Fresh Air Inside the training camps for “alpha males”
34 snips
Mar 31, 2026 
Charles Bethea, New Yorker writer who investigated alpha-male camps, describes mud, ice baths, and the loneliness driving men toward performance. Maureen Corrigan, book critic and literature professor, gives a brisk review of Tana French’s The Keeper. They discuss social media influencers, therapeutic rituals turned macho theater, political posturing, and the cultural currents fueling a resurgence of hypermasculinity.
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Nick Adams Turned Parody Into Political Influence
- Charles Bethea found Nick Adams on X promoting 45 alpha commandments and celebrating Trump as the "peak masculinity" exemplar, which helped Adams attract hundreds of thousands of followers.
- Adams' spectacle (steak, eggs, naked cold plunges) morphed from parody into earnest performance and led to formal political appointments and influence.
Blindfolds Mud Crawls And A Cry In The Woods
- Charles Bethea attended a RISE weekend where men were blindfolded, driven into the woods, and put through a Marine-style "beat down" that included low-crawling and group confrontations.
- During the event Brendan King asked an unemployed veteran about erectile dysfunction, prompting the man to cry and others to share, revealing genuine loneliness beneath the macho ritual.
Father Son Squire Day And Sloppy Ideological Sourcing
- Bethea attended Squire, a father-son program in Chino Hills where fathers paid about $1,000 for a day of physical challenges and ideology framed as correcting 'feminized betas.'
- The founder Bedros Kulian references The Way of Men without acknowledging its author's extremist views, exposing a pipeline from self-help to radical ideas.
