I jumped the gun: The “Tucker Carlson Original” mockumentary hilariously titled The End of Men did not air Monday night, as advertised. Tuckums was a bit sneaky: The show introduced a whole new season of his mockumentaries, which will stream on Fox Nation, and the episode featured little more than the long version of the trailer people made short work of on social media all weekend, with its many homoerotic montages of shirtless white men getting all manly by wrestling with one another. Oh, and with large tires. And maybe a cow? Also: swinging axes and drinking egg yolks? I couldn’t catch everything; it went by fast. But not fast enough.
It did include the ludicrous scene that shocked and then amused everyone who watched the trailer: a naked white man, arms out to make a cross, enjoying what looks like a giant iPhone that’s beaming red light at his testicles. Yes, that’s the solution to “the end of men”: testicle tanning, allegedly to boost testosterone and sperm production.
“The solutions are actually really simple,” physical trainer Andrew McGovern tells Carlson. “Red-light therapy—testicle tanning…has massive benefits.”
“There’s absolutely no controlled study that proves that,” urologist Marc Goldstein told Insider.
Of course there isn’t.
The trailer shows the The End of Men opening with President John F. Kennedy extolling the virtues of manly strength. “There is nothing more unfortunate than having soft, chubby, fat-looking children,” he says.
Next we see fat-looking children, as well as dead fish floating in some kind of water, somewhere. A connection? You decide.
And then, perhaps unwittingly displaying the decline in Kennedy generations, it features sad anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr., last seen comparing mask and vaccine requirements to Nazism. Kennedy claims there’s been a 50 percent decline in sperm counts in the past 40 years—as we watch some hapless sperm fail to penetrate an impregnable egg—along with a precipitous decline in testosterone levels. He provides no evidence of either (though there is some research showing average testosterone levels have fallen slightly in men over the past 50 years, largely because of obesity and smoking). Featuring the conspiracy-crazed Kennedy as his science guy shows the seriousness of Tucker’s project.
The Fox host acknowledges his viewers’ likely skepticism about his solution, admitting that half of them might be saying, “‘Testicle tanning? That’s crazy.’ But my view is, testosterone levels have crashed and nobody says anything about it, and that’s crazy. Why is it crazy to seek solutions?”
You know who thinks it’s crazy? Kid Rock, who followed the segment, laughing hilariously. “Stop, dude, stop. Testicle tanning? I haven’t heard anything that good in a long time!… I’m starting a punk rock band and it’s called ‘Testicle Tanning’ and that’s the end of it.” Carlson chides him, “Open your mind!” But the host is laughing, too—another tell that so much of what he spews is for shock value. I’m not sure he’s tanning his testicles, but who knows.
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Periodically, words scroll over the montages of manly men. “Hard times make strong men,” we’re told, while “weak men make hard times.” It’s all about Carlson’s white male panic and fear of being a “weak man.” You can see it in the paranoia behind his adoption of the “great replacement” theory—that Democrats want non-white immigrants to replace white Americans. Earlier, we saw it in his bizarre 2007 claim to have once beaten up a gay man for coming on to him in a public restroom. “I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy,” he told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Dan Abrams. “Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!” The two other men howled with laughter, seeming not to entirely believe the macho story from the pampered bow-tied rich kid.
Oh, and he delighted in calling me a “cunt” to a coworker back in 2010, mocking him for working for a woman, and telling him I needed to get laid. His history of sexist, even misogynist, comments is well-known. He believes strong women are something else that make weak men.
What else did we get to see as Carlson previewed the coming season of “Tucker Carlson Originals”? He interviewed a young woman who decided as a teen that she was transgender, identified as a man (it was unclear what if any medical intervention she sought), and then transitioned back to being a woman. She complained of being shamed for being straight. “I don’t want to be cis[gender]; cis means you’re bad. And I can’t change my race.” So she changed her gender. Carlson was horrified. “It’s a failure of male leadership–I mean adult leadership,” he caught himself. He closed by telling her, “Thank you for your commitment to evidence-based science.”
We get more science in a story about cattle mutilation. Did you know that’s a crisis? Me neither. Carlson interviews “experts” Seth and Scott, two bearded butchers. We see explicit, sickening videos of mutilated cattle, and then the butchers tell him it’s probably the work of “extraterrestrials.” And there’s a segment trashing Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, who is too soft on crime for Carlson’s taste. Alex Villanueva, LA County sheriff, tells him Gascon goes particularly easy on child abusers. “Chester the Molester can park himself in front of a grade school,” he claims, and then tells of “a guy who smokes meth right outside of a grade school in Venice.” Finally, there’s a segment on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, one of the “strong men”—a totalitarian—Carlson admires.
So there we have it: a trans-transgender young woman, a Democratic DA letting molesters run free, men so beaten down they have to tan their testicles—and Carlson’s pal Kid Rock (there’s a manly name for sure). Where cattle mutilation fits in, I don’t know—although the burly, bearded butchers would have made a stirring montage in The End of Men. If that appeals to you, get ready for Season Two of Tucker Carlson Originals. Remember, Season One featured a defense of the January 6 rioters—more strong men!—so dishonest that longtime Fox anchor Chris Wallace decamped to CNN.
That’s OK—more time for Tucker, whose venture into what he calls documentaries shows his employers’ investment in him. It’s good for Carlson—and bad for the rest of us.
