A Short Theory of Organ Guys
**This was going to be in a magazine, but not anymore, so I figured I’d share it here. I won’t be posting regularly, but like subscribe, I guess, it’s free.**
Organ meats are the newest tonic for our paranoid age. Liver reigns supreme with its distinct mineral chew, but many others compete for the carnivorous spotlight: eyes, brains, lungs, stomachs, intestines, marrows, hearts, blood and endless glands. Organ meat is nutrient dense, full of iron and vitamins and…other stuff, I’m sure. It has always, in some fashion, been part of our diet, in more innocent times ground up and squeezed into hot dogs or sausages, sublimated into another thing and made palatable via seasoning and elaborate preparation. Now, however, we consume guts unadulterated, fried or broiled and served upon plates curated to resemble the walls of an art gallery. No longer a dish but the accretion of discrete food objects, hunter-gatherer style.
We are rightfully wary of the processes that turn animals into variously flavored mushes, as evidenced by the collective suspicion of McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets and Subway Tuna. Factory farming is heinous, ultraprocessed foods cause all kinds of horrific ailments, gentrification eradicated local grocers and replaced them with spiritless corporate shells, and somehow one bald guy wound up owning everything. Amid the diffuse, near-untraceable ugliness of the present, we want to see what we eat, trace every morsel back to the animal from whence it came. The certainty of eating an organ—no mere meat but a specific, vital part of the animal—resolves into some kind of refuge, a singular known quantity in a life stunted by late capitalist predation.
Perhaps this food can heal our world-weary bodies. Thus, chunks and slabs of rich dark brown and cartilaginous white stud our plates while vegetables fall by the wayside: rumor has it, they’re loaded with half-invented “defense chemicals.” Many advocates also insist that eating the organs raw is crucial because cooking takes all the nutrition out. This goes against medical advice, common sense regarding the discovery of fire, and above all the often-unstated law of not eating gross things that taste nasty, like raw bull testicles. As usual, pets are also getting saddled with a version of this: the aptly named BARF (Biologically Appropriate Raw Food) diet. People are feeding dogs, cats, and themselves raw beef lung to help with “low air quality,” and eating testicles to boost testosterone (they don’t) or crunching on chicken feet to run faster: a Lamarckianism of the stomach. Paranoia veers into idiocy, and as always, grift rushes to fill the space between the two.
If social media is any gauge, men are more susceptible to such deceits, perhaps because of the crisis of masculinity everyone talks about or because men are more prone to paranoia and conspiracy theories. Among the morass of activists and influencers pushing for organs’ dietary preeminence and making a killing, the Liver King (real name: Brian Johnson) stands out by sheer derangement. I can’t stop watching his videos--they’re entrancing, obscene and violent, delightful schlock when watched with requisite detachment. Other non-fans are obsessed too, given that his comments on Instagram (followers: 1.8M) and TikTok (4.6M) are mostly negative. Imagine an impossibly large, ripped man with a bushy beard who refuses to stop yelling or put a shirt on, who loves guns and fireworks and butchering animals and tearing into their still-warm liver raw. A nine-year old’s version of a Real Man.
Johnson’s willingness to parody himself for the sake of the grift is almost moving, and above all effective: he became a social media sensation in late 2021 by eating raw liver and testicles and yelling “MOAR!” while lifting weights like some über-masc Giles Corey. He preaches a would-be traditional lifestyle based around nine “ancestral tenets”: sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight, bond. The gist of his claims is familiar: cavemen ate organs and exercised all day, and humans did not evolve to sit all day and write essays about social media or eat pasta. Johnson’s supplement company, which sells various combinations of organs in pill form with, as ever, little scientific justification, was raking in cash. His wife, who appears in many of the videos, never speaks.
Alas, everything threatened to crumble for Johnson when, in late November 2022, a competing fitness influencer posted a video featuring emails that described Johnson’s mighty regimen of steroids: $11,000 worth of monthly hormones. Not ancestral at all. With no shortage of revanchism, the media called curtains for the buff Texan, whose hypocrisy seemed beyond doubt. He responded with an apology that claimed his whole schtick was “an experiment” to find “our highest and most dominant form.” Young men were hurting the most, dying of suicide and dealing with “depression, autoimmune, anxiety, infertility, low ambition in life.” With Johnson discredited, the media set out to find a successor.
And then…Liver King kept posting. Johnson’s content changed: enormous guns and hunting became major parts of his feed, doubling down on appealing to a conservative masculinity.
Though his algorithmic presence decreased, his follower count on Tik Tok grew by almost a million. His fans, still drowned out by haters in his video comments, are there, busy supporting him. The novelist Tao Lin, for instance, is an avowed follower, and commented “Thank you. You’re doing a great job” on the original Instagram apology. When I asked him via email about his relationship to Liver King, Lin said: “I like Liver King a lot,” and detailed: “I’ve bought his supplements for myself, my parents, and some of my other relatives since 2015. His liver and other organ capsules. I’ve followed his social media since soon after he started his Instagram account.”
Lin has an extensive relationship with and interest in paranoia, which took center stage in his 2021 novel, Leave Society, whose autobiographical protagonist and narrator spends much of the narrative foisting various alternative treatments on his parents. In 2014, Lin was accused of statutory rape and other crimes by a former partner. His most recent work is a long essay (soon to become a book) in which he claimed to have “healed” his autism through “natural methods” like “nutrients, fasting, grounding (touching Earth with bare feet or other body parts), sunlight, sleep, and exercise.” He also mentions “animal organs,” which are “ample, underused sources of fat-soluble vitamins.” When I asked him about Johnson’s steroid use, he replied: “I think people overreacted about it. Compared to the lies of corporations and governments, who lie to gain billions of dollars, to hide their actions that have killed millions of people, to hide their destructive behaviors, etc., Liver King’s lying about his steroid usage is relatively benign.”
Other fans who stuck with Johnson post-steroid abuse agreed. I combed through Instagram comments in search of the odd bit of praise and support and asked if the steroid scandal felt like betrayal. Most of the people commenting positively with whom I spoke were themselves steroid users, either bodybuilders or just aging men looking to boost their testosterone. Chris, for instance, argued that Johnson’s steroid use was nothing out of the ordinary for fitness influencers. Johnson claims to have left PEDs behind, and though Chris believes Johnson is lying again, much like Lin he believes this should not be a priority: “his overall message is very good and inspiring to others.” Fitness influencer Kyle Newell, who goes by The Panda Man on Instagram and advocates a similar diet to Johnson to his almost 90 thousand followers, was unsurprised by the steroid use. He suggested that the scandal may have been intentional: “He got more coverage than ever and sales went up. He’s healthier than 99.9% of the planet, it’s easy for people to judge.”
Though they followed the ‘Ancestral tenets’ to varying degrees, all of the men with whom I spoke adhered to some element of Liver King’s dietary prescriptions, which they said reconnected them to what Justin Kane, a Houston reality TV producer, described as “THE THINGS THAT MADE OUR ANCESTORS SUCCESFUL THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO” (the caps are his). Their emphasis, always, was “the message” of self-improvement that forms the bedrock of Johnson’s philosophy. Some recounted specific events that got them into these routines: Chris, for instance, survived a near-fatal car crash and is still legally handicapped, while others cited dissatisfaction with the state of their lives as they entered their 40s. Masculinity grown feeble was a concern for all of them.
Out of exploratory curiosity, I asked these men their feelings on Andrew Tate, who deploys the same lines around male suffering that right-wing pseudo-intellectual Jordan Peterson pioneered in his own griftocratic rise to the top. Michael described Tate as “a better version of Liver King,” and Kyle said that he’s great because “he speaks his mind and has firm values that he shares and lives by.” What matters to them is the message, their sense that he tells and lives by his truth.
Tate experienced a similar (if less hypocritical) collapse after being indicted by Romanian authorities on charges of human trafficking and rape. they both inspire nostalgia for a (fictional) past, one in which conditions were less horrible and the world was more trustworthy, to justify their behaviors and beliefs. Tate’s past resembles his view of present-day Romania, where he moved in 2017 partly to avoid criminal charges: “a beautiful place…there are no feminists, there’s no open homosexuality. […] No homosexual agenda.” This, one imagines, frees him to terrorize and exploit women at will.
Liver King’s past is more distant but no less specific: Last year, Johnson traveled to Tanzania, where he went “Hunting with African Tribes.” The video’s description describes them as “our primitive peoples.” (I won’t detail every racist trope invoked—there are many—but a white American using a possessive to refer to a group of Indigenous Tanzanians warrants special mention.) These trips make evident that by “us” and “men,” Johnson means “white men,” who modernity has, he believes, weakened.
Johnson’s ideas call back to degeneration theory, a pseudo-scientific idea fashionable among eugenicists for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries which suggested that ‘undesirable’ genetic material could pollute the gene pool and lead to the downfall of Western civilization. You can guess the contaminants: non-white people, including Jews, black and indigenous people, as well as the poor and the mentally ill. As Lin told me, the origin of their contemporary version is (crank) Cleveland dentist Weston A. Price’s 1939 book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price advocated for (now-disproven)‘focal infection theory,’ a product of dentistry’s (still ongoing) struggle for inclusion in the medical establishment during the century’s early decades, as portrayed in Mary Otto’s 2017 book Teeth.
Price believed that dental infections, specifically those caused by root canals, explained the contemporary world’s illnesses because they spread (untraceably) throughout the body to cause everything from schizophrenia to cancer to acid reflux. He circled the world and met a dozen indigenous groups, including the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania. As Lin says in his autism essay, Price concluded that “aborigines got up to 10 times the vitamins and minerals of their civilized counterparts, didn’t need to have their wisdom teeth removed, and had near-perfect teeth; but when they switched to modern diets, they experienced physical and mental degeneration that accumulated over generations… Indigenous societies seemed optimized for creating what Price called “perfect infants.”
Anthropologists call this tactic of pointing to Native societies as utopias safe from the pollutions of “Western civilization” the myth of the noble savage. Pioneered in modern form by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this tactic is meant to legitimate colonial exploitation of the lands Native people inhabited in Africa, America, and Asia by suggesting that corrupt ‘modern’ societies need to use Native knowledge for their own improvement.
Price was forgotten until Sally Fallon’s 1995 cookbook, Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, pointed to him as a visionary. Johnson credits the book with guiding his transformation, as did Tao Lin when we spoke, suggesting that the book was a key origin point for the ancestral movement, of which Liver King is a key contemporary figure. Others include Paul Saladino (aka CarnivoreMD)—a physician who shares Johnson’s aversion to T-shirts, was his business partner for years, and is more measured in his endorsement of organ meats—and Raw Egg Nationalist, Bronze Age Pervert’s foodie copycat. Like BAP, REN is a QAnon conspiracist and fascist, a violent nationalist who suggests that eating only meat is the first step towards defeating the forces besieging America (see above re: degeneration). There is also @Butter__dawg, who regularly soaks eggs in maple syrup for breakfast and washes them down with a stick of butter; and @jackfloood, a decathlete who will compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics for the USA. These two accounts are clear parodies, but when you’ve seen someone make and consume even a bite of (deep breath) testicle and brain jelly, the irony becomes less credible.
They all consume organ meats, though none do it like Liver King. For him, eating organs is a key step on the road to healing from modernity. Above all, justified paranoia brings them together: something is wrong with our food, with the way we live. Their response, instead of political action against the capitalist rapacity that produced this state of affairs, is to propose an alternate diet and sell supplements, to profit off untrained paranoia. But capitalism doesn’t end when you’re rich—just ask Johnson’s endocrinologist.