Return of the Planet of the Apes
The All-Boys’ Clubs of the Trumpocene
Harvard’s student paper The Crimson recently reported that a conservative debating club has quietly ejected all its female members, in violation of the university’s inclusivity rules governing on-campus clubs. The brightest of America’s bright lads didn’t exactly hang the “No Girls Allowed” treehouse sign on the door. No. In a highly unmanly avoidance of confrontation, they quietly stopped charging the female members for dues, then dropped them from the John Adams Society for nonpayment.
Should we care about a bunch of overprivileged conservative undergraduates at Harvard excluding women? In the context of this moment for American women, maybe yes. Besides forced birth, our sex-assault convicted president hired a roofie-rape accused Secretary of War, regularly insults women, and heads a government so predator-friendly it sprung rape-accused global misogynist influencers and brought them to Miami.
In response to the Harvard report, a leader of what passes for the manosphere’s culturati, publisher Jonathan Keeperman tweeted his support: “We stand with the members as they choose to run their private organization as they see fit, and support them as they become the ‘premier organization for the reinvention of man at Harvard Square.”
After laughing at the grandiloquence, we had to sit back and give that a think. What exactly is meant by “the reinvention of man” at Harvard Square or anywhere in America? And how might ejecting young conservative women from an Ivy League debating club advance that goal?
There is nothing inherently wrong with all-male clubs except that the exclusion of women from SOME of those clubs historically ensured exclusion from the networks that those clubs foster. Still today, most clubs that really matter in terms of power and money are already men-only, and mostly nameless. The history of women entering named all-male clubs and institutions in the last half century is well known. The bitter resentment that shift inspired was sub rosa until recently.
A shared dream connects all of this: disinterring Cro-Magnon man from the icy steppe, revivifying a preverbal manhood of hairy brutality, unfettered primal urges and presumably, bigger balls. The engineers of this resurrection are soft-pawed tech billionaires and their acolytes, like the bobblehead-doll male grifter influencers (we’ve covered them at the Freakshow before) and disgruntled Nazi-adjacent academics. Of course, their ideas are taking root among the undergrads at Harvard, Jeffrey Epstein’s greatest networking node.
Passage Press publisher Keeperman, likely a failed novelist, taught creative writing at UC Irvine. He found his life path publishing out-of-print early 20th century European fascists, the ravings of Curtis Yarvin, a formerly anonymous Twitterer who called himself Raw Egg Nationalist, and American eugenicists and racists. For years, Keeperman hid behind the online nom de guerre LØm3z posting race theory and antifa-paranoia while building a following that included JD Vance. When outed by the Guardian as a surfer dude-hot SoCal spoiled brat, he was so pissed he threatened to sue.
The OG theorist of reinventing manhood is Bronze Age Pervert, whose book shamed what he called the “bugmen” of modernity, finding them attenuated wisps of the Homeric age slave-owning, gods-offering, sword-wielding studs. Real life BAP, Costin Vlad Alamariu, is the PhD–blessed son of Romanian immigrants to America, by heritage accustomed to Slavic and Ottoman despotism. When he’s not uttering the n-word and vile nicknames for female genitals on he-man livestreams, he can be found online posting homoerotic black and white images of male bodybuilders.
To BAP and his legion of fans among the MAGAs, history’s arc bent tragically toward “feminization.” They blame us for the problem they cannot/will not name: the subjection of men by a system that serves bloated capitalist hogs, at the moment of the Silicon Valley variety.
The ultimate boys’ club is the coterie of simps and try-hards besotted with Musk and Zuck and Thiel and Sacks – men who, perhaps at some level knowing they were just lucky math nerds standing around the right labs when the sum of all human knowledge exploded into the digital age, are now obsessed with “masculine energy.” See for example the odious little Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who recently kicked off a Tweetstorm blaming “leftist schoolmarm leaders” for American violence and calling for more “masculine leadership,” including public hangings.
Over at the Pentagon, where the virtual No Girls Allowed sign was only partly taken down within the last generation, Pete Kegseth has nailed it up again. His first act in office included firing female commanders. Since then, he’s been erasing their names from public plaques and website histories here and abroad. Last fall, he gave a cringe-worthy speech at Quantico at which he promised a “return to the highest male standard” of fitness. He then hired one of his fellow war criminal cheerleaders, Iraq war vet Eric Geressy to “review the role of women” in the military. When a journalist reported on Geressy’s kinky Goodreads list (Asian wife-sharing and Asian “lady-men” – are these books to the highest male standards?), newly minted Pentagon “correspondent” Christofascist grifter/influencer Jack Posobiec was either dispatched or took it upon himself to launch a smear campaign against the journalist.
Down the social scale from conservative Ivy League clubs and BAPist DC, social media offers a plethora of men-only clubs for basement-dwelling incels, with perma-virgin Nazi Nick Fuentes, craven anti-female preachers like Joel Webbon, and of course, the Tate brothers. The Tates have initiated millions of young men into a club that aims to make rape cool again and in which females are involved only as things – servants or sex slaves. Their recorded talks are the radicalizing misogynist version of Osama bin Laden’s anti-western lectures.
The Trump administration sprung these dirtbags from Romania and flew them into a Miami condo last spring. No one has taken credit for that, but Trump administration counsel Paul Ingrassia, as the Tates’ U.S. lawyer, has published manifestos extolling Andrew Tate as the embodiment of western masculinity.
The Tates’ online boys club consists of a legion of male pubescents, incels and presumably older losers who think they might buy Maseratis with money earned by sex-trafficked women. For $99 a month, they can join Tate’s “Hustlers University” and earn a PHD – “Pimping Hoes Degree.” Rumble advertises it:“Stop guessing. Master female dynamics with Andrew Tate…”
Most boys’ clubs don’t have names – just member benefits. Remember Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale? Not long after he was sacked over mismanagement and financial improprieties, Mrs. Parscale called 911 – Brad was “irate and waving a gun.” The next day, pictures of an armed Brad in his underwear being tackled by cops, shackled, and shoved into a police car sobbing flooded the web. Off he went to involuntary commitment.
Brad now has reportedly cut a $6 million contract to run a pro-Israel influence campaign targeting congregants of U.S. megachurches. I have been wracking my brains to come up with a female analog to Brad Parscale – the “comebacks” of Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan? But they were only revivified by managers whose livelihood depended on them, whereas Parscale is an entrepreneur, a CEO, and a member in good standing of the eternal, no-name, no-girls-allowed boys’ club.
AUTHOR NOTE: Tune in this Thursday, December 18th at 1 PM ET for a live interview with author and recovered evangelical Christian, Andra Watkins, on how Christian nationalists view women, and how we see it applied everywhere from Erika Kirk to Scott Yenor and JD Vance.
Watkins is the NYT bestselling author of Not Without My Father: One Woman’s 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace and writer behind the Substack bestseller For Such a Time As This (formerly How Project 2025 Will Ruin YOUR Life).
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Let's zoom out a bit. No one around the world wants America in their club any more, and apparently the feeling is mutual. We couldn't care less about your silly internal squabbles now that your nation has checked out entirely from the real community of man.
Great line, Nina: "Lucky math nerds standing around the right labs when the sum of all human knowledge exploded into the digital age, are now obsessed with “masculine energy.” I also find myself deeply disgusted with the girls who have been allowed in the boy's club: Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Karoline Leavitt and almost everyone with a Mar-a-Lago face. Why have so many people ceded power and authority to baboons? When Charlton Heston finally returns in his 1970s vintage spacecraft, he'll be so pleased.