Charles Bethea

Thanks, Tanya.

So sometime last year I was on X and I stumbled across this guy named Nick Adams who presented himself as a kind of alpha male guru.

He was telling men to never apologize, to find a woman who is, and I quote here, as low maintenance as she is hot.

He had a bunch of similar kinds of commandments about this alpha stuff.

There were 45 of them, actually, a numerical reference to the 45th president, Donald Trump, who Adams held up as a study in peak masculinity for the ages.

That's how he put it.

And his ex-account was like this kind of car wreck I couldn't stop looking at.

And incredibly, he had like 600,000 followers.

He still does.

And many of them treated him very seriously as this kind of guru that he seemed to want to be seen as on the topic of alpha masculinity.

And he'd written a book called Alpha Kings a few years ago, which purported to be a kind of manual, a compendium of his work.

his alpha wisdom, so to speak.

Trump had actually penned the foreword or was credited at least with penning the foreword to this book, which injected the whole project, obviously, with a kind of rocket fuel and a rightward political trajectory.

I mean, it was it was a little bit redundant, but it was a lot of just sort of back slapping for Adams is, you know, being an alpha male, holding up the values of what it means to be an alpha male, how alpha males are special and central to this this country's history.

And he, of course, Trump being Trump, he appreciated Adams's recognition that Trump is the sort of peak alpha male.

So it was this kind of back and forth patting on the back of one another.

Trump actually ends up nominating this guy, Nick Adams, who's just posting on X about, you know, the Hooters restaurant chain and all this kind of crass stuff.

He nominates him first to be the ambassador to Malaysia last year, which fizzled in the Senate.

And then he makes him the special presidential envoy for, and I quote, American tourism, exceptionalism and values.

And this was just a few weeks ago in early March that that came through.