Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be LARPers

Update: Andrew Isker’s podcast co-host, CJay Engel, whom he moved to a small town in Tennessee with, aiming to politically take it over, has stated that the office the picture was taken in, with at least one collection of books from a white-nationalist Holocaust denier, is his.

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I’d like to take a minute to talk directly to the young men out there who, as members of the “anon army,” look at the below photo of Andrew Isker and think that he’s a model of Christian masculinity to be followed. Please give me a few minutes of your time to explain how, in reality, Isker is being a massive dork here, and how you’ll ruin your life by following him and his fever dream of white grievance politics.

I’m not being derisive for effect, I mean every word of that last sentence, and will qualify every bit of it. I can do so as a former Airborne Infantry sergeant with the United States Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, with two combat tours. If you’re not sure what that means, enjoy the following video, tastefully set to Van Halen’s Jump, which they made me watch at orientation.

First, let’s examine the body armor that is at least two sizes too small, and will chafe his neck within the first mile of a patrol. You see, Isker has never served in the military, he’s just a guy who went online and bought some generic body armor. I can tell he went online, because no self-respecting arms dealer would let him walk out the door with armor that leaves the exact area of the body where the heart resides wide open. The whole point of acquiring properly-fitted body armor, and not going to Temu for it, is for it to cover enough of the torso to protect all of the wearer’s vital organs.

Secondly, note the lack of a weapon. Perhaps he’s practicing OPSEC—he doesn’t want to give away his arsenal. That would be well and good, except for the two, empty 5.56 mag pouches on the front of the armor. From those we can come to the conclusion that he has some form of an AR-15, and, if it’s inline with the quality of his body armor, it’s probably a stock M&P Sport with a red dot sight from Ali Express. Regardless, unless Isker has spent years training in the skill-sets of infantry rifle squad tactics, moving over urban terrain and clearing rooms with a fire team, should he ever decide to use his gear in the real world, he’d last about thirty seconds against a bunch of one-hundred-and-forty-pound, five-foot-eight eighteen-year-olds who go out into the woods every other week and practice suppressing and flanking an entrenched enemy.

Now that we’ve established that Isker is engaged in the equivalent of showing up to a WWE event with a replica championship belt, let’s briefly examine the pose and the environment in which it takes place. Note the outstretched chest to make the lats look larger than they are, the arms conspicuously distant from the body—when was the last time you saw someone legitimately tough pose for a picture like that? Who puts a poster of Andrew Jackson in a gold-painted frame and places it above his reading chair, yet doesn’t even take the time to hide the cheap power cable to his reading light? What kind of manly man whines when a journalist describes him as a white supremacist, and then poses for a picture between his IKEA bookshelves that contain a title by an open white supremacist and Holocaust denier, reprinted by a white nationalist publishing house? Wouldn’t a man’s man, as Eric Conn’s New Christendom is trying to portray Isker, have no problem boldly standing up for his beliefs, and not cry “SLANDER!” every time his opposition accurately describes them?

I could continue, but I think this will suffice. Isker is untrained and untested in the warfighting skill-set he is trying to sell himself as an exemplar of to you, young man looking for direction. He knows so little about it that he can’t even take a simple picture, trying to brand himself as a tough guy, without revealing that he’s a cosplaying dork to anyone who’s ever done the real thing. To those of us who know what a real operator looks like, this picture is the equivalent of a neckbeard with a fedora tipping his hat to “m’lady.”

I understand that perhaps you have very few examples of truly masculine men in your life and are looking for some direction in that respect, but this isn’t it. This is the male equivalent of a MLM diet shake scam being sold to middle-aged women looking to lose weight, except Isker’s trying to sell you on becoming a pariah to 99.9% of society. If you want to learn what healthy Christian masculinity is, turn off the podcasts, stop going to the conferences, find a church in your town that’s been around for over a century and place yourself under the discipleship of a silent-generation deacon or elder who’s been there since he was a boy. That guy has spent the last half-century serving others, the real test of biblical masculinity.

Those of us who have been tested in combat know that there’s nothing good at the end of the path of performative masculinity and grievance politics, and we don’t want to see young men like yourself ruin their lives with it. We are for you, not against you. Don’t follow a LARP.