Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. For about a decade now, we've been talking about toxic masculinity. The term gained steam alongside the cultural reckoning of Me Too. And now it has collided with a new and louder movement, an aspiration to be an alpha male. We see it everywhere.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has reinvented himself as a cage fighter and declared that corporate America doesn't have enough masculine energy. President Trump's inner circle includes men celebrated for their warrior tattoos, their MMA records, and their bench press videos.
And influencers with millions of followers are telling men and boys that the problem with society isn't how they treat others, it's that they've been made to feel ashamed of who they are. My guest today, New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea, embedded in the new phenomenon of camps and retreats where men go to reclaim their masculinity.
He's written a new piece called The Camps That Promise to Turn You or Your Son into an Alpha Male. But they found that across the country, men are paying big money to crawl through mud, carry logs, and sit in ice baths. Some programs promise to forge modern-day warriors with special ops training and rites of passage for teenage boys.
But what Bethea found inside these camps is more complicated than the culture war framing suggests. Underneath the warrior posturing, he writes, is genuine pain, men who are lonely, lost, and desperate. Charles Bethea, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thanks, Tanya.
Okay, so before we get into what you found, I actually want to know first how you even found out about these camps in the first place.
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.
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Chapter 2: What is the rise of the alpha male phenomenon?
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.
What did he write in the foreword?
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.
I want to play a clip that I think actually captures Nick's belief systems and his ethos. In this clip, he is on the Will Cain show talking about the alpha male. Let's listen.
So just give me the morning for an alpha male. I wake up, I eat a steak, 12 eggs. I'd probably do some Wim Hof. Do I ice bath? What do I do to start the day tomorrow?
So you want to eat as much steak and as many eggs as possible. I like to begin the day with a 72-ounce tomahawk. Medium rare is best. Maybe a bit bloodier if I'm up to it. Then definitely you are plunging without a shadow of a doubt. You're just getting – and you've got to do it in the birthday suit, Will. None of this short stuff. You've got to be birthday suit. Alphas go in the birthday suit.
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Chapter 3: What experiences did Charles Bethea have at the masculinity camps?
Yeah. Anyway, that is how he speaks. And if it was ever parody or ever put on, that's been forgotten and it's fully embraced and he's just run with the bit. And lots of people have taken it and run with him. And we know from Louis Thoreau's recent Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, there are lots of voices adjacent to Nick Adams on the internet. You know, the Andrew Tates, the Justin.
And I don't want to conflate all these people. They're different. Some of them are more toxic and troubling than others. The Andrew Tates, the Justin Wallers, the Myron Gaineses, Braden Peters. I wouldn't expect all of these to be household names, but young men especially are probably familiar with them.
What's so interesting is once you started going down the rabbit hole on X and other social media platforms, you started to get fed these ads. A lot of places turned you down, though, when you said you wanted to visit because they're suspicious of you. But you did get a response from Rise in Virginia and also... the Squire program in Chino Hills, California, which targets teenage boys.
But first, let's talk about RISE, which stands for...
Yeah, RISE stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution. And not to be confused with a separate man camp called Rise Up Kings, which is much more Christianity coded or biblically coded. And I should say, you know, even it's not just the names that sound similar with some of these programs that often have the word warrior in them.
But in fact, a lot of the people who've worked at these camps have gone from one to another. And there's a lot of cross-pollination there.
I actually want to play a clip from one of their promotional videos from a few years ago. And the men that you're about to hear from, I want to set the scene for folks, they're blindfolded. They're riding in a van through central Virginia. And the founder of Rise, Brendan King, he's narrating. Let's listen.
When a man reaches the end of himself... There's no other direction. There's no other path. There's no other way around. He has to rise.
This path will not be easy. This path is not for many men. This is a path you choose. To rise.
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Chapter 4: How do these camps address men's loneliness and connection?
What was it like?
Yeah, so Rise was both predictable to me in some ways and surprising, quite surprising in others. On the predictable side was a lot of its marketing, which of course I first encountered before the visit. The website had a picture of a man's mud-flecked face alongside the all-caps wording, BUILD COURAGE, EARN CERTAINTY, BECOME ELITE.
The image, the font, the whole presentation suggested to me something very boot campy. And when I learned that Brendan King was a former Marine, that made some sense. I began talking before visiting to some former participants, and they were kind of cagey. They didn't want to tell me too much about this thing. three-day quote-unquote live event that was the culmination of the experience.
Prior to the live event, the guys texted with each other and with Brendan King, and he would give them prompts. He would ask them, you know, to talk about ways that they'd failed in their life and stuff and to try to kind of open them up to some of the core issues that he would then deal with in a more dramatic way in the woods of central Virginia. And that's where I went.
Chapter 5: What motivations drive men to attend these masculinity retreats?
with these guys. I trailed this van where they'd been, nine guys or ten guys had been tossed into it wearing blindfolds. The stereo in the van was turned up loudly and it was this mishmash of like Jordan Peterson lectures and Marine Corps drills and loud sounds and it was all very disorienting. According to King, it was supposed to
put some distance between where they'd come from and where they were going.
It also sounds a lot like fraternity hazing.
Yeah, and so I found myself wanting to kind of put it, this program in particular, the first one I visited, rise into a box immediately. I was like, okay, so this is a military boot camp. Or no, this is fraternity hazing. And at every turn, Brendan King would, I think kind of cleverly to give him some credit, make it more complicated than that.
But at the beginning, I was almost rolling my eyes watching these guys get tossed into a van like a scene from old school. You know, but Brendan King, I already knew enough about him in our previous phone calls prior to my visit. He uses phrases like holding space, which is a much more, you know, modern therapeutic kind of term than you'd expect to come out of a former Marine's mouth.
So I was ready for him to complicate things a bit.
He himself is such an interesting person. He has been very open about his own troubles. He attempted suicide as a teenager. He has talked about his first marriage being ruined by actually chasing this alpha male ideal. And so now he's charging men upwards of $3,000 for this camp experience. How does he describe what he's offering?
Yeah, so here again, kind of the headline for what he's offering sounds a lot like what some of these more, I would argue, toxic programs are offering, which is they describe it as the opportunity for men to un-F their lives. And so what does that mean? I mean, that means... different things depending on who's running the program. But for King, it means the men show up.
And let me describe the men, if I can, these guys.
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Chapter 6: What is the structure and experience of the RISE program?
Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new novel by Tana French, The Keeper. This is Fresh Air. Crime writer Tana French is known for her Dublin Murder Squad mystery series, which included a nearly 500-page standalone novel in 2020 called The Searcher. It's about a retired Chicago police detective who moves to Ireland.
Now, French has published the last book and a three-part series about the sinister underside of rural Irish life. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says that The Keeper concludes the series in a grand, melancholy style.
The Keeper is the closer to Tana French's magnificent series of crime novels set in the west of Ireland and featuring retired Chicago police detective Cal Hooper. I don't ordinarily review novels that conclude a series because the power of a finale derives from all that's come before.
But if you're game to read the first two Cal Hooper books, or if you're already a fan, know that The Keeper solidifies this series' status as a contemporary classic. By now, after reckoning with local gangs, drug dealers, and con artists, Cal has lost much of his innocence about the quaint village of Ardna Kelty, his adoptive home.
He knows that evil can fester under shamrocks as abundantly as it does on city streets. In this finale, however, it's not so much the victims of crime who need Cal's protection, but the land itself. Ardna Kelty's pristine beauty is under threat from the machinations of a developer with political connections.
French, who's already proven herself to be an exquisite nature writer, on par with the likes of Norman Maclean and Annie Dillard, has the chops to render Cal's final rescue mission an epic environmental one. The Keeper opens at the local town shop, where we're told Cal would expect to get wind of trouble, from pregnancy to potato blight.
As he's buying eggs and chatting with Noreen the proprietor, in comes Tommy Moynihan, striding into the shop like he's walking into a merger meeting. Here's more of that introduction to this Hale fellow well-met. Tommy is some kind of big shot in the meat processing plant over towards Kilhone.
He's got a farmer's solid bulk, a politician's frozen silver hair, a C-list cattle baron's ranch house, a Range Rover the size of a buffalo, and an annual family holiday to Mexico. Cal dislikes Tommy. Tommy's son, a smarmy Nepo baby named Eugene, is about to propose to a sweet local girl named Rachel when she goes missing and is later found dead in the river.
The guards, the Irish police, are called in, but the town conducts its own parallel investigation via rumor into whether Rachel's death is an accident, suicide, or murder. Meanwhile, Cal learns that large parcels of farmland around Ardna Kelty are being bought up. Housing estates, factories, data centers, who knows what's in store?
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