Are you Mountain Man enough? (Getty)
“Sometimes you think you’re gettin’ food ‘cos there’s a coupla raisins in it, but it’s just a plate fulla horse apples.” Dewayne, or Dry Creek Wrangler School as he’s known to his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, is dispensing life advice through his bushy grey beard. He’s wearing jeans and a Stetson, and in his left hand dangles a cigar. The advice in question: don’t confuse apples with manure. Trust your instincts, fellers, and don’t take no bull.
Dry Creek is one of many such content creators who — mainly in the manly haven of YouTube, shielded from TikTok’s distinct girliness — have become icons of Mountain Man straight-talkin’, tonics for city boys strung out by modern masculinity. His videos vary from day-to-day instructional content (“Three things I’ll never do to my horse again”) to the philosophical. In one, he discusses feminism. He regrets that modern women must “go out and lord it over men” with big-shot careers in order to be respected; he laments the way society “belittles” mothers, and how “men stopped being men and women stopped being women”. While a little dated, there is no straight-up toxicity in his philosophy: he’s a harmless old-timer, and his shtick is nostalgia, positing himself as a substitute gramps for deracinated young men.
But the longer one spends with the wild men of YouTube, the stranger and more extreme they become. Before long, you’ll happen upon Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, a novelist and bushcrafter from Norway with nearly 700,000 subscribers. Similarly to Dry Creek, his format is based on vlogging time spent in the wilderness while offering philosophical titbits. But his titbits are made of much stronger stuff. Standing by a beautiful lake in the still-light middle of the night, Bull-Hansen tells us why so many men are single. Women are less attractive now because of “things such as obesity”; they have a “face covered in piercings, blue hair and a strong, independent woman attitude”. The incel alarm bells go off. “The high-value man will probably not be attracted by that.”
Bull-Hansen is dealing in a conceit which has been hugely successful in the manosphere in recent years: shoehorning redpill advice into content about rugged, natural masculinity. Of the marriage between the two, he says: “Nature is beautiful and brutal, but mostly beautiful. Everything here is as it should be, and as it has always been, and I like that.” In the mind of the anti-woke Mountain Man, the natural world is unapologetically aligned with the values of tribal patriarchy: it is a sphere where men can escape debilitating metrosexuality. Away from the deceptions of cities, this world is “real”. Standing pensively in the rain, Bull-Hansen denounces men “sitting looking at a screen, in a city apartment”. Being in the wilderness is a departure from Sodom, a return to the greatest and simplest conflicts not of man vs woman, but man vs nature, and sometimes man vs God.
It is not difficult to see how a casual viewer might become radicalised by such content. In one excruciating “comedy” video, he whittles a fake Covid passport out of wood. In another, he takes his son camping and rants about “disgusting” child custody arrangements controlled by vindictive mothers. He discusses how m-pox will provoke another worldwide lockdown, and has unsavoury takes on the UK riots. There are countless other creators doing similar things: one channel sees two men bro-ing out around a campfire, talking about “their masculine journey”; one gifts the other a knife and a waterproof Bible. Another channel urges men to “reject phone addiction and embrace nature” — but keep watching my videos, obviously — and to “train your body in the elements to mimic our ancestors”, with a clip of a hairy man screaming as he looks at the sky.
From where does this obsession with the wilderness, and the supposedly “sigma” philosophy of the Mountain Man, spring? The original Mountain Men were North American fur trappers — lone operatives or brigades venturing out west in the mid-1800s, setting up trading routes and dealing in lucrative beaver pelts to satisfy the desires of refined Europeans for fashionable waterproof hats. It was a tough life: they trekked about in hardened deer skins, setting their own broken bones and withstanding miserable winters. But there is a nobility in this suffering in the popular imagination, an almost Christ-like rejection of modern comforts, which persists in survivalist YouTubers of today. The Revenant (2015), in which Leonardo DiCaprio faces off with the Mountain Man’s great enemy — the Grizzly bear — is based on the experiences of the fur trapper Hugh Glass in 1823, and is shot through with Biblical themes of forgiveness (he is left for dead by his hunting party) and revival. In this sense, Mountain Men slot neatly in with fundamental visions of masculine virtue.
Since then, the spectre of the mountains has saturated American culture, and become a mythical site of communion with “reality”. In 1956, the writer Jack Kerouac spent 63 days at a fire lookout in the Cascades. The experience, which he described as a rite of passage for men, meant “finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength”. But Kerouac’s is not a masculinity in defiance of the feminised modern world; it is instead an opportunity to savour simple pleasures and seek transcendence. In Alone on a Mountain Top, he recounts his daily routine, including an endearing breakfast scene: “I’d make delicious pancakes, eating them at my little table that was decorated with bouquets of mountain lupine and sprigs of fir.” True Mountain Men aren’t afraid to be sentimental.
Pop culture is flooded with allusions to this noble alliance of manliness and Mother Nature, so that even — or perhaps especially — metropolitan males are compelled to spend their leisure time barbequing (the ancient dance of man and fire) or axe-throwing in depressing central London bars. There are two great idols within this philosophy, and adherents’ obsession with one or the other reliably predicts how extreme their views are. First, the cowboy: there is something winkingly good-natured about these Western-flavoured content creators, a sense of fun. Second, the Viking — the particular fixation of our flowing-haired friend Bull-Hansen; this idol lends itself to the most poisonous elements of the manosphere, providing a stronger racial angle (and, y’know, the raping and pillaging one). It is much less fun, much more self-important.
In both instances, these creators deal in performances of authenticity, down to ASMR campfire noises crackling along with the audio. You might think influencers selling fantasies of the wilderness to city folk is a strange, new tumescence of social media culture. But a century ago, an Englishman from Stratford-upon-Avon by the name of Nello Vernon-Wood was doing precisely that. In 1906, he reinvented himself as Tex Wood — apocryphally related to the Texan chaps he bought to disguise his genteel Englishness, a quality hiring ranchers were not warm to in the tough Canadian Banff. He forged a career playing the role of a true Mountain Man, writing short stories for The Sportsman and Hunting and Fishing that were gobbled up by their moneyed East Coast readers. They are all about the virtues of rugged, honest, wild masculinity — but with a pantomime wink to the performativity of the writer, a ramped-up version of Tex himself. He had a stint as a Hollywood animal handler on the 1935 film The Call of the Wild, before trying his own hand at selling Disneyfied wrangling experiences to tourists as a guide. It is from this persona that the stories come.
Tex Wood’s work is a charming portrait of mountain masculinity, in which he is far from a simplistic manly ideal, but always seems to come out on top. He admits, in his characteristic ersatz lingo, that he’s rather a weed: “Nobody’s ever complimented me on my figger; in fack, I got to stand twice in the same place before I throw a shader.” His writing is a constant analysis of class and physicality, where well-to-do poseurs “just out of Yale or Harvard or some one of those seats of learning Down East” suffer pratfalls and can’t hack the terrain. Tex deals in the same metrophobia as modern YouTube videos, showing disdain for soulless city types. He delights in taking the piss out of effete English “pilgrims” (customers), his own countrymen, who “bathed, shaved, massaged, and had a little tonic on their hair … and went into conference to decide what rifle, knife, field glasses etc., was the de rigger for that day”.
Within Tex’s masculine codes are gentlemanly values: he won’t kill an animal for a trophy, but will use the whole thing up; he is restrained and unflashy, and generally kind to women. How different from the Viking brutality of YouTube’s Wild Men. His writings are about simple pleasures, hard-earned achievements: of a beast’s head hanging over his fireplace, he writes: “Personal, I don’t give three whoops in Sheol if you or anyone else has a bigger one.” And he is ready to accept women as Mountain Men in their own right: in one story, a haughty client, Mr Van Dieman, stalks off to town (“he got to ghost dancing about what the market was doing”) and his wife and three daughters are left in the wilderness. “The oldest one beat the skin off me at shooting,” Tex writes, and later that evening they “danced us bow-legged”.
There is a profound lesson in the forgotten writings of the un-Googlable Tex Wood (be prepared for a surfeit of flooring). The bardic wink to performance, the gender-bending antics of hardy female guests, the gentle philosophising is not unlike the writing of another, better-known son of Stratford. For Wood, masculinity in the wilderness is about something entirely different from realising your alpha potential or resisting the encroachments of feminism. It’s about a self-knowingness, a communion with both the vicissitudes of the natural world and the ironies of the modern. His writing is so prophetic because of its awareness of the artifice of mountain values: Tex is himself a tourist, and is reliant on magazines and poncey East Coasters for a living; likewise, the Mountain Man YouTuber encourages a detachment from technology and industry while beaming directly from it.
The true nobility of the Mountain Man, embodied by Wood, is in his whimsy and gentleness and the unflashy, straight-talking values he lives by — not unlike our cowboy vlogger Dry Creek. There is nothing noble about launching an assault on feminism from a tent, but sentimental indulgence in nostalgia and a retreat from the swirling pressures of modernity is really not a bad thing, and feminists should resist pathologising or ridiculing a male yearning for a bit of mud (particularly as we are so jealous over our own feminine fantasies, such as astrology).
It is a shame that the tentacles of the manosphere are curling round the harmless tradition set by the likes of Tex Woods, and a little tolerance for the hokeyness of the genre is really the best antidote to the spreading poison. By remembering the fundamental values of the Mountain Man — hardiness, humour, kindness — men can reclaim him from the clutches of woman-haters and restore his original charm as a form of escapism, and of meaning. After all, a misogynist can stuff raisins down ‘em all he likes, but they’ll always be horse apples.
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SubscribeOnce again kudos to Ian Birrell and fellow journalists for doggedly pursuing this story. You are doing a public good even if you do not receive the recognition you deserve.
There is something funny and surreal in this article. The author is forced to document every little step in the chain of evidence even when the weight of evidence clearly points in one direction.
How much more proof do we need that there was an attempt to cover up even the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan virus lab? I guess it depends on who the ‘we’ is in that question. For people at the highest reaches of US and Chinese (and UK) science who want to cover their own tracks, I suppose the answer is there can never be enough proof.
Thank you for this article and the hard work put in. I am sure that many of us who were called ‘conspiracy theorists’ for being sceptical of the accounts of governments, global organisations like the WHO, aligned ‘interested’ scientists working for many large organisations, big tech and corporate media, big pharmaceuticals and the like – now feel almost proud to be ‘conspiracy theorists’.
I would rather be labelled a “conspiracy theorist” and keep my integrity rather than give in and follow the delusional “naive realists” down the easy road of “the science”, that’s for sure. The problem is that the majority of people, including (in fact, in particular) highly formally educated people, sadly don’t seem to be able or willing to do that. We are facing a crisis of truth and meaning, and it is not going well.
Well said. I’m in much the same mind.
Birrell is full on establishment. Ex speech writer to Cameron, the guy who gave us Libya. Ex deputy editor of the left wing independent.
What he wants you to believe is what the establishment wants you to believe.
How do you square that with his pernicious attitude in digging out the truth of an establishment cover-up over the last couple of years?
Unless you’re contending that it was all an establishment plot to lay an establishment plot that was designed to be uncovered?
I am responding to the article written and not the personal history of the author….
This is what journalism should be.
Fantastic article, proper journalism in action. I pity anyone who clings to the naive belief that whatever is said in a peer reviewed journal is beyond question and necessarily above board. The Drosten protocol, infection fatality rates, effectiveness of lockdown measures, and much more have all been the subject of lies and misinformation published in previously respectable journals. The Lancet, in particular, has been dreadful.
But this how the CCP works – it gets its people into places of influence, it bullies, it intimidates, and it lies, lies, and lies again, through whatever means are its disposal. It has no ethical limits, and absolutely no respect for the truth. It’s ultimately very cowardly – it won’t ever defend its cheating in public, it won’t tolerate dissent, and it knows that its power rests on maintaining deceit.
The sooner more people in the west realise that they – and some in their governments – have been systemically manipulated by this vile, corrupt, despicable regime and its corporate and political allies, the better. The realisation that we have been attacked and tricked in this way will be unpleasant for many – some people just won’t able to process it. But it is now the responsibility of those in leadership positions across our society to put their big boy and girl pants on and start to get grips with this to help us fight this disease of misinformation and reclaim our enlightenment.
It’s worth quoting further paragraphs from Eisenhower’s farewell address, the same one warning of the military-industrial complex:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
It is this process that has rendered science-as-it-is-done completely corruptible. Not to mention subject to the pernicious vagaries of social science and various postmodernisms.
Eisenhower was clearly very prescient. His farewell address should be obligatory reading for every high school and university student, for every academic scientist, for every employee of government science funding agencies, and lastly for every politician. Perhaps that would put a stop to the “follow the science” sheep which sin’t science but scientism (a fanatical religious belief), and restore open scientific/medical debate within academia and medicine.
I became aware of this sometime ago. He said this in 1961, long before the massive explosion in technology. I wonder what he would say if he could see what has happened.
Yet again it is clear that academia are utterly servile to those who fund their research and entirely feckless about who funds their research.
Why do we give these “experts” such credence without first invalidating any who have received payment from an actor in the issue at hand?
That’s right. Follow the money. Applies also to climate research.
Absolutely great article. I agree with every word. Really what needs to happen is that a number of these so-called top scientists should be arrested and charged with treason. Perhaps a little bit overboard but it would certainly provide a lesson and example to others that using letters and esteemed academic/government positions of authority after one’s name does not give one license to knowingly disseminate propaganda at the behest of an aggressive foreign power.
Great article, hope there’s more to come on this issue.
However, I’ve long had great scepticism about the moral compass of science. I’d go so far as to say ethics fly out of the window when scientists think they are doing work ‘at the edge’.
In what mad world would a scientist deliberately take bat viruses from a habitat (where they coexist with the population) and remove them to a lab, then grow and engineer them to be more dangerous? Oh yes, the mad world of science.
It’s no surprise that scientists can be motivated by money, power and ego. Have we, however, by our deification of science enabled this to happen?
We have Covid to thank for showing us the spectacle of UK members of SAGE and NERVTAG fighting with each other publicly like rats in a sack. Sorry, that’s disrespectful to rats. But it shows that scientists are human, not gods.
If I was being pessimistic, I’d say that science will be the death of us. Anybody who has read Justin Cronin’s The Passage will surely agree.
I really want to disagree with you, science should not have to cleave to morals (morals beings fragile and changeable). But science is conducted by people and people are always partisan and easily corrupted, sad to say. Corruptis optimi pessima.
I just get my membership because of article like that! This is journalism, research, professionalism and base on the facts! Well done!
The WHO investigator says a Chinese scientist may have started the pandemic after being infected with coronavirus while collecting bat samples in the field. Whether they will count this as zoonotic transmission or a lab leak is unclear?
What is all this building up to mean in a court of civil law?
Will I be able to join some class action lawsuit in getting my losses paid back by China? Is the 10 Trillion, or whatever it ends up being, wasted by the USA on covid response going to be paid back? My guess is no –
Affirmation of the presentation by Nicholas Wade that tore aside a tight curtain. Clearly much more evidence of the attempts to counter the leak hypothesis. Wade was the first to note dangerous research done at lowered safety levels. The research may or may not be critical to mankind, but if done at all, it must be done responsibly.
One item that seems critical is the fact that this research often results in patents with potential financial gain involved. Given how money corrupts, we might need to alter the patent system for discoveries vital to heath. Some research relates to patents that if public funds are involved should be public property. Scientists employed by the public should be allowed no interest in those public patents.
Thanks for your report. We’ll keep an eye on it. Obviously, vigilance in thorough reporting on these events/issues will not recede until many more questions are sufficiently answered in a manner that is beyond dispute.
Thank you. I an a conspiracy theorist of course. Who else would read such journalism?