The Camps Promising to Turn You—or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male

Charles Bethea charts the cultural ascent of the “alpha male” and scrutinizes the bootcamps that promise to help men rise by beating them down. Those camps include RISE, a retreat held in the Blue Ridge Mountains where, according to promotional copy, “men come to fight for the life they crave,” and the short-lived Modern Day Knight Project, whose offshoot, the Squire Program, brings in fathers and sons for weight training, bizarre speeches, and tandem cold plunges. For a few of the young men in attendance, it’s a hellish weekend just to please dad. For some of the fathers, it seems to work. Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen.

We assembled outside around a contraption that Keuilian described as a “bear trap from Alaska,” which was set to snap. “Life is full of bear traps,” he explained, noting, among other snares, “a little toot of coke” or a “red-haired girl named Kyla.” He triggered the trap with a stick, which broke in half. The dads and sons hustled to a nearby dirt patch. This was where the Modern Day Knight Project’s participants had once dug their own graves; you could still see the body-size depressions. Eckert instructed the dads and sons to run a few hundred yards with kettlebells, sledgehammers, and sandbags, then to smash open the sandbags. When they were done, Eckert declared, “Taking the heavy shit, still winning—that’s how you get the money, get the girl, get the fucking mansion and the car.”