Who knew The Blue Ridge Tunnel was being used to help men become "alpha males"?
However, the group leading the program claims they hate the term "alpha males" and the “manosphere” agenda
A recent story in the New Yorker by journalist Charles Bethea [“The Camps Promising to Turn You—or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male”] caught our attention because of the setting.
“On a hot morning last August, I tailed a van speeding through the countryside of central Virginia. The vehicle contained nine blindfolded men wearing black, as they had been instructed to do. Each had paid three thousand dollars to take part in a three-day program called RISE, which stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution. It offers men an opportunity to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and, as its website puts it, “change your story & unf**k your life.” The van’s speakers played a high-volume mashup of construction sounds, Jordan Peterson lectures, Marine Corps drills, and mumbling voices. “All designed to keep them in the present moment and separate them from the life they were coming from,” Brendan King, rise’s founder, told me.
Then it got more specific. The Blue Ridge Tunnel, specifically.
The van’s first stop was a gravel lot off the Blue Ridge Parkway. After allowing a porta-potty “leak-out,” King ordered the blindfolded men to march down a trail, holding one another’s shoulders, for nearly a mile. Occasionally, King’s assistants, a pair of bulky guys with law-enforcement backgrounds, offered the stumbling line a corrective shove. Weekend hikers gave the group a wide berth. Among the sightless were Justin, a martial-arts instructor from the Seattle area; Adam, who owns a lawn-mowing business in Indiana and had lost a baby; Kevin, a people-pleasing I.T. salesman from Dallas; and James, an unemployed Army veteran living in Phoenix with his second wife. James broke down crying when King asked him why he was there. “A lot of reasons,” James stammered. “Blocks and barriers.” The men, ranging in age from twenty-nine to sixty-four, carried rucksacks containing the few items that they were allowed to bring. Sleeping bags were permitted, but not pillows or pads.
Eventually, King ordered them to stop and remove their blindfolds. The air was now cool and moist. They saw that they were standing at the midpoint of a tunnel carved into a mountain. “You see that light at the end of the tunnel?” King shouted, his voice echoing. The men squinted. “That’s where you’re headed. But you’ve got to go backwards first.” They put their blindfolds back on, turned around, and wobbled out of the tunnel.
You can enjoy the rest of the story unpaywalled here.
When I posted about the story on DTM social media, there were swift and mocking condemnations of programs like RISE and their blindfolded walk through the old train tunnel.
“…it is very funny that someone is charging money to a bunch of losers to walk through a tunnel,” wrote New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on Bluesky.
Indeed, as Bethea reported, the men paid around $3,000 to be blindfolded and thrown into the back of a van.
Which prompted more comments like…
“if you would like to become Alpha, I would be happy to lead you through my crawlspace ($1000 plz).”
“These alpha male boot camps are one of the wildest grifts I’ve ever seen. You know you don’t have pay for this shit, right? I went to boot camp too, but the government paid me to be there and then they paid for my college education. And it was way more fun than whatever this is. We had grenades!”
“Men will literally do anything but go to therapy.”
Indeed, promotional videos like this from RISE, which tell men to “become the heros of their own stories,” are easy targets for mockery:
When a female follower on the DTM’s Facebook page said, “Lord dear baby JesusGIRLLL - please let us find out local dudes are doing this,” that got a rise out of RISE.
“Because why exactly? Asking for a friend,” wrote someone from the RISE - Ruthless Integrity & Simple Execution, LLC Facebook page.
“bc I think it’s really funny and hope to make fun of them in person,” the follower responded. “Tell your friend i said so. Since they seem to be unable to comment using their own real name and face - so brave. poor lil guy.”
RISE - Ruthless Integrity & Simple Execution, LLC then directed the DTM to an article the group’s founder, Brendan King, wrote on substack, taking issue with the way people were responding to the New Yorker article on social media.
“If you read the [New Yorker] article consciously you would have read that we at (RISE) do not seek to create “alpha” males,” King told the DTM. “In fact we hate that term and the “manosphere” type agenda. Consider our response to the article if you seek to actually do some independent research and journalism.”
Basically, King’s article is a long complaint about the many critical comments under the New Yorker’s Facebook post about Bethea’s story, which King believes were prompted by the story’s misleading headline and people not reading the story closely enough.
“Of the three times they have posted the article (each time with more “alpha male” wording to drive clicks), 99.9% of the comments—now nearing over 1,000—are insults, shaming, and attacks on the men who choose to attend, as if they are subhuman. Some even call for those running the programs to be shamed as well.”
King says he “heavily debated” allowing Bethea to write the story, knowing, he says, that “the New Yorker is a liberal, left-leaning publication,” but was ultimately happy with his reporting.
“I believed he [Bethea] was open to giving us a fair shot and writing as impartially as possible,” writes King. “At one point during the event, he turned to me—with tears in his eyes—and said: “I have been personally and professionally moved by what you are doing here.”
Really?
“Yes, there were powerful moments during the RISE event that made me emotional and I told King so,” Bethea told the DTM. “There are certainly troubling things happening in the manosphere arena, and these related programs, but, based on my three-day embed, I don’t think RISE deserves to be lumped in with the bad.”
As for the comments on social media that so bothered King, Bethea called them “unfortunate but predictable.”
“I’m not surprised that internet trolls are doing what trolls do: exaggerating, misinterpreting, mocking,” he said.
During an NPR interview about his article, Bethea described a man, a veteran in his 50s, in the RISE program, so lonely and disconnected that he goes alone to Walmart at night just to be around people. During a grueling crawling exercise with the group of men, King says to him, “Why aren't you fucking your wife?” Bethea continues:
And James starts to cry in front of all these men he’s just met. And he’s confessing that he has erectile dysfunction. And it’s silent. And then a few of the other guys start to essentially say, oh, yeah, I’ve had some issues in the bedroom, too, or whatever. King softens his tone and says, you know, I used to as well. That was a problem I had in my 20s.
And James’ problem’s not solved by this, obviously. But he’s shared it and others have seen him share his pain. They’ve acknowledged it. Some of them have confessed. And it was, frankly, a moving thing to witness. And so I was kind of open from that point on to this whole project being a little bit more complicated and maybe, maybe beneficial than I had suspected.
Back in my 30s, I was in a men’s therapy group for several years and I couldn’t imagine my therapist ever saying that to one of us. It struck me as unprofessional and abusive.
“It also looks an awful lot like straight-up fraternity hazing,” said another female DTM follower. “ I don’t think confidence is built through humiliation.” .
I asked Bethea to explain his thinking.
“Let’s be clear: I’m not a therapist. I’m certainly not offering a blanket endorsement of everything I saw at RISE, either,” Bethea told the DTM. “But it was ultimately heartening to see men share and listen deeply and make themselves vulnerable. These men reported being largely unable to do these things prior to RISE.”
However, Bethea emphasized that “certainly three days in the woods is not a magic pill.”
“I’m not offering RISE as a therapeutic blueprint for all men,” he says, “ or saying that King didn’t veer from best practices at times in his approach.”
In the end, man therapy aside, it’s also important not to lose sight of one important thing here: the fact that the Blue Ridge Tunnel is a pretty cool place, with an interesting history, and is worth checking out if you haven’t already! Blindfolds optional.