The Camps Promising to Turn You—or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male
Among the written works credited to Donald Trump is the foreword to a book from 2024 called “Alpha Kings.” The book’s author, Nick Adams, is a bearded and broad-faced former deputy mayor of a suburb of Sydney, where he tried and failed to get rid of the local pigeon population. In the foreword, Trump calls Adams, who is now an American citizen and an internet personality, “one of my favorite authors,” and praises his commitment to “fighting for the qualities that make alpha males so special.” Adams loves the restaurant chain Hooters, “ice cold domestic beers,” and belittling women. “Let me explain something to you, sweetheart,” one dialogue between Adams and a probably apocryphal woman, which he posted on X, begins. “I am an alpha male . . . I lead, you follow. You are the supporting cast, I am the main character.” In the book, Adams calls Trump a “study in peak alpha masculinity for the ages,” but “Alpha Kings” also has a larger agenda: “organizing thousands of alpha males in a way that hasn’t been done since Dwight Eisenhower assembled the troops to storm the beaches of Normandy in 1944.” His target readers are men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five who, Adams writes, “love America, love sports, have traditionally male interests and activities, and are sick of being told that their masculinity is toxic and that their generation will and should be led by women.” He offers them “Nick Adams’ Commandments for Alpha Males,” a list of forty-five (Trump, numerically) short dicta, including “Success is a low-maintenance woman, not just a hot one” and “Never apologize.” Adams does most of his lecturing on X, where he has more than six hundred thousand followers, but he also likes lecterns. In Washington, D.C., he warned one audience of Young Republicans, “It starts with the Fortnite controller and boneless chicken wings, and ends in gender pronouns and Communism.” Last year, Trump nominated Adams to become the U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia.
Trump was no doubt trolling the libs with this nomination. But the elevation of so-called alpha masculinity has not been incidental during his second term, which was midwifed in part by Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and lesser gods of the manosphere. Alpha-ness has become the official demeanor of American power. A few months before Charlie Kirk was killed, he visited Greenland with Trump, and subsequently said, of the President’s imperialist vision for the island, “It makes America dream again—that we’re not just this sad, low-testosterone beta male slouching in our chair.” Mark Zuckerberg recently reinvented himself as a leather-clad cage fighter, insisting that there isn’t enough “masculine energy” in corporate America. Zuck evidently can’t grow a beard, but Ezra Klein and Senator Chris Murphy have. There’s also the rise in facial plastic surgery for men—Elon Musk and John Mulaney are rumored to be among the recipients—seeking stronger chins. Penis implants have, well, risen. Trump’s Cabinet displays its alpha plumage, too: Pete Hegseth’s Crusade tattoos and “warrior ethos”; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s bench-pressing videos; Sean Duffy’s lumberjacking résumé; the mixed-martial-arts background of Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security. Even some of Trump’s female Cabinet members are cast this way. Tulsi Gabbard enjoys “Green Beret Tactical Challenges.” Linda McMahon, a former C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, is “very comfortable in a guy environment.” Recently, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, put agents through U.F.C. training, and Trump gave an endorsement of sorts to the influencer and boxer Jake Paul for political office, despite the fact that he’s not—yet—running for anything.
In the past several years, the phrase “alpha male” has seeped into the language around us, like the contamination of an underground aquifer. By the time former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars an “alpha male response,” I was using the term ironically. But there are plenty of American men these days who regard alpha masculinity—or “warrior mode,” or “modern knighthood,” or other such appellations—not ironically but aspirationally. There are now programs offering to help such men achieve these aspirations, or something close.
On a hot morning last August, I tailed a van speeding through the countryside of central Virginia. The vehicle contained nine blindfolded men wearing black, as they had been instructed to do. Each had paid three thousand dollars to take part in a three-day program called RISE, which stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution. It offers men an opportunity to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and, as its website puts it, “CHANGE YOUR STORY & UNF**K YOUR LIFE.” The van’s speakers played a high-volume mashup of construction sounds, Jordan Peterson lectures, Marine Corps drills, and mumbling voices. “All designed to keep them in the present moment and separate them from the life they were coming from,” Brendan King, RISE’s founder, told me.
The van’s first stop was a gravel lot off the Blue Ridge Parkway. After allowing a porta-potty “leak-out,” King ordered the blindfolded men to march down a trail, holding one another’s shoulders, for nearly a mile. Occasionally, King’s assistants, a pair of bulky guys with law-enforcement backgrounds, offered the stumbling line a corrective shove. Weekend hikers gave the group a wide berth. Among the sightless were Justin, a martial-arts instructor from the Seattle area; Adam, who owns a lawn-mowing business in Indiana and had lost a baby; Kevin, a people-pleasing I.T. salesman from Dallas; and James, an unemployed Army veteran living in Phoenix with his second wife. James broke down crying when King asked him why he was there. “A lot of reasons,” James stammered. “Blocks and barriers.” The men, ranging in age from twenty-nine to sixty-four, carried rucksacks containing the few items that they were allowed to bring. Sleeping bags were permitted, but not pillows or pads.
Eventually, King ordered them to stop and remove their blindfolds. The air was now cool and moist. They saw that they were standing at the midpoint of a tunnel carved into a mountain. “You see that light at the end of the tunnel?” King shouted, his voice echoing. The men squinted. “That’s where you’re headed. But you’ve got to go backwards first.” They put their blindfolds back on, turned around, and wobbled out of the tunnel.
In 1982, Frans de Waal’s book “Chimpanzee Politics” helped popularize the term “alpha male.” The book is an account of power struggles within a colony of male chimps at a zoo in the Netherlands. De Waal, a Dutch primatologist who taught at Emory University and was a director at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, challenged a number of assumptions about nonhuman primates. He noticed that the leaders of the chimps he studied were not necessarily the strongest or most intimidating but, rather, the ones who excelled at coalition-building. They kept the peace impartially, often by protecting underdogs when conflicts arose. De Waal called his alphas the “consolers-in-chief.”
It’s not clear how closely people read the book. In the nineties, Newt Gingrich handed out copies to freshman congressmen. “After that, the term ‘alpha male’ became very popular,” de Waal explained in a TED talk, a few years before his death. He continued, “On the internet, you will find all these business books that tell you how to be an alpha male. And what they mean is how to beat up others and beat them over the head and let them know that you are boss and ‘Don’t mess with me’ and so on. And, basically, an alpha male for them is a bully. And I really don’t like that.”
This was hardly America’s first brush with hypermasculinity. “The alpha male keeps returning as a heroic trope,” Michael Kimmel, a former professor of sociology at Stony Brook University and the author of “Manhood in America: A Cultural History,” told me. At the beginning of the twentieth century, men were increasingly working in offices, rather than in factories or on farms. Women joined them. “This was an ‘assault’ on masculinity,” Kimmel said. “People were freaked out that men were being feminized.” Scientists suggested gendered cures. In the eighteen-seventies, the physician Silas Weir Mitchell had begun advocating a “rest cure” for nervous women, sending them to bed and encouraging them to “live as domestic a life as possible.” Men, meanwhile, were told to act like cowboys, in what came to be known as the “West cure.” Theodore Roosevelt was prescribed this treatment, and later co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club and championed “rough-and-tumble” sports. The Boy Scouts and 4-H Clubs arrived in the early twentieth century, during what was later dubbed the golden age of fraternalism. More than a quarter of American men joined orders like the Knights of Pythias, and gyms grew in popularity. All of this, Kimmel explained, “was meant to help boys get away from female teachers, and, of course, Mom.”
After a great depression and two world wars, this culture began to shift. By the nineteen-fifties, efforts were under way to nurture traumatized young men who had served overseas. More public schools were built, and veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill. “We encouraged these men to move with their families to the suburbs, where they could have a little lawn and a barbecue,” Kimmel said. Another reorientation arrived in the seventies and eighties, in response to gay liberation, feminism, and greater workplace equality. In 1990, the poet Robert Bly published “Iron John: A Book About Men,” which spent more than a year on the Times best-seller list. “The grief in men has been increasing steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the grief has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored,” Bly wrote. The book spawned the “mythopoetic men’s movement,” which sought a return to a “deep masculinity” through all-male wilderness retreats and the use of Native American rituals. “Mythopoetic man,” though, wasn’t quite as catchy as “alpha male.” Kimmel thinks that George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore, in 2000, stemmed partly from this new dichotomy. “I remember Gore was called a beta,” Kimmel told me. “And Bush was alpha-male-ish.” The latter term, Kimmel came to believe, “means completely embodying the traditional notions of masculinity—the most important of which is being without apology.”
In 2022, the social scientist Richard Reeves published “Of Boys and Men,” which describes how men are falling behind in contemporary society. In the past forty years, men’s wages have decreased as a percentage of over-all family income, while broader wealth inequalities and job insecurity have grown. Girls now perform better than boys in high school and are more likely to enroll in college, setting them up for better careers. Men today are five times likelier than they were in the nineties to say that they don’t have any close friends. They are also much less likely to receive mental-health treatment than women, and four times more likely to die by suicide. “There are very good reasons for large numbers of young men to feel anxious, to worry about their future, including their relationships with women,” Raewyn Connell, a retired sociologist at the University of Sydney who is credited with co-founding the field of masculinity studies, told me. “That is perhaps what drives the circulation of the ‘alpha male’ idea.”
The alpha-beta framing now feels ubiquitous. A man in Maine recently filed a lawsuit alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated when he was told to stop calling attendees at school-board meetings “soft beta males.” Kimmel told me, “The tech bros and J. D. Vance fanboys and others seem to feel so put upon by wokeness, by political correctness, that they’re constantly being policed. The idea of being able to assert all of that and not have to apologize for being a man—boy, is that attractive to them.” Also attractive, Connell noted, is the business opportunity for “extracting money” and attention “from anxious young men.”
In 2008, Aaron Marino launched a YouTube channel called Alpha M. He was in his early thirties, broke, and the owner of a new camcorder, which he used to offer something that he hadn’t received in life: male guidance. “I didn’t care if you were gay or straight or what religious or political leanings you had,” he told me recently. “I just wanted to help you feel better about yourself.” Marino, who lives near Atlanta, built a following of millions of mostly young men who wanted to know “how to be a gentleman” and “what to do with butt hair.” He discussed sex, too. A recent Alpha M video reveals the “7 Everyday Habits KILLING your ‘Manhood’!”—Marino calls his penis Big Al—and cautions against erectile enemies like seed oils and screen time. All along, he told me, he has been trying to help create the “right kind of alpha male,” which he defines, generously, as “the best version of yourself you can be.”
During the pandemic, many of Marino’s subscribers left. “At my height, I had twenty-five million views a month,” Marino told me. “And that dropped off a cliff to, like, three million. I saw what was getting popular and what you had to say—and I just wasn’t willing to sacrifice my integrity.” Accounts run by male influencers like Andrew Tate, Andy Elliott, and Wes Watson were supplanting him. Watson, who spent nine years in prison for robbery, burglary, assault, and battery, offers the “unbreakable mind-set” to his followers on YouTube. He posts videos of his Bugatti, a romantic interest, and his buddies, most of whom, like him, have head tattoos and huge arms. “Show people that you’ve made a lot of money, have a hot girlfriend, drive a nice car, and there’s your following,” Marino told me. Also: post pejorative-laced challenges for your audience. “MEN are SOFT AF for ONE REASON!!” Watson wrote on Instagram recently. “THEY DON’T F*CKING Push Themselves Past Their COMFORT ZONE ANYMORE!!” (Last year, Watson was arrested again, for allegedly beating a man at a Miami gym where they were working out. He did not respond to a request for comment, but, in court filings, he describes the beating as “consensual.”)
Alpha-themed training programs have taken off. “It was easy when it was just hunting and living in caves,” one program’s website explains. “Now you have to compete with CEO, celebrities, plastic surgery, and some very expensive toys like Bugatti Veyron. However, in the midst of all that, some men stand out. . . . These are the alpha males.” Fourteen hours and fifteen hundred dollars later, that’s you. A four-day in-person program, in Austin, called Activate Your Alpha promised to “not only take you through the riggers [sic] of pseudo special operations training but also dive deep into the crevices of our own psyches as men.” Elsewhere, the alpha sales pitch is Biblically coded. Rise Up Kings offers a three-day “Awakening” event, in Texas and Florida, that “will transform you into the leader and the man of God you were created to be.” As with ads for many other such courses, the R.U.K. sizzle reel shows men rolling in mud, taking ice baths, and raising heavy objects in the air, like G.I. Jesus, as dramatic music plays. One R.U.K. grad says, “The old man that arrived here three days ago is now dead. And there’s a new man, there’s a king, that has risen.” Other programs sell teens on “Christ-like manhood,” which includes learning “basic auto repair” (two thousand bucks). The blog for the Art of Manliness has a primer on “How to Poop Like a Samurai”—“Legs free is good. Legs free and armed is better.” The Men of War Crucible offers to “forge modern-day warriors and restore the masculine warrior spirit,” as typified by the Knights Templar. (One industry observer told me, “They just beat the shit out of you for days on end. It’s alpha as fuck.”) Warrior Week advertises an acceptance rate similar to that of an Ivy League school. “You must FIND a way in,” the program’s site warns. I D.M.’d Warrior Week’s head coach—who calls himself “the Reverend of Truth” and has said, “Transformation is not theory, it’s war”—asking to visit a session. He called me “brother” in his response, which ended in a rejection. An automated message from another program, which also denied me, read “Thank You, Warrior.”
I had better luck with RISE. The program’s home page shows a man’s mud-flecked face, cast downward, above four short imperatives: “Build COURAGE. Earn CERTAINTY. Find BROTHERS. Become ELITE.” James, the Army veteran from Phoenix, had stumbled across it one night last June, while his wife slept. He was a chubby, mixed-race fifty-five-year-old with an earring. He wanted to be the man his wife deserved, he told me, but he was lonely and uncertain; though he’d shown bravery in combat, he didn’t feel brave anymore. Certainly not ELITE. He wanted to shed his skin. “I knew I couldn’t do it alone,” he told me. “So I’m sitting there going through the websites and looking and looking, but all I kept finding were these religious retreats. Then I saw the RISE website.” Two days later, he spoke with Brendan King, the program’s founder.
King, who is in his early fifties, is a former marine, a motivational speaker, and a mental-health and substance-abuse professional. Before launching RISE, in 2024, he coached at Warrior Week. He and I first communicated—King in ALL-CAPS text messages—last summer. He invited me to see the culmination of his program’s “full-spectrum transformation,” held at a wooded property that he owns in Virginia. In the two-month lead-up to the event, King explained, each participant answers daily prompts: “What are the biggest promises you have broken and what has that cost you?” “Write a ruthlessly honest letter to your father.” The men share their responses with one another, and with King, through voice memos. “It’s designed to truly open a man up,” he told me, “so when you get to Virginia we have all the pieces.” King keeps notes on each participant during the event, which begins with what he calls the “beatdown.”
The beatdown started with a low crawl up King’s steep gravel driveway. Relieved of their blindfolds, the men now wore heavy rucksacks filled with colored rocks representing their anger (red), guilt and shame (black), and sadness (blue). “Listen up,” King said, as they panted at the halfway point. “What are you learning?”
“Not to quit,” someone said.
“Teamwork,” another offered.
“What about you?” King asked James, who had been grumbling.
“It’s very easy to just quit—give up, say ‘Fuck it,’ ” James replied after a moment.
“What else in your life have you been close to quitting on?” King asked.
“Myself.”
“O.K., that’s pretty generic. Give me a thing. A specific thing.”
“I’m drawing a blank,” James said.
King looked around. “Who’s not fucking his wife? Is that you?”
“That’s me,” James finally said. “I’ve made excuses. I’ve allowed myself to—”
“Don’t get overly complicated again. What’s the reason? Is she ugly?”
“No.”
“Does she stink?”
“No. It’s me.”
“Is your dick not big enough?”
James paused. “Honestly, it doesn’t work,” he said. “I suffer from E.D.”
“O.K.,” King said, softening his tone. “Here we go.”
James started sobbing. “There’s nothing worse.”
“There was a time when I was younger when I couldn’t get it up,” King offered. “And it fucking embarrassed the fuck out of me.”
“I’ve been there,” another man said. Others nodded.
“I gotta take a fucking needle to my dick,” James went on. “There is no intimacy, no romance.” He stammered. “I can’t give her the things that she needs. And it’s demoralizing. I don’t feel like a man. So why would I be capable at anything else I do in life?”
“That’s why we’re here, brother,” King said. He addressed the group: “The gift that he’s getting right now is just knowing that other men are sitting here listening to him and saying, ‘Hey, we love you, bro. We get it.’ ” He said, “See your brother in his pain.”
Later, James told King that he had experienced horror in Iraq; he could still smell the burning flesh. He hadn’t told anyone about it. “My mom’s never been the type that really knew how to be emotional,” James said. “Growing up, if I was sad or upset, she always bought me stuff. And that’s what I always equated to happiness. So as an adult, when I was alone and depressed, I would just go buy me something.” He continued, “There was times where I was so alone and I felt like I didn’t have any human interaction. At nine, ten o’clock at night, I’d go to a Walmart, and I would just aimlessly walk, just to have other bodies around.”
Others spoke up, too. Justin, the martial artist, who has suffered from drug addiction, told King, “You’re trying to trigger us.” He was wallowing in a mud pit that the men, wallowing with him, had dug together. King was spraying them with a hose, and Justin blurted out, “My childhood was fucked.” King told him to explain. “My parents used to whup the shit out of me,” Justin said. “I watched my mom stab my dad. I watched my mom run over my dad with the car. I stabbed my mom with a needle when I caught her shooting up. I’ve been through so much pain.”
“What do you take away from it?” King asked. “What’s the gift in this for you?”
“There’s always gonna be suffering,” Justin said. “It’s where you put your fucking mind. And right now my mind is not here.”
“That’s why you got high, bro!” King said. “You’ve disappeared from pain your whole life. I want you to be present. I want you to feel the cold, feel the water, smell the mud, see the mud. So that the day comes and you go, ‘I don’t ever want to fucking go back through that again!’ ”
The physical trials of RISE brought to mind the Modern Day Knight Project, a controversial forerunner that took a more intense degradation-as-realization approach. The program, launched in 2019, cost eighteen thousand dollars and attracted men who had “totally stifled” their “alpha male and . . . haven’t had an example of an alpha male,” as Bedros Keuilian, its founder, has said. Keuilian, a stout, bearded fifty-one-year-old, founded Fit Body Boot Camp, a global personal-training franchise, in 2010, and now lives in Chino Hills, California. When he was six, his family moved from Armenia to the States, where, he says, he was a “fat kid” and a petty thief. He now describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” and has linked his work to the will of the divine; he has a million Instagram followers and a book, “Man Up: How to Cut the Bullshit and Kick Ass in Business (and in Life).” On one of his websites, Keuilian claims, “Every day over 2 million people use a product, service, or coaching program I’ve created, which gives me an incredible amount of happiness and significance.” He describes the Modern Day Knight Project in the parlance of sweary self-help hustlers: it helped men do “hard shit” and accept their “calling to greatness.” The Project’s marketing materials note, “Male chimps don’t accept disrespect, it’s not uncommon for one to kill another to defend his honor in the pack.”
The Project’s participants were instructed to fight one another and endure simulated drowning, among other humiliations and discomforts, while remaining awake for most of three days. In a 2023 blog post, a finance guy named Michael Ashcraft described it as a “75-hour men’s military Hell Week.” He hadn’t got beyond the bear crawls when he quit. “With muscles screaming, out of the bear crawl posture, I stood up,” Ashcraft wrote. “Looking at me with eyes of fury, my coach was livid: ‘Mike, get down and crawl!’ Nonplussed, I beckoned for the bell.” Ashcraft tapped out before being ordered to dig a grave, get inside a body bag, and consider his eulogy as instructors piled dirt on top of him.
The Project ended in September of 2024. Keuilian told me at one point that this was a result of Trump’s return and a diminished “attack on masculinity.” Another time, he said that it had become “too cost-prohibitive.” Also, a thirty-year-old Project participant named Richard Spoon had died after a trail run during the program. An obituary for Spoon, an electrical lineman in Westfield, New York, noted his devotion to his wife, his dog, and exercise. Spoon had seen an Instagram ad for the Project. Kaitlin, his widow, told me that the program had offered him a sense of purpose. Watching videos posted online during the event, though, she grew concerned by his obvious exhaustion: his legs looked strangely pale. “My husband took the whole ‘you can’t quit’ thing so seriously,” she said. “He wanted to be a better person so badly.” She filed a wrongful-death complaint against Keuilian, alleging negligence—there was no emergency medic present. She ultimately settled; Keuilian did not have to admit any fault. For his part, Keuilian blamed Spoon’s death on an enlarged heart—not his program—but noted that it was “heartbreaking.” He said, “A lot of people got hurt.” But nine men, he added, had told him that the Project had saved their lives. “We were touched by God for those five years,” he told me, proudly.
Keuilian more recently founded the Squire Program, which now trains teen-aged boys in six states. It is marketed as “a rite of passage for your son as he becomes a man”—or a “savage servant,” as Keuilian calls righteous men capable of ass-kicking. “Knights had squires that helped them prepare their armor, horse, and weapons for war,” Keuilian told me. “And the squires had the knights as examples of healthy masculinity.” Squire’s website portrays its work as essential to saving America: “The opposition is on a mission to weaken masculine societies and turn them into soft, confused, unsure, passive-aggressive, feminized betas.” It goes on, “Imagine how much easier it is to have greater control over a society when you have a country full of young men who are docile.” I found a YouTube review of Squire by an online observer named Charles White, Jr., titled “Father Son Alpha Male Bootcamp is Cringe.” White calls the program’s creators “scammers” who “prey upon desperate losers” and notes the site’s grammatical errors: “They just view proofreading as beta shit.” Keuilian subsequently copped to the bad grammar. But he did not apologize for “being mean, being loud, and being aggressive,” or for the program’s curriculum, which he calls “a metaphor for life.”
Early one morning, I visited a Squire session at a private gym across the street from a state prison in Chino Hills. It was still dark when we gathered. Keuilian wore a black Squire hoodie. He was joined by a couple of coaches, including Steve Eckert, a bald and bushy-browed former marine who functions as Keuilian’s “hammer.” I noticed a tattoo on his forearm that read “No Excuses”; a nearby wall was scrawled with the words “LIONS NOT SHEEP.” Before coming, I’d watched a 2021 video about the Modern Day Knight Project in which Eckert told Keuilian, “You’re almost racist if you’re a man these days.” Keuilian told me that Eckert, who “lost his shit on purpose” with adult participants as the Modern Day Knight Project’s “facilitator of suffering,” is more “tranquillized” for the Squire Program’s twelve- to seventeen-year-olds. Eckert had come with his homeschooled fourteen-year-old son, Tyson, who shook my hand while making penetrating eye contact. Tyson, who is training to be a U.F.C. fighter, was there to model manhood and sonhood for the aspiring squires. There were ten teen-agers who’d travelled from around the country with their dads. The parents had each paid nine hundred dollars; most had found Squire online. They all wore black-and-white Squire unis. Some sons looked stoked, others like hostages.
The day began with introductions in a garage attached to the gym. “Man, we’re just here to literally be intentional about getting him his manhood,” Chad, a dad from Dallas, told the room, gesturing to his gangly fifteen-year-old son, Will. Later, Will told me, “I’m mostly just here for my dad.”
Many of the fathers expressed a sincere desire to do better for their sons than their dads had done for them. Keuilian applauded this impulse. His father, a communist, had taught him Ping-Pong, he said, but “was very broke-minded.” At one point, a guest speaker named Keith Yackey, who describes himself online as an “Ex Pastor turned Sex Coach,” stood and asked, “How many of you guys want to grow up to be rich?” Some hands shot up. Others hesitated. “In our culture, they’re shaming you for wanting to be rich,” Yackey continued. “They shame you for wanting to be jacked and juicy. They shame you for wanting to have lots of sex and intimacy with your wife.” He went on, “When the culture is putting people like Harry Styles in a dress and on a magazine and young kids go, ‘I wonder if I’m a girl or not,’ we’re here to say, ‘Fuck that.’ ” Keuilian outlined for the group the “characteristics of a man,” at least according to the 2012 book “The Way of Men,” by Jack Donovan, who I later learned is a far-right “masculinist” and white supremacist who has argued that women should not have the right to vote. The core characteristics of a man, Donovan says, are strength, honor, courage, and mastery.
We assembled outside around a contraption that Keuilian described as a “bear trap from Alaska,” which was set to snap. “Life is full of bear traps,” he explained, noting, among other snares, “a little toot of coke” or a “red-haired girl named Kyla.” He triggered the trap with a stick, which broke in half. The dads and sons hustled to a nearby dirt patch. This was where the Modern Day Knight Project’s participants had once dug their own graves; you could still see the body-size depressions. Eckert instructed the dads and sons to run a few hundred yards with kettlebells, sledgehammers, and sandbags, then to smash open the sandbags. When they were done, Eckert declared, “Taking the heavy shit, still winning—that’s how you get the money, get the girl, get the fucking mansion and the car.”
Back inside: pullups and frog jumps. Eckert referenced “fruitcakes” and “pussies”—things to avoid being. A father lifted his son to help him complete a pullup. Another dad took a different tack, saying, “Let’s go, fat boy!” As the group hopped and grunted, Keuilian strode through the room with a video crew, shooting a Squire promo (two takes). “A father and son working together is a cheat code for life,” Keuilian told the camera.
Tyson Eckert, the fourteen-year-old, lectured about character, competence, confidence, capability, credibility, competitiveness, and courage. “You need to lift,” he told the class, displaying a shirtless photo of himself and a quote attributed to Socrates that extolled “the beauty and strength” of the male physique. Then it was off to a nearby public park for “jousting.” The boys donned headgear and faced off, one on one, with padded sticks. The coaches encouraged “kill shots” to the head. Each winner received a token, another metaphor. “Tokens mean putting food on the table for your family,” one coach said. I watched a small son get pummelled. “That was fun,” he said flatly when it was over. Heading back to the gym, one notably silent son told me that his father had made him come.
After a burrito lunch, and a peek at Yackey’s Porsche, Keuilian unrolled a jujitsu mat. “I didn’t think I’d be choking out my dad today,” Will, from Dallas, told me. Then there was an ice bath and an obstacle course scattered with barbed wire and nails. Keuilian had been talking up the bath all day. Each father and son shared a cattle trough, facing each other. As the timer passed seven minutes, Steve Eckert exhorted a whimpering young man to dunk his head underwater. In obvious pain, he complied.
Diplomas were distributed. Then a coach filmed testimonials. “Zac looked at me, and he was, like, ‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ ” a dad from Oregon said, referring to the ice bath. “We locked eyes and we exchanged a look that was, like, ‘You got this, bro,’ and we went back down under and we emerged again victorious, and that moment will be seared in my brain forever.” His son nodded. The dad declared, with boosterish enthusiasm, “Bring your sons. Turn them into men.” I asked a son—not his—if he would tell friends back home about Squire. Probably not, he said: “They might think it was weird.”
On the final night of RISE, after the participants peered into one another’s eyes around a campfire and shared what “power” they beheld, the men walked one at a time through the murmuring dark to a small clearing in the woods. A cracked mirror leaned against a tree. Before it, a pile began to form: the stones each man had carried for two days. One by one, they dropped their metaphorical anger, guilt, shame, and sadness and gazed into the glass. “He’s got some things to say to you,” King, standing nearby, told each man. “You’ve got some things to say to him.” Most of the men cried. “I hated what I was looking at,” James, the veteran, told me later. “I hated who I was. I hated all—just all the shit I’ve done. And that was me, I guess, in a way, getting out that last little bit of anger.” He went on, “I just told myself, like, ‘You are different. You’re not this bad person you always are trying to make yourself be—and you’ve got a lot to look forward to.’ ”
King had sold these men on something like a Very Tough Mudder, but it turned out to be more touchy-feely than that. Regardless, he assured me, the program “works for the guys who show up.” Other male-development programs make similar promises. Some likely do real harm. But I glimpsed a heartening shift in some of the men at RISE. King didn’t mention the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” from 1949, which argues that people need a familiar language with which to work through their problems on their own terms. But it seems clear that some men, turned off by New Agey lingo or the sterile setting of traditional therapy, may need the bro talk and the mud to begin the work of confronting deeply uncomfortable feelings.
The next morning, the men hiked up to a grassy mountaintop to watch the sun rise. King had saved this view, and their first decent cup of coffee, for the end of the course. The men were each journaling when I approached. “At first, it was, like, ‘I’m weak. I’m the worst out of the group,’ ” James told me. “And then I realized I needed that to show me that I can trust in other people.”
Adam, the youngest participant, sat close by. “When my daughter passed away, she was two months old, and I never got to spend more than a few hours with her,” he told me, staring at the horizon. “I’ve carried that guilt for a very long time, and I can’t do it anymore. My kids deserve a better father than that.” His eyes were wet.
One man was missing from the mountaintop. The night before, Justin, the martial artist, had thrown off his pack during the final ruck. He’d demanded, and received, a ride to his car. I ran into him at the airport the next day. “It was so degrading to, like, lay in the mud and spread mud all over yourself and then clean yourself off with baby wipes and get sprayed with the hose all over your face. I wanted to fight, honestly. I was pissed,” he said. “I could have stayed at home and had my wife spray me down with a hose and tell me what I was doing wrong.” He shook his head. “It’s, like, ‘Carry this log all day, and then when you get rid of the log tell me how you feel.’ Of course you’re gonna feel like a weight is lifted off you.” He later got a refund.
Trump’s nomination of Nick Adams as Ambassador caused protests in Malaysia, and ultimately lapsed in the Senate. Adams claimed that, in fact, he’d been “promoted.” Earlier this month, the State Department announced that he is now the “Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values.” He continues his alpha shtick. When the U.S. men’s team defeated Canada for an Olympic gold medal in hockey, Adams declared on X, “Canadian beta males will be celebrating their silver medal with a Taylor Swift singalong, but only after the land acknowledgement.” He received eight thousand likes for this. I wanted to ask Adams if it was lonely in his man cave while he came up with this stuff, but he didn’t respond to my e-mail.
King sees rise as the next step in the evolution of the alpha-male ideal. “I attempted suicide at seventeen, walking into traffic,” he told me. “I was a mess—drugs and alcohol, the whole nine. I thought that becoming alpha—that tough, badass guy—was going to be the thing. And I ruined my first marriage because of it. In my second marriage, I realized the man that my wife wants to see, it’s not that man. She wants the man that can sit there and hold space.” He’d recently landed on a term for this man: “sovereign male,” someone who “takes the best parts of the alpha and the best parts of the beta.” King acknowledged that getting there need not involve crawling through mud. “You can do therapy, yoga, microdosing, ayahuasca—I’m sober, so that’s not for me,” he said. “But real men need to learn to connect and console.”
Six months after the RISE event in Virginia, most of the participants were still in touch, texting frequently in a group chat. “Man, I’ve got fifty unread messages today,” James told me recently. He felt a degree of change. His wife had told him that he was more present. “She says I’m getting softer, too,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing.” ♦