Monday, June 26, 2023

RFK JR. ENTERS THE MANOSPHERE

This obviously wasn't the biggest news event of the weekend, but I think there's more to it than what you see on the surface:
A clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. working out at an outdoor gym while shirtless has gone viral on Twitter, being viewed more than 10.5 million times so far.

"Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!" the Democratic 2024 presidential hopeful tweeted on Sunday, who also posted footage of himself completing nine push-ups.
RFK Jr. certainly isn't the first electoral challenger to portray himself as healthier and more vigorous than an older incumbent. But because he's been praised and promoted for years by Steve Bannon, and is in a mutual admiraation society with Tucker Carlson, I suspect that this is intended as outreach to the "manosphere" -- the disaffected young men Bannon tried to reach during the "alt-right" days at Breitbart, and Carlson was trying to reach with his Fox "documentary" The End of Men.

Separated at birth?


I wrote this about the manosphere in April 2022, around the time Carlson released The End of Men:
Remember 2017, when much of the concern talk about Trumpism focused on the "alt-right," a movement that had been given a platform at Breitbart by Steve Bannon before he moved into the Trump White House as an adviser? The alt-right evolved from online and other communities focused on masculinity. In The Atlantic in 2017, Angela Nagle wrote,
For eight years, I have been closely observing an array of rightist forums as they have followed a strange and marked evolution. Initially, at least, taking the red pill was more closely associated with antifeminist and men’s-rights forums like Reddit’s /r/TheRedPill, which launched in 2012, than with the nativist or racist corners of the online right. TheRedPill was infamous for its mix of virulent misogyny and retrograde dating advice. The young men who frequented it obsessed over the male pecking order, evolutionary sexual psychology, and the decline of Western men....

Over time, this online “manosphere” would embrace an increasingly hard-line antifeminism, one that began to shade into broader critiques of a fraying social order.... The Proud Boys, a group founded by the former Vice impresario Gavin McInnes to fight the forces of emasculation ... blended sexism and creeping nativism.
... Steve Bannon's idea, in the run-up to the 2016 election, was that embracing ideas like this under the alt-right banner could win converts to his brand of politics: young men who might otherwise vote Democratic, or not vote, but would now back Donald Trump. Carlson clearly believes that project can be revived, shed of the alt-right label.
And so we got a Carlson video promoting testicle-tanning, the consumption of raw eggs, and other bizarre practices, all in the name of masculinity. And now a buff RFK Jr. is exercising shirtless, in the hope that young males hoping to avoid some form of feminization will see him as a pro-masculinity warrior and turn out in Democratic primaries to vote against Biden.

Oh, here's another Kennedy video, this one posted by a well-known right-wing influencer:


Mike Cernovich is usually identified as one of the chief promoters of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, but he's also the author of the book Danger & Play: Essays on Embracing Masculinity. From his description of the book:
In the Essays on Masculnity, you’ll be exposed to what most consider a radical and outrageous way of living your life. Namely, you’ll learn how to shed slave emotions like guilt and shame to begin – perhaps for the first time ever – living life on your terms.... Cernovich does not write for the slow or the weak. He writes for independent men (and even some women) who aren’t afraid to have their ideas about the world challenged.
How did Cernovich get that clip in the first place? The fact that he's the one who posted it tells me that this is part of the right-wing project, and that it's a bid for the same audience the Proud Boys and the Carlson film were meant to reach. It's not just Kennedy showing us he's younger than Biden.
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