TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. For about a decade now, we've been talking about toxic masculinity. The term gained steam alongside the cultural reckoning of #MeToo. 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." Bethea 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.
CHARLES BETHEA: Thanks, Tonya.
MOSLEY: OK, 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.
BETHEA: 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 X 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 alpha wisdom, so to speak. Trump had actually penned the forward, or was credited, at least, with penning the forward to this book, which injected the whole project, obviously, with a kind of rocket fuel and a rightward political trajectory. Yeah.
MOSLEY: What did he write in the forward?
BETHEA: I mean, it was a little bit redundant. But it was a lot of just sort of backslapping for Adams', you know, being an alpha male, holding up the values of what it means to be an alpha male, how alpha males were special and central to this country's history. And he, of course, Trump being Trump, he appreciated Adams' 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.
And 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.
MOSLEY: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WILL CAIN SHOW")
WILL CAIN: So just give me the morning for an alpha male.
NICK ADAMS: (Laughter) You got it.
CAIN: I wake up, I eat a steak, 12 eggs. I'd probably do some Wim Hof. Do I ice bath? What do I do...
ADAMS: I do
CAIN: ...To start the day tomorrow?
ADAMS: 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.
CAIN: (Laughter).
ADAMS: 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 - you're getting - and you got to do it in the birthday suit, Will. None of this shorts. Got to be birthday suit. Alphas go in the birthday suit. They plunge.
CAIN: OK.
ADAMS: Then you get out of the plunge.
CAIN: Going to be cold.
ADAMS: Yeah. Get a nice bathrobe on. Then that's when you start closing the seven-figure deals.
CAIN: (Laughter).
ADAMS: I'm just walking you through the Nick Adams day in the life, right?
CAIN: Right.
ADAMS: That's when you start closing those deals. Then you've got the sheilas ringing. That's when you're declining the calls because business comes first, Will.
MOSLEY: That was Nick Adams on "The Will Cain Show." And, Charles, you were talking about how you encounter him on X. And you're just seeing all of these kinds of videos and reading some of his ethos there, which kind of ties health and wellness to virality and success.
BETHEA: And I have to say, the whole thing that we just heard, it does really veer into parody at times. But it's just not perceived that way by the audience, or most of the audience, as far as I could gather from the comments. I also should say that I feel slightly uncomfortable hearing him talk about cold plunging in that way because I also like to cold plunge.
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
BETHEA: But anyway, that is how he speaks. And if it was ever parody or ever a 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 Theroux'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. These are - I wouldn't expect all of these to be household names, but young men especially are probably familiar with them.
MOSLEY: 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?
BETHEA: 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.
MOSLEY: I actually want to play a clip...
BETHEA: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BRENDAN KING: 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. Be the better man for your family.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MOSLEY: That was a clip from a promotional video for RISE, which was developed by Brendan King. He's a former Marine and mental health and substance abuse professional. And, Charles, the video looks like a boot camp, kind of. You actually got to visit it. What was it like?
BETHEA: 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 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 with these guys. I trailed this van where they had been - nine guys or 10 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. And according to King, it was supposed to put some distance between where they'd come from and where they were going.
MOSLEY: It also sounds...
BETHEA: And where...
MOSLEY: ...A lot like fraternity hazing.
BETHEA: 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, OK. 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, it was almost - 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.
MOSLEY: 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?
BETHEA: 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.
MOSLEY: Yes.
BETHEA: There were about 10 of them. They came from a variety of backgrounds. I expected them to be all white. There was a little diversity in the group. There were IT guys. There were sales guys. There were blue-collar workers. There was an unemployed man. He'd had to, I think, borrow or even get a gift of $3,000 from one of the other attendees to enable to afford to attend. So these were not guys who were all, you know, Silicon Valley types, by any means.
So this man I'll describe - James is this guy. He's in his 50s. He's unemployed. He's a Army veteran who's served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, if I recall correctly. He's on his second marriage. And he's incredibly lonely, so lonely that he - he told me this. He would go to Walmart late at night by himself, not to buy anything but just to feel proximity to other human beings, just to be close to people. And that was just incredibly sad, hard to hear, but a really effective, I think, encapsulation of this guy's mental state as he seeks out a program that's - he hopes is going to make him into a stronger, more fulfilled and capable man.
MOSLEY: My guest today is New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAN AUERBACH SONG, "HEARTBROKEN, IN DISREPAIR")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I am talking with New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea about his piece "The Camps That Promise To Turn You Or Your Son Into An Alpha Male." When we left off, we were discussing the Virginia men's camp RISE.
You heard a lot of men who essentially opened up about some of the realities of their lives, the things that they were holding. I mean, in a disparaging way, a lot of these guys might be thought of as incel or incel-adjacent. I mean - and that's short for involuntarily celibate. There's just kind of these men who may not feel like they have risen to what society says a real man should be.
BETHEA: I think that's right. Kind of maybe older versions of something incel-adjacent, but men who had just gotten to a point in their lives where they found all sorts of blocks in their relationships, in their professional life. They felt, you know, isolated, and they needed help getting out. But they're not - like many men, not inclined to go to therapy, didn't think that therapy was for them. And so they instead start typing into Google late at night, like James told me he did, you know, words like lonely and anxious and afraid. And maybe beta, even, the opposite of alpha. And so up turned all of these camps, and James ultimately decided to click on RISE.
So there he is. He's in the woods of Virginia. He takes off his blindfold with the rest of the guys, and they begin what King calls the beatdown phase. The beatdown begins about an hour into it. They're low crawling, which is, I guess, a Marine term for what it sounds like - on your elbows - crawling up a steep, gravel driveway. And it's very hot. It looks hard. I'm in pretty good shape. It looks like I would probably struggle with it, too.
And these guys are grumbling. They're pissed. And James starts to mouth off midway through. And so King stops the group and he begins to, I think, pretty methodically and with some skill, inquire - and he starts with James - into their issues. And so he says to James, this unemployed guy from Arizona, you know, like, why aren't you having sex with your wife? That's what - within 10, 15 seconds, he goes straight into it in front of the rest of the guys. He doesn't say why aren't you having sex. He uses a more crude word than that. But that's essentially what he starts to focus on.
And James starts to cry in front of all these men he's just met. And he's confessing that he has erectile dysfunction. And it's silent. And then a few of the other guys start to essentially say, oh, yeah, I've had some issues in the bedroom, too, or whatever. King softens his tone and says, you know, I used to as well. That was a problem I had in my 20s.
And James' problem's not solved by this, obviously. But he's shared it and others have seen him share his pain. They've acknowledged it. Some of them have confessed. And it was, frankly, a moving thing to witness. And so I was kind of open from that point on to this whole project being a little bit more complicated and maybe, maybe beneficial than I had suspected.
MOSLEY: There are other programs also for kids. And you feature one program called the Squire Program. And their website says that - and I'm quoting directly - "the opposition is on a mission to weaken masculine societies and turn them into soft, confused, feminized betas." What does this kind of offering look like for children?
BETHEA: Yeah, so this program, Squire, in what you just read and elsewhere, it takes a much more politicized stance. The founder, Bedros Keuilian, is this Armenian immigrant, now in his 50s, who's kind of - describes having lived the American dream. He'd grown up poor in a communist country. He'd had a father who was a physical disciplinarian but was very broke-minded, was how Bedros put it to me.
And Bedros had made millions of dollars through this Fit Body Boot Camp franchise, written a book called "Man Up." And he had all these followers on X and elsewhere, millions. And he's certainly no Andrew Tate. He's a warmer guy. He calls himself a papa bear. But he does traffic in some toxic stuff.
And so I show up early one morning, just north of LA in Chino Hills. And I see about a dozen fathers and sons inside Keuilian's gym, and they're kind of stretching. 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 going to 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.
MOSLEY: Bedros, the founder of Squire, he also has outlined the characteristics of a man using this book from 2012 called "The Way Of Men," which you later discovered that the author of that book is a far-right white supremacist who has argued that women shouldn't have the right to vote.
BETHEA: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so...
MOSLEY: Did Bedros know that?
BETHEA: 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've, could've 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, you know, anything about, you know, 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.
MOSLEY: My guest today is New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "SMASH")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and today, I'm talking with New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea about his piece "The Camps That Promise To Turn You - Or Your Son - Into An Alpha Male." Bethea covers the American South for The New Yorker. Previously, he was an editor at Outside and a writer-at-large for Atlanta. His work has also appeared in Grantland, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Rolling Stone and WIRED. He lives in Atlanta.
I notice it, as a mom of a 13-year-old boy, that there's a lot of emphasis in the culture right now around being fit, being strong, appearance and the appearance of strength and leadership in the ways that you're talking about - in the physicality, just, like, doing hard stuff.
I think I'm really curious to know, though, especially what you found in your reporting. Where does the origin of this come from? Because from my view, this has always been the case for what is considered an ideal male, what is the height of masculinity. Where did that message ultimately get lost along the way? And then where did it pick up steam again, where someone of your generation would be finding this as an epiphany versus something that's already embedded into what you understand about yourself as a man?
BETHEA: There's an interesting history of what you could call hypermasculinity that the alpha male phenomenon fits into. And I talked with a former professor at Stony Brook named Michael Kimmel, who's written books about masculinity, who helped walk me through this. But there's this recurring history of hypermasculinity, and it's always a predictable response to the perceived threats of feminization, which kind of ebb and flow on their own.
So for example, in the late 19th and early 20th century, as women begin to enter the workforce in greater numbers, men are told to take what's called the West Cure. Basically, it's a prescription to the cowboy lifestyle. So Teddy Roosevelt - a young Teddy Roosevelt - goes ranching and hunting in the Dakotas to, quote-unquote, "cure" his anxiety and exhaustion after the death of his wife and mother. He goes on, famously, of course, to be president, but also to found the Boone and Crockett Club to advocate playing rough-and-tumble sports.
After this, you get the Boy Scouts, you get the 4-H club, you get the Knights of Pythias and the Oddfellows - all these fraternities that were really popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, which was actually known, I learned, as the golden age of fraternalism. But the pendulum swings back the other way. So after the Great Depression, a few world wars, American society takes to nurturing men again because they've been damaged by war, and society is more encouraging of this kind of sedate, suburban, backyard cookout lifestyle.
Then you get - a few decades later, you get gay liberation, feminism, more workplace equality. The pendulum swings back. And so you get the publishing of a book in 1990 called "Iron John" by this writer-poet Robert Bly, who's advocating a return to a deep masculinity through wilderness retreats - stuff that actually kind of resembles some of what RISE and other programs are doing. And Bly, he idealizes what he calls the mythopoetic man, and this gives way a few years later to alpha male, which I think is a slightly simpler set of words than mythopoetic man (laughter), but alpha male...
MOSLEY: And that term - yeah, that term was - comes from this primatologist who was studying chimpanzees. But how was his research kind of distorted? He argued that it was distorted before his death.
BETHEA: Yeah. So this guy - Frans de Waal was his name - in the late '70s, early '80s he's this Dutch primatologist who is studying male chimps in a zoo in the Netherlands, and he needs a word or a term to describe the male chimps that he sees who are not necessarily the largest, but they're especially good at keeping the peace, at consoling other chimps in need. And he settles on the term alpha male, and that's the term he uses in this book he publishes in 1982 called "Chimpanzee Politics."
Newt Gingrich, as the story goes - according to de Waal, this seems to be the sequence of events. Newt Gingrich, then a Republican congressman in Georgia, gets his hands on the book, seems to like it, passes it around to freshman congressman in the early '90s. They don't appear to read it very carefully, and alpha male soon comes to mean something much more reductive - this thing we've been talking about in these camps that I went to - as meaning, essentially, like, the best at bullying. A kind of physically dominant male who really distrusts and dismisses deep human connection, consolation, vulnerability - anything that can be perceived as weak.
MOSLEY: Newt Gingrich is passing this out as kind of a playbook for coalition building, and then this alpha male description kind of takes a life of its own online. There's this guy, Aaron Marino, who built one of the earliest and most popular alpha male YouTube channels. I'm bringing him up because what you write about him is really fascinating. What happened to him, and what does his story really tell us about what this market actually rewards?
BETHEA: Yeah. So Marino is this guy who, around 2008, he's - I think he's unemployed. He's at a low point in his life. He's in his 30s, I think. And his wife gives him a camcorder, and he decides to use it to give to other guys, or try to give to other guys, what he didn't get as a young man, which was kind of fatherly guidance, really, just guidance from a mentor, a male mentor, in his life. So he starts filming videos and putting them on YouTube. This is the early-ish days of YouTube. And he gets really, really popular.
And his videos, I'd say, I mean, as compared to what we now have with the Andrew Tates, they're almost sweet in their (laughter) simplicity. He's talking about, you know, in a more appropriate way, how do you improve your sex life? How do you do - you know, shaving tips, dressing tips. Just how do you optimize yourself as a man? And he describes alpha male for him, I think, pretty generously as just sort of the optimal version of yourself.
But, you know, years pass. He has millions of followers. The pandemic comes around, and they start to retreat. They start to unfollow. And they start to be attracted by the Andrew Tates, the Wes Watsons, the Andy Elliotts - I'm just naming not because all of them are super well-known but because these are the sorts of names that folks who go online looking for alpha males now will find.
MOSLEY: And these guys, describe how they are and how they differ - how extreme, perhaps, their views are.
BETHEA: Yeah. I mean, a disconcerting number of them have spent time in prison. Wes Watson, for example, is a guy who - he goes to prison for a number of years prior to becoming an alpha male influencer for battery, for assault. He gets out. He's currently dealing, I think, with yet another charge related to a beating that he administered to a guy at a gym.
But Watson - he's very, very muscular, tattoos all over his body. He has attractive women in his videos. I don't know what his relationship to them are. He did not respond to a request for comment. But he's - he drives Bugattis, or he has Bugattis, I should say, in his videos. And these are the - these are all supposed to kind of be the symbols of alphaness (ph) attained. And he offers his followers - his virtual followers, 'cause he doesn't have a real, live camp like Brendan King and Bedros Keuilian - he offers them a mindset. The unbreakable mindset, he calls it. And so, you know, you have guys that - they put out these two- or three-minute YouTube videos. They show their bling. And they tell young men, like, you know, just, like, stop being soft AF, right? Like, get out and try to do hard stuff. And that's kind of the extent of their teachings. It's pretty thin. It's just sort of a demand that they man up.
MOSLEY: Yeah. As those types of influencers become more popular, then influencers like Aaron Marino become less popular. But...
BETHEA: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Charles, there's kind of, like, this - if I'm reading your piece right, a profound gap between men who are at the highest power and highest level of their power, either through success or money or politics, performing this physical dominance. And then there are the men you met in these camps who are feeling worthless and invisible, and they are being very vulnerable in saying that they feel lost. And both groups are kind of operating under this same alpha ideology. And I wondered from you - what does that do to the men at the bottom of this movement, the ones genuinely searching..
BETHEA: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...For something real?
BETHEA: Yeah. And let's quickly, if it's OK, remind ourselves - these guys at the bottom, as Richard Reeves and other scholars have made clear - they're making less money as a percentage of overall family income than men were four decades ago. They're not as likely to go to college. They're five times likelier than they were in the '90s to not have any close friends. They're not likely to receive mental health treatment. They're very likely to die by suicide. These are the guys who are coming across these videos, guys like Watson and Tate. And I think they see them as kind of avatars, the same way that disillusioned, let's say, rural white voters in the middle of the country in red states see Trump as a kind of an avatar. It's like, we don't expect much out of life, but it's kind of nice to have this sort of heroic version of us out there, sort of, like, yelling at the things that we don't like. That's one way, I think, to see the possible service that these influencers are offering these men, but it falls so far short of anything like the sort of therapy-adjacent approach that I saw at RISE.
MOSLEY: My guest today is New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICE T SONG, "O.G. ORIGINAL GANGSTER")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I am talking with New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea about his piece "The Camps That Promise To Turn You Or Your Son Into An Alpha Male."
There's this tension that I just keep coming back to because it's obvious from your reporting - and really, the decade or so that we've been talking about toxic masculinity and kind of this rise of the manosphere - there's real suffering. It's a legitimate crisis out there. Men are falling behind in real and measurable ways - as you mentioned, in wages and education and friendship and mental health overall. And there don't seem to be systems in place, communal systems like women have, where they can express themselves. There's still somewhat of a stigma on therapy, which doesn't seem like that is what is being pushed in these spaces. And yet this response that's gaining the most cultural traction isn't any of these things. It's these boot camps and influencers telling men what they need to be more dominant. What has been your ultimate takeaway? And I wonder if you have changed at all, now going through this reporting yourself and seeing all of this firsthand.
BETHEA: Yeah. So I was - my mind was swimming, to be honest, when I came home from RISE after those three days of camping out with these guys and trying to sort out, like, what was silly, what was potentially smart, what was surprising, what was predictable. And I had the good fortune of sitting down - actually, in the hours immediately after leaving, I went back to Charlottesville, and I sat down with a newish friend who teaches college-level anthropology. And he mentioned to me an essay by a French anthropologist who's apparently quite famous, but I confess I did not know, Claude Levi-Strauss.
And this essay was written in the middle of the 20th century, called "The Effectiveness Of Symbols." It's a very difficult essay, far beyond my own area of expertise. But the very basic point, as it pertains to therapeutically adjacent men's development programs - I - is how I would describe them, like RISE - is that most people need a familiar language to work through their own problems on their own terms. So in the case of King's men, the mud and the bro talk kind of ease them into the much harder work of engaging with the difficult feelings that we all as humans have and experience. SI thought that was really - a really nice way to conceptualize what was happening, and it wasn't something that Brendan King or any of these guys had told me. It was this - it was fortunate - it was the good fortune of talking with an anthropologist who was like, oh, yeah. Those are symbols at work here. These guys are working with symbols. And...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
BETHEA: That's how - that's why this works and why this, in the right hands, can be a useful approach to doing something like therapy. The other thing that I personally came away from this, again, RISE experience, which I found to be the more effective of the two that I watched, was the words brother and brotherhood get thrown around a lot. I mean, these guys that I was talking to prior to visiting camps were constantly referring to me as brother. And I'm rolling my eyes, like, come on, like, we're not brothers here. We're not bros, even. Like, we don't know each other. It feels disingenuous. It's false. And after those three days at RISE, I saw the guys calling each other sometimes brother, and I heard King calling them brother.
And I started to, like, think about brotherhood as something that, while it can be cliched in - when it's used the wrong way or disingenuously or too much, there is something really important. And of course, this also applies to women and sisterhood, but in the case of men, brotherhood is really important - just to sit with other men. As we become adults and we become separate from each other and we have busier lives, it's harder to sit down and just listen to the problems that we're all going through, big or small. So I left that being like, you know what? I should probably work on my own - and I rolled my own eyes as I said it - but, like, I should work on my own brotherhood a little bit.
MOSLEY: I want to play a clip that I think captures something about how this performance of masculinity has moved from the internet to the highest levels of American power. In this clip, we will hear Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doing a workout challenge. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Three.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Three.
ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: Hi. I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your HHS Secretary. I'm here with Secretary Hegseth from the Department of Defense. And we had our big Pete and Bobby challenge today - 50 pullups, a hundred pushups. You try to get under five minutes. How'd you do?
PETE HEGSETH: We got close.
KENNEDY: We got close.
HEGSETH: I was about 5:25. You were right behind me.
KENNEDY: We had a couple of Marines here.
HEGSETH: One beat three minutes. A couple beat four minutes. Pretty impressive.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KENNEDY: It was President Trump who inspired us to do this. This is the beginning of our tour challenging Americans to get back in shape, eat better. But also, you need to get out and exercise.
MOSLEY: That was Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doing an exercise challenge. And on the face of it, Charles, I mean, it sounds positive. They're preaching good health and working out and, yeah, all of that kind of stuff. But you kind of describe Trump's cabinet as kind of displaying its alphaness in a very specific way. Can you say more about that?
BETHEA: Yeah. So Trump loves to - it's just - it's so - it's become increasingly clear, even in just recent weeks, how he loves to surround himself with people in his cabinet - and beyond, I suppose - who are these kind of avatars of alpha males. And interestingly, they don't have to be men, even. You've got Tulsi Gabbard, and you have Linda McMahon, who, in their own ways, have kind of signed on to this idea that, like, manly men and manly, male challenges are, like - are things that we should be doing with our lives. Tulsi Gabbard is interested in Green Beret tactical challenges, I learned.
But yeah, you have Hegseth's quasi pullups. You have Kennedy doing his blue-jean, shirtless bench pressing. All of this is just creating this, to many of us, I think, probably funny, but for others, like, this idea of what we should be aspiring to as - specifically as men. Like, these are successful people. These are the leaders of our country. They are avatars of alpha maleness. And they don't even have to say it, right? Like, you get what they're representing just by looking at them and watching, you know, Kash Patel put his agents through UFC training, as he did very recently. It's, like, the stuff is just - it's really on the nose. And it's everywhere, increasingly, in this political administration, unlike any that I think we've seen before it.
MOSLEY: Charles Bethea, thank you so much for your reporting.
BETHEA: Thank you.
MOSLEY: New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea.
Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new novel by Tana French, "The Keeper." This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF TERRY SLINGBAUM'S "WATER GAMES - RAVEL RE-IMAGINED") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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