Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The History of American Masculinity Grifters

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Robert and Miles talk about the mid-century crisis in American masculinity and then catch up to the modern era, and Gamergate.   https://www.sandboxx.us/news/alpha-male-boot-camps-are-a-joke/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-are-man-warrior-camps/ https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/fashion/01Fitness.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0 https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2024/01/22/modern-day-knight-project-videos-men-man-camps/72290454007/ https://nypost.com/2018/11/15/masculinity-guru-wants-guys-to-stop-being-so-nice-to-women/ https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/1/23/14238530/self-help-advice-bogus https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/09/manosphere-poisoning-conservatism https://www.motherjones.com/politics 2023/08/boy-problems-andrew-tate-masculinity-crisis-manosphere/ https://medium.com/sexstories/the-right-faces-its-cuckholding-sex-fantasies-1351ed88a8ae https://classic.esquire.com/article/1958/11/1/the-crisis-of-american-masculinity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGy1SaXKxqA https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0276146719897107 https://www.tesble.com/10.1177/0276146719897107 https://www.mybootcampchallenge.com/ https://classic.esquire.com/article/1958/11/1/the-crisis-of-american-masculinity https://www.tesble.com/10.1177/0276146719897107 https://www.themdkproject.com/flip-the-switch https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/fac_other_pubs/118/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/new-chat-logs-show-how-4chan-users-pushed-gamergate-into-the-national-spotlight/ https://www.wired.com/story/gamergates-aggrieved-men-still-haunt-the-internet/ https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-did-you-know/moral-and-medical-panic-over-bicycles https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cosmetic-leg-lengthening-surgeries-luring-patients-courting-controversy/story?id=106826824   https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/why-us-men-voluntarily-undergo-limb-lengthening-procedure/LNLGCLEFKY27BA2NTYGNIO5OKA/?ref=readmoreSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Call zone media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm doing my Halloween voice because this will probably come out pretty close to Halloween. Miles, have you ever poisoned candy? Have I ever poisoned candy? Yeah, anyone's candy. Have you ever poisoned a child's candy, Miles?

No, I used to poison mine to get out of school though. Well, we'll leave that a maybe. Miles, are you ready to get back into part two here, Miles Gray,, I used to poison mine to get out of school though. Well, we'll leave that a maybe. Miles, are you ready to get back into part two here, Miles Gray, host of The Daily Site, guys? I'm so ready. I'm so ready. Excellent, excellent. Because like I said,

I feel like mans are gonna turn it around. Yes, some men are gonna fluence themselves into a healthier place. I feel like it's gonna happen. I hated that. We've got, look, we've got manfluenza over here. You know what I mean? Oh, I hated that. We've got, look, we've got manfluenza over here. Yeah, oh, I hated that also. Oh, manfluenza.

Manfluenza. Manfluenza. Concerned about men, including both of you. Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.

In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Julian Edelman.

I'm Rob Gronkowski. And we are super excited to tell you about our new show, Dudes on Dudes. We're spilling all the behind-the-scenes stories, crazy details, and honestly, just having a blast talking football. Every week we're discussing our favorite players of all times from legends to our buddies to current stars. We're finally answering the age-old question, what kind of dudes are these dudes? We're gonna find out, Jules! New episodes drop every Thursday during the NFL season.

Listen to Dudes on Dudes on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stick to sports, shut up and dribble. Despite what some people believe, to Jamal Hill. I'll be discussing political, social and economic issues through the lens of sports with some of the biggest names and smartest people. So here's the assignment. Listen to Spolitics on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. Let's get Spolitical.

It's been 30 years since the horror began. 9-1-1 what's your emergency? He said he was going to kill me. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you. Listen to the Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So I'm gonna start this episode by returning to the distant past and the next era of masculinity gurus to come around after the stock market collapsed. One of the first guys through that particular door was a man that you probably heard his name, Charles Atlas, who in 1930 started running a series of ads and popular mechanics bragging, let me prove in seven days

that I can make you a new man. Now, Atlas was obviously not the first guy to promise insecure men that he could make them huge and that in doing so, he would solve every problem in their lives. But he was probably the most muscular of the first generation of these guys. As the Depression faded and the war years came, Atlas was also the first to realize

that magazines meant for mature adults, like Popular Mechanics, weren't the best place to target insecure young men. To do that, you had to reach them in comic books. Charles placed ads in every comic under the sun. Because this was a hungrier era in general, he didn't tend to focus on like trying to get men, you know, to lose weight or whatever. That really wasn't a thing, right? Trying to convince them that like they're fat

and out of shape. That wouldn't really work in this era because everyone's starving. So instead he mocked them for being too skinny. This tactic culminated in his famous 97 pound weakling ads. Here's an early example, right? And to think they called me skinny. Give me 15 minutes a day and I'll give you a new body.

And then we see a very, a very oily Italian man, right? I mean, just, just as shiny as the day is long. Leopard, pink undies. Shining portrait of masculinity. There's a little box underneath him, right above his knees that says Charles Atlas holder of the title the world's most perfectly developed man You're wondering Where does that title scum internet? Who decided that we'll talk about it he did

Now what really made Charles stand out in a crowded field of fitness gurus was his laser focus on fucking with the self-confidence of boys and young men reading his ads, right? He was the guy who was like, I'm just going to use body dysmorphia to make all of my money, you know? To make money, yeah, yeah. And he really did it, probably the first guy I saw doing it

in a really organized way that I've found that's like really unhealthy in a very modern way where he just wants you to feel bad about your body. Right. His most popular 97 pound weakling ads were comics themselves. So he is really targeting kids to make them hate their bodies.

And the premise of like most of these was that a bully at the beach mocks our protagonist for being scrawny. And in the comic I have here, he's saying, hey skinny, your ribs are showing. Don't let him hit you, Joe. Watch what you say, fella. Shut up, you bag of bones.

And then the muscular guy hits our hero who takes Charles Atlas's getting jacked course, becomes swole, and then goes back to the beach to beat the shit out of this guy and presumably take back his woman, right? Right, that's how it works. Yeah, yeah, after he beats up the beach bully, his girlfriend says,

Oh Joe, you are a real he-man after all. Oh Jesus. Thank you for winning me back. Yeah. Yeah. This comic does not pass the Bechdel test. I did not enjoy that. Yeah. Thank you. No, horrible stuff.

Now, it's not gonna surprise you to learn that Charles Atlas was not his real name. Oh really? Because that's not anyone's real name. No. What is funny is that his real name also sounds fake. He was born Angelo Siciliano, which sounds like what J.K. Rowling

would have named an Italian wizard. Like, is it just not a real person's name? Yeah. Angelo Siciliano. Yeah, Siciliano. Italian wizard. Now, before he was a muscle salesman, he was a poor kid in Brooklyn who couldn't afford a YMCA membership and tried several fad workouts of the day without results. Siciliano thus fell for the con before he got in on it himself,

treating Bernard McFadden's physical culture magazine as the Bible and hassling strong men at weightlifting competitions to learn their secrets. He would later claim that the infamous 97 pound weakling story had its origins in his real life, that that was a thing that actually happened to him as a kid, that he had sand kicked in his face by a bully. And then my favorite part of this is,

because there were no Charles Atlas classes to take when he was bullied as a kid. He went to the zoo where he studied, found out the secrets of muscle growth by watching a lion. Because his whole program was like calisthenics based. He was like, well, lions have muscles and they don't lift weights. So it must be a calisthenics problem. Holy was like, well, lions have muscles and they don't lift weights. So it must be a calisthenics problem.

Holy shit. Also, I also love that he just like ran down like muscle men from the circus to be like, hey, what's your secret? What's your secret? He would go to like muscle shows and then would like annoy them afterwards being like, hey man, how'd you get so big?

How'd you get so huge? I don't know, lifting a shit ton of weight. They ate nothing but beef steak and picked up heavy things, bro. It's like, I don't know, lifting a shit ton of weight. They ate nothing but beef steak and picked up heavy things, bro. It was like the 19 teens. Just raw ground beef, man. Room temperature, raw ground beef. Just shoveling it in their mouths.

Ick, ick, ick, ick. Ickers. Now, whatever his real secret, Siciliano did figure out how to get swole and he made his living as a circus strongman until in 1922, he met a homeopathic doctor who'd written for physical culture and hired him to author a fitness course he could sell in magazines.

He changed his name to Charles Atlas and the rest was history. Now I looked into the case of like, who declared him the world's most perfectly developed man? And Wikipedia says there's no evidence that he ever won this. This is just a thing he declared himself. But I found another source that I trust implicitly, barbend.com, which offers a free arm training ebook to readers that claims with citations that he did in fact win a most handsome man contest held by Bernard McFadden and a subsequent America's most perfectly developed man contest held also by Bernard McFadden. So, you know,

maybe it's kind of legit, although he was sort of working for the guy. So right now Atlas was absolutely a grifter, but he came far enough back that he was at least fun. Right. In his day, it was enough to be huge and make kids feel bad about their bodies. Today, his descendants, guys like Andrew Tate, have to do that. And they also have to sell supplements and shit. They have to get into all this culture war shit. It's not just, you can't just pose naked and offer health and dieting tricks anymore.

You have to have a place in the culture wars. You have to find a way to make people think that by listening to your shit, they're part of a great and vicious struggle. Otherwise, there's just nothing. You kind of get lost by the wayside without that. I don't know why. I think some of this has to do with the fact that in Charles Atlas's day, they didn't really

know how people got big. They generally knew that you had to lift heavy things. There was a lot less was known about like sports nutrition and the like, a lot less was known about how to work out in order to maximize muscle growth. And steroids weren't really a thing. Right now we have, thank God, steroids, right?

Thank God the anabolic came online, baby. It's easier, people can get swole pretty easily if they have time and money nowadays, right? And the back acne is free. And the back acne is free. And the back acne is free, right? As is the HGH gut. You too can look like Joe Rogan. I like to call it organ enlargement, all right?

Don't call it an, that's what's happening. My organs are becoming oversized on my body. He has the massive guts of a healthy man. Yeah. Now I want to, yeah. So it's like, think about that guy who compared himself to the rock before getting his legs butchered, right?

Just the fact that you're shredded isn't going, like people aren't confident at all as a result of that anymore. It doesn't bring you the same, it used to be if you were huge, maybe that was enough to feel like a big man. Nowadays, it just really makes you feel like one of the herds.

So these guys who, you know who are essentially doing the same thing Atlas was, they have to sell themselves as like culture war icons too, right? Because in part because these men are struggling for something that gives them meaning, right? And war is a force that gives us meaning. So they want some sort of like thing to fight for and some sort of leader to like,

you know, take the reins, right? Right. And a good example of like how some guys do this is the current panic among right-wing masculinity influencer types over seed oils. Now, one of the major sources of the seed oil panic and the idea is that seed oils are toxic and they're stopping you from like being muscular. They're killing you. They're basically killing you as a man and they're stopping you from like being muscular, they're killing you. They're basically killing you as a man. They're rendering you infertile, you know? And it's a conspiracy, right?

That's kind of the insinuation that the spread of seed oils in cooking is part of a conspiracy to destroy men, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's easier to do that than really zoom out. Yeah, it's the seed oils, man. Yeah, man. That's it. Girls out. Yeah, it's the seed oils, man. Yeah, man.

That's it. Girls don't like it because all the seed oils, that safflower oil is really fucking you up. Oh man, safflower? Oh, no, I'll pray for you. No, no, no. I'll pray for you. It's gotta be olive oil, right?

Where's olive oil, the seed oil? I don't think so. I hope not. I mean, I guess it comes from the olives themselves. Whatever. I'm all fucked up on seed oils, man. You know what I'm gonna do. All I know is my brother says that

there's only to eat avocado oil and he's a doctor. He says to eat avocado, oh, there you go. I hear that too. It also has a high smoke point, higher smoke point than olive oil. So if you do high temperature cooking, I'm like, I can second that. See, as a masculinity influencer myself, Miles,

I cook only with diesel fuel, you know? Yeah, right, right. If it's good enough for my truck, it's good enough for me. And 10W30 motor oil. Yeah, yeah, oh, well, yeah, 10W30. Well, I just put that on some bread, you know, a little bit of salt in there, not too much. You don't wanna have too much sodium, yeah.

Oh, Vegemite, gross. Dip my bread in 10W30. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what are the big names in the seed oils community is Carnivore Aurelius,

a Twitter account with more than 300,000 followers that he's done a few things. He was one of these guys who would like- That just broke my brain. Take pictures of old buildings from the classical era and be like, why can't we make these anymore? I mean, we could, bro. We just have other ways of making houses

than having Min-Hu granite for a thousand years. I don't know. We have better materials. If you ever had to walk around on a floor made out of fucking marble when it's raining, like we have other ways of building things now. If you do that now, you're gonna break your little extendo femur bone

that you paid 75. You're not gonna be able to keep balance on that. So he is one of the big guys who is pushing this idea that seed oils are responsible for all of the woes of modern life. And I don't think I need to waste time breaking down why he's wrong, but I will show you a post of his from August of 2023,

which I find interesting as a mirror to the Charles Atlas ads that we started this episode with. Before seed oils were invented, everybody was hot and healthy. Less than 10% of people were obese versus 40% today. And CBD was non-existent. But in the last hundred years, seed oil consumption has increased 20 times.

And so has disease. Here are studies showing why I don't eat them. And then his evidence is this picture of Atlantic beach in 1908. Like, look at that. Look at all these. And like, what I find interesting here is that if you look at the men in this,

they're like, for one thing, a lot shorter than men today tend to be. And also pretty skinny as a general rule. And if this same picture in 1908 would have been a used by Charles Atlas as like evidence of how scrawny the average men is and why they need his workout program.

They're all wimps. Look at these wimps. They're all gonna get sand kicked in their face. Look at these bags of bone. Absolute embarrassments they are. Like Chuck Atlas, he just sees targets there, sand kicking targets. Like that boy on the left right there with the,

you could see him in the left side, bottom side of the picture in the wife beater, black shirt shirt like that guy's getting sand kicked right in his face. Oh, yeah So is the guy can we call them wife beaters anymore? Is that offensive these days? Yeah, I think you're supposed to call them tank tops and tops wait Wow tanks So the military industrial complex is fine miles. Yeah, I guess I don't know man. Like I don't make the rules man I don't make sure I'm just here to sell seed oils, man I did like when I was a kid that was the only thing people ever called those shirts Oh, yeah

No, I was ever able to explain to me like why they called white be no the other one you heard was it was a guinea Tea are the other ones and like guinea tea. Yeah, those are like the Alternatives and like there were no good options. Yeah, like to the point now I remember needing one and I set it off handily and my partner, Her Majesty is like, yo, that's not- Can't call them that anymore. Don't say that. And I'm like, no, that out loud, yeah, I don't want to say that in a store.

In the small town I grew up in, yeah, they were definitely always called wife beaters. And it was because it was like a shirt people in trailer parks would often wear. And I think probably my mom didn't tell me why it got that name because all of my friends were kids in trailer parks. She didn't wanna talk shit about their dads. But it was like, I didn't really evaluate that until just now, that like, oh, yes,

it is kind of messed up to call a t-shirt that. Yeah, yeah, well, look, these were strange times we were dealing with. Yeah, we're all growing every minute. Anyway, also, we don't have enough black tank tops in our society. It's not a bad look. Not a bad look on those kids. I'm sure they're dead now, but they look nice in a picture. Hey, you never know what that photo's saying. 1908 and those little teenagers.

Yeah, they're dead as hell. Yeah. Hey, they're making some worms happy though. Yeah, yeah, probably. Or at least we're like 70 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's say cremated, which is a better way, but hey, that's up to you.

Well, we'll see, we'll see. So yeah, this is, I just found it funny that like the same picture that is being like portrayed is this is like how much, ah, men used to be real men. Back when all of those men were alive, they were being told you're far too skinny. It's, but it's the exact same way, even with like who's raising our kids, right?

It's like the men should be there with the kids. And now it's like, you hear people be like, women are working. They're not raising the kids. Yeah. I would never hire a man to babysit. That's just wrong. And you're like, wow, whatever.

It's a fun house mirror, depending on where your life's at and where society is. Yeah, a certain chunk of the population are just always going to be assholes who need to find a reason why whatever other people are fine with isn't okay and is ruining their lives because usually they wanna make money off of it. Right.

That's just the reality of human beings. And the sooner you make peace with it, the sooner you can just daydream about those people getting hit by buses. So. Wow. Yeah. So anyway, I wanna read a quote

about the fake seed oil crisis by Rolling Stone's E.J. Dixon, just to kind of give you some context on this fun little piece of our culture at the present moment. Carnivore Aurelius is an account dedicated to restoring our ancestral meat-loving lifestyle. Its website also sells a branded bag of beef liver crisps for $89.99. Like other proponents

of the carnivore diet, like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, Carnivore Aurelius frequently advocates for traditional family values, tweeting about how feminism is a scam or idyllic photos of young, beautiful blonde moms with babies with the caption, ladies, there's nothing wrong with you if you want this over becoming a partner at a law firm. It has also devoted much space to pushing the evils of seed oils. My favorite thing about this is, so he's claimed that seed oils are the most destructive force in the world today and cutting them out of the diet will change your health. And some of his evidence for that is canola oil

is literally made from seeds of the rape plant, named after what it will do to your health. Okay. I feel like, again, I shouldn't need to say anything here, but I will, which is that rape seed, which is the unfortunate name of the plant that canola oil comes from. I always thought it was misspelled whenever I had seen it.

I was like, huh? no, it is an unfortunate name Yeah, but it has nothing to do with rape the thing right it comes from the Latin word Rapem for turnip because it's like related to the turnip plant. Oh, thank God just unrelated I thought just some sick fuck was this like, you know what? We're gonna name again I'm like could we have called it rap seed probably yeah probably would have been a better idea But you know the, scientists never listened to what I think things should be named. And I keep telling them, I keep telling them

and I keep telling the, you know, the local police, I'd say it's a misunderstanding. It's a misunderstanding. He's got good ideas. Listen to it. Yeah. Speaking of calling the local police, don't do that. Listen to these ads.

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So join me, Sloane Glass, on the new True true crime podcast American Homicide. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

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as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Julian Edelman. I'm Rob Gronkowski. Guess what, folks? We're teammates again. And we're gonna welcome you guys all to Dudes on Dudes. I'm a dude, you're a dude, and Dudes

on Dudes is our brand new show. We're gonna highlight players, peers, guys that we played against, legends from the past, and we're just gonna sit here and talk about them, and we'll get into the types of dudes. What kind of types of dudes are there, guys? We got studs, wizards. We got freaks. Or dudes dudes. We got dogs. Dogs. We'll break down their games.

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Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer. Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster. No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth,

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So we are again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time fact checking carnivore Arrelius's Twitter account, in part because his fans won't listen to this show. They can read. Yeah, I mean, I know about it, but like maybe offline, you can just tell me why I shouldn't be tripping about it. Cause I threw out all my- Oh no, you should be very scared of C-loans, Miles. Absolutely. But it's okay.

I have a solution for you. You know? I have pure chicken liver that did not come from KFC. It just for $300 a pound, I will send it to you via the mail. Do they have that from KFC. It just for $300 a pound. I will send it to you via the mail. Do they have that at KFC? They used to have it at KFC. Do they not anymore?

I haven't got a KFC in a very long time. They had chicken liver and KFC? And fried chicken livers and it was pretty good. It was not bad. Wow. I had no idea. I like liver. I'm like the liver king, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, you fry up some more. It's pretty good. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Thank you. It's because fry up some more. And you put more jacks. Mm-hmm, thank you, thank you. It's because of all the steroids. Oh, that makes sense. So, going back to our journey through time,

you might expect the post-war era, right? The late 40s through the 50s to have been a time where the masculinity and crisis thing wouldn't have found much purchase, right? If any period of time men were actually confident in themselves, it must have been the post-war years, right? These guys period of time men were actually confident in themselves, it must have been the post-war years, right? These guys went and they kicked some Nazi ass and they came back and they bought houses for $13, right? Like what do you, there was never a better time to feel like

a man than this, as long as you were white, right? Yeah. PTSD is a concept didn't really exist. There's no, you're just drinking your way through that. Yeah. Oh my God, that poor fucker is shell shocked. Yeah. Scared of war. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Why do I scream at my kids every night? Just go back home and hit your children

like the rest of us. Come on now. Ha ha ha ha. So this was, however, a time of crisis for masculinity, like literally every other period of modern American history has been. And specifically, however, a time of crisis for masculinity, like literally every other period of modern American history has been. And specifically, it was a time in which American intellectuals first really started to write

in a modern sense about the crisis of American masculinity. Now the fact that this happened makes sense when you put a few more things together. The 1950s is the era in which hyperviolent men's magazines first become really popular. We've done some episodes with Margaret Killjoy where we read through a few of those, but these are like, you see them made fun of on the internet today, magazines where like the cover will be a guy fighting a bunch of crabs, right? Or like wrestling a bear or something while a half naked woman like looks on, right? And if you read interviews with like writers of that era, some of them are pretty open

about the fact that they saw their audience as primarily frustrated men who'd been in the military during the war years, but never seen combat. And so they just kind of permanently felt like they'd missed out, right? This thing that would have made me into a man and made me confident I didn't get, it was kind of stolen from me, right?

Right, right, right. Isn't that kind of what Jarhead was about? Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I guess so. Cause like, you know, Desert Storm wasn't really a war. Yeah. Am I misremembering? I felt like that was like a big part of them. I haven't seen Jarhead in a long time.

Ah, I needed to see the pink mist, man. And I never saw it. It wasn't enough. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, kind of thing. Anyway. Yeah, you only get that experience that a guy who didn't see the pink mist, but I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, kind of thing. Anyway. Yeah, you only get that experience that a guy who didn't see the pink mist, but I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Right.

So Witkowski points out that the 1950s was not so much a real crisis of manhood because again, the average white man in America was doing pretty well in that decade. But instead it was a crisis and all of these articles about crises and masculinity were part of the result of a crisis and self-confidence among the kind of men who wrote about culture for a living. These were guys who overwhelmingly hadn't fought. These are guys who felt insecure about their position as cultural elites. This is when you started to also see analysis of films and TV shows and what they had to say about masculinity.

One of the shows that really scared these men writing these articles at the time was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which poked fun at male authority figures and had competent witty female characters. There was a certain kind of public intellectual who was terrified by this. I'm going to read a quote again from Witkowski's paper. In a fascinating Look magazine article entitled The American Male, Why Do Women Dominate Him? Author J. Robert Moskin opined with harm. It is certain that as women grow ever more numerous and more dominant, we will have to

invent new meanings and myths for maleness in America. Because as psychiatrist Dr. Irene J. Rosalin warns, we are drifting toward a social structure made up of he-women and she-men. Moskin believed men coped with this situation, at least in part, through a set of gendered consumption activities. They drank regularly, in commuter-cane bar cars, watched televised baseball at home, played golf on weekends, and went on all-male fishing trips. At work, their expense accounts paid for meals at fancy restaurants and when traveling for

spacious suites and lavish entertaining. Moskin's article clearly focused on the lives of middle-class men like himself. He was senior editor at Look Magazine at the time." And that is such a part of all of these male panic articles is that it's just the thing that you, the guy who was like born into wealth and privilege and is like the head editor at Esquire, it's just what you are scared of, right? Because you know that you don't have a real job.

Right. Yeah. What do you do? It's like, I rank bow ties and then talk to guys who were just served in a combat zone. Yeah, I tried to scare men who lived through the SS attacking them about Ozzie and Harriet. Yeah, right, right, right. Survivors of Bastogne.

I tried to get to freak out about girls in movies. Awesome stuff, man. I know how to speak their language, man. It's part of why this is so funny. Again, my grandpa did all of this stuff, went overseas, like fought in wars and then came back home and would have been the first to tell you that he took every dime he ever made

and handed it over to his wife who managed all of the family finances because he had an eighth grade education and she was really good at math, right? He never felt like less of a man as a result of it either. No. Like. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that I think,

especially that generation was offered, like in that sense, because's, I mean, that's the thing that I think, especially that generation was offered, like in that sense, because so many, so many served there, they come back and like, maybe you just come back and like, you know what I realized? I don't know shit about math. So here, man, just to take these checks. Yeah. Just keep me fed and I'll be okay. So Moskin was a major advocate of the idea that the increasing visibility of gay men,

and remember, this is 1950 goddamn eight, was a sign that American men were losing their potency. Now, as opposed to the crisis of manhood around the turn of the century or the 1920s, the chief fear here wasn't that women were ruining young boys. Instead, now it had moved on to a feeling that in a world of more liberated women,

men might have to work harder to find companionship. Now, the manfluencer who sailed into this breach was kind of ironically the least toxic guy we're going to talk about in these episodes, Hugh Hefner. And I'm not saying he was a very toxic man, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Playboy actually offered, in addition to a new vision of manhood, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Playboy actually offered, in addition to a new vision of manhood,

it offered a new vision of like, womenhood that was in some ways less poisonous than what had come before, right? In part because women were not seen in Playboy as a threat, as opposed to women being interested in you was shown as a sign of vigor and success, right? There's a lot that's toxic about that, but it wasn't telling men, you should be scared of women because they're working, right? There's a lot that's toxic about that, but it wasn't telling men you should be scared of women

because they're working, right? It was more telling them that your ability to be interesting to these new liberated women is what defines you as a man, you know? And again, there's toxic stuff there, but it's less poisonous than some of the stuff we've talked about outside of that, right? But at least it's centered, it's like, no, man,

you're less than and can be better. It's not them you need to improve yourself. And you need to meet their new and expanded interests too, by changing and largely by buying things, right? By being like having a bachelor pad, by purchasing these kinds of luxury items, right? Having multiple rooms that were just gigantic mattresses where untold horrors befell people, but yeah, anyway.

Yeah, Hugh, like Hugh Hefner is not doing this because it's the good thing to do, but it is like less poisonous than like women are corrupting your children because they're inherently less. Because they're raising them. Yeah. Right. Now, Playboy helped ignite a market

for a new kind of content aimed entirely at men, as the Men's Adventure magazines were, but focused on cultivating an image of class and refinement by selling designer clothing and high-end stereo equipment to guys with disposable income. And I also think it's a little less toxic to be like spend your disposable income on like gym shit or getting taller as opposed to like,

at least you got a stereo if you buy a stereo. Maybe it won't actually help you pick up a lady, but at least you've got a stereo. And maybe a grand kid comes across that amplifier and is like, hey, this is actually good shit here. Yeah, you get a fucking sweet amp. I can sell that for drugs. Right, yes, for the new sign of masculinity.

Now, one of the magazines that came from this moment was Esquire, which in 1958 published an article you will see cited in every history of American masculinity. If you read any of these modern day, like published in the last year or two, articles about our current crisis of masculinity, they will all reference an article called The Crisis of American Masculinity by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Now, Arthur was kind of the platonic ideal of an East Coast intellectual elite. His mom's family had come over on the Mayflower.

His dad was a Prussian Jew who'd converted and sent him to Exeter Academy and then Harvard. Over a long career as a political writer, he laid down the definitive first biography of JFK's White House. He convinced RFK to run for president. He then wrote a definitive book about RFK after he was assassinated.

He invented the term the Imperial Presidency. So he's a guy people listened to. And also I will wager a guy who knew very little about how the average man in the US felt about masculinity, right? He was not a guy who talked to a lot of blue collar laborers, you know? His friends are all wealthy and influential elites.

In 1958, he decided to write an article that reflected their fears about manhood because this was the late 50s. It ran into Esquire next to one of the better cigarette ads I've seen. Miles, does this make you want to palm all? Cause I'll tell you what. Oh, shit. Oh, man.

Wait, how do I get that flavor in my mouth? Nothing like lobster and tobacco, two great tastes that go great together. Look, I'm always I've always said there's nothing that goes together like North Carolina North Carolinian tobacco and shellfish just mixing in my mouth. Look, look when you're when you're eating the shellfish in Atlantic City, it's been rancid for up to 72 hours before it hits your plate. You need a Paul Maul to coat your throat.

That's just a protective effect, you know? Yeah, that's how you, yeah, you fight off the bacterial infection. It's the only way to survive eating Atlantic City shellfish. What a fucking lifestyle. It's like, you want this, bro. We know you wanna have a fucking cigarette in one hand.

A bunch of fucking shrimp. Sucking down 70 degree quote unquote fresh shrimp. Yeah. No, man, that's not the way to advertise these things. Hey boys, wanna not eat for days? Yeah. Cigarettes. Mm, yummies, yeah. Your ribs are showing now, fella.

I do find it interesting too that Ad uses the term smoked out. No dry smoked out taste, but in a very different term out, no dry smoked out taste, but in a very different term to how we use smoked out today, Miles. Wow, but now I'm like, hold on Paul Moll, what are you saying? I'm back.

Fascinating. Schlesinger's article is still deeply influential today, in part because it seems so modern. When he lists archetypes of masculinity, they're all characters from books or movies, and a huge amount of his conclusions on this crisis are based on media. Hemingway's later books, for example,

he cites as evidence that men have become, men in general have become preoccupied with proving their virility. And like, I might suggest that Hemingway's lack of self-confidence as he aged might have more to do with why those books were the way they were than how the average American was in 1958.

I don't know. Maybe that makes a little more sense to me. It's not a me problem. It's not a me problem. It's not a me problem. Yeah, obviously in the average American, like Hemingway was channeling Joe Schmo in these books he wrote 14 seconds

before blowing his brains out, you know, clearly. Just fascinating conclusions that he came to here. Now it becomes clear a few paragraphs in that Schlesinger is personally upset with some of the same things that had worried men a generation earlier. Quote, while men design dresses and brew up cosmetics, women become doctors, lawyers, bank cashiers,

and executives. Women now fill many masculine roles, writes the psychologist Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, and expect their husbands to assume many of the tasks once reserved for their own sex. They seem an expanding, aggressive force, seizing new domains like a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive,

are hardly able to hold their own and gracefully accept assignments from their new rulers. Yeah, their new rulers, women ruling everything in 1958. Oh, how did they see the future? Yeah, fascinating stuff. Downwind patriarchy two months after this thing. Men are making perfume now. Now, as a liberal intellectual, I will say,

Arthur doesn't let himself go too far down this road. He does pivot by, first off, he says that like, well, we can't turn things around. Once women have gotten a taste of freedom, they're just going to keep being free and we just have to accept that, right? And he does point out, he also makes a note that like, obviously there's a chance that a man who helps out

with cleaning the house might just be super confident in his masculinity, right? Maybe a man who literally stabbed SS men to death with frozen icicles doesn't feel emasculated by sweeping, you know? But then we get this line, but there is more impressive evidence than the helpful husband that this is an age of sexual ambiguity. It appears no accident, for example, that the changing of sex, the Christine Jorgensen

phenomenon so fascinates our newspaper editors and readers, or that homosexuality, that incarnation of sexual ambiguity, should be encouraged enjoying a cultural boom new in our history." Now, we've talked about Christine Jorgensen on the show before. She was probably the first transgender woman on American television. She was kind of the first public transgender celebrity in like American life. And she was, you know, because she, in part because she was seen as kind of singular, as opposed to a symbol of a community of people. I think she actually got a lot less attacked than, you know, we currently see today and like the right wing anti-trans culture war.

She was kind of described, she was often seen as like, this is one person who is like, has this peculiar thing about them or having on them on TV to talk about it as opposed to like, you know, something broader. But it is interesting to me that like, in this foundational work of American male insecurity, Schlesinger picks on a trans woman, right? Like that is kind of fascinating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's not the only guy doing it, but he does so in a way that's like very familiar to the modern era. It's like she's a sign that men in general are less confident in being men. Just like calling homosexuality a sign of sexual ambiguity and like man, there's nothing ambiguous about being gay. Yeah, pretty clear.

Pretty clear. Yeah, I know what I want. Yeah. Yeah. But I do consider it worthwhile to draw the connection. Right. Now, if you can tolerate the way that Schlesinger writes, and that is a big if,

his article is extremely funny at points. There's a long segment where he frets over homosexual male characters in fiction and how they suggest men are rejecting normal female desire for full and reciprocal love. And then he writes this incredible paragraph. One can pause and note why the Gary Coopers, Cary Grant, Clark Gables, and Spencer Tracy's continue to play romantic leads opposite girls young enough to be their daughters. It's obviously

because so few of the younger male stars can project a convincing sense of masculinity. Yeah, man. That's why. Yeah, that's why, bro. Not a thing that's gonna keep happening for all of the time that movies exist. Holy shit. Yes. It's just that these young bucks can't compete with the masculinity of a Gary Cooper. Yeah. Oh my God.

Fucking hell. Yeah. Wow. So funny. I love that. That's that's so funny bottle that up I love that. Yeah, man. It's cuz these guys like their dicks up It's not because a lot of men like very young women it has to be because of this Absolutely just nuts You know what else is crazy miles the? The deals that our advertisers will guarantee you. Absolutely so out of their mind that they have been 51 50

and are currently being held in a psychiatric facility against their will. It's really a problem. Yeah, they're wearing grippy socks. Yeah. Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind. Who did this and why?

And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where. Where the crime happened. I'm journalist Sloane Glass, and I host the new podcast American Homicide. Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders. And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story. On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico Desert, the swampy Louisiana Bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness. And we'll learn how each region of the country

holds deadly secrets. So join me, Sloane Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with, his father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the MyCultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Julian Edelman. I'm Rob Gronkowski.

Guess what, folks? We're teammates again, and we're gonna welcome you guys all to Dudes on Dudes. I'm a dude, you're a dude, and Dudes on Dudes is our brand new show. We're gonna highlight players, peers, guys that we played against, legends from the past, and we're just gonna sit here and talk about them. And we'll get into the types of dudes. What kind of types of dudes are there, Grumps? We got studs,

wizards, we got freaks, or dudes dude. We got dogs. Dog! We'll break down their games, we'll share some insider stories and determine what kind of dude each of these dudes are. Is Randy Moss a stud or a freak? Is Tom Brady a dog or a dude's dude? We're going to find out, Jules. New episodes drop every Thursday during the NFL season. Listen to Dudes on Dudes on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Stick to sports. Sports and politics don't mix. Or my personal favorite, shut up and dribble. I've heard these complaints throughout my sports journalism career, but despite what some people believe, sports and politics have mixed since the beginning. Now you have a podcast that isn't afraid to explore the complicated marriage between sports and politics

with a new podcast called Spolitics with me, Jamel Hill. Join me as I fearlessly explore political, social, and economical issues through the lens of sports with some of the biggest names and smartest people. You might even learn something. So here's the assignment. Listen to Spolitics on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And let's get Spolitical. It's been 30 years since the horror began. 911, what's your emergency? Someone, he said he was gonna kill me. horror began. Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer. Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.

In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster. No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth, while fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found.

We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you. Listen to the murder years, season two, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Anyway, we're back. So Arthur does come, despite some very, very silly lines, to a decent enough conclusion. I will say this is not like a hateful article. It's just deeply out of touch. And his conclusion is that there's no recovering the old style of masculinity. Things have changed. Women now have much more freedom than they do and that that's not going backwards.

So in specifically states, I'll give him credit for this, he's like trying to go back to the old style of masculinity is as foolish as trying to bring back white supremacy. He describes both as the neuroses of an immature society. And then he goes on to suggest that men need to remake themselves. And this is again where you get to, well, you're just a deeply out of touch coastal elite where he's like, and obviously the way for men to make themselves is through satire and politics, right? Men should write funny articles for the New Yorker

to recover their masculinity. How many smoking jackets do you own? Get into politics. He writes, a virile political life will be definite and hard hitting, respecting debate and dissent, seeking clarity and decision. Basically, he's like to solve the crisis of masculinity, we need to redefine masculinity

as like writing pithy articles for a living and political columns, you know? Which is exactly what he does. Arthur Schlesinger, a man who was not at all insecure about his manhood does for a living. No, no, but I comment on it. Yeah, I just find that so funny. Now, obviously, Miles, in our modern era

where men still control most of the wealth and power in society, one of the best ways to profit off the masculinity crisis is to sell guys like Arthur Schlesinger, who himself was not, again, not gonna make fun of his appearance, but if you look at a picture of him, not an imposing figure, right? No, no. To sell guys like that

an image of masculinity they want to copy. And as we sort of started the episode with, the model is very consistent across all of the grifters today, right? And it's a guy who looks like a Navy SEAL in a movie from the mid aughts, right? It's like a dude. Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right?

And to give you an example, they all look kinda like this, right? If there's a phenotype for manfluencers, the most common one by far, and like Andrew Tate doesn't match this, but a lot of them do, right? It's this guy, he's got like kind of a military style haircut. He's got a big beard.

He's either wearing a tailored suit, workout gear, or like combat gear, right? Right, yeah. All of, like 80% of the dudes in this space look like tack gear. Or tailored tack gear, right? Right, yeah. All of, like 80% of the dudes in this space look like this. Or tailored tack gear. Or tailored tack gear, right? Too skinny of a tie, personally. Too skinny of a tie, you know, beard clearly died,

but whatever. Now, there's a million of these guys out there, but the particular guy whose photo I just showed you is named Jack Murphy. Now, Jack came up in a similar social social status to Schlesinger and his peers. He graduated George Mason University and then went to Georgetown School of Foreign Service where he earned an MA in International Affairs. He has talked about his childhood as being extremely difficult and abusive.

Maybe that's true. I don't know. Because this man's a liar, I'm really not gonna get into it much. This is not a full BTB on the guy, but either way, he goes to Georgetown and he gets an MA in international affairs, right? He gets a job consulting. This is not a poor person.

This is a guy who gets a job consulting on two different charter schools in the DC area and eventually winds up running two charter schools. Barbara Smith, who worked under him and eventually wrote a book about the experience, claims that he fired off staff in order to collect two executive director salaries, making like a million dollars in change

in the few years that he's there, right? Now, during his time in power over these schools, they had the lowest family return rates for any charter schools in the district. And by the way, he is working in a majority black district. So this is a white guy who came into a majority black district, basically took over gutted two charter schools, fucked them up seriously and pocketed the money, right?

That's Jack's background. Hey, school choice, man. We need school choice though. Yeah, it's critically important. Not just a way to empower these freaks. Yeah, yeah. In 2015, the year after Gamergate, Jack realized that there was an even better con out there.

Blogging about masculinity. He wrote in one article that year, quote, "'It is our duty as men to save the feminists "'from themselves. "'Therefore, I am offering rape to feminists "'as an olive branch.'" Oh, this guy. This guy, yeah.

You may have heard about him. He got a lot of, he is, he kind of broached into the mainstream a little bit when he wrote that because people were very angry about it. Unfortunately, it doesn't really hurt guys like this. We'll talk about what hurts guys like this, because the good news is that Jack is now no longer a major figure in the right wing, right?

Now this guy's whole life is like a conservative fantasy, right? He like cashes in on hurting black kids particularly and gets rich off of like running charter schools into the ground, that's their dream, right? But despite this, he pretends to have been a liberal and in 2018 writes a book titled, Democrat to Deplorable, an attempt to take advantage of the fact

that right after Trump's election, certain kinds of journalists, particularly at the times, were starving to platform guys like him. And his hope was, I write this book, they'll all do to me what they did to JD Vance, right? Where I'll suddenly get all this mainstream legitimacy for explaining why very reasonable people used to be very liberal,

are now voting for Donald Trump. You know, we just got forced to, right? Now, unfortunately for Jack, he was a little late in this, right? If this book had come out in like spring of 2017, right? He might've really had something here, right? That would've been the ideal time to launch this grift. 2018 is a little late.

For one thing, it's after Charlottesville, right? Like- Yeah, that's kind of the window. That's kind of the window. You were just a little bit too late. Man, I know publishing is a slow process, homie. Like I get it. It's tough. It's tough to make those deadlines.

To his credit, he saw the future of monetizing being a guy like this though, was in selling coaching services. And so he launched the Liminal Order, where for a hundred dollars a month, young men could learn to stop being beta males. And this is almost the same grift that Andrew Tate has set up, right?

Like it's this whole thing where like, you pay me a monthly salary to get like, you know, access to a chat room where I will coach you in being, you know, a better man, a stronger man, right? And I think there's- Or how to traffic women if it gets- How to traffic women, right? I don't know if Jack would have gotten into that,

probably if you'd given him enough time. He also started trying to rebrand as a gunfluencer and posing in badly set up tactical gear. This just is not how you do it. You don't put the gun there, man. You don't put the gun there. You wanna dry your fucking sidearm and shoot yourself in the shoulder, homie?

Is that what you're looking for, bro? What is he doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? Who did you see holding a gun that way? Yeah, I mean, it's just clearly, it's like, I saw a video game cover that looked like this, and that's what I'm impersonating.

We have, at this point, a couple of hundred years of men wearing guns professionally, and everyone agrees, somewhere around the waist, right? We could debate the position around the waist, but somewhere around the waist, not your sternum, you know? Like what are you doing, man? I just clocked that.

What do you have like a Glock on his clavicle? Yeah, he's got like a Glock on his fucking clavicle. Oh, sorry. I tend to turn up the contrast on my screen to be like, oh, wow. Because you know, when you pull that thing out, you want whoever you're aiming that at. They're like, dude, this thing smells like your armpit.

Yeah, that's the right way to fucking carry a gun. My God, I know. So Jack launched a podcast where he hosted guests like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posovic, men who had been moderately more successful than him in cultivating an audience and followers with variations of the same grift. And then near the end of 2021, disaster struck.

Some of his fans found that back in 2015, he'd done something besides blog about feminism. He'd written about his love of being cuckolded. Now- Oh, that's rough. This guy's a fun one. This guy's a fun one. Now, Miles, being cuckolded is a perfectly fine fetish in which a man has his girlfriend or

wife or whomever pick up other men and fuck them in front of him. As far as things people do in bed go, we would call this pretty vanilla where I come from. But on the right- I watch someone have sex. Right, right. Okay. Share. Whatever. On the right wing, in 2021, Cuck was maybe the single most popular insult. So with coming out as you're trying to brand yourself

as an influence in this space, that you are literally a cuck, not gonna go over well. Right after this comes out, Jack gets interviewed by The Blaze, and he's asked about his fetish. In a Medium post, Jonathan Poletti summarizes what happened next. He exploded at the female host.

I'm not gonna talk about this. And basically, you know, fuck you for bringing this up right here and right now. Why are you doing this to me? Talking to social media afterwards, he tried to get the hosts of the interview fired. It was perceived as so unhinged as to fuel curiosity about his past.

Right-wingers found themselves on a Russian porn website, watching amateur masturbation videos done in 2018 for a gay audience called Big Bad Bear 1000. Here was Jack naked on camera, calling himself hetero flexible and talking about his history of male, male sex. I like men, I like men and I like boys. Wow.

The boys part. Great stuff, bro. Yeah, yeah, no, that's not great. Yeah. I mean, again, when this poor guy, you didn't have to almost blow your armpit off with a gun or any of this other stuff. You could have just lived your truth. You could have lived a much happier life. Yeah. Yeah. I said you wanted to still could have written a bad book, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. People can write terrible books, too. Everyone can. That's your right. Isn't American. Yeah. Yeah. No, don't get that. Now, get that pistol away from can. That's your right as an American. Yeah. Now get that pistol away from you. You're so weak. Yes, don't carry a gun that way. You shouldn't have a gun at all, Jack. Yeah.

Now there are more influential far, and by the way, this guy was a fellow at the Claremont Institute. So great stuff. There are more influential far right masculinity grifters. But I think Jack represents the pulsing insecurity at the heart of every one of these dudes. He is a human embodiment of what these crises of masculinity really are at their core and

always have been. Boring men from privileged backgrounds working high paid but useless jobs that don't make them quite enough to paper over the deep yawning void at the center of their soul. I've been pretty critical of that Schlesinger piece this episode, and I think with good reason, but I will give Arthur credit. There's a paragraph in his piece that absolutely describes Jack, and a lot of these guys, to a T. The pre-democratic world was characteristically a world of status in which people were provided

with ready-made identities, but modern Western society, free, equalitarian, democratic, has swept away all the old niches in which people for so many centuries found safe refuge. Only a few people at any time in human history have enjoyed the challenge of making themselves. Most have fled from the unendurable burden of freedom into the wound-like security of the group. The new age of social mobility may be fine for those strong enough to discover and develop their own roles. But for the timid and the frightened, who constitute the majority in any age, the great vacant

spaces of a qualitarian society can become a nightmare filled with nameless horrors." Yeah. All right. Yep. Didn't miss on that one. Yeah, he didn't miss on that one. I think that really gets, I think that gets a lot of what's going on with these guys is they have freedom, they could be whoever they wanted to be.

And they see, I think it's part of, it's not all of, but it's part of why trans people are such a constant focus for them. They see some people take this freedom that exists in our society and that to some extent was increased by the coming of the digital age. And they're angry and jealous because they don't have the courage to find or make themselves in the same way. And so they want to attack those people who are authentically creating themselves, right? Right.

And it would be much less risky to be like, yeah, I like being a cuck. Yeah. Well, whatever. Yeah. Whatever. That's who you are, Jack. You could have just been that. Right. Right. Yeah, whatever. That's that's who you are Jack. You could have just been that right? Yeah, and wow that that's such a great point of yeah Yeah to see people like where the the stakes are so much higher in terms of society's acceptance of them and like you have these

Other guys just like I just want to be like a nerd or something. Yeah. Yeah that manifesting or metastasizing into that kind of angers Yeah. Yeah frightening. Yeah. Yeah. Frightening. Yeah. Frightening, bad, sad, but you know, kudos to Steve Bannon for realizing this was going on and had a fucking profit off of it. Yeah, man. Kudos to him for getting that sweet Seinfeld money too. Yeah.

My dad was playing his cards right, baby. Not the most toxic person involved with Seinfeld. We'll say that. I know, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, Miles, that's the end of the episode. You got anything to plug before we roll out here? Check me out if you wanna hear me talk every day

about news, politics, and the like on the Daily Zeitgeist. And look, if you also wanna blow steam off and hear me talk about Trash Reality Show with Sophia Alexandra, who's been a past guest on here,'m on 420 day fiance those are the those are the spots you can check me well check that out and you know as miles says every year yeah and you know anyway once we do that we can take back our country that's what you're always saying miles that's what I'm saying. And I ain't backing down, man. No, no. I ain't backing down.

Hell yeah, brother. Hell yeah, brother. Yeah, yeah. So he gives me the hell yeah. That's the most frightening shit ever. So anyway, look up Miles's new fertilizer bomb recipe at Miles Green. I don't even know what to call that website.

Miles, thanks for coming on the show. Check out my The Pinecasters Cookbook. Yeah, yeah. The Pinecasters. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. The Pond. Anyway, we're done. Bye. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.

In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Julian Edelman. I'm Rob Gronkowski. And we are super excited to tell you about our new show, Dudes on Dudes. We're spilling all the behind-the-scenes stories,

crazy details, and honestly, just having a blast talking football. Every week we're discussing our favorite players of all times, from legends to our buddies to current stars. We're finally answering the age-old question, what kind of dudes are these dudes? We're gonna find out, Jules! New episodes drop every Thursday during the NFL season. Listen to Dudes on Dudes on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy,

Elian Gonzalez, was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stick to sports, shut up and dribble. Despite what some people believe, get your podcasts. with me, Jamel Hill. I'll be discussing political, social, and economic issues through the lens of sports with some of the biggest names and smartest people. So here's the assignment. Listen to Spolitics on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get Spolitical. I'm going deep undercover.

It's hard to visualize you with hair. To expose the secret world of professional shoplifting. So you can make $1,000 a professional shoplifting. So you can make a thousand dollars a day shoplifting. Yeah. And I end up outside the mansion of the shoplifting queen herself. I hear the cops. Dude, I think we should go. Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.