An Open Letter to Lucas Bean on “The Manosphere Is Dead & Far Right”

Mr. Bean,

My name is Mumia Obsidian Ali. I am one of the founding voices of the Black Manosphere online and of the Black Manosphere Conclave, an annual in-person gathering of Black men committed to excellence in character, competence, and results. I watched your recent short, “The Manosphere Is Dead and the Far Right Killed It,” and found it troubling—not because disagreement is forbidden, but because the standard of evidence and engagement it employs falls well short of what a serious public claim requires.

John Stuart Mill put the matter cleanly: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” Your video knows only one side, and it presents that side as settled fact. What follows is a point-by-point examination of the claims you actually made.

1. “The manosphere is dead and the far right killed it.”

You open with this assertion and treat it as established. You supply no evidence for it.

There are no audience metrics, no trend data on creator output or engagement, no search-interest graphs, and no post-2018 (let alone post-2024) measurements showing decline, let alone death. The sole support offered is an interpretive leap from a single 2021 academic paper whose data window closed in 2018.

Against that assertion stands a large body of mainstream reporting that treated Manosphere-adjacent media—particularly the large male-skewing podcasts and livestreams—as a material factor in Donald Trump’s 2024 victory among younger male voters. Joe Rogan, routinely grouped with that broader ecosystem, remains one of the highest-ranking podcasts by major measurement systems in 2026. None of this is proof that every corner of the Manosphere is healthy or admirable. It is, however, decisive evidence that the space is not “dead.” An assertion of death requires positive evidence of death. You offered none.

2. The named figures: Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro

You state that Tate “did not teach men how to be men. He taught them who to hate”; that Peterson “did not help men find meaning. He helped them find an enemy”; and that Shapiro “didn’t give men critical thinking. He gave them a political identity disguised as logic.” You further claim that each of them took men who could not get dates and turned them into consumers of far-right content.

These are strong charges. You present no primary evidence for any of them.

You do not quote a single extended statement from any of the three men, play any of their actual arguments, or engage the books and long-form work in which they have set out their positions. Extraordinary claims require evidence commensurate with their strength. Naming people and attaching motives is not the same as demonstrating those motives from the public record. On this point your video offers assertion, not demonstration.

3. The EPFL study you cite

You attribute the research to “Manuel Rivero” of EPFL and claim that he “called it the radicalization pipeline.” The actual paper is “Are Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube” (Robin Mamié, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Robert West, 2021). It analyzed roughly 300 million comments from Reddit and YouTube spanning 2006–2018.

What the paper found is more limited and more careful than your presentation:

• There was meaningful user-base overlap between certain Manosphere communities and Alt-right spaces.
• Users who had engaged Manosphere content were more likely than carefully chosen counterparts to later engage Alt-right content.
• The effects were heterogeneous by community and platform—stronger and more consistent for MGTOW and Men’s Rights Activists, weaker or more platform-specific for Incels and PUAs, and more pronounced on Reddit than on YouTube.
• The authors described a “nuanced picture of the pipeline” and treated the data as observational evidence of migratory patterns. They did not claim a deliberate, uniform recruiting funnel, did not brand their finding “the radicalization pipeline” as a formal conclusion of intentional predation, and did not attribute the patterns to “right-wing media” systematically moving in on lonely men and converting self-improvement seekers into far-right consumers.

Your video collapses those qualifications into a clean morality play. That is a rhetorical choice, not a faithful rendering of the study you cited.

4. The Manosphere is not a monolith

The same 2021 paper you invoked actually underscores internal diversity. Subsequent research by William Costello and colleagues on the incel population—one of the subgroups most often portrayed as uniformly far-right—found roughly 39 percent right/centre-right, 44–45 percent left/centre-left, and a clear non-White share in the mid-to-high 30s to low 40s percent range. The broader Manosphere contains fitness and self-improvement content, financial advice, men’s-rights advocacy, pickup artistry, MGTOW, various “pill” frameworks, and political discussion of many different stripes. Treating the entire space as a single far-right recruitment apparatus is an overgeneralization the data do not support.

5. Method and standards

You have built a body of short-form content that speaks almost exclusively to an already-sympathetic audience. There is little evidence of sustained, reciprocal engagement with the strongest available critics who can answer in real time. There are no public debates, no long-form interviews in which adversaries are allowed to state their case fully, and no visible record of men whose dating, financial, or psychological outcomes improved because of your intervention.

That is a legitimate content strategy. It is not the same as the intellectual standard Mill described, nor is it the standard many of us in the Black Manosphere have chosen to meet. We publish open letters, conduct on-the-record interviews, host live gatherings whose participants report concrete changes in their lives, and answer critics by name with primary material. Results are measurable or they are not. Assertions about other men’s stupidity and arrested development are easy; demonstrated alternatives are harder.

You are under no obligation to debate anyone. If, however, the posture is that of a serious analyst diagnosing an entire cultural formation as dead and captured, then the burden of proof and the burden of engagement rise accordingly. On both counts the video falls short.

I remain open to a public exchange of the actual claims, the actual data, and the actual arguments. Until then, the record stands as it is: a strong rhetorical performance resting on a selective reading of a limited study and on characterizations of named individuals that were never substantiated from their own words.

Mumia Obsidian Ali

Black Manosphere Conclave

www.blackmanosphere.com