The ‘Cornell 7’ case should terrify every father of boys



As the civil lawsuit and renewed criminal investigation into what allegedly happened inside Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house move forward, the public argument over blame has become largely binary: her or them.

“Consent” has become the watercooler word. Was she responsible for putting herself in that situation, or were the men responsible for what happened afterward?

Brotherhood isn’t helping your brothers get away with bad things. It’s demanding that your brothers be better men.

But I want to bring two more parties into the conversation: dads and the “manosphere.”

I keep asking myself a question I don’t see asked nearly enough: Where were the other young men?

Not the seven fraternity members accused in Jane Doe’s lawsuit. I mean the other brothers who may have been in the house or who saw the fraternity Snapchat thread during the night.

According to the civil complaint and reporting on the messages, a photo of Doe appeared in a group chat, and messages invited other fraternity members to come upstairs. The public record does not establish what every recipient knew or whether each was physically present. But the question remains: What had those young men been taught a man should do if he realizes something terrible may be happening down the hall?

More frightening is the thought of what my sons would have done if they were in that house.

That’s where dads — and the competing vision of masculinity being sold to young men online — belong in this conversation.

I have two boys under 10, and I’ve noticed the standard most dads emphasize: Don’t be the bad guy. Don’t bully other kids. Don’t take advantage of your friends.

Fine. But that’s the floor.

Your goal as a father isn’t merely to raise boys who won’t commit evil. It’s to raise boys who will confront it.

Too often, we obsess over raising boys who aren’t predators. We don’t spend nearly enough time raising protectors. Strength isn’t demonstrated by what you can take from somebody weaker. It’s demonstrated by what you’re willing to risk on that person’s behalf.

I’m not raising my sons to walk away from the Cornell fraternity house room. I’m raising them to open the door and stop what’s happening. Sometimes avoidance is the right answer, and avoidance takes judgment. Other times intervention is the right answer, and intervention takes courage.

The manosphere teaches young men that masculinity is something you prove through acquisition: women, sex, money, muscles, followers, status, dominance. Men advertise their “body count” as if the number of women they have slept with were a masculine achievement. Women become objects, not obligations. That’s rotten.

Most critics focus on how the manosphere distorts the way young men see women. They spend less time on how it distorts the way young men see other men. The entire system is a hierarchy: Who’s the alpha? Who’s weak? Who’s afraid? Who’s willing to go the farthest?

RELATED: Nick Freitas says America needs real men again

Ivan Pantic/iStock/Getty Images

Now imagine being the 19-year-old fraternity brother who realizes something is badly wrong upstairs. Stopping it may mean risking exactly what this worldview tells him matters most: the approval of other men.

The popular phrase goes, “Character is what you do when no one’s watching.” Good. But I’m also teaching my boys that character is doing the right thing when everyone is watching — and when doing it makes you unpopular.

Applied to the Cornell allegations, the manosphere tells a young man not to be the buzzkill. Actual masculinity tells him to be willing to become the least popular man in the house. Open the door. Stop what’s happening. Find her clothes. Get her somewhere safe. Call the police if necessary. Accept the social consequences tomorrow.

That’s courage.

The stakes rise when the wrongdoer is your friend: your frat bro, your teammate, your lifelong best friend. We teach boys that loyalty is a masculine virtue. It is. But we have confused loyalty with complicity.

We take our friends’ keys when they shouldn’t drive. Likewise, dragging your friend out of a room when he is about to do something horrific isn’t betraying him. It may be the most brotherly thing you can do for him.

Brotherhood isn’t helping your brothers get away with bad things. It’s demanding that your brothers be better men.

The manosphere didn’t arrive in a vacuum. Boys have been begging for someone to tell them what a man is, what strength looks like, and what we owe other people. If fathers don’t answer those questions, someone on TikTok happily will.

RELATED: America needs heroes who do not apologize for being heroes

Heritage Art/Heritage Images/Getty Images

The answer to the manosphere isn’t telling boys that masculinity is toxic. It’s giving them a better version of it.

My biggest fear as a father concerns the moments when I won’t be there. Fatherhood has an expiration date on enforcement. Eventually my sons will face a situation without me standing beside them.

Then it won’t be who’s beside them. It will be what’s inside them.

If I’m successful, their standard won’t be “don’t get arrested” or even “don’t participate.” It will be this: When everyone else loses his head, keep yours. And when somebody vulnerable needs help, help.

The courts will determine legal culpability in the Cornell case. New York Attorney General Letitia James is now overseeing the renewed criminal investigation, while the civil lawsuit proceeds separately.

Fathers don’t need to wait for either process to ask what would have happened if their own son had been there.

We shouldn’t settle for hoping he wouldn’t have participated. We should raise the son who would have stopped it.

The loyalty gap that fueled Andrew Tate's rise among young men



Andrew Tate may say some “true” things — as BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey admits — but she warns that the manosphere he boasts is not the right path for young men to follow, calling it a “sinful reaction to feminism.”

And Nick Freitas couldn’t agree with Stuckey more.

“I think there’s two things that we have to recognize whenever we talk about what we might call the manosphere,” Freitas tells Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“Andrew Tate, Justin Waller, some of these other guys … the first thing we need to recognize is the reason why they resonated so much with young men was not simply because all these guys have admirable accomplishments in their own right, along with a lot of other problematic things,” he says.


“But they tend to be strong. They tend to be wealthy. And they tend to, you know, women tend to be attracted to them,” he continues, noting that a young man “without a spiritual basis” will be drawn to this image.

And those young men will also feel a sense of loyalty to men like Andrew Tate, as they feel like he was “sticking up for them when nobody else would.”

“Men associate loyalty with love,” Freitas says.

“And so a lot of young men look at guys like Andrew Tate and they say, ‘That guy had my back when none of you people in the church were mentioning any of this. And now the first time you want to come up and talk about the problems with masculinity, you want to bash Andrew Tate, the one guy that had my back,'” he explains.

“And so the way I think we need to approach something like that is certainly not by excusing what I believe is disastrous, sinful, and ultimately not genuinely masculine behavior,” he continues. “But I think we need to recognize the source of the problem and from whence it comes.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Christianity Is Not An Excuse To Be An Effeminate Wimp

In 'Offensive Christianity,' J. Chase Davis argues that asserting your masculinity is good for men as well as the church.

Jason Whitlock: I told you Andrew Tate was wicked. Now he’s in handcuffs.



Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate has been arrested in the U.S. after British authorities issued new charges — which include seven counts of rape and charges related to sex trafficking and indecent images of a child.

His brother Tristan was arrested as well, with a whopping 59 charges against the pair in total.

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is not surprised, pointing out that the entire belief system the Tates capitalized on was a lie.

“The manosphere sold you a lie. A big one,” he begins. “They told you that the alternative to weak, feminized, go-along-to-get-along men was Andrew Tate. That he was the antidote, the cure, real masculinity.”


“No, Andrew Tate was never the opposite of the culture’s sickness. He was the culture’s sickness wearing a nicer watch,” he adds.

And while Tate railed against feminism, he wasn’t that different from the feminists.

“Think about it. The feminists tell women, ‘Your body is your product. Sell it. Own it. Sex work is work.’ And what did Andrew Tate tell men? ‘Turn women into product. Run the webcam. Take the money.’ It’s the same immorality, same worship of flesh, same contempt for God’s design, just pointed in a different direction,” Whitlock explains.

Tate also claimed that he had broken free of “the matrix,” which drew a loyal following from many young men who feel the system has been working against them.

Instead, Whitlock says that Tate is “one of the biggest benefactors of the matrix.”

“He’s their shining example of what the matrix can do with anybody willing to be dishonest. Andrew Tate wasn’t neo. He wasn’t fighting the system. He was the system’s greatest advertisement. And the fruit of it is what you saw this weekend in Miami,” he explains.

“Real masculinity is not how many women you can control. It’s not a rented Bugatti. It’s not a compound full of security cameras and neon lights. Real masculinity is responsibility. It’s a covenant. It’s a man who provides, who protects, who leads his home under God, not a man who preys on the vulnerable and calls it strength,” he says.

“I said it back in January, and I’ll say it again right now. Andrew Tate is trying to lead you away from your actual ally,” he continues. “Any Christian man that’s trying to pursue holiness, trying to pursue righteousness, that is your ally.”

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Netflix 'Manosphere' doc: Virtuous voyeurism and dull TV



There was a time when Louis Theroux was the best documentary-maker alive. Not the most famous, not the flashiest — the best. He had a gift for making dangerous people feel comfortable enough to hang themselves with their own words.

His technique was deceptively simple: show up, look confused, ask the obvious question nobody else dared ask, and let the awkward silences do the heavy lifting.

Theroux spends much of the film asking genuinely dangerous, profit-driven men why they do not try being nicer.

The results were extraordinary. He immersed himself in the Westboro Baptist Church and revealed something more than fire-and-brimstone rhetoric — that hatred has a morning routine, eats cereal, and goes to bed at a reasonable hour.

He walked into San Quentin and found the prison’s strict social architecture more fascinating than horrifying. He sat with alcoholics dying in a hospital liver ward and captured something devastating without once reaching for a violin. He starred in a porn film fully clothed, somehow maintaining both his dignity and his curiosity.

His early work was morally serious without being moralistic — an almost impossible balance that he struck repeatedly.

That Theroux is gone.

Concern troll

In his place stands something considerably less interesting: a concerned therapist in training with a camera crew, packaging society’s oddballs for an audience that already knows what it thinks of them.

His latest Netflix outing, "Inside the Manosphere," is the clearest evidence yet. Theroux plunges into the world of online alpha-male influencers — Harrison Sullivan, Justin Waller, Myron Gaines, Sneako — tracking their revenue streams, their rhetoric, and their relentless contempt for women.

Miami apartments. Spanish nightclubs. Podcast sets where female guests are humiliated for content.

Sullivan funnels Telegram followers to OnlyFans accounts for kickbacks while publicly mocking the creators. Waller hawks Andrew Tate’s $49-a-month “university.” Gaines, a man of genuine venom, performs dominance for the camera like someone who has mistaken cruelty for confidence.

The material is genuinely ripe. These men are running sophisticated grift operations dressed up as philosophy, monetizing male loneliness and directing the resulting rage at all women. They deserve scrutiny.

The problem is that Theroux no longer scrutinizes. He pathologizes.

Practiced horror

Every interaction becomes a therapeutic probe. Every exchange is framed as evidence of something “disturbing.” The wide-eyed incredulity — once a genuine performance of curiosity — now reads as practiced horror for a largely left-leaning platform.

When Sullivan admits bluntly that he would never have found an audience doing wholesome content — “If I’d just done good things, I would never have blown up” — it is the most honest moment in the film.

Theroux treats it as a tragedy. It is simply capitalism.

Sullivan knows exactly what he is doing.

The real story is not that these men are broken. It is that they have correctly identified a lucrative market of young men who feel abandoned by mainstream culture — and are bleeding them dry. That is the documentary.

Theroux keeps making a different one — a morality play in which he is cast as the bewildered voice of reason.

RELATED: Muscular Christianity: Debunking the manosphere’s lies

Ian Maule/Getty Images

Prepackaged pandering

The irony is that his presence amplifies the very thing he deplores. Sullivan’s mother, in a sharp moment the film almost buries, asks the obvious question: If you find this so reprehensible, why are you publicizing it?

Theroux spends much of the film asking genuinely dangerous, profit-driven men why they do not try being nicer — roughly as effective as asking Putin to send Zelenskyy a fruit basket.

He is outmatched by people who have spent years controlling their image, and he does not seem to notice. These are seasoned sharks who have fielded far worse and treat the beanpole Brit like a speed bump on the way to their next revenue stream.

What made the early work so extraordinary was Theroux’s apparent absence of agenda. He let meth addicts, dementia patients, Scientologists, and porn stars speak for themselves and trusted audiences to draw their own conclusions. He did not editorialize.

The manosphere documentary editorializes constantly — each segment arriving labeled, prejudged, prepackaged for viewers who tuned in already convinced.

This is what woke documentary-making looks like at its most comfortable: confirming what the audience believes in a way that seems like investigation.

It is virtuous voyeurism — and painfully dull television.

The manosphere — equal parts genuine grievance and cynical exploitation — is a real and fascinating phenomenon. The young men being farmed for subscription fees and manufactured resentment deserve actual examination, not a wagging finger and a worried look.

Theroux was once the person who could have done that.

Watch "Drinking to Oblivion." Watch "The Most Hated Family in America." Watch a man doing the hardest thing in journalism — entering without a verdict and finding something real on the other side.

Sadly, that man traded his instincts for a Netflix brief and never looked back.

He got paid. The audience got a lecture.

The SECRET every young man NEEDS to hear



Young men are inheriting a spiritually starving society, where they’re being sold a future of cheap pleasures, hollow heroes, and never-ending screen time.

It’s a lot of noise, and it will rob the youth of all purpose.

But Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck has some advice.

“If there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy, seek those things. Don’t admire them. Don’t nod at them. Seek them. Hunt them. Chase them. Build your life around those things,” Glenn explains.


“A man who will do that, a boy, a young man who will do that, will become different, noticeably different. He will stop letting the culture feed him garbage. He stops applauding the trivial. He stops laughing at the obscene or cheering for the cruel. He will become a curator of real, lasting beauty in an age that has forgotten what beauty even looks like.”

“When other men are chasing down or holding up cynicism, this man holds up hope. When everyone around him is chasing dopamine, he chooses discipline. When others will blame their circumstance, he’ll take responsibility for his own action. When the world worships the shallow, he goes and searches for the deep.”

“You become what you seek. If you seek trash, you become trash. You seek virtue, you become a man of virtue. You seek excellence, and your life will begin to shine, not loudly, but steadily like the steel glow of a blade being forged.”

The world, Glenn says, already has a never-ending supply of “angry,” “addicted,” and “distracted” boys.

What it needs now, he explains, are men.

“Whole men. Clear-eyed men. Men whose souls are anchored to something higher than the algorithms trying to own them,” he says. “Build a life worthy of admiration. Forget about the applause. Fill your mind with words that make you wiser.”

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Muscular Christianity: Debunking the manosphere’s lies



When women are told that the biggest issue they face is their self-esteem — not their sin — it doesn’t bring them closer to God or make them more likely to walk through the church doors on Sunday.

Instead, it leaves them feeling like they can find that kind of advice anywhere.

“Why would you go to church and sacrifice your free time if you’re going to hear the same message anywhere?” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey asks ex-Green Beret and Virginia delegate Nick Freitas, noting that they’re simply being told what “they want to hear.”

And women aren’t the only ones being fooled.

“Do you feel like that also might be happening among the Andrew Tate acolytes of the world who say, ‘Okay, in order to attract these young men, we have to not be like Jesus was. We have to be crass, and we have to be rude, and we have to be arrogant, and we have to be materialistic, and we have to be promiscuous, and we have to talk about women like they’re objects ’cause that’s real masculinity’?” she asks.


Freitas agrees, calling the approach symbolic of the “manosphere.”

“So, I think there’s two things that we have to recognize whenever we talk about what we might call the manosphere — Andrew Tate, Justin Waller, some of these other guys, Fresh and Fit. ... The first thing that we need to recognize is the reason why they resonated so much with young men was not simply because all these guys have admirable accomplishments in their own right,” he explains.

“But they tend to be strong. They tend to be wealthy, and they tend to, you know, women tend to be attracted to them, right? So, these are all things that, if you’re a young man without a spiritual basis in your life, you’re looking at these things going, ‘I want that,’” he continues.

“The most important component, though, is a lot of young men felt like those guys were sticking up for them when nobody else would,” he says, noting that “men associate loyalty with love.”

“And so, a lot of young men look at guys like Andrew Tate, and they say, ‘That guy had my back when none of you people in the church were mentioning any of this. And now the first time you want to come up and talk about the problems with masculinity, you want to bash Andrew Tate, the one guy that had my back,’” he explains.

“And so, the way I think we need to approach something like that is certainly not by excusing what I believe is disastrous, sinful, and ultimately not genuinely masculine behavior, but I think we need to recognize the source of the problem and from whence it comes,” he adds.

Freitas also explains that the “masculinity” that the manosphere pushes is “hedonistic masculinity,” which says that “you should dominate for the sake of your own pleasure.”

“Essentially, your will to power is the highest moral standard that you can appeal to. That is not in line with Christianity at all,” he says, adding that in order to be in line with Christianity it would have to be “sacrificial in nature.”

“The thing that I would tell young men is, I can appreciate that Andrew Tate is fit, right? I can appreciate that the man can fight. ... But if you really want something that’s going to give you ultimate meaning and purpose, ... you get that when you recognize that there is a God,” he explains.

“He has a meaning and purpose for your life,” he continues, adding, “and he requires you to be strong because it is a difficult world.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Muscular Christianity: Debunking the Manosphere's Lies | Nick Freitas | Ep 1264
play icon

Muscular Christianity: Debunking the Manosphere's Lies | Nick Freitas | Ep 1264

The NYT Interview With Andrew Schulz Is An Indictment Of Legacy Media

The reason the ‘manosphere’ is so popular is because people are genuinely interested in authentic conservations, not liberal propaganda.

Andrew Tate’s Trojan horse: Would the right let in a ‘minor-attracted person’ too?



Judging by their embrace of Andrew Tate, it seems as though some conservative influencers in 2025 are ready to trade in their familiar “Christ is King” mantra for a new one: “Pimping ain’t easy.”

Benny Johnson is a popular conservative commentator with over 3 million followers on X and close to 3 million subscribers on YouTube. He caused a major controversy in right-wing circles after announcing he would have the man known as “Top G” on his show to discuss the sentencing phase of President Trump’s hush-money case. Johnson advertised his guest with an image of both men in black aviator shades with images of a crying liberal woman in their lenses.

American conservatism will die a well-deserved death if it becomes defined by its foes rather than its values.

The imagery was telling. Andrew Tate has described his webcam operation featuring over 75 women as “pimping” and bragged about getting “betas” from all over the world to send money to the women “working” for him. His appearance on Johnson’s show wasn’t going to be a hard-hitting interview about Tate’s own legal troubles, an update on his human trafficking case in Romania, or his past statements about controlling women.

Tate’s contribution to the show was essentially a series of comparisons he made between himself and President Trump, as well as complaints about conservatives “policing” right-wing bad boys. At one point, Alina Habba, one of Trump’s legal counselors, joined the show and gushed over Tate. She compared his legal travails to Trump’s and told Tate she sympathizes with him, admires him, and has his back.

I try to avoid therapeutic language, but Tate’s defenders conducted a master class in gaslighting. Instead of addressing the concerns conservatives have about Tate’s content and views, they made the issue about censorship and free speech. Johnson even tried to shield himself with the Bible, posting, “He who is without sin cast the first stone …”

I have no problem with media personalities speaking to guests with controversial views. I’m an ’80s baby who remembers when talk show hosts would invite provocateurs to explain their ideas and defend their positions in front of a hostile crowd. But there is a big difference between Phil Donahue interviewing a former Klansman to understand his views and fawning over him like an Exalted Cyclops groupie.

The pushback against Tate and his defenders isn’t about “cancel culture” or policing speech. It’s driven by the fact Tate promotes a lifestyle and worldview that are completely antithetical to what conservatives claim they value.

I highly doubt any conservative influencer would post an image promoting a drag queen who performs in front of kids or a pediatric surgeon who performs “gender-affirming” hysterectomies and then screech about free speech and censorship when fans criticize their decision. Likewise, no one would accept such a lapse in judgement with out-of-context scriptures.

Conservatives have a right to determine which ideas need to be debated publicly and which personalities should be promoted widely. Failure to use discernment when considering allies and co-belligerents always backfires.

I saw this firsthand in 2020 when Black Lives Matter turned a self-evidently true phrase into a movement that gave its leaders political power, cultural influence, and a multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio. Of all the victims of BLM’s obvious scam, the churches and pastors who hitched their wagon to anti-family Marxist lesbians were by far the most pitiful. My issue with them was not their naïveté. It was the fact that they thought they needed people with such anti-biblical views to deliver a message about the value of human life that could be pulled straight from the Bible.

Likewise, American conservatism will die a well-deserved death if it becomes defined by its foes rather than its values.

You can’t take a bold public stance against pornography one minute and celebrate OnlyFans “entrepreneurs” the next simply because they have “based” takes on politics. You can’t claim to care about rebuilding the family one day, then fawn all over people whose ideas will only create more broken homes. You can’t call out transgender ideology when it’s pushed by “impossible women” in public health roles but prop up men identifying as women on the right because they appear to be more convincing counterfeits or support the incoming president.

The litmus test for the right can’t be how much a person is hated by the left. You don’t have to be an expert on Andrew Tate’s legal issues to understand why conservatives shouldn’t want to see his ideas and views legitimized. If having the right enemies is all it takes to become a conservative media darling, a shrewd “minor-attracted person” could simply hide his pedophilia behind a manufactured persona characterized by standing up to the globalists trying to destroy Western civilization.

No serious political movement should be that easy to hoodwink, and no self-respecting person would want to be.