Image Credit: Pacific Press / Contributor / Getty Images 
Zohran Mamdani was at the annual Men’s Day event on the streets of Brooklyn this Saturday when he was cornered and forced to lay down on his back and do something he had clearly never done before. Yes, Zohran Mamdani was forced—to do a bench press.
This is the kind of unrehearsed public stunt politicians and would-be politicians dread, even more than being forced to eat in front of a camera (unless you’re Pete Buttigieg, that is, and you manage to make devouring a cinnamon roll look like… whatever the hell that was).
For the first time in his expertly curated campaign, which had seen him ride the subway train with insufferable hipster faggots and play up as many braindead Gen-Z memes as possible, Mamdani was way out of his comfort zone, totally off script, and boy did it show.
The bar was loaded with one plate on either side—a whopping 135 pounds, the full weight of Sydney Sweeney’s cleavage—and out it came from the rack, with the expert guidance of a heavily muscled spotter.
Mamdani’s arms were shaking like the quarterback’s knees on prom night.
The bar went down, then surprisingly it came back up. It went down again, and surprisingly it came back up again.
Of course, neither of the two reps was actually performed by the candidate for New York mayor. He got up, laughed and patted the spotter on the back, before fleeing the scene. Later, he was pictured with his designer boots off kicking a soccer ball.
Mamdani’s opponents in the mayoral race, including the incumbent Eric Adams, pounced on his pathetic display.
Mayor Adams headed to the exact same spot and filmed a video himself banging out multiple reps without any aid from the man who had spotted Mamdani.
Adams posted the video to X and crowed, “64 vs 33. A lifetime of hard work vs. a silver spoon. The results speak for themselves.”
“The weight of the job is too heavy for ‘Mamscrawny,” Adams continued. “The only thing he can lift is your taxes.”
Not bad, Mayor Adams. Not bad. But we’re still only talking about 135 pounds, for God’s sake. This is a warmup weight.
Andrew Cuomo, whose brother Chris is no stranger to the gym, also chimed in.
“It’s easy to talk, it’s hard to carry the burden,” he wrote on X.
“This guy can’t bench his own body weight, let alone carry the weight of leading the most important city in the world.”
My favourite response, however, came from Starting Strength, the chain of weightlifting gyms.
“Strength. One of the few things you can’t take from others and redistribute.”
Amen; although Mamdani did a pretty good job of seizing the means of force production from his spotter.
But as embarrassing as Mamdani’s attempt at bench-pressing was, and as much as it may revolt you or me or any man with an ounce of testosterone in his body, it probably makes him more, not less, attractive to leftists.
A study published in May this year, in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, found that “left-wing authoritarians are less likely to support physically strong men as leaders.” Left-wing authoritarians are those who “favor strong social control but in pursuit of progressive goals.”
The study began from the premise that “Throughout history, physical strength has served as a signal of dominance and leadership ability, particularly among men. Stronger men may have been more successful in acquiring resources or enforcing group norms. These traits, while less directly relevant in modern society, still appear to shape how people think about leadership.” The psychologists wanted to understand how.
Previous research had shown that conservatives generally prefer more dominant-looking leaders. It’s been suggested this is because of an evolutionary tendency to favor men who look like they can enforce hierarchies and defend against threats. By contrast, among leftists and liberals—who seek to promote equality and oppose rigid hierarchies rooted in competition and strength—they want leaders whose appearance says, “I can cooperate. I care.” This certainly sounds plausible.
The psychologists recruited over 300 undergraduate students from an American university and asked them to rate a series of pictures showing men with either strong or weak upper bodies. The same set of faces were used throughout, to allow the researchers to focus on the effects of muscularity in particular.
The participants rated each image on the basis of how strong the man seemed, how politically conservative he appeared to be, and whether they would vote for him if he were running for president. They then completed a questionnaire designed to assess their agreement with leftist-authoritarian beliefs. This included their agreement with statements like, “The rich should be stripped of their belongings and status,” and “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views.”
The results? Participants saw stronger-looking men as more conservative across the board, but participants with a greater affinity for left-wing authoritarianism were less likely to prefer them as leaders. Interestingly, there were no sex-based differences: Men as much as women, so long as they were sympathetic to left-wing tyranny, rejected leadership by strong men.
I can’t say I’m surprised, honestly. I write about the biological basis of political beliefs all the time. I know there is one. Why wouldn’t there be? And sure, it’s something people get quite uncomfortable thinking about, let alone talking about, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
During the 2024 election, testosterone became a thoroughly political issue after Donald Trump’s absurd heroism in Butler and Hulk Hogan’s equally absurd shirt-rip at the RNC a week later. In response, the Democrats went all-in on emasculation at their National Convention. In a genuine you-really-couldn’t-make-it-up moment, Planned Parenthood parked a mobile vasectomy van outside the convention centre, so male attendees could get the snip on their way in. About a dozen men actually did. Inside the hall, the message was that the Democrats are the party of low testosterone men who don’t want to be like that awful Hulk Hogan and, in any case, testosterone decline is good because it makes men less macho and pig-headed and more willing to vote for a female president like Kamala Harris. If men were more like Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz and less like Hulk Hogan, Progress would be a whole lot easier.
The truth is, biological decline benefits leftists. Not just because sicker, unhealthier people are more dependent and therefore more likely to look to the state to protect them and fulfil their basic needs, but also because biological decline is altering the hormonal basis of politics and, in particular, the role of testosterone. I examine this process in detail in my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, which is due out very soon (big announcement coming this week, actually).
We have every reason to believe that testosterone decline, on a societal level, is driving political change. That it’s literally creating more leftists.
A number of scientific studies clearly show that higher testosterone levels are associated with archetypally right-wing beliefs and behaviours. Controlled experiments show that men with higher testosterone are more accepting of hierarchy and inequality, and that they’re more inclined to what’s often referred to as “parochial altruism,” a preference for one’s own people over outsiders.
Reduce a man’s testosterone, and you’ll reduce his aversion to inequality, at the same time as increasing his willingness to open his country’s borders and let just about anybody in. Handy, that.
Across the Western world, testosterone levels are plummeting, perhaps by as much as 1% year on year. In the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, for example, a decline of 20% in testosterone levels was observed over a period of less than 20 years. This shocking result has been replicated in a number of other studies from other countries like Finland and Israel.
This decline is part and parcel of a broader reproductive decline, with sperm counts and sperm quality also dropping off a cliff. A “spermageddon” scenario, where men simply don’t make enough sperm to be able to reproduce, could be right around the corner. Professor Shanna Swan, one of the world’s leading experts in reproductive health, has predicted it could arrive as early as 2045, simply by extrapolating current trends in sperm counts.
Zohran Mamdani is many things. He’s a symptom of demographic change and his candidacy would never have been possible without decades of massive non-European immigration. But he’s also a symptom of America’s biological decline, too: of a nation sapped of its vitality and drawn to ideas that a healthy nation would reject, rightly, without so much as a second thought.
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