Falling Into Weimar
And: Field Notes From The Far Right; A Love Letter To Le Creuset's Dutch Oven
I commend to you the Substack of my friend Eddie LaRow, a young Christian book editor who is also a hell of a writer. Today he has a Substack about “mogging,” or “looksmaxxing” — a new practice adopted by a subculture of young men on the hard right. When Eddie sent me the link to the piece, he commented, “We’re not walking into Weimar, we’re falling into it.”
From the piece:
Michael Knowles’ recent interview with Braden Peters—better known as Cavicular—was one such performance. Peters tells Knowles that he began taking testosterone at fourteen (he’s nineteen now), claiming he was simply placing himself “where we…evolutionarily should be” given declining testosterone levels across generations. His justification? “Ambitious young men want to improve themselves.”
When I heard this, what became evident was how young men are seeking community and meaning online. There is something they are seeing in the mirror or online that is driving them to want to be different. Peters seems to be one such case. He was dissatisfied with himself—with his appearance. At one point in the interview, Knowles points out that this change in identity is not much different than what motivates transgender ideology, to which Clavicular offers a laugh and half-heartened attempt at engagement with the critique. But more than being dissatisfied with himself, he has a misconstrued notion of what makes “success.” Peters views success in purely temporal categories: high paying job, attractive girl, an online following, independence from society and authority, breaking free from the generational shackles, the list could go on and on.
More:
Peters highlights several areas of improvement on the quest to gigachadom: physical, mental, spiritual. But for him, all of these collapse into one metric: looks. “Looks,” he says flatly, “is just the most important metric.” Metric for what? Well, in this case, a metric for status and self-worth. Peters spends a good portion of the interview explaining his transition from a regular boy to the definition of looksmaxxing.
Looksmaxxing is an online movement that promotes maximizing one’s own physical attractiveness. There are varying levels of “maxxing” including softmaxxing, which is done by “mewing” or oral posture training. Mewing is a facial strength exercise whereby one places their tongue on the top of their mouth and applies pressure in an attempt to modify the structure of the jaw. Hardmaxxing, as in the case of Cavicular, is more drastic and often involves the use of outside means of improvement such as surgical enhancements or the use of anabolic steroids (“roidmaxxing”).
One more:
The conversation then went into darker waters. The vocabulary reveals the ideology. Peters calls VP Vance “subhuman” while praising Gavin Newsom as a “mogger”—slang for, in Peters’ words, “someone who is just like, I would say, the peak human.” To “mog” someone is to dominate them in “looks…wealth…and status.” At one point, Peters offers a physiognomy assessment of Sydney Sweeney, analyzing her “recessed infra orbitals and recessed upper maxilla” before rating her “average to above average.” This quick physical categorization, almost medical in nature, gets to the root of the issue: disconnecting the human person from their being created in God’s image. The spiritual, a point that Knowles constantly tried to steer the conversation back to, was absent. There is a latent nihilism in this exchange. Knowles kept trying to bring the conversation back to meaning, and Cavicular, in a joking nonchalant demeanor gave the impression that nothing matters — only the rugged individual, the fleshly person staring back at us in the mirror.
This is where the manosphere’s obsession with “looksmaxxing” reveals its true nature: an attempt to flatten human beings into purely physical specimens, sorted and ranked by facial structure and biological markers. In some ways this is a grasping at simplicity in a digital age that offers anything but. Young men are grasping for a way to find meaning in a society that lacks it.
Read it all — there’s lots of really smart analysis there. LaRow ends by talking about visiting the US Holocaust Museum, and seeing an exhibit about Nazi obsession with physiognomy — that is, the way people look as a guide to their worth as human beings. To call VP Vance “subhuman” because of his looks is straight out of the Nazi playbook.
You’ll probably say, “Looksmaxxing? Never heard of it. Must not be a thing.” Readers, that’s just it: many of you are like me: of an older generation, one that is not at all aware of all the things going on with Gen Z. Attention must be paid. Note well that this movement, if that’s what it is, is not about simply trying to improve yourself — get in better shape, dress better, groom yourself more fastidiously. There’s a strong ideological component to it, and the ideology is very dark. “Subhuman”? Really?
Really.
Braden Peters is a handsome man. Yet he is deeply dissatisfied with the way he looks, and tells Knowles that in two weeks, he’s going to have “double jaw surgery”. He also said he hit himself in the head with a hammer to make his bones grow back stronger. I don’t think any but a small number of young men would become as extreme as this guy. But the fact that this is a Thing at all is a sign of something deeply unwell in American society.
Field Notes About The ‘Far Right’
On the long flight back across the ocean, I read a second book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field. Field is a liberal, so I knew it would be critical, and that some of my friends would be in it (hey, I even make a few brief appearances, though more as a mention than a criticism), but I think it’s important to read in a balanced way, to see how the other side sees us.
As expected, it is highly critical, and in my view particularly unfair to the NatCon movement, and to Christopher Rufo. Still, I found it worth reading, because many of the things she brings up really are problems with the MAGA New Right — things I need to think about. I don’t think she was fair in some cases, but then again, as a bona fide liberal, she has her own biases, for which I adjusted. And credit to her, when she agreed with this or that figure, she would say that this or that idea is good, or that he points to a problem liberals ignore.
I’m not going to focus primarily on my complaints about the book, but about what good things I learned from it, or at least were challenged by.
