Charles Bethea

The boys look a little, some of them look a little like hostages, a little nervous.

Some of them look maybe a little bit more like they were down for whatever this was going to be.

And I spend about 12 hours with them.

They each paid, I think, around $1,000, maybe a little less to be there for this day.

So they're ready for what they think are gonna be a number of physical challenges.

And they sit down, they do introductions,

in this room attached to the gym.

And I hear the fathers who'd brought their sons, it was certainly the fathers who'd made the choice to be there, say something that was, I think, you know, like just something anybody can agree with.

Like they wanted to do better for their sons than had been done for them by their fathers.

And that was a theme I heard a lot through both camps was like a lot of

men and young men who didn't have active or positive fatherly role models.

I guess the most charitable way to view that is that Bedros just didn't do his homework.

But I suspect that he knew enough about this guy, Jack Donovan, who wrote the book The Way of Men that outlines these courage, bravery, mastery, these things that supposedly define what a man is.

He should have, could have known that this guy also didn't just dabble but puts out there like a pretty straightforwardly white supremacist and misogynistic view.

And it was weird because Bedros in our conversations, while he leaned into chauvinistic sort of ideas, like he was not saying anything about the –

that society should be led by white men or that women shouldn't vote.

But nonetheless, he's citing a book by an author who, if anyone who's listening to him does a little bit, gets curious and does a little more digging, they'll discover this book, these other books, read them, and probably be a little confused, if not fully radicalized.

So it seems sloppy at best.

There's an interesting history of what you could call hypermasculinity that the alpha male phenomenon fits into.

I talked with a former professor at Stony Brook named Michael Kimmel who's written books about masculinity.