THE LAST MEN: Liberalism and Death of Masculinity, pt.3
In preparation for my new book, read the third of three parts of a never-before-seen 10,000 word piece I wrote back in the autumn
Welcome back, my friends, to this exclusive long essay developing some of the themes of my new book. We’ve had the first and second parts, which you can read here and here. Today we’ve got the third part, in which I discuss “the death of friendship” and how and why male-bonding is disparaged by the liberal mainstream.
Like I said on Friday, please let me know in the comments what you think. I’ll be settling down to write the new book this autumn, with a scheduled release in early 2025.
“Once a society collapses, then, you’re in hard times. Well, iron sharpens iron as they say, and those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive. And then they go on to re-establish order, and so the cycle begins again.”
These words – my own – closed out the first trailer for the Tucker Carlson Originals documentary The End of Men. By “the cycle” I was referring to the idea, expressed in countless internet memes, that “strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men.” Human history, in short, is a never-ending cycle of prosperity, decadence, decay and renewal. This idea, however meme-ified it may have become, has its roots in a number of different religious traditions, such as the Hindu notion of the sat yuga and the kali yuga, great ages of “ascending” and “descending” life.
As I spoke those words in the trailer, the strains of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” began to swell and a flurry of images played across the screen. A muscular man flipping a tractor tyre. Another chopping wood. A plunge into an ice bath. A man – could it have been me? – drinking a glass of raw eggs. Then finally, as the voiceover and the music reached their climax together, a male figure emerged from the darkness, his perfect taper from broad muscular shoulders to a tight waist silhouetted by a full-length red-light machine. “TUCKER CARLSON ORIGINALS PRESENTS… THE END OF MEN” [DAAA-DAAAH!]. (For the full dramatic effect, you’re going to have to watch the trailer on YouTube.)
It was clear to all involved, not least of all Tucker himself, that the trailer was going to make waves. That was our intention, of course. But none of us anticipated the level of response the trailer received when it debuted on Fox, on a Friday back in April 2022. Before the end of the day, the first hitpiece was up, and they continued to roll in for weeks afterwards. “Tucker Carlson exposes his insecurities in ‘The End of Men’ trailer” (Forbes). “Tucker Carlson’s documentary trailer is a bizarre, homoerotic fever dream nobody asked for” (Pink News). “Can Tucker Carlson’s bizarrely beefy ‘End of Men’ teaser be real?” (Los Angeles Magazine). Yes, it was real, but disbelief apparently ran so high that the regime’s fact-checkers at Snopes.com felt compelled to issue a confirmation.
The usual suspects chipped in on social media. Cenk Uygur, famed bestiality advocate and member of the Young Turks, wondered whether there was “some chance Tucker is trolling his own audience because there’s gay porn less gay than this.” “I am sitting here next to my gay husband living my gay life reading a gay novel as research for my new gay book,” tweeted New York writer and gay man Mark Harris, “and yet I am not and will never be as gay as whatever is haunting Tucker Carlson’s gay fantasies.” George Takei added, simply, “This is so gay.”
Most of the attention and ridicule was directed towards the now-infamous “testicle tanning” sequence, in which one of my fellow participants stood astride a rock in the “Vitruvian Man” position, with only a JOOV red-light machine to cover his modesty. As mad as it may look, it’s a completely serious method for increasing the body’s production of testosterone, with a decent amount of science behind it. The basic idea is that a specific kind of red light penetrates the testicles and energises the Leydig cells, where testosterone is produced, making them work better. It's well established, mainly from studies intended to aid the factory-farming of animals like chickens, that exposure to certain frequencies of light, including green and blue light, can dramatically increase growth and muscular development. Not that Stephen Colbert would know any of this. All he saw was a naked dude doing something funny with a high-tech device at crotch-level. “Is that man scanning his penis at the self-checkout!?” Colbert quipped on the Late Show, before adding that it was surprising to see Tucker “promoting testicle tanning”, since “last time I checked, he is the whitest dick ever.” (Such a funny guy!)
The focus on the supposedly homoerotic aspects of the trailer came at the expense of a very serious message. That message, delivered mainly in the more sombre and foreboding first half, was the same as the message of this book: We are heading towards a reproductive and moral collapse, because men are no longer men. In presenting that stark message, Tucker assembled an array of experts, including Professor Shanna Swan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to lay out the facts, just as I have done.
Tucker also gave prominent billing to archival footage of a speech President John F. Kennedy gave in 1962. “I welcome this opportunity to speak to the people of America about a subject which I believe to be most important, and that is the subject of physical fitness. A country is as strong really as its citizens, and I think that mental and physical health go hand in hand.” Kennedy went on to lament that “There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children. I hope that all of you will join – and everybody in the United States – to make sure that our children participate fully in a vigorous and adventurous life, which is possible for them in this very rich country of ours.” The footage raised the intriguing possibility that, had he not been killed, JFK might have nipped America’s present health crisis in the bud. Interspersed with the footage and audio of Kennedy himself were scenes from the famous La Sierra high-school program, a bodyweight-strength routine created at La Sierra High School in California and often dubbed “history’s hardest PE program”. It was apparently his introduction to the La Sierra program that inspired Kennedy to make physical fitness a renewed priority for American schools.
The inclusion of Kennedy’s speech was also intended to make liberals, the kind who would – and did – cry “fascism” at the sight of regimented, state-approved physical fitness, feel very uncomfortable indeed, since this was a celebrated Democrat president saying these words, not a “controversial” Fox News anchor or a “right-wing bodybuilder” like myself. If liberals who watched the trailer felt this cognitive dissonance, they seem to have done what they usually do and suppressed it.
Indeed, it’s hard not to conclude that the trailer’s critics chose wilfully to ignore its central message, however distracting the scantily clad men in its second half were. After all, if there’s one demographic liberals – and the critics were all liberals – have zero sympathy for, it’s young white men, and most of the participants in the documentary were young white men. But it goes deeper than that, I think. What liberals don’t like and don’t want – and, a fortiori, what the liberal system doesn’t like and doesn’t want – is for young men, full stop, to break free and create something exciting and new for themselves beyond the boundaries of transient consumerism and other isothymic pursuits. Because that’s fundamentally what the documentary was about. It wasn’t simply intended to be a doom-and-gloom fest – a “blackpill”, to use the internet slang – about the degeneration of men and the impending death of the species. The aim was to provide a rallying cry for young men: you can take control of your lives, you can reverse the biological decline, and you can do it by finding other like-minded men and having a great time, lifting weights, wrestling, going horse-riding and hunting, and eating the kinds of foods your ancestors used to eat (including, of course, raw eggs). You can even tan your balls if you want – just maybe not in public.
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