Alpha Male and Jew
The manosphere's antisemitic turn
A few years ago I attended a manosphere conference in Orlando, Florida. One of the masculinity gurus was up on stage doing his macho man routine. He talked of ‘alpha males’ and ‘patriarchs’ and there was some Jungian waffle about initiation rituals. Then out of nowhere he began talking about ‘the Js’ acting ‘behind the scenes’. He had sprinkled it into the speech like herbs on a pizza.
At the time I found it quite shocking, though looking back it seems entirely unremarkable, not least because such sentiments have become depressingly common in certain parts of the internet. ‘They [Israel] control the Matrix. They control narratives,’ the accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate told his livestream audience in August 2024. Following his arrest that the same month, Tate also retweeted a post by the American white supremacist Nick Fuentes. ‘Just 2 days after Andrew Tate said that “the Matrix” is really just the Jewish mafia – his house was raided and he was arrested again,’ said Fuentes in the tweet promoted by Tate. Moreover earlier that year Tate had urged his followers to question whether ‘they’ lied about the Second World War and whether the Nazis were really the ‘bad guys’.
Others in the manosphere have gone the same way. Dan Bilzerian, the Instagram playboy whose ostentatious lifestyle made him a hero to adolescent males of all ages during the 2010s, has turned into a full blown Holocaust denier. ‘6 million Jews did not die during WW2, they lied to you,’ he wrote on X in January 2025. ‘Stop calling “them” Globalists, Elitists, Frankists, Sabbateanists, Communists, Deep State, Zionists, Oligarchists, Rothschild Bankers JUST SAY JEWS...’, tweeted Myron Gaines, co-host of the popular Fresh&Fit podcast, in August 2024. Others in the masculinity huckster scene talk of being ‘Jewpilled’.
The 2000s manosphere was largely made up of pickup artists. They were misogynists to be sure and displayed a cavalier attitude toward women’s free will. They gave men scripted lines and sent them out to bars and clubs to practice on unsuspecting women. Their clients were told to ‘disregard’ what women said and to ‘push through’ what was characterised as ‘token resistance’. Yet by and large they were not political misogynists - they did not launch into jaundiced three-hour diatribes about a ‘gynocentric social order’. In fact, if women found one of their clients repulsive then it was his fault rather than hers. ‘She’s not a bitch,’ as probably the most famous pickup artist - Mystery (aka Erik von Markovik) - used to tell his students; ‘she’s just a bitch to you.’
A change in tone became evident during the 2010s when self-proclaimed ‘red pill’ gurus began to emerge. In their eyes she definitely was a bitch. Whereas Mystery had dressed flamboyantly and worn kohl eyeliner to the club as part of his ‘peacocking’ routine, the new brooms of the manosphere saw men in makeup as part of the problem: a sign that society had become irredeemably feminised and degenerate.
The basic premise of the red pill is that women run the world. It is therefore unsurprising that its devotees should be susceptible to other conspiratorial beliefs. I suspect this is partly down to what has been called ‘crank magnetism’: the tendency of delusional beliefs to attract each other and become magnetic. Each is a product of the same sloppy thinking.
The structure of manosphere misogyny is analogous to antisemitism. Women, like Jews, are depicted as opposites. They are inferior and superior; weak but powerful; governed by a fluctuating tide of emotion yet capable of crushing men under the jackboot of feminism.
One way to resolve such tensions is to view women as doing someone else’s bidding. And so they become marionettes, controlled by dark forces pulling the strings behind the scenes. That those behind the curtain should turn out to be Jews is less surprising when one considers the increasing overlap between the manosphere and the far-right. The Italian fascist Julius Evola in particular is influential in groups that truck in ‘warrior masculinity’. Evola believed that healthy societies were masculine whereas ‘decadent’ societies were feminine. His obsession with virility and manliness also fed into his prejudicial view of Jewish culture, which he considered to be overly intellectual and ‘effeminate’.
If a philosemite is an antisemite who loves Jews, then philosemitism is increasingly a cudgel with which to attack the left. Last year the clinical psychologist and self-help guru Jordan Peterson penned a strange op-ed for the Evening Standard - ‘my message to the Jews’ - in which he gave vent to this tendency. For Peterson, Jewish people are a job lot of serviceable stereotypes. After offering some qualified praise for their ‘high IQs’, Peterson lurched into a bizarre and patronising rant that contained a distinctly menacing overtone.
Wake up, my liberal Jewish friends. You simply cannot have your cake and eat it, too. Those you thought were your allies are the very vultures waiting hungrily for your carcasses to appear dead in the street - and we are perilously close to that, as I am sure you have become aware. If your community insists upon allying itself with the ideology that tears down success itself - that casts that success as exploitation, oppression and victimisation - you will definitely be the first heads on the chopping block.
Peterson has been known to write about women in a similar way, telling young men that the stereotypes they have imbibed about them are true while evincing faux-concern for the ‘chaotic feminine’ under his anthropomorphic gaze. Any counterargument to this Petersonian cant is usually foreclosed by the patina of ‘science’ (IQ and pseudo-intellectual personality tests) that he injects into his hifalutin prognostications.
Peterson’s purported qualifications when it comes to claiming a monopoly of insight into antisemitism are revealing in their own right. He claims to have been ‘watching the rising tide of antisemitism for about five years’ (a conveniently abridged timeframe: there were probably few ‘post-modern neo-Marxists’, Peterson’s bête noire, at the Unite the Right rally of 2017 in Charlottesville where they chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’). Predictably enough, right-wing antisemitism is waved away by Peterson as ‘ethno-nationalist trolling’, whereas its left-wing variant is described as ‘a foundational threat to all that is good, true, meritorious and beautiful’. As I think I said already, a cudgel.
The rest of Peterson’s self-proclaimed ‘expertise’ on antisemitism comes from the fact that some of his best friends are Jews - or to be precise, because he has an ‘entrepreneurial alliance’ with The Daily Wire, a conservative video channel co-founded by Ben Shapiro, ‘perhaps the world’s best known Orthodox Jew, and a good friend of mine’ (with this dismal formulation in mind, it’s worth remembering that just a few years ago Peterson was being lauded by conservative commentators as ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world’).
Donald Trump is another philosemite who values Jews only so long as they play their allotted role. ‘I’m a negotiator like you,’ he told an audience of wealthy Jewish donors in 2015. And yet when Jews are insufficiently deferential Trump speaks to them in a different key. During a 2019 speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Trump described Jews voting Democrat as a ‘great disloyalty’. Last year Trump was more explicit, telling the conservative podcaster Hugh Hewitt that Jews had been ungrateful to him: ‘Israel has to do one thing, they have to get smart about Trump because they don’t back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody - and it’s not reciprocal.’
Despite his avowed opposition to antisemitism in the pro-Palestine movement (there’s that cudgel again) Trump displays few of the same scruples when it comes to fraternising with antisemites who say flattering things about him. He famously invited Kanye West and Nick Fuentes to Mar-a-Lago in November 2022. He also welcomed a fitness influencer named Ian Smith to the resort the same year. A speaker on the ReAwaken America tour, a pro-Trump roadshow launched in 2021 by former national security advisor Mike Flynn, Smith has posted memes that cast doubt on the Holocaust and speculated that the ‘good guys’ didn’t win World War Two. He has also claimed that ‘all this woke stuff’ is ‘coming from the Jews’.
The leakage of antisemitic discourse into popular right-wing media is at this point undeniable. Joe Rogan has the largest podcast platform in the world with 11 million listeners. He recently had on a Holocaust revisionist who claims that ‘Israel did 9/11’. In March of this year, the comedian Theo Von, another major player in the male-dominated podcast circuit, invited on the antisemitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens (among a host of other wild claims, Owens has promoted the blood libel and described Lenin and Stalin as part of a ‘Jewish cabal’).
Regrettably it appears that large sections of the podcast circuit are favourably disposed to this kind of thing, a consequence perhaps of the fact that its leading figures wish to have it both ways - to supplant ‘legacy media’ without any of the corresponding sense of journalistic responsibility. Indeed, such ethical considerations are neatly sidestepped with the cynical claim that mainstream journalism is itself mere propaganda. This is effectively a licence to pump out whatever trash one likes under the guise of engaging in ‘honest conversations’. Rogan, who has a $250 million deal with Spotify, self-servingly still things of himself as a regular guy ‘just asking questions’.
As Chris Dillow has pointed out, this is why the idea of a ‘marketplace of ideas’ is such an unhelpful concept: in a well functioning market the purveyors of rubbish lose money and leave. But platforming lunatics (Holocaust deniers, vaccine conspiracists, 9/11 truthers) can be incredibly lucrative. One way to stand out and gain market share is in fact to tout oneself as a repository of ‘dangerous ideas’ that the corporate mainstream would rather you didn’t hear. The result is ‘nihilism dressed as curiosity’, as Mike Brock notes:
The theatre of neutrality performed by podcast hosts and commentators might create compelling content and build loyal audiences, but it doesn’t serve truth. In pretending that all perspectives deserve equal consideration, in refusing to make moral judgments about the ideas they platform, they aren't expanding discourse - they’re eroding the conditions that make meaningful discourse possible.
The credulous ‘curiosity’ of Rogan and co sits well with the fashionable cultural climate of ‘anti-elitism’ and ‘accessibility’. Listeners are served up a portmanteau of ‘independent researchers’ and ‘citizen journalists’ who share their audience’s defensive hostility toward ‘liberal’ education. They in turn reassure this audience that they too can grasp all of history and philosophy without ever having to undertake the formal learning required to gain mastery over either.
That antisemitism should readily find a ready audience in this world is hardly surprising. After all antisemitism is both anti-intellectual and pseudo-intellectual; ‘the stupid answer to a serious question’, as the political scientist Stephen Bronner has written; or for Jean-Paul Sartre, the purview of those who prefer to think of themselves as an ‘elite of the ordinary’. As Sartre writes of the attitude of the antisemite in Anti-Semite and Jew:
But the way is open to me, mediocre me, to understand what the most subtle, the most cultivated intelligence has been unable to grasp.
In an age when everybody wants the secret sauce - perhaps no-one more so than the defeated persons who believe their own intellectual pretensions to have been thwarted by malign elites - one begins to understand from where contemporary antisemitism draws at least some of its sustenance.
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