From the fantasy-infused white nationalism of body-building Swede "The Golden One" to the racially diverse misogyny and antisemitism of the Fresh & Fit podcast, we explore the shifting relationship of the manosphere to neo-fascism. Our guest is Eamon Whalen, reporter for Mother Jones.
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Eamon Whalen: https://twitter.com/EamonWhalen
Eamon Whalen’s Manosphere article: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/06/after-metoo-andrew-tate-jordan-peterson-influencers-men-fight-back/
Cover art by Jess Johnson (http://instagram.com/flesh_dozer)
Theme & music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com). Editing by Corey Clotz.
Man, the breadwinner, playboy, carnivore, retainer of semen, and lifter of weights.
He is wild, hairy, dominant, breathing into his balls and bonding with his bros.
And more than anything, he charges you monthly for his content.
Welcome to Man Clan.
We are your alpha hosts and paragons of masculinity.
Annie Kelly and Julian Field.
And this week's Sigma guest is reporter for Mother Jones, Eamon Whalen.
Welcome, Eamon.
How have you been keeping your T levels high and your masculinity primed?
Well, you know, I just got my deadlifts in yesterday.
So, you know, I'm on, I'm on, I'm on rest day.
Yeah, leg day was yesterday.
So recharging.
Welcome to another episode of Man Clan Treasured Listener.
Once again, we apologise for the hiatus between episodes.
Julian and I are finding that the deeper we delve into these ancient and primal masculine rites and ceremonies, the more of our sanity we seem to be losing.
We are beginning to lose time.
Just this morning, after engaging in our usual testosterone-boosting dawn rituals, we suddenly awoke in the middle of the night, in woodlands we had never visited before, covered in blood and animal skins.
What's more, in some kind of hyper-masculine fugue state, we seem to have scrawled in the earth an invocation dedicated to Nergal, the ancient Mesopotamian god of war.
We understand all of this to indicate that we are on the right track, and we consider our puny minds a worthy sacrifice in order to make ourselves and you, our listeners, stronger and more manly men.
Real men ask for help.
Real men go to rehab and come back sober!
That's right.
The subject of today's masculinity lesson will be about neo-fascist figures in the manosphere.
The relationship between anti-feminists and white supremacists online is a complicated one.
Having watched these two spaces for over 10 years now, it's tough to argue that there isn't a significant overlap.
But it would be a mistake to totally collapse their differences and view anti-feminism and white nationalism as one and the same.
There are, after all, female white supremacists and anti-feminists of colour who tend to complicate the cosiness between the two.
It seems to me that the relationship between these two spheres is undergoing a process of change right now, and so I think it's worth looking back on the history between the two to see if it can't help us predict where they go next.
As you'll probably have heard me mention several hundred times by now, I did my PhD about this exact topic.
The Manosphere and its relationship to what was then called the alt-right.
Uh, nerdgal, more like nerdgal!
What the hell, man?
My thesis specifically focused on what happened in this space during the period from 2012 to 2016.
This was a pretty significant period of evolution for the Manosphere, and when I began to notice a general shift from a focus on gender issues towards what I saw as a more confident, coherent, far-right politics in several of the sites that I studied.
It's important to say, I think, that not everyone in the Manosphere signed up for this.
I saw certain figures taking a stand against it, but they tended to be outliers and they very often diminished in influence and viewership as a result.
All the energy and the interest at the time was in this international anti-progressive coalition, in a race to be as red-pilled as possible on every single topic going.
Feminism, race, sexuality, immigration.
Why did this happen?
I'm currently in the process of reassessing my original calculations, but I tend to think there's three big reasons.
The first reason is that this was just an energetic period for the international far-right generally, as well as the revival of militant right-wing extremist groups and acts of political violence described as a fifth global wave of terror by the political scientist Vincent Alger Several far-right political parties across the world saw a swell in their support.
Most famously, and perhaps most saliently for the broadly North American manosphere, the Trump presidential campaign used both anti-feminist and nationalist rhetoric, which Mark Potok, a fellow for the Southern Poverty Law Center, described as having electrified the radical right.
The second reason was that 2012-2016 was an important time in terms of the social technology of the internet.
Although social media platforms had arrived earlier, there wasn't an immediate mass migration towards them so much as a gradual shift, which I think was boosted by the slow societal diffusion of technology-like smartphones.
In the period that I looked at, lots of online networks were making the shift from blogs, websites and forums to social media platforms, and the Manosphere was no exception.
What nearly always came with that was a broadening of the network, as various segments that had previously been separate, even if there was a lot of user overlap, began to encounter each other regularly for the first time.
This fits in with my third and final reason, which is that anti-progressivism is often, ironically enough, an intersectional framework.
If you've got a grudge against feminists, it's more likely that you'll have a grudge against anti-racist or LGBT activists too, and the longer you stay involved in online spaces devoted to that grudge, the truer that is.
We tend to mirror the people we see as our political opponents, who in the Manosphere's case were typically adopting a broad coalition stance against oppression and bigotry in all its forms.
But I think another reason is that lots of arguments in favour of an existing social hierarchy tend to be pretty similar.
So if you find yourself accepting it in one instance, you're already primed to accept it in another.
And of course, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that many white supremacists and neo-Nazis very much viewed the trend for popular anti-feminism, exemplified in things like Gamergate, as an opportunity to recruit.
But whatever reason you prefer, it's undeniable that much of the Manosphere took a far rightward direction in the period that I studied it.
You don't have to take my word for it, this was something that lots of the Manosphere themselves were commenting on.
As one commenter on a Return of Kings blog once put it, in a way that I found mournfully poetic.
The red pill used to just be about figuring out how to get a woman to swallow your cum.
Dot dot dot.
Somehow it's become about saving ourselves from NWA rule and civil war.
Oh my god.
Wow.
So true.
It just used to be about the simple trick of figuring out how to get them to swallow your cum.
Wow.
I mean, I've never heard... Yeah, that probably should have just been the tagline for my PhD thesis, to be honest.
It sums it entirely up.
Well, you know, male professors, they do have a reputation.
I just love the two just somehow.
Like, he's just like, very kind of like victim to just like, I don't know how this happened, but I'm ready for war.
Like, that's true.
Yeah, I used to be Tom Cruise from Magnolia and now I'm freaking Rambo.
But some of the more reflective figureheads of the far right, at least, seemed to be a little bit concerned about how the influence of the manosphere was shaping their identitarian movement.
In particular, I remember seeing some white nationalists wondering if it was necessarily a good thing that their primary recruitment tactic seemed to be through stoking male resentment about sex and dating.
After all, if your primary complaint about the world is that there's not enough white babies being born, it's probably not the wisest move to spend all your time talking to your audience of mostly white men about how terrible and degenerate white women are.
Yeah, there was so much cum swallowing because you were so successful at your cool pick-up tactics that now we don't have enough white babies.
Are you happy?
Yeah, that's true.
They got into this to get tics and they just kind of end up just being like, I hate tics.
I don't want anything to do with them.
This is something that other academics have observed too.
Gillian Sunderland, a sociologist at the University of Toronto writing in Men and Masculinity's journal, noted that this conflict had even reached Stormfront, perhaps the most notorious white supremacist site on the internet.
I conducted a qualitative analysis of Stormfront.org, a leading white nationalist forum.
Through my research, I uncovered two distinct gender strategies vying for site dominance.
Forum users adopting a protective, patriarchal strategy enact what I term Aryan masculinity, formed in opposition to racialized men.
Conversely, users who view women as their main enemy and consider themselves simultaneously dominant and victimized perform what I call alt-misogyny masculinity.
The conflict between these two racist masculine strategies centers on the focal "other,"
against which movement identity is constructed—people of color or women.
These findings reveal not only diversity in extreme right masculinity, but significant
conflict between gender strategies.
Have you all heard of Jack Donovan?
Yeah.
He has the concept, the alt-misogynist masculinity reminds me of him.
He has the concept of androphilia, which is that men can have sex with men and retain their manhood.
Homosexuality is about championing a masculine ideal and that the modern expression of homosexuality is part of the same degeneracy, but there is a sort of male supremacist homosexuality he calls androphilia.
Yeah, yeah.
I'd totally forgotten about Jack Donovan.
He's like the kind of old school man-o-sphere, I think.
But yeah, I think you're right.
Like, definitely like has a real influence, I think, on the kind of homoerotic sort of like, I don't know, frisson of like, I don't know, things like Bronze Age pervert and things like that.
Exactly.
He's into the wolves of Vinland, or he was for a bit.
Yeah, I mean, this was already kind of a movement in fascist Germany, you know, just the adulation of the male body and the belief that, you know, women, sometimes we don't need them at all.
He actually, Jack Donovan actually spoke at a far right, a conference in Germany for like a far right think tank.
And it was, uh, his speech was called violence is golden.
Oh, wow.
No way.
Yeah.
I hadn't really realized that he would sort of like integrated himself into the kind of like international far right like that.
That's really interesting.
I have to look him up.
One of the first figures on the alt-right that I saw both responding to this conflict and taking a position within it was Marcus Follen.
Follen is a Swedish white nationalist YouTuber who goes by the moniker The Golden One.
The Golden One is a deliberately cartoonish character even by the standards of the Manosphere.
Here's a picture of him so you can see what I mean.
I don't know, Julian, you want to describe what you're looking at?
Um, yeah, we've got a kind of a loincloth Tarzan bottom.
He is wearing a helmet.
I believe it's a kind of Praetorian Roman helmet, if I'm not wrong.
And he is kind of, you know, baby oiled up.
In one of them, he even has like a weird axe of some sort.
And he's doing poses that, um, yeah, I think, you know, with his blonde hair and his perfectly sculpted muscles, recreating statues of yore.
Yeah, there's there's certainly a homoerotic aspect here.
As Iko Mali, writing for the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right, described The Golden One,
"Like all influencers, The Golden One has crafted his own brand. He has created a very specific
public persona, a sort of modern-day pastiche of a Nordic Viking/bodybuilder, which he uses for
metapolitical and economic goals. He combines fitness, nutrition, and training videos with
content dedicated to politics, far-right books, and activists. He gets paid to give lectures,
uses Patreon to get monthly funding."
At the moment he has over 750 patrons who donate each month.
Follin also has his own clothing line, Leggio Gloria, which he wears in his YouTube videos.
He even has his own nutrition line.
The Golden One's success is not only metapolitical, it is also a small business venture.
Sounds familiar?
Yeah.
Like so many of the people we discuss here, Fallon began his online career as a bodybuilding and fitness YouTube channel back in 2013, but quickly began to expand out to his clear passion for fantasy books and video games, and with them, politics.
For Follin, his passion for the fantasy genre and his commitment to white nationalist politics are one and the same.
It's clear that he gets much of his understanding of historic Europe from fantasy, and it's not uncommon to hear him justifying a particular argument with reference to the worlds of Tolkien or Skyrim.
Here, not for the first or last time, he talks about what masculinity means to him through Lord of the Rings characters.
Greetings my esteemed Laddingtons!
I'm checking in from paradise aka Sweden in July.
I'm checking in with a clarification regarding the terms alpha and beta.
Now regarding the term alpha, I have never once referred to myself as an alpha.
I have however referred to others as alpha and I have used the term to As a compliment, basically, I've said this is an Alpha character and I've basically meant cool or manly or whatever.
So I've said that many of the characters in the Fellowship of the Ring, they are Alpha.
So I've said Sam is an Alpha, Aragorn is an Alpha, Legolas is an Alpha, but...
Technically speaking, the alpha in the fellowship is of course Gandalf and the other High Thumos men.
They are submitting to his superior knowledge and he takes on the role of being a leader.
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