so there's of a lot, lot of like post family stuff that they're trying to recover from and not in a very coherent way, but the Fry Corps had these, you know, rituals and training that provided them with a refuge from the perceived threat of, you know, emotional dissolution and female sexuality. So the misogyny for them was like a foundational element of fascist identity. And they divided the world into their own hardness and then the liquid mass of women, but also revolutionaries who were always about to engulf them, which is a very like Freudian Jungian sort of image. And it's also very predictive of alpha beta language. So table light says that the Freikorsman were very into turning the body into armor through physical suffering to resist the red flood of communism. And guess what? The red flood is embodied in a particular type of woman, the red woman. And the red woman was juxtaposed against the white nurse who I think might prefigure the trad wife of today, but here's a quote from Table Light to close this out Quote the Red Woman is vividly, aggressively sexual in fantasy. Always a whore. Her mouth is enormous, spewing out insults at our Fry as they attempt to ride straight back through the city streets. The Red Woman is in addition, armed, or is so, at least in fantasy. She might have a gun under her skirt, or she might lead the Fry corpsman through a dark passageway to an ambush. In other words, there is no distinguishing her sexuality from the mortal danger she presents.
- [66:57]
Derek Barris
Day or night. VRBO Care is here 247 to help make every part of your stay seamless. If anything comes up or you simply need a little guidance, support is ready whenever you reach out. From the moment you book to the
- [67:13]
Matthew Remsky
moment you head home.
- [67:14]
Derek Barris
We're here to help things run smoothly
- [67:17]
Matthew Remsky
because a great trip starts with the right support.
- [67:21]
Derek Barris
And hey, a good playlist doesn't hurt either.