Review of The Last Men and their tendency for liberal politics

The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity
Charles Cornish-Dale
Passage Publishing. 2025 

“A cross between Jordan Peterson and The Most Interesting Man In The World, Nationalist blends the sensational with the scientific. Dr. Peterson shot to fame telling young men to clean their rooms; Mr. Nationalist is busy telling men to clean up their diets.”
—John MacGhlionn, The Federalist

“A man’s testosterone levels may be the difference between a life of sex and success and a life spent rotting in a fetid basement, playing video games and eating chicken tenders heated up in the microwave by Mum,” explains Charles Cornish-Dale is his fascinating yet slightly frightening book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. He goes on to introduce us to the hikikimori, Japanese “herbivore men” who have done exactly this. Completely lacking in any kind of drive whatsoever, they have simply dropped out of life. This phenomenon, argues Cornish-Dale, who is more commonly known as “Raw Egg Nationalist,” is increasingly being seen in the West.

The West has become an anti-masculine society. Cornish-Dale reminds us that Francis Fukuyama’s infamous book title The End of History, which people quote as hubristically implying that the world’s conflicts are over, was actually The End of History and the Last Man, and he notes that it actually alludes to something particularly poignant. Man has always built a society in which he can engage in what the Greeks called thymos; the ability to thrust. However, with the key political battles won there is no longer room to do this. Instead, we see the victory of the submissive slave who will conform to the system. There is nothing left to strive for, so what are men supposed to do now?

This, argues Cornish-Dale, is the unfortunate situation that the “the last men” find themselves in. Indeed, there are many ways in which modern society is actively reducing their testosterone levels; actively making them into lesser men. Studies find that average male testosterone levels are falling year on year, contributing to a growing fertility crisis among Western males. A significant contributor to this is endocrine disruptors which are found in plastics and numerous other industrial products by which we are increasingly surrounded. Cornish-Dale points out that Alex Jones was roundly mocked in 2014 for ranting that certain herbicides were causing frogs to become gay. However, it appears that he was correct, and the same is true in humans. Certain industrial products do actually appear to be feminising men and so rendering them less heterosexual and less fertile. Cornish-Dale presents evidence that the epidemic of transgenderism in recent decades might possibly be related to endocrine disruptors.

There are also very specific industrial products that have been shown to interfere with masculinisation. Diethylstilbestrol (DES) was given to millions of pregnant women in the mid-twentieth century who had a history of miscarriages. It may have stopped them from miscarrying but it had a devastating impact on their sons: “Exposure to DES in utero has been linked to terrible reproductive abnormalities in both sexes, including undescended testicles and micropenises in boys . . .” A class of chemicals known as phthalates are used in many plastic products. They lead to reduced semen quality and lower testosterone. Cornish-Dale notes that if you use these plastics to store food then they will leak into the food and, by extension, into you and they can be transferred to a baby via breast milk. At one point in the book, Cornish-Dale notes that micro-plastics are in all of us and all parts of our bodies including the “meat,” that is within the tissue of the penis.

Naturally, argues Cornish-Dale, this has a serious impact on politics. If men are low in testosterone, they lack not just sex drive but any kind of drive—the two are intimately connected. They become docile, permitting replacement migration, but this can never work because it doesn’t take long before testosterone begins to drop among the immigrants as they begin to be exposed to the same industrial chemicals. Also, observes Cornish-Dale, various liberal ideas, such as vegetarianism, cause a collapse in testosterone as well. The obesity epidemic, caused, in part, by a lack of exercise and the consumption of appalling food—in particular, highly processed food—further adds to this testosterone decline.

Cornish-Dale sets out a clear manifesto on what needs to be done, giving advice that reaches into minutiae of everyday life. Use wooden chopping boards; don’t use plastic ones. Don’t store food in plastic and for goodness sake don’t microwave food if it’s on a plastic plate because this will cause serious leakage of plastic into the food. Much of his advice is common sense: exercise, lift weights and eat meat. One of the problems with this area of research is that it is so often espoused by obvious fanatics; “gyms bros” and the like. The Last Men is popular-academic in style. It carefully and reasonably argues its case and fully references its assertions with copious academic studies.

As a person who has researched the causes of changes in political viewpoint across time in the West, I found The Last Men very persuasive. Male testosterone is in decline and this, surely, at least in part, helps to explain the feminised kind of men who, as studies show, tends towards liberal politics.