Also media What Mendez My Brothers. I'm Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I sit down with Miles Gray and go sitting Mendez brother show.
How are we feeling?
A one? That one all hot for each other one, the one where Javier Bardem is their dad.
Yeah, I love that.
I know there's a lot of reasons to have issue with that. I know the brothers have have taken issue with that show's depiction. I will say I think it fundamentally shows the killing as justified. Because if I walked into a house, any house I just rewatched No Country for Old Men and saw Javier Bardem there, I'm opening fire, you know. Yeah, Like it's not even about the other stuff. It's just about like that, Like he's terrifying.
Exactly if I would, I could go to a fucking like fundraise charity fundraiser for orphaned children, and if he was hosting, I'd be like, dude, lighting him up. I'm sorry, I cannot sheathe my blade until it has spilled.
He could have a cattle boat gun anywhere anywhere, and even if you handcuffed that son of a bit, he could get you.
No he's freaky. He's freaky, he's terrifying. He's a terrifying man.
He was in that movie Vicky Christina Barcelona, and he's supposed.
To say he that he was. He was charming in that movie by a pedophile.
Supposed to be.
But I was like, no.
No, no, no, it's a deticted by Woody Allen. Yeah, yeah, no, stumbling blocks detected.
No.
Uh.
You know.
You know who's not terrifying or who is terrifying but terrifyingly talented is Miles Gray, who already introduced I don't know why I'm doing. How are you doing today, Miles?
I'm great, Robert, how are you doing?
I'm doing good? Miles, you're a maafy.
I got to ask you the Lakers, are you feeling good? Based on what JJ Reddick the same?
I mean, I really appreciate that he's feeling so confident, but I'm not. I'm not I'm not feeling I'm not feeling discouraged.
That's what we do. That's what we do is like your fans. Okay, sorry I had to just interject that famously. All men.
You know, Miles, you're a man, a man, manly a man.
Yeah.
So there. A lot of us are men, and I think if you're a man whose brain is not putting, you've probably had the feeling often in the last like five or six years where you'll like see something about young people and like what influencers your popular today, like Andrew Tate, and go like.
What the fuck's happening with dudes? Right? What's going on? Something awry?
And this this feeling is kind of uh exacerbated by the fact that I feel like every year or so, each of the big publications The Atlantic, the Washington Post, you know, the New York Times and New York Times magazine will do like a masculinity and crisis article right where they're they're trying to talk about, like why are men getting more conservative?
What's wrong with young men?
You know.
I wanted to look into that, and specifically I wanted to look into like the history of moral panics over masculinity in the United States, because this is a spoiler, about every thirty years, all of the columnists in the country get convinced that masculinity is in crisis. And this has been happening for roughly one hundred and twenty years.
Oh so it's the same as like nobody wants to work these Yes, yes.
This is exactly that kind of thing. There's some slight changes in how it gets expressed based on the time, but what hasn't changed is that every time there's a crisis of masculinity, a crop of grifters rises up to make a bunch of money off of the fact that men don't feel good about being men anymore. So we're going to talk about that this week. This is a week where we talk about the man fluencers, a word I'm going to use a lot, even though no one
likes it. Nobody feels good about the term manfluencer. We all kind of yeah, how do you feel about manfluencers? I don't care the episode started.
Yeah, I mean fine. I look, I don't know what we're going to talk about every time I agree to be on the show. So I'm just glad it's something that I've personally invested a lot of my own money, and so I feel like maybe I can bring a little bit of balance to this conversation, just like you, Robert, just tear down the whole fucking movement. Bro.
Now that you've admitted you never read our emails about the subject, I'm excited to have you on For our new episode, Miles reads a series of actionable threats that elected officials.
Dear Senator Schumer, whoa, what's this one about?
Wow, Miles, you came with his address. I didn't even have that in a script.
I don't know that. Somebody's just asked me to look up a name.
We all love Chuck Schumer. I assume or love you anyway. Cold, open, done, We're back, We're hot now open has begun.
Oh yeah, I say top, I'm concerned about men, like.
Concerned about men. We're all concerned about men.
Just to say, because men are concerning.
We are. Yeah, they are my sister. Yeah, I do.
Feel Miles, you and I are you?
When were you born? Oh? Wow? You never ask You never ask a bro his age, dude, first rule of man food.
Well, Miles, your face doesn't show it, you know.
Yeah, the day, the exact same birthday. It's Harry. Okay, I just turned forty years old. Oh really, I wouldn't guess.
I literally remember that you are his birthday twin every time, every time.
Everything.
That's because a lot. I really think.
I because I graduated in two thousand and six from high school, and I think I was in a sweet spot that like only lasted for a couple of years where we I think very briefly really just for the last two years of high school, things kind of were very healthy with young men compare compared to how they were before and after. There was a switchover that happened between junior high and senior high for me, where when
I was in middle school. In junior high, like I would get bullied a bunch for being the kid who had like D and D books or whatever, or you know, I played Warhammer and shit, like I got.
Hating Warhamer Warhammer figure fifteen fifteen.
But yeah, like that didn't go well for me. And then when I was in my junior year, World of Warcraft came out and suddenly all of that stopped. And it was right at the same time that like people started getting a little less shitty and then suddenly a lot less shitty towards like queer kids in school. There was this like brief period where all of the trends for and I think I was I was kind of right on the cusp of it because I just noticed that all of the weird kids stopped getting as much shit.
When I was about sixteen years old. It doesn't seem like that lasted very long.
But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I remember in high school we used to we used to give swirlies to the D and D kids.
I got, I've got some swirlies until I until I had a growth spur at around age fourteen, and then suddenly like I was too big for swearing.
But yeah, I got a lot of terrible eye infections as a result of those rough days day in my early years. But I think I know you mean because too, like there was also like for my age, it was like Eminem was also like the guy who was rapping and you were just hurling the f for it around like with abandoned.
We let him and m get away with a lot a lot folks. I threw me a couple of his songs the other day and I was.
Like, Jesus Christy, what wow, this man was out of pocket. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but that was the thing you get like, you know, but if you're like a black guy doing that, then they'll be like, we need to talk about censoring music. But then you're not liked. Eminem, Mom, lovem mom, Eminem Yo. My mom didn't But my mom also didn't. I don't. I don't think my mom knew who Eminem was probably until eight mile and she's like the white guy from the rapping movie. Yeah.
Anyway, so Miles, a few days before I sat down to write these episodes of videos sarted going viral. And this is not the first time I've seen this video go viral. It's happened at least once more like a year or so earlier. But it shows a you may
have seen it. It shows a group of soggy men in their late twenties to early thirties standing by the ocean holding sledgehammers awkwardly like, while a dude who appears to be about twenty percent trendblone acetate and creatine by body weight curls abuse at them, And I'm gonna I'm going to show you a segment of that clip, and before I do, you should know that each of the wet dudes getting yelled at paid twelve thousand dollars for
a three day course. So everyone's standing there getting screamed at has settled out twelve grand for the experience.
You don't fucking deserve to be here, fucking quick, you piece of shit. I want to be a better man. I want to be a better husband, I want to be a better father. I want to be a better You fucking whiney piece of shit. None of you deserve to be here by move with a purpose belly.
Ah.
But that's embarrassing.
That's that's just embarrassing. That's just embarrassing. These guys can't even like lift the sledgehammers and they're just no, please abuse me.
No, Sophie, I do think you should click the first link that I gave you and show that video too, now that now that we've seen the first one, because these are all fun.
So for the first one that I had kep the first time, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I just I just love watching then pay money to get screamed at and know that like every dom that I know would charge a lot less and then you'd be with the pretty lady exactly. It's just a much better deal.
And someone who smells good and takes seriously right.
Enjoy this, and like, if you know, if you know any of these guys, please tell them to see their dermatologists, because I see a lot of.
One man.
Not incredible way to spend twelve thousand dollars the way that.
They understood when he was like, belly, Yeah.
Yeah, you can buy if you're this kind of guy. For one thing, the very nicest firearms that exist in the country, you can all buy for less than twelve thousand dollars. Truly, you can buy a pretty good Toyota Prius for twelve thousand dollars. You can just have twelve thousand dollars and not get screamed at for twelve thousand dollars. There's so much you can do with twelve thousand dollars.
Put that in a high yield savings account, right, exactly.
Put it under your bed, any anything, but spend it to get screamed at.
Yeah, by some guy who's fucking dad failed him. So yeah, let's just repeat the cycle together, guys. Yeah.
Now, this is a video from the Modern Day Night Project, which exists take upper middle classmen who have money but no sense of self worth and put them through an intense, unpleasant, but also short and manageable experience so they feel like real men. Their website even includes a very depressing banner ad right at the top that says attention, The Modern Day Night Project is only for entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders. Wow, your family deserves the best version of you as a leader,
husband and father. Your family also deserves twelve thousand dollars.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Now, this is all This whole course is based on a kind of the public understanding of something called Hell Week that the Navy Seals do, which basically, if you're going to become a Navy Seal, there's a part of the training that's a week where you spend all of your time doing very miserable, tortuous exercises generally in and around the ocean and like not really sleeping, and it sucks.
But it's also part of like job training, right, Like you are training to do a job that you will be paid four as opposed to paying twelve thousand dollars. And it's also I think there's a lot you could one can debate is Hell Week really necessary for training Navy Seals. What you can't debate is that, like Navy Seals go on to do a thing as a result of this experience, as opposed to nothing at all.
Right, Yeah, you get to fight in America's imperial fighting forces. This one you just go and just fucking scream at your partner.
Yeah, and there's this there's this misunderstanding too, and it's this is we get the same thing with like boot camp, right where people focus on like shit they saw in Full Metal Jacket, you know, the drill sergeant screaming these creative insults at you, all the like mental and physical abuse, and they're like, wow, that's what makes soldiers and ignore the fact that, like both for Navy Seals and for regular soldiers, the getting yelled at is a small part
of like months and admit, in the case of the Navy Seals, like literally years of like learning technical stuff like how to use explosives, how to use firearms in different ways, how to do all of the weird boat shit that you have to do as.
A name you me, and the like.
There's a bunch of actual technical training that is a much bigger part of the whole experience than getting screened at. And then when you finish getting trained, you get to go do that job instead of going back to selling
used cars and encino. Now, I don't think there's a big point in me critiquing these places on like merit though, because the Modern Day Night Project and so many other boot camp style programs for adult men are part of a network of what you can call manfluencer programs, all of which capitalize on the feelings of inadequacy and weakness, but seem to be endemic among mostly white dudes who
have more money than self confidence. When you look at the marketing materials around all of the products in this category, you see a couple of things over and over again. Modern society has made it nearly impossible to be masculine, and this is literally killing men. That's how this is all framed. And here's a clip from their big advertisement video on their website that honestly looks like it was coded in two thousand and eight. It looks like the Dredge Report.
It's like administering chemotherapy to a cancerous area of the body, and it's going to unearth and expose who you are. The physical challenging that you go through is purpose driven. Every single evolution is purpose driven. Every single evolution creates opportunity for four things to lead, to show emotional discipline, to communicate, and.
To problem solve.
So the project is here for a purpose to help you become the man you know in your deepest heart that you're meant to be. And all we're going to do, is instructors over the next seventy five hours, is administer the project no different than a doctor would administer chemotherapy to a cancerous body part.
This is so fucking stupid, dude.
Yeah the music though.
I casu.
Yeah, my parents both died due to complications from chemo. So for one thing, Like, I don't know, bro, Chemo's not really like, are these guys in such a Are these guys admitting that by doing this, they're in such a desperate strait that they will literally die if a man doesn't scream at them on a beach. Because I don't think that's their issue. I think their issue is they didn't do a job that led to them shooting people.
And because our media entirely almost because like a lot of media, particularly the media guys like this consume, entirely focuses on violets as like a way to prove your masculinity, they have no way to feel like they're men.
Right. Violence is a love language. Actually is what we want to give the men who are in dire need of chemo?
Yeah, or as I say, fo, yeah, amazing stuff. You could you would do a much better job by just giving them chemo. Right, that's a real near death experience.
Seriously, and even like the irony too of like chemo like decades ago, where they're like, this might this radiation might come boomerang back around in a few decades and cause like serious illness again, other ganzer, this could be Also, yeah, it's like, yeah, it might help now, or maybe you're going to raise somebody who's going to turn to a mass murder. I don't know what.
Yeah, non zero number of these guys took their sons out to the beach the next week and made them hold a sledgehammer while they screamed down right right, here's another segment from that video.
The blood, so people spilled together who go through adversity together, is thicker, creates a bigger bond, a deeper bond than the water of the womb, meaning people who have shared the same womb. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
Cool. Now, what what the fuck?
Man? What a cool?
Yeah?
This is a covenant? Right? Do any of these men even understand the gestational process either? They're like, there's it's water womb? Was that? What was that part? Again?
This is we're calling this a covenant because everyone paid twelve grand to get yelled at on the beach together. That's a fucking covenant.
Honestly, you better god for twelve grand. They better be calling it a fucking covenant. Yeah, if it's just like a bunch of cool guys and hanging out getting pissed on and then and then it ain't. It doesn't sound as good. It's funny.
I mean, obviously what they're playing with here is something very real, which is that, like, when you experience actual trauma and adversity with a group of people, it can in fact bond you to them, right, the idea of having and there's it's very attractive to a lot of them in this idea that like I can go through
this very manageable version of the experience. That it is not so like actually joining the military and fighting is not a manageable experience, which is why so many people who do it wind up killing themselves later, right.
Sure, or coming back and being like, do not do that. Don't do that?
Yeah, don't not man it, Like whatever you want to call it, it's not.
War, and it's not fucking worth it.
It is a chaotic and dangerous thing to do, right, as opposed to this, which is not really all that dangerous. And then the danger of a guy who is taking like black market fucking gear having his heart explode as he does fucking sledgehammer push.
Ups or whatever.
Right, but this idea that like, you can do this very manageable thing that really just costs money and takes three days. And then there's this large, you hope, influential group of men that you share an intense bond with, right, that is attractive to a kind of guy, a fairly normal kind of guy today, because it's very normal for men today to be overwhelmingly lonely. A study by the Survey Center on American Life in twenty twenty one found that one in five single American men report having no
close friends. And that's a catastrophe that really is like an existential threat because when you have young men who are miserable, it's very easy to convince those young men to do terrible things. This has been a problem for all of human history.
See the cycle happen a lot of time. Yeah, like you got bored young men or people who have taken up arms previously and have nothing to do, and like Hey, what do you guys, What are you guys up to? Yeah?
Nothing, miserable and alone paying twelve grand to get screamed at on the beach?
A yeah, twelve four So what my math? Three four grand a day four granted to day something like yell dad on the beach and you I think you're entering some fucking covenant, yeah, with other people who have the same terrible problem solving skills you do, or you thought this was the way out of whatever your problems were, and then you think you're gonna be able to open up to the guy who said you're a piece of shit over and over when you have any kind of
problem that might need any kind of nuanced advice. Yes, yes, yes, sign me up. Yeah, someone lend me twelve grand. Yeah.
Now, there's a very good vice article on these camps and on the Modern Day Night Project in particular by Brendan Burrs. It does pretty good job of describing some of the sorts of guys who find programs like this appealing and why I'm going to quote from that now. The first time that victrm Diel, a thirty nine year old real estate agent in recent divorce, met bedros Kluian he was at a three day business workshop hosted by Coluian.
Seeing Kluean's tattooed sleeve, his square set jaw, listening to his gruff, gravelly voice, dial thought, this is a man I want to be like. His thoughts kept tumbling. Am my man, crushing crushing this dude? Holy shit. This is a good example of what you call the shallow appeal of this program and the men who run it. Right, these guys all look like the Special Forces dudes I watch in movies. I wish I was that kind of guy, because I've kind of been taught that that's the only
way to be that has any value now. Feeling that way, it's not something to be proud of, but I wouldn't say it's shameful. It's extremely common. Most men go through a period of time where they're like, I either should try to find a way to go fight or I wish I had right. That's not an uncommon experience for men, And there's a lot to be said about the idea
that like it's probably healthy. As a society, you have various rituals that are widely recognized that like signify the passage into adulthood, that like societies that build something like that in avoid some problems that we have in our society. I'm not against that idea. I just think you probably shouldn't have to pay twelve grand for the privilege ye know.
Yes, barrier to entry.
Yeah yeah, now. Brindan writes about another attendee, Keith Schmidt, a forty nine year old veteran and firefighter who was struggling with.
Mental health issues. Quote.
He had his demons childhood trauma full of sexual, physical and mental abuse, plus PTSD from serving in the military. But he'd shoved that crap down somewhere deep, shut off from the rest of him, because, as he'd always been taught, that's what a man does. A man doesn't cry, a man compartmentalizes. If a man accessed any emotion, it was anger,
a fuel Schmidt knew too well. He first described its power when his grade school teacher, Miss McGrath, told him one day that he wouldn't amount to anything more than a garbage man. Fuck you, he responded, He'd get back at Miss mcgraf, his mother who belittled and hit him,
the mentor who molested him. He'd get back at all them with the sweet revenge of success, and like that is so sad, because that is a man in desperate need of like mental health care that twelve grand could provide a lot of them.
Oh by a lot of good therapy for twelve thousand gree for four grand one day, one day's cost of that scream ode camp. Did you put that into therapy? Yeah?
Shit, he might make progress, right, and Schmid is one of the guys who will claim repeatedly that this program improved his life, maybe even saved it. And who am I to argue with him here?
Right?
There isn't much point anyway, because as silly as these programs and the ones like them are, they're not the most poisonous outgrowth of what is an industry devoted entirely to the crisis of American masculinity. Right, Unlike the most influential voices in this industry, guys like Andrew Taate Kluean isn't tricking guys into an MLM or so far as I can tell, ranting about race science and the evils
of the Nineteenth Amendment. He's just selling them the fantasy that the problems are rooted in the fact that their lives don't share enough of the aesthetics of an action movie from twenty eleven, right.
Yeah, which is funny because you know, the irony to me is that this whole obsession with seal boot camp that's from g I Jane, It sure is. That's a lot of a fucking movie where a woman of God through that, like Buds training for seals, and that was I think one of the very first mainstream depictions we got of what Bud's training looked like for a Navy seals. So it's interesting too that we're also referencing a movie to define masculinity that was about this woman who went
through it and became a Navy seal. And it's like, yeah, dude, like that man, But.
For us it's so and it's such a Again, I have a lot of friends who served, particularly in like the Marine Corps. Probably the closest friend I have who did and who then went on to fight like described it to me because I asked him about boot camp and he like, his description was so very different this kind of shit. He was like, Oh, it's a game. It's like a very silly game, and you realize the rules of the game early on, and you realize that
like most of the instructors. The ones who aren't out of their mind are playing a game too, and if you play along, then like you can get the thing that you want out of it, which is being done with it, right, That was his attitude. I also have a friend who shot himself in boot camp, So, like boot camp contains, people have wide varieties of reactions to it, But just the idea that you would voluntarily pay money to have this experience is fucking nuts to me.
Yeah right, I mean it's convenient too to think that, Rather than interrogate your own beliefs or trauma that might be informing like where you're at in life, it's just easy to be like, yeah, dude, I think I just give this maniac twelve grand and twelve thousand dollars and I don't even get to fire a fucking machine gun. No, no, but I can hold a sledgehammer for five minutes above my head. Yeah. Yeah.
A lot of my friends who went through boot camp got to fire an automatic grenade launcher, which is worth twelve Now that's that's approaching a twelve thousand dollars experience.
Right, Yeah, we got to use a China Lake mar nineteen. Yeah.
Now, a writer who isn't me, but whose name I have long since forgotten. MUD's described kind of what we're seeing with these camps as cargo cult masculinity. Now, if you haven't heard the term cargo cult, there's a couple of things that can mean. It's actually a much more complicated term than it usually gets boiled down to generally
when people reference it. They're talking about a specific cult called the John Froome Colt, which was found, like spotted in a bunch of Melanesian islanders after World War Two.
And the gist of what had happened is for years during the war they'd been gotten air drops of supplies as like soldiers had billeted on the island, and a bunch of the shit that was sent to those soldiers, including Western food and technology they hadn't seen before, like wound up getting you know, being accessible to the locals as well. Right when the US pulled out, some locals engaged in this kind of cultic behavior, trying to emulate
some of the practices they'd seen soldiers engage in. They'd done like parade ground marches with like faked rifles carved out of wood. They've ritually used these kind of like handwave landing signals and fake control towers and stuff. They'd like carved headphones from wood to try to reenact what they'd seen the soldiers doing that had brought the planes, right because they didn't really understand fully what was happening. Because these are people that just had not been a
part of the technological world prior to World War Two. Right, So, cargo cult masculinity is people applying that same kind of logic to the idea of being a man. Right, You're carving the headphones out of wood to try to pretend like you're in a man tower because you don't understand what it actually is that's going. Like you want the sleeve tattoos and the beard, and you want to like own the gun that you saw in the movie because you don't actually understand what it means to be a man.
There's nothing to it to you, but like these kind of signifiers, right. Right, So this week we're going to be talking about the men who have made servicing this cargo cult into an industry, and to talk about where that industry started, we're going to have to go back a century or so to a time when modern masculinity gurus assure us men were real men who worked hard, didn't complain, avoided seed oils, and went over to Europe to fight in World wars every couple of years. Yeah,
fuck it, we'll be talking about the seed oils guys later. So, speaking of seed oils, you know you won't make you take a seed oil because seed oils kill your penis.
Uh me.
Oh, and our advertisers, we're back, We're back. And hey, if you want to kill your penis, you know, because fucking vast deference getting those clipped is expensive, just eat some seed oils. I guarantee you can't get someone pregnant if you eat seed oils. You can show you the iHeart Radio Corporation if you get pregnant after eating seed oils.
That's a promise. You know, that's a ton of rubber bands too. You'd probably do it that too.
You can, in fact do that lot. So the early nineteen hundreds is like in man Fluencer lingo, like this, this is the ideal time to be a man, right, this is when everything was better today. If you like, listen to these guys talk about what went wrong with men.
They'll talk about like the first half of the twentieth century is like almost this perfect time, right, men were men, everything was better, And this is largely because their attitudes of what it was like for men in this period of time came entirely through the lens of film and television. So it might surprise people to learn that the nineteen twenties, you know, the turn of the century to the nineteen twenties, was the site of our first real crisis of masculinity
in the United States. Now my main source here is an excellent article on what's called male compensatory consumption by
Terrence Witkowski for the Journeral of Macro Marketing. It starts by making the case that back during the colonial period, popular notions of masculinity tended to focus on either the wealthy, slaveholding heads of planter dynasties or men's like Jefferson's mythic yaloeman farmer right heroic artisans, which is the term what Kowski uses, who lacked wealth but were skilled, physically strong,
and wealth and self reliant. By the early eighteen hundreds, this had started to morph into a recognizable phenomenon, the cult of the self made man. By the end of the century, the American ideal had solidified into something still very recognizable to us, the independent homesteader or small business owner, carving a place for himself out of the wild frontier or the chaos of the city. Nearly all man influencers
today model themselves on one of these two archetypes. In fact, these attitudes have been so consistent that back in the nineteen seventies, psychologist named Robert Brandon summarized the four themes of masculinity in American society. Number one, no sissy stuff. Number two Wait, actually, yes, yes, it's basically he's like it's scared of being scared of being gay.
Right.
Like that's a I mean, I think he's got it on the money. Right, fear of like being seen as gay is a big attitude of like masculinity.
Yes, love it. Number one, no sissy stuff.
Number two the big wheel right, that's a reference to the need to be the provider, right, this the source of wealth and financial success that like, the people in your life are reliant on. Number three the sturdy oak. Right, that's like the protector defender of your family. And number four give him hell right, this need to be seen as like a fighter. You know, to some extent at least capable of fighting for for yourself and your family and whatnot. Now, this understanding of the American man was
the product of generations. It was a thing that was like formed over time, a great deal of time and a great deal of like media.
Right.
But it met its first existential conflict during the tail end of the Victorian era, ironically as a result of the strict separation of women and men's spheres of existence
during that period. Terrence Witkowski writes the late Victorian era doctrine of separate spheres, where husbands left for work in factories and offices while they're somewhat sequestered wives managed household consumption, meant that mothers monopolized the better part of child rearing, and boys lacked the benefit of close male supervision they
once had when most fathers worked closer to home. Moreover, women were taking charge of public education, at least in the lower grades, and thus further socializing boys in non manly ways. According to gender alarmists, So this first panic about gender in the US comes about at the end of the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, as suddenly people are like, wait a second, women are raising all of the kids and they're teaching them too, They're going to teach them how to be women.
Yeah, like you know how that works? Women no women things nol today?
Boy ah, why did we send all of harmn off to die in coal factories? It is interesting that also, like, and this is up to the present day, all of these crises and masculinity start with as a result of like danger bad things capitalism does. Because right, it is bad for like children to never see their dads because they're working in the poison factory.
You know, Like that's terrible, yeah, right, and why is that? Well, you know, they have to exploit his labor.
Since a day standing in a pile of cyanide up to my nipples.
Couldn't raise we discovered apples for lunch.
Yeah, And this brings me to the most influential right wing moral panic of the modern era, because I think it relates exactly to the kind of panic you saw at the turn of the nineteenth century. And I'm talking about gamer Gate. Now, if you happen to be under a rock or too old or too young to spend time in places like four chan during gamer Gate, I'm gonna summarize what happened.
I missed out. Yeah, terrible. You guys lost it. You were just talking about that sweet spot and six we had about eight years. So a young man got angry at his ex girlfriend, who was a female games developer who had made a video game about depression. I'm not using their names. You can find them easily.
I just think these people have had their names stuck out there often enough. He alleged that she had slept with a gaming journalist and she had dated a guy at a website called Kotaku. Now that guy had not
written about her game. He had like quoted her once in an article before they started dating, but he had not actually reviewed her game, which is what they claimed the whole problem was, right that this was proof of this insidious women are sleeping with men and it's polluting the hobby right like, it's causing all of these games to get unfair reviews.
Right now.
What it actually happened is that gaming had become the most popular form of recreation in the country, and that also made it popular among women and men who weren't assholes, and this led to a broadening of what games could be.
You really saw in this period of the early offs, this like explosion and all these independent games that had very different ideas on like what gaming ought or like what a game could be that did not comport with the big Triple A games and stuff that had been huge in the past, and like these games didn't stop there from being Triple A games where you murder people. That's still the most common kind of video game. In fact, I just finished replaying Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven. Games where
you murder people are better than ever. We've gotten so good at games where you murder P've perfected it.
Yeah, now you can be pretty much any three letter agency you want to be too, Like, there's probably a game four that too.
Yeah, there's a game for whatever kind of murder you want to commit. Guys, you're fine. Yeah, but yeah, there was this attitude that like women were ruining games, and it's really it is the same fears, like, well, because men need to make money, and they need specifically to make money by laboring in factories and offices. Because we have changed the economics of the country in a way that's more efficient and profitable for a very small small
number of people. Right only the people taking care of kids are women, And now we're going to have express this panic towards the idea that like, that's going to make men womanly? Right, Well, what happens at gamer Gate, and it's it's a much more kind of autocathonic, you know, raised from within the community sort of experience rather than something imposed outside by these kind of moral busy bodies.
But you do have a lot of people who are scared that like, oh, if women are involved in gaming, it's going to change gaming, right, and that's going to destroy the only place that men have to really be men anymore.
The only place. It's one of the things you.
See if you read, like if you go back to a lot of those original posts on four Channet, the start a gamer Gate is this attitude that like, the only place I socialize and like meet friends is in like the lobbies of different games, and if there are women there, if I don't feel free to use slurs or make the kind of jokes I used to, then there's like, no, this is a harm to me. I am who am right?
Yeah? If I'm a white teenager who likes to use the hard r N word while proban call of do, then I have no I have no soul anymore.
Yeah, yeah, and obviously the claims that they made that like this was about ethics and video game journalism, this was about like, you know, corruption in these companies. That was all bullshit, but they very successfully use that as a screen right. And so when when it became clear to the media that they needed to report on gamer Gate, an awful lot of journalists did fall for well, let's talk about how valid the allegations are as opposed to
let's look at the harassment campaign that's being executed. And as a result, no one did anything about the harassment campaign, and that harassment campaign has gone on to become the standard right wing playbook for how to do everything. This is the only way conservatism really works in the United States anymore. I found a succinct explanation for how these these efforts are carried out in a courts article by
Rve Waldman. Quote. The gamer Gate playbook is simple and direct. First, identify a vulnerable target, usually a woman, person of color, a member of the LGBTQ community. Then highlight their vulnerabilities that disaffected, mostly white young men can attack them. Continue the attacks until someone pushes back or the platform of choice shuts it down. Now, if you've spent any time online today. You've just watched the right wing panic over DEI as it's led to teachers being harassed out of
jobs and schools closed by bomb threats. This is all the Gamergate playbook, right, which is again entirely how the right wing culture war machine works these days. Now, we're going to talk about how that happened later, because this was very much an intentional process, right. There were people from the beginning who saw the potential in utilizing this community of angry young men this way. He's in jail right now, I think, Yeah, he is in jail still currently,
mister Bannon. Yeah, we'll be chatting about him a while. And it's one of these things I've been reporting about stuff downstream of Gamergate for years. I brought it up on the show a lot. I didn't realize until recently that back in the early nineteen hundreds there was this fear over female teachers and like moms raising their sons, that really is.
It's the same.
There's girls in this space that should just be and it's going to ruin boys, you know, we have to do. And it's the fault of the women right who have forced themselves into these areas right in both cases. It's just like capitalism saw that a lot of women are buying video games. You know, capitalism put men in factories.
Right, where's the market, where's the labor? There we go off, you go.
We're going to be kind of flitting back and forth from the past to the future here. You know, I just felt like that was the best way to do it. Hopefully people will be relatively fine with this. But to return to the nineteen hundreds, right, once the suffragette movement started picking up steam, the kind of men who didn't trust the concept of a female teacher got even weirder. And I'm going to continue with a quote from Witkowski here.
Their presence challenged those men who felt deserving of political entitlement. During the bicycling craze of the eighteen nineties, women constituted about a third of the market and thus became a visible kinetic reminder of changing gender norms. And this gets us miles to one of my favorite moral panics in
American history, the panic over girls and bicycles. Now, the gist of the issue is that with bicycles, single women were for the first time able to travel large, long distances on their own right, like and without needing to have a lot of money. Right, if you have a bike, you could travel on your own and you could travel quite far. You need to have horse money. You need to have a guy who will let you use a horse.
You don't need need carb money, right, you just need carbohydrates, right, yeah, you just need calories.
Now.
This change happened during a general boom and employment for women. So suddenly women are working and they are taking themselves places. And also the necessities, you know, just the physical realities of how bicycles work led to changes in women's clothing. This is part of why the layered and complex women's wear the Victorian era went away, right, because it's just not as convenient when you're cycling, right, And this is bicycle is one of the things that led to women
wearing pants. It's not the only, like that's a more complicated story than that, but bicycles are a significant part of that.
Right. Do you think there are like some terrible accidents where they're like, look, honey, if you're going to ride a bike, you wear your gigantic skirt with underskirt stuff, and that's not gonna get stuck caught in the chain or anything. Don't worry about it. Yeah.
Yeah, if you've got you can't get out go out the door with less than thirty pounds of whalebone on your body.
No, no, no, before you get on that two wheeled abomination. Yeah.
And obviously, like it gets the degree to which Victorian clothing was like, where's like these insanely complicated. That gets exaggerated some, but it's generally agreeable that like the fact that cycles are in the mix now is part of why it becomes more common for women to wear stuff like pants. Right now, this all of this freaks out a lot of people, and this generation of medical grifters of like doctors who see that men are really not happy with women bicycling, rise up to kind of profit
off of that right. And these are guys who are like, I can explain you're not happy with this because you just don't like women doing things, but I'm going to come up with a medical justification for why you're really in the right for not wanting women to wear but bicycles. They started arguing, there's like papers on this that bicycles literally change women's skeletons, cursing them with bicycle hand or bicycle.
Foot, bicycle, hand bicycle hand? Where was the grifter who's like, oh, I hate I mean, I know you think I'm lying. Come over here, check this out. Our bicycles on your hand? A fuck? Wait what am I looking at? It's a hand, it's a hand bicycle.
It's a hand with some muscles on it. You know, she's not just she's not just sitting in a room with yellow wallpapers waiting to die.
Those are some thick thumbs. Yeah, grip that shit. Oh no.
In an article for McGill University's Office for Science and Society, Jonathan Jerry Wrights, it was thought that women were mentally and physically impaired by the demands of their reproductive apparatus and menstruation cycles. Riding around on a tricycle was considered fine, but on a strenuous bicycle why it might cause a
woman's finite physical energy to be extinguished. Medical journal at the time would seek out anomalies linked to bicycle writing and confuse an association with a cause and effect relationship, although perhaps the confusion was a little bit voluntary. Writing
a bicycle could cause appendicitis. They reported internal inflammation and swelling off the throat from all the excitement, and teenage girls whose reproductive system was still developing were thought to be at risk of displacement of the uterus, physical shocks, and all sorts of bodily transformations brought about by the
bicycle that would render them unable to bear children. Now today, Miles, if you're an awful crank with a terrible opinion, you can probably get the New York Times to write a very sympathetic profile of you, if you went to a good school with the New York Times reporter. Back in eighteen ninety four, the Times was still at the cutting age of endorsing nonsense. That year, they published an article
titled Lunacy in England. It argued, quote, there is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy and homicidal mania.
General lunacy, general lunacy, just general lunacies.
Kind of catch up, Yeah, it did. I mean, it is true that when you add cars to the mixed bicycles do cause some people to become a homicidal but it's not the cyclists in general.
Oh yeah, no, no, no, not at all. No, she's general lunis I love that. Yeah, those are my favorite terms when like you could just grift off of just sort of like a I'm going to combine some words. I mean, obviously you understand what I'm saying, lunacy, but general. So if I ever see something like, well, that woman, she's stronger than me, it's like, well, general lunacy has obviously taken over from the confidence you got on a bicycle. I mean, this is the problem.
Though, now, Michael Miles, in nineteen twenty, women had come to make about twenty percent of the workforce. We know women had always been a massive part of the economy, that now they held formal jobs in a world of offices and factories that had been nearly all male since
their inception. This caused another panic, one that resembles modern panics over migrant workers, as employers realized women could handle a lot of the same jobs that men could, and they could pay women half as much for their labor.
Right.
It is weirdly, like very similar to the panic you get over migrants, and it's all focused on the fact that capitalists again are seeing like, well, we can just have women do the same things and pay them half as much like, there's no no one's going to get angry at us fucking over these ladies and men start getting pissed that, like, women are taking these jobs that used to be held by specifically, this is not factory work.
Women aren't replacing men in coal mines. This is jobs that had been held by educated men, right, like bookkeepers in stores. Right, these guys are a lot of these men are replaced by women and cash registers in the eighteen eighties. The actual impact in the daily lives of male workers would have been small, because only about a third of employed men in nineteen ten worked for companies with a workforce that was more than five percent female.
But because of the kind of men whose jobs were disrupted and the kind of men who feared they'd be next, were white collar types. The cultural response to this disruption was an obsession with manliness, right, and it came about in a large part as a result of like guys who worked for newspapers expressing the anxieties of their class, of like educated men who didn't get their hands sturdy
right Witkowski rights. Social historians have contended that many American men engaged in myriad forms of gendered consumption behavior to compensate for threats to their masculinity by an increasingly administrative and allegedly feminized culture. As Rotundo put it, when changes in the workplace caused men to feel uncertain of their manhood, their primary response was to seek new forms of reassurance
about it. Strenuous recreation, spectator sports, adventure novels, and a growing cult of the wilderness all served this need, right, And this is a period of time we've talked about Bernard McFadden, right, the manliness guru who came out with Physical Culture magazine, which is kind of the first like muscle magazine. You know, he comes out in the early
nineteen hundreds. He's very much writing this wave Teddy Roosevelt, you know, to an extent, a lot of his popularity comes out of this, right, because he's this stereotypically manly men who is in a lot of ways not just like a presidential candidate, but an ideal of masculinity for a lot of men. You know, in this you read of anxiety a lot. Yeah, I'm hunting big game in Africa.
You're like, whoa a man.
I'm a fucking I'm a fucking Like basically a guy whose job used to beat a count shit at a general store, and now I don't have a job. You know, I'm going to fucking fantasize about being like Teddy Roosevelt, and I'm going to get into weightlifting, you.
Know, exactly, throw a handlebar mustache. Yeah.
Now, these guys are followed very quickly by a swarm of grifters selling products guaranteed to make insecure men feel more like Bernar or Teddy. This included a variety of quack products that feel extremely modern in the present day. Here's what Kowski again. K Leo Minges of Rochester, New York founded the Cartilage Company to peddle up a dubious stretching program using arcane machinery that promised to increase men's
stature up to several inches. His company advertised heavily in national publications such as Munzies magazines and Popular Mechanics, and in many other print vehicles featuring headlines such as how I Grew Tall, How to grow tall and broaden your shoulders, and from nineteen oh four, every Woman Admires a Tall Man. The illustrations often showed women towering over short men, and again, you see like what the what's really happening here? This is not a widespread anxiety. Guys who are coal miners
are not insecure about their masculinity. It's like short dudes who work in the city and feel like, Ah, women are taking the jobs that I thought would be safe for me. And also I feel scared around them because my mom never let me talk to women until she died when I was twenty eight. And I just don't understand how to deal with the world right.
And I'm so frightened now, And I think all these other men I'm around, they're using these machines to lengthen their corporal right side.
I could get taller too by buying this machine from the fucking from a magazine up.
Yeah.
Now, none of this machinery worked right, But in the twenty first century, Miles, we've come around to actually having a way. You can do this right. Making yourself taller is with it. As long as you've got money you can in fact pay to get taller, and an unthinkable tolerance for pain.
Yeah, and a massive yeah.
If you are willing to permanently injure yourself and forever be less physically capable in every way that matters.
Hey, man Tallery, you want to be taller? You down? Just one question? Man, you down with bone extensions?
What? Yes, Miles, that's where we're going here. I want to introduce you to one of my favorite TikTok accounts, height Like Though, with one hundred and twenty three thousand followers and almost six million likes. This is the account for doctor Shahab Mabubian, probably the top name and funniest name in surgical height enhancement. Today, let's take a look at one of his most popular videos with seven point
three million views and like half a million likes. I want to warn you now that watching and hearing this video made me want to die.
He underwent the height lengthening procedure on his famous last week to permanently get three inches taller.
Oh, great content, incredible stuff.
Thank you TikTok.
Now in that TikTok, my favorite like response to the video itself was one guy just saying, one guy Captain B. Maxwell saying that sounds painful honestly and bad for the bones. And yeah, good news, captain. You are correct. This is bad for the bones.
What was.
I don't know, I don't know why that decision was made. But doctor Mabubian seems to be making enough money that I yeah, yeah, he knows his business. Dancing ironically a thing you won't be doing once you get leg extensions.
They tell you you'll you'll absolutely void the warranty on you if you deign to dance like.
As now speaking of Cissy's no, sorry, here's ads. We're back miles. So obviously, leg lengthening I didn't start out as a grift for insecure men. Like the surgery itself comes from a good place, which is there are men who are born with one leg like longer than the sure other, right, and that right, I mean I have a cousin who's got this and like, yeah, it messes up like the way that you walk, right, and having
a surgery that can deal with that. The trade offs can be worth it, right, or if you've been injured seriously, you know, as the result of like a lot of guys get injured in war, right, and they wind up after they get rebuilt with one leg shorter than the other, and maybe they'd want to do this right in that case, the trade offs are, at least for some people worth it, right, And that's what the surgery was used for for decades, but within the last fifteen to twenty years, enterprising doctors
like Mabubian have realized how much money there is and taking advantage of insecure men.
He told BuzzFeed.
It's become a big part of my practice. It's the thing most people are the most people are interested in. That's where I get most of my consultations. Now, if you're wondering how this surgery works, don't worry. I have another upsetting TikTok video that explains it all.
This nail will be implanted and the patient's steamers to perminently make him three inches tallercise nail.
I always check it and make sure it's nice and tight as not lose where we.
Put it in. Great?
Does that seem like a reputable medical professional that you Miles?
No, Also, like what what it looked like one of those shitty like closet coat.
Rat doesn't look as strong as my current bones's kind of.
Telescoping, a kind of swimsy.
Bony like it looks like a drain snake.
Yeah, yeah, it looks like a fucking drained snake. That's actually your new femur, which is a consequence like the Consequently, it's supposed to be the strongest fucking bone in your body.
It'll be fine, probably, Yeah, yeah, you're good.
Yeah.
Well, look, dude, you want to be a fucking short camp or you want to your whole life?
Absolutely not?
Or do you want to finally be there five? Or do you finally want to be five to six?
Now?
When you read profiles of the guys who get these surgeries, they focus heavily on how they are perceived at work and by women as shorter men. From an article in the New Zealand Herald about one of Mobubian's patients before Scott's surgery in January, he was five foot seven and said he was constantly ridiculed because.
Of his stature.
I was not treated with respect every single workplace I've been in. There have been several situations where people commented on my height to discredit me entirely as a person. The twenty five year old recalled that, coupled with demeaning social media and pop culture discourse about men of the lesser stature being garden nomes, drove him to seek out the seventy five thousand dollars perceives garden. I've never heard that in my life.
I've never heard that.
I'm not saying guys who are short don't get shit right, especially in school. We all get shipped for something though. Brother, there's not a person I know people who are like professional models that have horrible insecurities about aspects of your body. You would never guess because some dude made fun of that part of their body when they were like fifteen. Right, that's just life, that's just being a person. You just got to deal with it, man, Right, you don't have to.
Yeah, hope you hope you have some kind of support system around the ability to sort of like take these things on without it turning into you know, this ship. That's why it's like the kind of sad part about all this shit too, is like you don't get there because you're just like a dude. Like it's it's multiple levels of failure. Then then you sort of add in this really fragile mind state.
Yeah, you probably don't have a lot of like people that are just that you care about and there's nothing transactional about that relationship in your life who you know, maybe you could add because like that's part of how you get over insecurities, is like having people who care about you and you love that allow you to have a sense of that help you build up a sense of self worth, that let you realize how irrational the
things you were obsessed with work exactly. That's like just part of becoming a person, you know, is getting that. And when people are denied that and the loneliness epidemic I think is a part of that, then they do shit like pay doctor Maboobi and seventy five thousand dollars to get their legs through it.
Five.
It's wild.
That's a nice car. That's like a fully kitted out real land Rover from a nice year right, Like, yeah, it's like one of like in almost any car worth having you can get for seventy five grand.
I feel like, but nowadays, like seventy five thousands, I get like base model Silverado truck.
Oh yeah, but that's not really worth having, No, I know, but I'm just saying, like it's weird.
How like seventy five thousand.
Trailer dot com you can get a fucking left hand drive land Cruise and a jay engine from less than that. Yeah, right, that'll actually turn heads. Nobody's gonna look at another Silverado. Get you one of them Japanese fire trucks. People look at those.
Yeah, what's that? It's like, Oh, this it's actually uh it's a Honda Acte. Ever heard of it? No, it's a five speed four by four. Yeah.
Anyway, you can get some of the cheaper unimogus for seventy five grand. Those are cool.
Yeah.
So my favorite of these articles was an ABC News piece that interviewed a guy and introduced him as someone who quote, at first glance, says he could be mistaken for Dwayne the Rock Johnson. And I'm not I'm not gonna pull up this guy's picture. I'm not going to make fun of his looks. But he doesn't. What he means by this is that he's super jacked and he wears designer clothing. Now, I'm not going to put up a picture of the guy, because again, I don't want
to edge on mocking someone's appearance. But I will laugh a little at his explanation for why he felt that his natural height five foot nine perfectly average.
That is not a short man, that is a man of normal heights. Okay, right, this.
Is why he felt his height was insufficient. Quote, I'm not average. I don't like to be average. So yeah, man.
Sorry, dude, Like, and I bet guess what, I don't even think your little femur extendo that you're about to throw on there it might do the I don't know if that's going to do the trick either.
No, man, that's just going to make you a guy who's been seventy five grand to ruin his legs. Now you can't do squats anymore homemade, And.
Then what do you do? Like and would a guy like that openly tell you know a woman, because again it's all about being.
Like, this guy's got rid of matter, I guess. And there's like this thing in the article he's like, well, now I can have a kid now that I'm not like dealing with the shame of being five foot nine?
How much how much.
Does this bonzergery costs on a rege? Seventy five thousand, seventy.
Five fucking thousand. Honestly, let's do it.
Just like get there, be in lie on your dating profile, add to and we.
Know you know what, you know what, I'm not going to say, there's no women who would prefer to be with a guy who's three inches taller than a guy who has seventy five grand and a high heeled like mutual funder something. But I'm gonna guess the vast majority of men and women prefer the person with a degree of financial stability to the permanently ruin their legs.
Right. They're like, hey, you can be with this guy who walks like Edgar from.
Men in Black who's going to have murder arthritis by age forty four.
Or this guy who's five to eight and has seventy five thousand dollars in.
The Some of this comes from the shit you get, like with the insults, where they're like, there are these locked in stone physical features. If you don't have the perfect version of all of them, you will never know love.
And like again, maybe this is just me coming out of like non monogamy communities, but I know so many short guys who get laid to a degree that would make these people's fucking head oh yeah, right fry and like that it's because they know how to do shit like drive forklifts, and like they wound up doing like ex showing in a public situation that they had some sort of cool knowledge and that someone interested in them, which is the way most people get.
Just walking around walking around with the air of self acceptance. Yes, yes, that's not even like you didn't have to demonstrate, like hey, I can parallel park a big rig like no, no, just if you walk in people notice someone is just that not on some.
Like superficial, super fragile ego shit people. People are generally attracted to folks who go out, and this is men and women attracted to folks who like do cool things in the world. And you can you have with seventy five grand you can pay for training to do any number of cool things that you don't currently know how to do.
It's even cheaper to be able to laugh at yourself too. Yeah, that's another underrated quality that.
People being this kind of guy who is like so angry at his being five foot nine that he destroys his physical health for life. Like yeah, anyway, So grifters like the Cartilage Company and doctor Maboubian are products of a society with a lot of access to easy money and deep, widespread and security on behalf of the people with the most of it. When the Great Depression hit, a lot of these vanity products and magazine shilling them collapsed because no one had the money to pay for
this kind of bullshit. Widespread unemployment also had a negative impact on the self and image of many men. And this was like a period where you actually saw this kind of crisis and masculinity spread away from the kind of moneyed educated class to like working classmen, right, And for a reason that is much more sympathetic, you know,
than a guy feeling like he's not tall enough. It's because, like, suddenly I can't support my family, right, And the only thing that's ever given me a sense of worth in the society is that I can support my family, right, and that I have a lot of sims for right, like that you're not a that's not evidence of like a personal weakness, that's the society itself being sick.
You know.
There's documentation of this. Sociologist Mira Komarovsky interviewed families of fifty nine unemployed men from the winter of nineteen thirty five to thirty six, and she described that men who had lost their role as provider and their self confidence with it tended to isolate themselves. They pulled out of men's lodges in unions and stopped socializing even with family.
Sexual activity also plummeted although this may have just been a way of saving money because condoms weren't really that much of a thing, you know.
At the time. Ooh rich, yeah, god, yeah.
Yeah, you can afford to have sex and not make more kids that you can't pay for.
Yeah.
Now, what I found really interesting about this this study is something that with Kowski summarizes here, men out of work were underemployed had additional time on their hands. A wide selection of inexpensive home leisure activities, from playing solitariy to assembling jigsaw puzzles to building model kits became quite popular.
Considering the meaning of hobby consumption, young and young observed their most important contribution during the depression years was a capacity to impart a sense of self worth to the hobbyist. Jobs might be scarce, but working hard at a hobby fulfilled the need for self esteem. That's what a person that what a person was doing had value, and that the hobby itself took attention away from the economic difficulties
of the day. I kind of I find this interesting because it's like, this seems to be sort of hinting at the role that gaming, which is today the most popular hobby for young men in our culture was going to play in radicalization, right, because when you lose, when you feel like you don't have you can't do any of the things that make you amend. You're not making enough money to take care of anyone. In a lot of cases, you don't have a family to take care of.
You.
Saw back in the Great Depression, a lot of the men experiencing this turn towards like hobbies and games. And I don't think that's unrelated to what's happening now to shit like Gameragate, right, I think there is a line there, right.
Yeah, for sure, if you aren't able to demonstrate some ability of being potent and with whatever financial options you are you have, then yeah, fuck it, dude, Like I'm going to prestige a bunch of characters and call of duty, or I'll build a ship in a bottle.
It's this also the sense of like, you know, these guys in the Depression had had the again, their whole world, their job cut out from under them, and a lot of young men in our society their good jobs just haven't ever existed, right, There's never been the hope of being able to like get a house for yourself, of being able to like raise kids. That's just not a practical thing. And then you pair that with a lot of the isolation you know that the Internet image has
brought on upon young men. And yeah, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised that the first big explosion of like organized angry young men as a political force in our culture came out of gaming right. It's not weird.
Yeah, no, not at all.
No, And Steve Bannon was one of the first guys to realize that this was on the offing. In twenty fifteen, in the immediate wake of gamer Gate, he saw the angry young men who'd been so easy to rile up, harass, and threaten young female developers as a ready base of support for Trump's nascent campaign. He bankrolled and supported the career of early influencers like Milo Eanopolis, who had gotten their start making mediat a service the community of enraged
video game nerds Gamergate had started to organize. Now Eanopolis is still unfortunately kind of with us. He pivoted successfully to the alt right, which as a cultural product, was a direct descendant and refinement of the basic elements present in Gamergate. This cultural product was wildly successful at thrusting a lot of these tactics for manipulating mass media and harassing opponents into silence into mainstream Republican politics. And that's
a dark thing on its own. But there was a darker side to Gamergate because the communities the alt right came out of had only been momentarily useful to guys like Bannon. He wanted power, and Milo and other influencers who kind of came up as a result of his money, wanted an audience of people who weren't just freaks mailing
dead animals to girls they hated. They left those guys behind as they started courting senators and governors, but the fever swamps remained, and the people inside them did not handle abandonment and the passing of their cultural moment well. Now, one of the websites that came out of Gamergate was eight chan. Right, Gamergate really gets kind of started being
organized in four chan. Four Chan eventually kicks these guys off for all of the harassment and law breaking, and so eight chan gets created in like twenty fourteen as a place for these people as refugees to go, and eight chan very quickly becomes a place dedicated to harassment right, particularly to harassment of women, and one of the board's poll gets more extreme than that. It becomes just a straight up place for Nazis to organize on the internet.
And I was the journalist following this, right, I was the guy who was really reporting on a lot of this stuff before most other people got around to it. So I watched from twenty fourteen or so to twenty nineteen as these people went from like guys who were really angry about women in their online spaces and games, to guys who were talking about wanting to mass murder migrants, you know, who are like non white and creating genocide, right or doing a white genocide by moving to other countries.
This kind of culminated, I'm sure a lot of people are aware in the christ Church mass shootings and several mass shootings that followed in twenty nineteen in Pawe and Alpaso in the United States. The Buffalo shooting was related to all of this, you know. There have been a
couple others, one in Norway that got stopped. And when I was writing about this at the time, I used a term called the gamification of terror to describe the process by which young men socialized largely online in games, used things like Twitch in first person cameras to stream their massacres.
Right.
It was taking now all of these elements that had been present in the gaming that had kind of brought them together and putting it into these real world massacres, right because it made them in part, it made them more familiar. It made it feel like something that was more a natural outgrowth of what they were already doing,
and it was just something they understood. It was the way that they communicated, and it, you know, all of this was very surprising to people at the time, the idea that like someone would stream in first person video of them shooting women and children in a mosque. But if you followed these people, it really wasn't strange at all. You know, it was the only way things were ever
going to go. And that's kind of what's scariest to me about it, is like there's a lot more that's like that of like, well, we can all tell anyone who's following knows where this shit's going next, right, and there's just nothing to do. It feels like, but like watch the ship's head towards the rocks anyway, Miles, that's the episode that's part one.
How are you doing U as usual? When we end part one of a two part I feel optimistic. I think we're going to turn around. In part two, all the guys therapy and maybe and.
All the girls get to be not near any of those guys.
Yeah, and maybe in part two Robert will pronounce the guy's name Milo. We don't know.
It doesn't matter. Fuck that guy, Yeah, fuck that guy. I'm sorry, I don't care. Doesn't matter, It doesn't matter. I almost talked about Davis Areni today, but I decided not to. Maybe next time, friends, Maybe next time.
How's you have anything you want to plug?
Uh?
Check me out every day just lamenting about uh not lament. That's celebrating are the downfall of our society. And also funny stuff too on the daily Zeitgeist, which is fun with Jack O'Brien. Check that out.
Yeah, hell yeah, Well, anyway, we're done, go to help.
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