Masculinity In Review

* Check out Jonathan’s sci-fi book series, The Night Sky Trilogy

Nick Paro sits down with Jonathan Buchwalter — a Holocaust and 20th-century U.S. history teacher, Shelton State adjunct, TikTok historian, and as of a few days ago the newly-elected chairman of the Tuscaloosa County Democratic Party — for a late-night, second-of-the-day Intelligent Masculinity conversation that moves from a 1930 Berlin landlord dispute to a 2026 American press conference without ever changing subjects. Jonathan’s argument, built brick by historical brick, is that the strain of authoritarianism running through American life right now is best read alongside the rise of European fascism — not because the costumes match, but because the propaganda machinery does. His definition of intelligent masculinity, when he finally lands it in the closing arc, is the cleanest answer the show has gotten in months: “mastery over the reptile.” The hour is a working tutorial in why those two things — the political diagnosis and the personal practice — are the same conversation.

The episode opens with the Horst Wessel story, and it is worth slowing down to hear what Jonathan does with it. Wessel was a brown-shirted street-fighter in the early Weimar period, killed in 1930 by communist street-fighters after he allegedly threatened an elderly landlady the communists had been looking after. Joseph Goebbels turned the corpse into a movement. “You don’t have to look too hard to see really similar circumstances in our recent history,” Jonathan says, “the death of a propagandist being manipulated into the story of martyrdom for the cause, the use of a corpse really.” He names Charlie Kirk. Nick adds Stephen Miller as the modern Goebbels analog, and notes that the church-with-the-Christian-flag-above-the-Stars-and-Stripes he drives past on his way to Tulsa is where the propaganda actually took. The point is not that Kirk is Wessel. The point is that the technology of martyr manufacture is older than the men running it, and that knowing the history is the only way to recognize the technique in real time.

What follows is the most rigorous discussion of religion-and-fascism the series has hosted. Jonathan’s comparative move is to treat religious institutions as variables rather than constants. Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were both authoritarian projects that had to negotiate with deeply organized churches — the Vatican, with its money and its pulpit; the Lutheran Protestant set, with its anti-Semitic inheritance and its Christian charity simultaneously. Mussolini’s acolytes talked about a new civic religion of fascism and then quietly conceded that they had to stand alongside the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church had hard power. The Nazis split the difference: one faction wanted to Christianize Hitler into a savior figure; Himmler’s faction wanted the church to be the next enemy after the communists and the Jews. America in 2026 has no such institution to negotiate with. “Now American organized religion is far less organized,” Jonathan says, and so what fills the vacuum is “disparate megachurches that share some school curricula” — the Church of the Highlands and its pseudo-college, ministering trainings, sponsored Christian universities — nothing remotely like the Lutheran Church of Germany. The friction this analysis produces is the most useful kind. It refuses both the lazy “it can’t happen here” and the equally lazy “it’s the same thing.” It tells you which lever is missing.

The Pete Hegseth section is where the historical thread meets the cultural one, and where Jonathan’s central thesis crystallizes. He traces the American religious-political schism back to the late 1920s and 1930s — the Christian socialist tradition of a populist Christ versus the more reactionary, oligarchal tradition of a Christ who helps those who help themselves — and walks it forward through Bill Buckley Jr. versus Martin Luther King Jr., two equally religious men asking opposite questions about who God is to us. The earlier authoritarians, in Jonathan’s reading, believed things. The early Nazis got shot at Beer Hall Putsches; they took real beatings in real street fights with communists. Hegseth has never known struggle. His ideas, Jonathan says, “move in line with whatever is most beneficial to him in the moment.” The cross tattoo, the Christianized masculinity, the sloppy-drunk press conference videos — these don’t create friction in him because there is no underlying belief for the behavior to grind against. “It’s just pure ego. It’s just pure aesthetic.” This is the diagnostic frame the rest of the episode operates inside: an authoritarianism that has stopped pretending to believe in anything beyond its own self-preservation, and a brand of masculinity that has stopped pretending to believe in anything beyond its own image.

That frame is what turns the gym-bro section from a sidebar into the show’s payoff. Jonathan grew up in gym culture — his stepdad Jamie was a professional bodybuilder — and his account of the “old heads” is unsentimental but generous. They were honest. They told nineteen-year-olds the truth about tren and test: it will make you absolutely massive, it will also put you at enormous risk, it is not good for you, it is superman serum. The modern MAHA-flavored manfluencer is, in Jonathan’s read, a liar by job description. He sells supplements he knows don’t work, takes gear he won’t admit to, and gleefully tells nineteen-year-olds — boys at the peak of their natural testosterone production, with the best growth vector they will ever have — to start blasting. The bill, Jonathan warns, is years out: an epidemic of joint pain in men’s late twenties, fried testosterone in men trying to start families in their early thirties, men who cannot pick up their own kids because they picked up too much weight at nineteen on a substance they were lied to about. The aesthetic that authoritarianism sold to Hegseth is the same aesthetic the manfluencer sells to the seventeen-year-old: a costume of strength that costs the strength itself.

Jonathan’s diagnosis of the seventeen-year-old is precise enough to quote in full. Every generation of young men has wanted women and not known how to talk to them — that part isn’t new. What is new is that the kid can now ask his question of an algorithm instead of a big brother or a dad or a friend, and the algorithm has product to sell. It tells him birth rates are women’s fault. It tells him his sexual market value is low. It tells him to get his jawline sorted, do bone smashing, blast a bunch of tren, and the women will flock. “And it’s all feeding this cycle of anxiety,” Jonathan says. “None of that is approachable, realistic, or grounded in reality in any meaningful way. And so it doesn’t solve your problem. So you get more anxious and you get less able to talk to women and you get less able to interact meaningfully with other people around you. And you come off as more and more of a freak.” The kid goes back to the influencer for more of the thing that made him worse. The dependence forms. The sense of self gets outsourced to “freaks on the internet who are lying to you to sell you something.” Nick connects it to looksmaxxing’s Adam archetype and notes — pointedly — that Adam is the most beta man in scripture, since he let a snake (and Nick has a stronger word for what that snake was) steal his wife. The series’s gleeful crassness on this point is part of its argument: the manfluencer’s Bible Story is a worse reading of the text than a podcast joke.

The counterprogramming is Jonathan’s grandfather and his stepdad Jamie, and the episode earns its emotional weight in those passages. His biological father, as far as he knows, is still in jail — long history of drinking, of physical abuse, never around. His grandfather was a steel-industry worker with no education and a history of abuse of his own, and what Jonathan saw in him every day was a man who provided, who asked after others, who shared what he loved. Jamie, his stepdad, was a blue-collar bodybuilder who met a bookworm where the bookworm actually lived. Every Saturday morning, like clockwork: breakfast together while the girls slept, Dragon Ball Z, then the gym. “He just welcomed me into that part of his life without reservation. And didn’t make me feel weak because I couldn’t pick the weight up, didn’t make me feel stupid because I didn’t know how the emotions worked. He was just there showing me how it worked and trying to meet me in the nerdy shit that I was into and bring that in to the physicality that he was into.” That is the opposite of the manfluencer transaction. It is presence instead of product. It is, in the show’s working vocabulary, intelligent masculinity in practice. Jonathan now has a one-year-old son and a daughter, and he names the reservoir directly: he is passing the goodness Jamie gave him forward.

The hour’s best definition is also its quietest. Jonathan calls intelligent masculinity “mastery over the reptile” — the discipline to say, I have these big angry feelings, but that doesn’t mean I need to hit something with a stick about it. I feel this drive toward this objective, and that doesn’t mean I have to step over people to get there. When mastery happens, he tells Nick, you find you are not just more satisfied — you become an example. He texted his best friend James recently from the couch, his daughter under one arm, his son enamored with the colors on the TV, his wife laughing at her phone beside him: “This is the most like a man I’ve ever felt in my life, because I had people that loved me and people that I loved and people that I knew could trust...