Maintenance Phase - "Soy Boys"

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

How a plant-based pejorative went from an alt-right burn to a core concern of mainstream Republicans.Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastLinks!Joe Explains the Term "Soy Boy" to Donnell RawlingsAlex Jones Gay Bomb RantSoyboys and Sensitivity: Mocking Meat Avoidance from Punch to TwitterHow the alt-right uses milk to promote white supremacyMen's Health 2009 pieceNeither soy nor isoflavone intake affects male reproductive hormonesA Brief History of Conservatives Using Tofu-Eating as an InsultThe Soy Conspiracy Alex Jones’ Protegé, Paul Joseph Watson, Is About to Steal His Crackpot CrownWhy Men Think Plant-Based Meat Will Turn Them Into WomenStangle: Impossible burgers are made of what?Plant-based meat and the knock-down, drag-out fight for the American dietWhy Republicans Can’t Stop Talking About MasculinityReal American men and the liberal war on meat“The Great Replacement:” An ExplainerThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Also, due to my hand problems, I'm no longer holding my mic. I have a mic stand now, and so I can do the clap emojis. Like, give the men estrogen. Okay, I have one, but it might be too scientific. Oh, it's interesting. As an expert in this field. As an expert in the field, I can't wait to hear what comes next. To educate the public.

Welcome to maintenance phase, the podcast that says, Yestrogen to all forms of estrogen. People thought I wasn't an expert. People thought I didn't know, but I do know. Big I am enough energy. If this one was about testosterone, it would have been say yes, testosterone. It wouldn't have been testosteroney the San Francisco treat. I'm Michael Hops. I am Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. You can also subscribe through Apple Podcast Premium.

It's the same audio content. Michael. Aubrey I'm so excited. I'm not even letting you get to that today. We're doing part. You're so excited. I'm jumping right in. Tell me what you're excited about.

Okay, I am like such a beta cook. Percent. They're like, I already feel seen. This one is about the soy boy thing, right? Uh-huh. Men are growing boobs because they're eating tofu or something? Yes. Today, we're going to be talking about sort of the right wing insults, soy boy, which has sort of morphed into almost a plank in the Republican platform.

Yeah, it's really bleak. And we're also gonna figure out what the underlying science is from all of that. What does the research say about fapping? The fap. A cock or a nerve you say. So just to start us off, for folks who are unfamiliar, first of all, congratulations. Soyboy is an insult or sort of pejorative that's very popular in far-right spaces, especially online

spaces. It goes in the same sort of category as calling men like Cux or Loti or beta males or new males. I have been called all of those things and I agree. Yeah, that's right. You're part of the extended cuckaverse. Oh. So, I thought we would watch a little video clip of someone who I thought would be a real expert in this. Uh, explaining what a soy boy is. Oh no.

Soy is like a political fruit or vegetables. Is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. People call you a soy boy. If you're a Republican, people call weak men, soy boys. I never knew that. Soy is one of the rare foods that's actually attached to being a bitch. That's a pussy food.

And this is not my perspective. This is just, I just think it's a fucking, it's a plant. It doesn't matter to me. Right. I think soy lowers your testosterone. I think it does't matter to me. I think soy lowers your testosterone. I think it does like estrogen. Yeah, yeah.

So, soy isoflavones can produce estrogen like activity in the body, mimicking the effects of natural estrogen. Yeah, but I think you can grow titties of a soy. Not quite, but it might feminize you. It might feminize you. Plants affect your hormone production. This is how I want to learn my scientific information

from one comedian telling another comedian. Michael, tell me your thoughts and feelings. Does this come port with what you would expect of Joe Rogan and does this come port with what you have heard about Soy? Sure, can you give me a second of just fitting my sports bra? Because I have some papers this morning. Very logistically bit for me. This is like the fucking perfect Joe Rogan thing.

Where he's like, I don't know, man. Some people think it's like pacifying, but like, oh no, no, man. Anyway, why don't we Google that? Oh, yeah, it turns out it is. Yeah, here's some crank screenshot from some crank website. I mean, he brings it back to that I don't believe it at the end of this segment.

Okay. And Donald Rowling's, I will say, hilariously chimed in with. I thought it was about being a foodie. I do think there's probably something to that though, in that it's kind of coded as like, liberal, if-feet, ivory tower, like, lib bullshit, right? I mean, this is kind of the whole thing, it's like a, it's a culture war thing.

More than, I mean, obviously more than it's any kind of scientific stuff, and it's basically like, people I don't like are like really into tofu. And therefore tofu must be like uniquely pernicious in some way. Totally. So the people I don't like part is sort of the caricature of a soy boy, right? They're usually depicted as being sort of unathletic. They don't really have muscle tone.

They are generally seen to have feminine traits, small hands, small features, breast tissue as part of it, right? They're usually shown wearing glasses and with an untrimmed beard. That's like a little scraggly, right? Okay, there's like a whole aesthetic. And there is a face that's called soy face or this, prefer this name so I let grin. Oh, that's pretty good Wait, let me go go so I land. Oh, it's sort of like the Aziz I'm sorry face in parks and wreck. Yeah Big open mouth surprised smile. I was just about to be like I make that But that's kind of proof of their point, I guess,

if you're in this world. This is widely just an intervention for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Joe Rogan's right over your shoulder. I'm the face fan. Mike, there's life after being a gay person. You don't have to live this way. I will say, I have a huge hands.

I don't know, that's not like a masculine feminine. But like, for a beta cook, like a five foot six, effeminate, prancing little man, I have giant hands. Maybe you're not a soy boy. The whole point of this episode for me is to prove my masculinity. So in addition to all of those sort of physical features, those sort of soy boy stereotype also includes them

being vegetarian or vegan. They're also considered to be SJWs, but not like the sort of like boundless rage of lady SJWs. The idea here is that they're sort of the cowed male equivalent. And they're sort of betraying their sex too, right? It's like, well, as a man, you're sort of supposed to be like loyal to other men, right? You're not supposed to be like talking about like, oh, the gender wage gap and stuff like, come on, man.

Yeah, and I also think this is a term that is deeply, deeply racialized. Yeah. So there's also a little tinge of sort of like race trader that's happening in there, right? Yeah. So in order to talk about this sort of set of myths and this kind of right wing panic, we got to talk about soy a little bit. this sort of set of myths and this kind of right wing panic. We got to talk about soy a little bit. Soy itself has been cultivated in East Asia for thousands of years. It has a ton of advantages. As a crop, it's hardy. It can grow in pretty low quality soil.

And it also like any sort of beans and peas that you might grow, as gardeners know, it will actually enrich the soil for the next crop that you plant. It sounds like a pretty hardy crop. It sounds pretty manly. It sounds fairly alpha. So the 70s is when we start to see much more of a takeoff of like tofu in particular and soy as like the main event, which is also around the same time that the US starts to experience a real boom in natural foods and health food stores, right?

So there's more of an idea that some foods are really good, some foods are really bad. And at this point, we start getting layers of moralizing about it and sort of what those foods say about who you are. This is also around the time that people start really wrapping up our understanding of tofu in our understanding of vegetarians. We start getting more of a market for vegetarians

and more of a market for vegetarian foods. Things like tofu dogs start popping up in grocery stores and folks become sort of more aware if they are not vegetarian that there is sort of a growing sense that there are more and more vegetarians around them. Right. This is, we talked about this in our vegetarianism episode, but also, I know this is when it happened,

but we also get the social construction of vegetarians and vegans as sort of like, holier than thou. I mean, I have not met a vegan like this, but this idea of like, they're constantly scolding you, and they think they're better than you and all this stuff. Like, I remember this stuff from the 90s. Can I tell you my theory about where that comes from?

Ooh, I think it is. So listen, we talked about this a little bit in our food pyramid episode, that there was sort of this push by doctors to define vegetarianism as sort of the heart healthiest diet and the thing you ought to pursue and like cut out animal products.

But I think that folks were feeling really judged by that. Yeah, and externalized that response to feeling judged as like they're always preaching to you. People used to mention tofu the way that they would mention, like, John Tesch. Has just like the most, obviously, just like, loser shit, like, that guy eats tofu. That is a true thing. I think whatever a particular culture or group of people

selects as their example of a gross out food is like incredibly telling. Yes, super, yeah, yeah. What I learned in the research of this sort of cultural anxiety about men and men's health is that this is actually a pretty long historical pattern of making fun of vegetarians more when white masculinity feels like it is sort of 10 US or outdated or under threat. So dating back to the 1800s, people in the US and the UK started sort of depicting vegetarians,

especially men who are vegetarians, as a kind of threat to like hegemonic masculinity, right, that there's this implicit threat of a man deciding to do something other than what, quote unquote, manly matter is supposed to do. This man has five, six, any hosts a podcast. Apparently, this sort of response is because of the cultural association between masculinity and, like, hunting or domination or any of that kind of stuff.

But a lot of it has to do with sort of diets being lighter in animal products had long been associated with black indigenous and people of color, but particularly Asian people, right? And existing stereotypes had depicted Asian cis men as effeminate and sort of insufficiently masculine, right? Like that's a thing that continues to this day. Yeah. And those stereotypes, I did not fucking know this.

Those stereotypes were used to justify colonialism and colonialist projects throughout Asia. Oh, in 1884, there's an American neurologist who writes about Asian communities and sort of like the diets in East Asia and writes, quote, thus flesh eating nations have ever been more aggressive than those peoples whose diet

is largely or exclusively vegetable. What the effeminate rice eaters in India and China have again and again yielded to the superior moral courage of an infinitely smaller number of meat-eating Englishmen. Dude, how the fuck is a British person gonna be like, we're good at colonialism because our food is better. How come you know about British food at this time?

Don't think that's the reason. They haven't stolen Indian food. Yeah. Exactly. We have like one and a half spices at this point. So while all of these sorts of foods are getting attached to that idea of like the sort of like lefty vegan scold, right? Foods like tofu become aligned with this kind of like clast liberalism, right? That it's about both left leaning politics

but also a certain amount of disposable income. And other foods like red meat, which is quite expensive, become tied to conservatism in the popular imagination. So by the early 1990s, Rush Limbaugh is already sort of railing against, quote unquote, latte drinking liberals, right? The lattes, they still trot that out sometimes, which is the part you should because lattes are now so fucking normal.

Yeah, yeah, that's like not even like a liberal elite thing. That's like a suburban strip mall thing. This is where we get into the like real sort of modern origins of this myth. If you're ready. Does it serve Alex Jones? myth, if you're ready. Does this happen to Alex Jones? No, it starts with 2006, we're gonna start with Michael Pollan, Oh.

Publishing the Omnivores dilemma. We're coming for you, Pollan. No. We left him alive last time. It's like Saddam Hussein in the 90s. We're coming back. Right, Jesus Christ. So in 2006, Pollan publishes the Omnivores dilemma and Rush Limbaugh really latches on.

Limbaugh was a pollen guy. No, he was not a pollen guy. And he was like, get off my case. I eat what I want. So he was anti-pollin, okay? He was totally anti-pollin. And this starts to sort of bubble up a little bit in conservative spaces. So later that same year, the right wing website, WorldNetDaily, ran a six-part feature on

the hazards of, quote unquote, health foods. Oh, nice. Nice. What were the hazards? The hazards were that soy and like flax and then a bunch of other health foods were the cause of homosexuality. Oh early puberty, late puberty, and that's false though because the cause of homosexuality is having small hands. So within a few years, those claims start to broaden and they start to focus in on just soy, right? Soy alone is now responsible for a quote unquote feminization of cis men.

And that quote unquote feminization was reported with this sort of air of medical authority, right? That's like, it's definitely happening. We should all be freaked out, and the silence is clear. A lot of that traces back to one particular story. Okay. That story is published in 2009 in Men's Health. Oh.

Okay. So I just sent you the screen grab of this, of the head and deck. Oh, for this story. Fuck, yes, this is a question mark headline. We love a question mark headline. So it's like men's health. And then in you know, they have these like tags with like categories, right? It'll be like movies or books or whatever.

The category of this story is soy's negative effects. Yeah, that's like the vertical. Yeah. is soy's negative effects. That's like the vertical. And then the headline is, is this the most dangerous food for men? And then subheadline, the unassuming soybean has silently infiltrated the American diet as what might just be the perfect protein source. It's cheap and vegetarian and could even unclog our hearts. But there may be a hidden dark side to soy, one that has the power to undermine everything it means to be male. So here's my question. Based on your years of experience hosting the show with me,

what do you expect this article to contain? Maybe this is just because I've been reading too much anti-vaxx nonsense lately, but I'm expecting like an opening anecdote. John always felt like a man, but then he ate a patty of tofu, and now he has boobs or something. So I'm like super anecdotal, unconfirmed report. And then we're gonna interview some like allegedly iconoclastic doctor.

Like the scientific consensus is that soybeans are fine, but like doctor so and so says that he sees patients whatever. God it's like you don't even need me here. Yeah, I'll take the episode from here, Aubrey. Sorry, I have like it's hilarious because that is like beat for fucking thing. Fuck, yes. And I will say it does, it's not that it starts with an anecdote. It starts with an anecdote. It mills with an anecdote. It is with an anecdote.

This is one person story. The article focused on a guy named James Price who was a retired US Army intelligence officer who was diagnosed with gynecumastia, which is enlarged mammary glands and men. He says that he went in to seek treatment after feeling really emotionally dysregulated for a long time. And he was like, it was above and beyond this thing, but it was around the time my wife died. And I was like, buddy, you're going to feel emotionally

dysregulated after your partner dies. Yeah. But he was, again, he was like, no, it was more than that. But I was like, oh, this feels like a very funny joke about like a dude has a feeling. And I was like, I gotta see a doctor. Yeah, yeah, it must be the soybeans. Yeah, totally.

So he went to the doctor and they ran a bunch of tests and spent a bunch of time investigating, and they found that this one guy had elevated estrogen levels, according to men's health, he had roughly eight times that that would be expected for other cis men. Okay. As the story unfolds, we find out that this guy, James Price, found out that he was lactose intolerant some years earlier, so he had switched to soy milk.

Okay. And when the doctor asked him how much soy milk he drank, he said it was like one of his favorite drinks, and that he estimated that he drank about three quarts of soy milk a day. He does like a big gulp cup full of soy milk next to him. That's a couple of big gulps full of soy milk a day. He does like a big gulp cup full of soy milk next to him at all times. That's a couple of big gulps full of soy milk, right?

So this is like entirely anecdotal, right? We're just talking about this one guy and then the piece drops into these sweeping alarmist claims about Americans consuming too much soy? Right, because you can probably do a correlation with like over the last 10 years. So the consumption in America is quintuple or something, because it probably did by 2009.

Yes, I mean, that's essentially what they did. So here's what they have to say. They talk about the AAP recommending cow's milk formula over soy formula in a report in 2008, which is true. They did. They note that 35% of bottle fed babies in the US at the time received at least some of their protein from soy. Okay. They go on, this is more maintenance phase catnip. This is a quote from the actual piece. Okay. It says a 2001 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association surveyed

over 800 adults, ages 20 to 34, who were fed either soy-based or cow's milk formulas during their infancy. One of the few differences to emerge was that the group raised on soy formula regularly used more asthma and allergy medications in adulthood. Was this just a quirk of the sampling? Or could it represent a subtle impairment of immune function? What? Right, this is false because we know

that the immune function is related to the mercury that they're getting in the vaccines. Uh-huh, correct. So it's the music that's already... And also like serving an existing group of people who have allergies and are eating foods that are more common in allergy friendly spaces. Yeah.

Feels like, yeah, no shit. If you take allergy meds, you might be more tuned in to your own personal sort of like health and wellbeing. You might be more likely to gravitate toward like health foods. You know what I mean? Like there's so much going on here. And instead they do this dumb shit like heavy lifting question mark thing.

This is very similar to the moving of the goalpost thing among anti-vaxxers where it's like, it's this vaccine, it's this other vaccine, it's autism, no, it's everything, no it's allergies. Where it's like, okay, if people are consuming more estrogen and it's causing this guy's very specific condition, that's one thing, but then we have a completely different narrative here

where it's like asthma and allergies. But those are all like different biological mechanisms by which it would be affecting you. I feel like there's this idea that foods are just like, good for you or bad for you and like anything bad that happens. You're like, oh, it's just food. Right, so like it doesn it again with there is a piece

where they sort of like cite a couple of papers suggesting that one component of soy is linked to erectile dysfunction in animals. And then they do a whole thing being like, what if it's true in people too? Yeah. Chill the fuck out. This is an article that's not ready to be written yet.

There's just not enough evidence here to say anything for sure. But instead they turn in this like, I'm just asking questions kind of draft. We're all eating soybeans, and now the mice can't even get boners anymore. Nobody wants to talk about it. No, this is, I feel like there's like

a fundamental kind of mismatch here in that I think that it is good to do studies on like random shit. Like I don't really mind these kinds of studies being done, but I think that one of the fundamental challenges of like the information age is that because everybody has access to so much information, like it's very easy to look up academic journals. You can easily take these super preliminary studies. I'd be like, we're all growing boobs because of the soybean. But I don't wanna throw the scientific baby

out with the bath water here. I think doing animal studies is fine. It's just that they get interpreted and spread around our bad information environment in this really obnoxious way. Yeah, totally. So it is true that soy contains something called phytoestrogens.

Phytoestrogens exist in plants, but they have some chemical similarities to the estrogen that is produced by humans. They're similar to estrogen, but they are not human estrogen. And also even when we are talking about straight up human estrogen, despite, you know, we sort of characterize estrogen as like a women's hormone or something, right? But people of all sexes and genders produce estrogen. Right. So like you produce estrogen, I produce estrogen. I also produce testosterone. We just have them in different balances.

Right. Phytoestrogens are named phytoestrogens because they are chemically similar, but decidedly sort of not identical. Phyto just means plant. And when humans eat phytoestrogens, they are metabolized differently. They are put to work differently.

Like it all sort of works differently, right? When you eat phytoestrogens versus when your body produces estrogen. It really feels like these people are just like going through Wikipedia and looking for any excuse. They're like, ooh, phytoestrogens. It has the word estrogen in it. Right.

And it's like, do you have any actual knowledge of the substance or how it works? It's like, did it it it did it, it has estrogen in it. So that men's health piece comes out in 2009. In 2010, we get two big research reviews, two big meta analyses that show no compelling evidence that a soy rich diet impacts testosterone levels, sperm counts, or anything else to do with cis men's health, right? Maybe you're just a pussy because you're a pussy, Todd. This is very

similar to the mercury and vaccine stuff where it's just like, yeah, if this was true, we would fucking know it and it would be super obvious. There's vast differences between populations and how much soy they're eating. It would be really fucking easy to measure. So men's health unwittingly plants a seed. And by 2015, we get what becomes, frankly, a real modern classic of the internet. I sent you a link.

I'm afraid this is what we will be watching. Oh, this shit, I've seen this already. I've seen this already. Well, see it again. I love this shit. Okay, this is, the title is Alex Jones gay bomb rant. All right, we're doing, let's not do 1.5, because I feel like we want,

we want the full's not do 1.5. So I feel like we want we want to really let it breathe Okay, yeah, this is when you become like a garbage clip Somalia By the way, they didn't just test it. They spray them with gay bombs if you're a new lecture just I said They consider they didn't consider using it. They've used it on our trips. And they had on, they spray PCP on the trips, Jacob's ladder.

You think PCP, some horse tranquilizer, something? They got stuff that'll whack your brain permanently. They give the trips special machines on a really no-no tech that already re-engineered their branch. I mean, he cuts a Wikipedia. comes to Wikipedia there it is the gay bomb Look it up for yourself. I mean this is what they're what do you think? Tank water is it's a gay bomb baby Oh, and I'm not saying people didn't naturally have homosexual feelings. I'm not even getting into it

I'm gonna give me a break. What do you think? I'm like oh shocked by it. I son up here bashing it because I don't like gay people I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin frogs gay Do you understand that he's clarifying his views? I'm saying be in social engineering it's not funny Probably stuff off the side of here. I need a side of it. I can do that now cuz I have a mic apologize I'm gonna settle down. I have it done this in months and I'm just I just cannot handle it anymore Apologize I apologize Jesus forgive me Let me just get back to the news. Thank you

Children becoming hunchback due to addiction to smart phones hunchback due to addiction to smart sounds. Yeah. That sounds real. That's all I can do. Michael, the amount of restrain, it took me to not play the entire 11 minutes. I know, I kind of want to keep going. So, hey, can I have to collect myself? I have watched this so many times.

I was about to make fun of him for like working himself up into a lather and being like, I can't do this anymore. And then I remembered what we do for a living. That's our whole thing. The whole thing. We live in a glass house so I'm not gonna do this anymore. Yeah.

Who can say that they're better than the gay, the old guy? So the lead into this and the lead out of this little segment is him genuinely just like leafing through pages of stapled packets of printed out internet news stories. It's so fucking funny, they're like all the papers on the desk, which makes it seem sort of like always going through and like reading the studies and stuff,

but like this man has not read Like a complete sentences and his entire know it also like an intern printed out one And he's literally reading off headlines also wait, I need to go to the gay bomb wiki entry Michael This was exactly the thing we were just gonna do don't even go Don't even go to the wiki entry. I'm gonna tell you time stamp. So you're gonna just keep your thing on pause and take yourself to 528-ish, somewhere in that neighborhood. Okay.

And then we're just gonna go full screen. Okay. What does that full screen say, Mike? It says, sources remain unclear, and it has insufficient citations. Oh, yeah. And then it says, the halitosis bomb and gay bomb

are informal names for two theoretical, non-lethal chemical weapons that a U.S. Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. So if you pause the show that you're watching, when you're watching Alex Jones, it fully debunks itself. It's also very funny to me because even if you could produce this bomb, it's not like homosexuality just turns you

into this like repatious like sex, wander immediately. Like if I was like in my house and like, cutting vegetables, and all of a sudden, like, some vapor came in the room that made me straight, I would just keep cutting vegetables. Like, my life wouldn't immediately change. You wouldn't flip over your cutting board and just like tear into some raw beef.

This only works if you think that gay people are like, driven mad immediately, like immediately by their gayness. So Alex Jones actually doesn't specifically mention soy in this clip, but I think it's a really good indicator of where the right is at. On again, this perceived threat to white masculinity, right? This whole thing is about like, they're turning Frogs gay and there's the gay bomb and all of this sort of stuff is really sort of softening the ground for this, for this soy panic stuff.

So I guess what we've got so far is like, the men's health article and the Alex Jones clip are basically two ends of the spectrum of the same concept, right? It's like, the men's health one is like, the most respectable form of the spectrum of the same concept, right? It's like, the men's health one is like the most respectable form of the idea that like, oh, the science says that phytosestrogens, blah, blah, blah. And then Alex Jones is a completely out-in-outer space

version of it that is just like, you're drinking chemicals and now you're gay sort of thing. But basically, there's a wide spectrum of ideology that is getting this message. That there is some threat to masculinity and it's like through the form of food. Yeah, absolutely. Part of what we're seeing here is that,

depending on what you ingest, you could become a gay frog. You could grow breasts, right? All of this stuff is sort of getting reached for through this particular portal of like, it's about things that you ingest. It's also very interesting to me that it's like, it's turning the frogs gay

and that's a threat to masculinity when like, you can be gay and masculine. Like my grinder profile says mask for a mask. No, it's a very important value for me, as everyone knows. So that Alex Jones freak out is in 2015. And again, like all of these things are doing just little things and little things and little things to sort of ratchet this conversation up.

Yeah. It's not until 2017 that we get the emergence of soyboy as like an insults, right? Oh. The history of who first used soy boy as a pejorative is disputed. Okay. There are some folks who say that the first appearance was a forechan comment of someone just calling someone else a soy boy cuckold.

Okay. Some folks claim it was Mike Cernovich. Do you know Mike Cernovich? He's just like a far right guy. Wasn't he the pizza gate guy? Yeah. He's a blogger. He's a far right dude. He's big in the manosphere. His sort of claim or the thing that he's credited with in all of this is posting the following image. I don't know. you're gonna show it to me. I'm sorry. Yeah, to you. I'm sorry, the image quality is so tiny and small. Okay, oh my fucking god.

It's so it's an image meme of like a bunch of dudes in suits. And he's superimposed a bunch of those like pussy hats from the women's march on top of them. And then the header says the soy boys, and then it says under that soy boy. Slaying it used to describe males who completely and utterly lack all necessary masculine qualities. This pathetic state is usually achieved

by an overindulgence of immasculating products and or ideologies. Also, products like Tofu and SJW podcasts. Mike, I feel like you've missed a critical part of the sort of text of this image, and that might be down to the low resolution. Those people are Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, Jamesorden Jimmy Kimmel John Oliver Seth Meyers Jimmy Fallon Bill Mar Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah. Well Bill Mars kind of a soy boy But everybody else that's mean so it's like a picture of late night Show host. Why is this why is this what they're mad at I tried to find the source tweet

But it's been deleted so I don't know. Regardless of which one of these absolute fucking gremlins started it, this is the year 2017 that the concept of the soyboys sort of took off online. There's a far right YouTuber who releases a video called The Truth About Soyface, and it just gets tons and tons of views.

That YouTuber is named Paul Joseph Watson. I knew he was gonna be in there. Ha ha! Tell me what you know about Paul Joseph Watson because I didn't know shit about shit. He's, I don't, is it a real accent? He's British, I think. He's from Sheffield.

Was he on Alex Jones' show? Wasn't he an Info Wars guy? He was like a little, he was a little like Karate kid to like Alex Jones's Mr. Miyagi. He was an Info Wars employee for a very long time starting in 2002 employee imagine filling out your W2 LLC imagine listening Alex Jones as a reference Of course, LLC. Imagine listening Alex Jones as a reference. Oh.

Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. The content is all exactly what you would expect from a long time info wars staffer. Right. He's got a bunch of conspiracy theories about Islamic takeovers. He's just doing the like explicit proud misogyny transphobia racism.

Yeah. And particularly when it comes to soy, he calls the popularization of soy, quote, a globalist chemical warfare program for the uninitiated globalist is used as an anti-Semitic dog whistle, right? Yeah. It is built on the idea for many that the world is run by a secret cabal of Jewish people. It's also the same thing, like they maintain just enough plausible deniability.

To be like, well, we never said it was anti-Semitic. It's like the ringtone that only teenagers can hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just say globalist and only racist are like Jewish people. Yeah. So that's 2018. The next stop in our story is a very weird one.

It takes us to a trade publication from the plain states in 2019. When a veterinarian publishes a piece in his local trade publication, the Tri-State Livestock News, he wrote a piece focused on the impossible whopper that included the absolute banger of a line, quote, here's to hoping that the impossible whopper is a possible flopper. Oh, God.

That's like something we would try as a tagline and be like, oh, even for you, my. I would, I would fire you for that. Yeah. So the idea behind this piece is that the main ingredient in impossible meat and beyond meat is soy. So in this piece, he claims that quote, an impossible whopper has 18 million times

as much estrogen as a regular whopper, and he directly says that eating four impossible whoppers per day would quote, grow boobs on a male. Oh, God. Estrogen, he says 18 million times as much estrogen. There is no estrogen. It's phytoestrogens, which are similar, but a different thing.

Is he just like making this number up? Where's anybody getting this? He's just pulling this shit out of thin air. Okay. And like, listen, this piece went viral. Yeah. This goes so far and wide that at one point, this guy gets a call from a reporter at the Atlantic, who is like, hey, do you wanna say anything about

how far and wide this has gone? And he was like, yeah, we published a retraction. I didn't expect this to go that far and wide. I understand now that I'm wrong and I wish I'd never written it. Like, he really goes hard on like, I fuck this up. But that doesn't get, of course, anywhere near as far, right? It's not until 2021 that the mainstream, mainstream

of the GOP really keys into, like, soypanic and the masculinity crisis, right? So how many years from Alex Jones are we? It's like from Alex Jones to, like, Ted Cruz. It looks like six years. Six years, exactly. Exactly, six years. That's actually a little slower than it usually takes.

So 2021 is when Josh Holley starts talking about masculinity stuff more. This is when JD Vance has his, like, garbage tweets about Kyle Rittenhouse being an issue of broken homes and fathers and abandoning our boys and all of that. In 2021, Jody Ernst, who's a Republican from Iowa, introduces a bill called the Telling Agencies

to stop tweaking what employees eat, act. Oh, that has to stand for something. Which is the Tasty Act. Oh, God. The Tasty Act would ban meatless Mondays in federal buildings. This is such a pussy shit. Stop banning stuff that you don't like. It's so bizarre to me. It's turning me into one of these fucking men's rights guys.

I'm like, this is the postification of America as men fucking moaning about shit like this. This narrative really reaches a crescendo actually last year when Tucker Carlson released a documentary called The End of Men. The Red Ball, the Red Ball Obelisk documentary. Yeah, absolutely. Tucker Carlson released a documentary called The End of Men. The Red Ball, the Red Ball Obelisk documentary. Yeah, absolutely. So the trailer.

The Red Light Scrodom Tannin. Which we both refused to Google. That's where like, oh my God, we're not gonna spend time on this. But then I did spend time on it. I watched it. I watched it a couple of times. My favorite. Jesus Christ. We're not gonna go into it here

because I wanted to do a bonus episode on it because every sentence in it is the most bananas nonsense you've ever heard. Rich text. But I did wanna share this one portion. It's a quote from someone who calls himself the raw egg nationalist. Oh, what?

What are those words in that order? What? What? Ha ha ha ha ha. I love that you and I are both, like, join me, this is gross. God, can we as a society agree on one fucking thing? Raw eggs. Can we all just agree?

Don't eat fucking raw eggs, guys. Not if you're talking to the raw egg nationalist. Can we have one thing? I just set you a quote. This is something that Rye Nationalist says in this documentary that really sort of encapsulates quite a bit of his message as far as I can tell. Oh my God, this is such a masterpiece, Aubrey.

You're welcome. The enemy today is what I like to call soy globalism. The globalist aim is to destroy nations and global communities. And they do this by isolating communities and sickening them through food and also through so-called medicine, and all the chemicals were exposed to on a daily basis. The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed, and isolated. The better to control

you and milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you. By making an individual strong, you make a nation strong. It's wild that it is like such deep fringe horrifying conspiracy theories, and this aired on Fox News. Yeah, like a normal mainstream. Yeah, this is shit that is on TV, and a lot of people are watching it. It's also it's so disingenuous to her. He says like they want to milk you for as much economic value as they can.

Okay, great. So you you support a higher minimum wage then, right? No. Yeah. You support unions, right? No. So what are we? It's like they they use these arguments, but they don't actually believe any of this shit, right? They're just praying on people who are like low information enough that they don't know the actual ideology behind this stuff, because none of're just praying on people who are like low information enough that they don't know the actual ideology behind this stuff, because none of these people are going to make your life any better.

Yeah, I mean, it's also wild to just think through all of this and be like, man, there are so many legit things to worry about with Sisman's health, but none of them are this. Get your prostate checked. Get your regular screenings, get your prostate checked. Get your fucking vaccines, get your shingles vaccines, like go to the doctor regularly. Right, there's like a bunch of stuff

that we could actually actively be working on with cystudes. I feel like the biggest thing to do these days is like depression and loneliness and these bruises and like potentially drug overdoses. It's like, yeah, there's real problems that I think are like, absolutely worth taking seriously, but like, to take them seriously, you have to talk about the actual problem.

So now we're in this place. We're sort of the cats out of the bag, right? Like, yeah. I think we're at a point now where it is kind of threatening to tip from a far right idea to a center right idea. That's already happened, but from a center right idea, back to being sort of a mainstream myth about health, and that part makes me nervous.

Also, it's so, it's weirdly important to these man gurus or something that masculinity has to be under attack all the time. They have this strange conception where it's like masculinity is like this all powerful thing, but also like it can crumble down. Yeah. At the slightest poke. This sort of like masculinity under attack,

the war on Christmas, all of that shit, is a way of being like, I'm actually just defending myself and you're the one who's attacking me. Right, right, this is self-defense. So like it allows people to do this weird Jedi mind track with themselves, right? Because it's attacking me. Right, right, this is self-defense. So it allows people to do this weird Jedi mind trick with themselves, right? Because it's also, it's like, yeah,

if you don't want to eat tofu, don't eat tofu, not everybody likes tofu, it's really fun. If you don't want to go see Barbie, don't go see Barbie, it's not like, it's fine. Nobody gets a shit. It's like the weird, there's something so fucking insecure about all of this stuff. And I don't want to call these people like,

soy beta cucks, because that's like problematic to like invoke. But it is like by their own fucking standards of masculinity, this is not alpha behavior. This is some real beta bullshit. It's some beta bullshit, dude. Take it from a five foot six podcaster with huge hands. Take it from the leftist podcaster who's gay,

the big day SJW podcaster. This couple-kunnel does not allow him to get in fights, but still. Thank you. you