Social media, as frequenters know, is rife with a certain kind of male personality. Many of them are successful, flashy, well-built “gymfluencers” constantly preaching the importance of consistent exercise. Others lack a knack for bodybuilding but are far from wanting for ostentation and preachiness. What they share is an emphasis on the “alpha male” mentality and sometimes the “sigma grindset,” two states of mind centered on an obsession with hard work, status, and power. As in most cases, power comes with a price, and the power sought by these personalities comes at the expense of basic human decency.
Representatives of this class are ever-expanding. Among the most popular are brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, and Myron Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl) and Walter Weekes of the Fresh and Fit Podcast. Though he’s far from a bodybuilder and doesn’t echo as much “alpha” rhetoric as his ideological peers, Dave Portnoy and his employees at Barstool Sports fit this bill as well. But what exactly, you might still be wondering, do they all have in common? Rampant misogyny and racial prejudice, to begin with. Except Portnoy, who is Jewish, there’s also a strong antisemitic streak. Hate preaching of this kind (to audiences of mainly teenage and twentysomething males) defines and consistently benefits all of their careers.
What’s worse, the influence of the Tate brothers and Barstool Sports is even felt on Capitol Hill. Evidence points to the Trump administration’s involvement in the termination of a travel ban that restricted the Tates to Romania, where they were facing charges including rape and human trafficking. Portnoy wrote in 2015 that he was “voting for Donald Trump…I don’t care if he’s racist. I don’t care if he’s sexist. I don’t care about any of it.” His especially detestable endorsement spawned an army of spiteful, Trumpian young men so prominent in contemporary sociopolitical life that their movement was awarded its own name: Barstool conservatism.
What is the allure of such vindictive patterns of thought? Why are the young boys and men of the Internet so drawn to casual, careless hatred? The answer, I find, is in the way that hatred is presented to them. The Tate brothers and Portnoy package it in opulence and social standing. The former are known for their showy, high-rolling lifestyles, while the latter is worth over one hundred million dollars and boasts that his status renders him “uncancellable.” Fresh and Fit refers to itself as a “self-improvement podcast,” essentially promising its impressionable listeners that anything is possible once you stop respecting women and racial minorities.
What these personalities’ audiences fail to grasp is that the trappings of opulence and status can never offer them anything material. Casual immorality and prejudice cannot make wealth or success more attainable for them. In fact, it’s only the original distributors of this hate who stand to gain anything at all from passing it along. Self-improvement and success, in reality, are best suited to the independent and open mind—not the closed, callous, unconcerned one.
Featured image/photo courtesy of Erik Mclean on Unsplash.