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I always saw him owing his existence to a white right wing masculinity crisis in the US. Similar to a political Dan Bilzerian or other types of Instagram celebs. Where the typical figures of the right wing sphere are more dweebs and nerds than manly leaders. But they all recognize that being swole would be a much better look. So they adopted him as a sort of proof of concept.
But outside of that the guy seems to exist only in blogs, on twitter and allegedly in the heads of aspiring young Republicans. Similar to a Curtis Yarvin if he took steroids and tried to find meaning in flexing. But on that end I've never read a word the man has said.
Yeah, to me a lot of these right-wing influencers' masculinity comes off as hilarious overcompensation. It's like seeing someone who learned everything he knows about masculinity by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies but does not have enough of a sense of a humor to understand how most of those movies were in part making fun of themselves. It's people who think that they have to do something to become men rather than just being men by virtue of having been born men, hence the interest that sphere has in the idea of rituals that supposedly turn boys into men and in the idea that "women can just be, but men have to do". Which there is a grain of truth in, perhaps, but what is sometimes missed is that, while rituals and gym muscles can surely help, what grants a man confidence probably more than anything else is a combination of accomplishing things in the real world and also expanding his awareness, including about the nature of his own insecurities. And you can replace "man" with "woman" in the previous sentence and I doubt that it would become any less true. Ironically, there might be some parallels to transgenderism in the concern with having to become a man rather than just being a man.
If you're actually interested in greco-roman philosophy, the emphasis on weight-lifting and bodybuilding is real and serious. Plato, for instance, is actually a wrestling nickname that he got for being so broad and buff rather than his original name. I'm not so sure that you can qualify this as overcompensation, because if someone is legitimately attempting to follow the beliefs and practices of the classical philosophers one of the requirements is actually getting into incredibly good shape and wrestling people (getting a cool wrestling nickname like "The Rock" or "Plato" is optional though as far as I can tell).
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