Manosphere
The online ecosystem of masculinity-crisis content, “red-pill” ideology, pick-up artistry, and anti-feminist commentary; amplified into mainstream GOP media by Tucker Carlson’s “The End of Men” documentary (October 5, 2022); part of the broader Hard Right ideological current that converged with the New Right during the Biden years
What It Is
The Manosphere is a loosely connected online ecosystem centered on claims about a “masculinity crisis” in contemporary Western society: collapsing testosterone levels, declining male achievement, male alienation, anti-male bias in education and law. Figures include Raw Egg Nationalist (anonymous Twitter/X account), Bronze Age Pervert (BAP; Costin Alamariu), and various “red-pill” accounts.
The ideological range is wide — from mainstream fitness culture to explicitly white nationalist content — but the common thread is the claim that liberalism, feminism, and “woke” culture have emasculated Western men, and that restoration requires a return to masculine virtues and hierarchy.
Raw Egg Nationalist (REN)
Raw Egg Nationalist is an anonymous Hard Right Twitter/X figure, publisher of Man’s World magazine. He appeared in Tucker Carlson’s “The End of Men” as the “spiritual leader” of the “bro scientists,” delivering a monologue about “soy globalism” — the claim that globalists are deliberately sickening people through food and chemicals to control them. “The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed and isolated, the better to control you and to milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you. That’s soy globalism in a nutshell. Own nothing, live in the pod, eat the soy.”
REN is also the author of Eggs Benedict Option (2022) — a play on Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option — about Russian household dacha gardening as a countermeasure to globalist food systems. The book invokes the “Planetary Health Diet” promoted by “our globalist overlords” and subscribes to the thinking of Aleksandr Dugin. Despite its wholesome community-gardening surface, a deeper look reveals REN is “tightly ensconced in the world of white supremacy, ethnic nationalism, and neo-fascism.”
REN publishes with Antelope Hill Publishing — a small fascist publishing house in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that publishes Goebbels’s novel Michael, Testament of a Russian Fascist, and Richard Walther Darré’s A New Nobility of Blood and Soil (described as “foundational to the National Socialist worldview”). Hitler birthday discount code: “birthday boy.” Antelope Hill has been called “openly fascist” and “a white supremacist publishing company.”
Tucker Carlson’s “The End of Men”
Tucker Carlson’s documentary “The End of Men” (Fox Nation, October 5, 2022) brought Manosphere ideology into mainstream GOP media. The documentary’s opening montage juxtaposed JFK fitness rhetoric with images of Biden stumbling, overweight bodies, polluted water, and Senate Democrats kneeling for George Floyd — overlaid with the slogan “HARD TIMES MADE STRONG MEN / STRONG MEN MADE GOOD TIMES / GOOD TIMES MADE WEAK MEN / WEAK MEN MADE HARD TIMES.” The documentary featured “infrared ball tanning” (widely mocked) and claimed testosterone levels in American men were “collapsing.”
The documentary also featured credible material — Dr. Linda Birnbaum (former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) discussing endocrine disruptors and corporate regulatory capture. Carlson then hyped her findings in ways inconsistent with his other programming (other “Originals” episodes defended wind farm opposition and green energy skepticism). “There is no reason to believe that Carlson would have been talking about endocrine disruptors had it not allowed him to use that science to stir up a panic about testosterone levels, declining manliness, and the end of human civilization.”
Field reads the documentary as a tipping point: the moment Manosphere ideology went mainstream within GOP media, merging with Great Replacement anxiety, 2020 election denialism, and anti-left culture war.
The Dimes Square Scene
The Hard Right’s aesthetic and the “dirtbag left” found a meeting point in the Dimes Square scene in Lower Manhattan. In 2020 the area gained notoriety for edgy countercultural writers bucking pandemic restrictions. By 2021 it featured an “antiwoke” transgressive film festival (New People’s Cinema Club, October 2021), funded by Peter Thiel, with a Red Scare interview of John Waters. Curtis Yarvin was reportedly a fixture. The scene included MAGA Republicans, cynical left-wing aesthetes, “canceled” heterodox thinkers, and radical Catholics.
The Red Scare podcast (Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan) reviewed Bronze Age Mindset in 2022, expressing fascination with its aesthetics while “fully acknowledging its latent fascism and hard-core racism.” They later had BAP on for a three-hour interview. BAP to Red Scare: “I talk to people from all walks of life who will listen to you at so called highest levels of American society and they love you.”
August 2022, the NYT published an op-ed by First Things editor Julia Yost titled “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” detailing Catholic strains in Dimes Square. Nekrasova described herself as “Catholic like Andy Warhol.” August 17, 2023: Ahmari hosted the Tyranny, Inc. launch at Sovereign House (Dimes Square underground venue); Bhaskar Sunkara (president of The Nation, founding editor of Jacobin) cohosted.
Field: the Red Scare podcasters’ flirtations with Hard Right figures “seemed at the time like a high-water mark of the left-to-right pipeline.” The more extreme the right became, the more appealing it became to parts of the far left that were already estranged from liberal identity politics.
Relationship to the New Right
Sohrab Ahmari was the only significant New Right commentator to directly attack the Hard Right and Manosphere figures in writing, calling Raw Egg Nationalist, Bronze Age Pervert, and L0m3z the “Unabomber Right” in The New Statesman (2023). Patrick Deneen warned against Bronze Age Pervert in public talks but did not write against him. The rest of the New Right largely ignored or implicitly tolerated the Hard Right’s extremism.
Cross-References
- Tucker Carlson — “The End of Men” documentary; platformed REN
- Hard Right — the broader extremist current of which the Manosphere is a part
- Costin Alamariu — Bronze Age Pervert; the Manosphere’s most intellectually pretentious figure; connected to REN
- Sohrab Ahmari — called them the “Unabomber Right”; the exception who fought back
- Great Replacement Theory — adjacent ideological current (demographic/fertility anxiety)
- Peter Thiel — funded New People’s Cinema Club in Dimes Square
- Curtis Yarvin — Dimes Square fixture
- IM-1776 — Hard Right magazine in the same aesthetic ecosystem as Man’s World