Everyone got a good laugh back in April when Tucker Carlson released the trailer for his pseudo-documentary, “The End of Men,” which featured men tanning their testicles with what looked like a car charger and hunky muscle-bound weightlifters gazing at each other homoerotically while pumping iron. The ridicule that erupted on social media in response seems to have affected the film’s release; Carlson suddenly stopped promoting it, with a promise of a later release.
Carlson finally did so this week, streaming “The End of Men” on Fox Nation, and has been promoting it on Fox News via his nightly program. The “documentary” remains as absurd as ever, but it’s also become clear that it revolves almost entirely around the conspiracy theories promoted by a man who goes by the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist, based on his habit of consuming over 30 raw eggs daily, which he does as part of a diet he says will combat the “globalists” trying to control the world. What Carlson doesn’t tell his audience is that Raw Egg Nationalist is deeply enmeshed with racist white nationalists, including a publisher who specializes in reissuing old Nazi texts.
The identity of Raw Egg Nationalist, who speaks with a British accent, is currently unknown. But he has built a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube while promoting his theories about “soy globalism” attempting to control the population through diet. He touts pseudoscience to his followers, urging them to consume large amounts of raw eggs—called “slonking”—and uncooked foods, including meat, as a key to resisting their “tyranny.”
Before he turned up in Carlson’s pseudo-documentary, he had been featured on Infowars’ War Room with Owen Shroyer promoting the same claptrap. In addition to the underlying antisemitism of his rants about “globalists,” he regularly refers to “the Great Reset,” a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theory concocted by COVID denialists and promoted heavily by Infowars’ Alex Jones, claiming that these “globalists” are using vaccines and health concerns to enslave the world. “Great Reset” theorists frequently use antisemitic themes to promote their claims.
“The enemy today is what I like to call soy globalism and the globalist aim is to destroy nations and local communities, and they do this by isolating and sickening the individual especially through food but also through so-called medicine and all the dreadful chemicals we're exposed to on a daily basis,” he told Shroyer. “Globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed, and isolated. The better to control you and to milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you. That's the Great Reset in a nutshell. Own nothing. Live in the pod. Eat the soy.”
He reiterated these claims in Carlson’s pseudo-documentary, and in his appearances this week on Fox News:
TUCKER CARLSON: If the bro scientists have a spiritual leader, it would be a man who calls himself Raw Egg Nationalist. Here's his message.
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: The enemy today is what I like to call soy globalism. The globalist aim is to destroy nations and local communities, and they do this by isolating communities and sickening through food and also through so-called medicine. And all the dreadful chemicals we're exposed to on a daily basis. The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed, and isolated. The better to control you and to milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you. That's soy globalism in a nutshell. Own nothing. Live in the pod. Eat the soy.
The best response to this is a strong politics of nationalism. The nation is only as strong as the individuals who make it up. And that's where raw eggs come in. Eggs are a superfood packed with protein, fats, vitamins, minerals and anabolic cholesterol, the absolute opposite of the disgusting rubbish that globalists want you to eat. Eggs are cheap. You can’t patent an egg. By making the individual strong, you make the nation strong.
Carlson repeated that final line in a tweet promoting the interview.
“The End of Men” is devoted mostly to exploring the ideas of “bro scientists”—a movement led by non-scientists who embrace New Age-ish pseudoscience—such as Raw Egg Nationalist. Largely incoherent, it explores how modernity has ostensibly rendered men impotent with lowered testosterone levels and sperm count.
It features footage of muscle-bound men lifting weights in the Texas desert and “slonking” with great gusto. It also features other “Great Reset” promoters such as alt-right troll Mike Cernovich, who tells Carlson’s viewers that “most doctors aren’t real scientists.” Anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has used antisemitic rhetoric while leading the resistance to COVID vaccines—is also featured.
Carlson neglects to describe Raw Egg Nationalist’s extensive associations with white nationalists and the far right. He has published several books, including a text about bodybuilders and a recipe book for raw eggs, as well as his Raw Egg Nationalism in Theory and Practice. Another book, titled The Eggs Benedict Option, explores the effects of the “globalist plan for food” and their “preparations for a new worldwide diet.” It features a foreword by prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist Noor Bin Ladin.
All of these books, as Jared Holt of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue points out, are published by Antelope Hill, a Pennsylvania-based house whose catalogue is entirely comprised of far-right texts, particularly translations of historical works by Nazis and fascists of the early to mid-20th century. It also publishes original works by contemporary white nationalists and neofascists.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog exposed Antelope Hill in an in-depth report earlier this year. “Since 2020, Antelope Hill has profited from hate by translating historical works by 20th-century Nazis and fascists, offering a publishing platform to contemporary white power propagandists and shipping books around the world using selling platforms including Amazon,” it reports.
Raw Egg Nationalist has also propounded on the purported decline of testosterone levels and sperm count in men in The American Mind, a publication of the far-right think tank the Claremont Institute, which has descended into Trumpian extremism over the past five years; other pieces in the same publication have extolled the virtues of proto-fascist political violence and dispensing with traditional conservatism.
The same week that Carlson promoted him, Raw Egg Nationalist also showed up as the guest on the podcast of Lauren Southern, a well-known white nationalist who has marched with the Proud Boys, and was a leading participant in the effort by European far-right Identitarians to prevent refugees from Syria reach European shores.
At the end of that interview, Raw Egg Nationalist explains what’s going on in the scene in Carlson’s film with the man tanning his testicles on an infrared unit:
There was a study done in the 1930s which showed that sunlight exposure on different parts of the body stimulated testosterone production by varying amounts, and that sunlight exposure to the testicles stimulated the most testosterone production—something like a 200 percent testosterone increase. So that’s basic what the ball-tanning thing is about, exposing the ladic cells in the testicles, which produce testosterone, to particular frequencies of light which basically energize the cells and, the idea is, make them stimulate more testosterone production. And anecdotally, people seem to feel good about it.
In reality, of course, this kind of pseudoscience is not only bogus, but the effects of this treatment—called “red light therapy”—are more likely to have the reverse effect. The therapy is mostly used for certain dermal treatments, but there has never been a study of its ability to increase testosterone. Doctors says its use on testicles could actually lower your testosterone by warming up the genital area.
“The risks of it come with temperature changes as you elevate the temperature of the scrotum. If there is a temperature increase, sperm production will diminish, testosterone production will diminish, so there's that potential,” Amin Herati, M.D., director of male infertility and men’s health at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told GW Medical Faculty Associates.
“I think the biggest risk of testosterone therapy that I worry about with these guys ... is that it can cause you to be infertile,” warns Jesse Mills of UCLA’s School of Urology. “Let’s say that testicular tanning does actually improve your [testosterone] levels by anywhere from 30 to 200 percent—if you’re quoting a study that was never a real study in the first place—we don’t know what's happening to those sperm counts.”
“If you’re improving your testosterone by killing your sperm, that may be one of these bro-science things, which actually may do more harm than good.”
There is, moreover, a deeper danger lurking in the spread of this pseudoscience, because it has historically played a role in recruiting followers into fascist belief systems. Joshua Molloy and Dr. Eviane Leidig explained this danger in a piece for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, noting that “gastropolitics has long played a historical role within the far-right”:
Maintaining the ideal masculine and feminine body devoid of modern influences is a far-right fetish that aestheticizes the purity of racial reproduction. As indicated above, a healthy body is projected as a healthy nation, which is atomized into individual heteronormative family units. The contemporary far-right continues this legacy through raw meat and dairy, as well as anti-seed oils, production and consumption. No longer is a reliance on BigAg, representing state control, necessary for survival. However, one key aspect of situating the importance of this movement is its high visual and aesthetic reproduction within digital cultures. While its origins are esoteric and fringe, it has steadily become more visible and recognized as a form of in-group community building among the broader far-right ecosystem, largely mainstreamed through prevalent right-wing figures. This type of conspiratorial spread, when linked to the Great Reset, may present the potential for violent consequences.
Of course, Carlson has a long history of promoting white-nationalist ideas and apologizing for far-right violence, regardless of the often violent consequences. This is nothing new for him—but it does expand the range of harm he will inevitably inflict on the rest of us.
