A figurehead of the rightwing bodybuilding scene, the blogger who goes by Raw Egg Nationalist has built a huge following for his blend of far-right rhetoric and unorthodox dietary advice.
Via his X/Twitter account, where he has over 218,000 followers, a Substack blog and his Man’s World magazine, the pseudonymous author preaches about nutrition, masculinity, race and immigration.
His notoriety gained a significant boost in October 2022, when he featured heavily in The End of Men, a documentary by far-right US presenter and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Now HOPE not hate can reveal the identity of the man behind the account: Charles Cornish-Dale, a former academic in his mid-30s who studied history at Cambridge and Oxford and lives with his mother in a small village in South Dorset.
“Sol Brah”. “Stone Age Herbalist”. “Raw Egg Nationalist”.
If you’ve accidentally strayed into the badlands of Twitter’s “For You” curated timeline recently, you might well have come across one or all of the bizarrely-named accounts above, part of the nebulous online milieu of far-right bodybuilders and health nuts sometimes referred to as “fascist fitness” or “bro science”.
It’s a scene where apolitical, if medically questionable, advice on fitness and nutrition is combined with an extreme and conspiracy-laden view of history, race, gender relations and the state of modern society, often presented as though it were a repackaging of ancient wisdom forgotten by modern man.
Key among these is Raw Egg Nationalist, an anonymous Twitter account which uses a modified image of famed bodybuilder Vince Gironda as its profile picture and first drew fame for his advocacy of drinking – or “schlonking” – up to 18 raw eggs a day.
Cornish-Dale himself refers to the movement as “Right Wing Bodybuilders”, or RWBB, and considers it a part of the broader so-called “Dissident Right” movement, which defines itself by strong opposition to what they see as feeble and insufficiently right-wing mainstream conservative movements.
Another key figure in this scene is “Bronze Age Pervert”, recently identified as US academic Costin Alamariu, whose self-published book Bronze Age Mindset was reportedly popular among members of the Trump administration.
Cornish-Dale’s own books and annuals of his magazine ‘Man’s World’ are published by Antelope Hill, a US-based neo-Nazi publisher that displays his work alongside their own compendiums of speeches from Adolf Hitler and other Nazi figureheads.
Despite being a relative latecomer to the fascist fitness scene, setting up his Twitter account in August 2019, Raw Egg Nationalist quickly became one of its best known figures. His following on Twitter would eventually leapfrog that of Bronze Age Pervert, largely thanks to the latter being suspended by Twitter in August 2021 after HOPE not hate reported him for evading a previous ban.
Across his various outlets, which include an X/Twitter account with 218,000 subscribers, the online magazine Man’s World, a Substack blog, Cornish-Dale presents a picture of a world in which a shadowy cabal of globalists is conspiring to poison and sicken humanity and emasculate men.
In Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End Of Men, the far-right broadcaster introduced Cornish-Dale’s appearance by suggesting he had a preeminent position in what he termed the “bro scientist” movement:
“If the ‘bro scientists’ have a spiritual leader, it would be a man who calls himself Raw Egg Nationalist”
Cornish-Dale went on to introduce himself as an “anon right-wing bodybuilder” who “dispense[s] redpill fitness and health information to the masses”, before outlining the broader ideology that underpins the “bro scientist” trend:
“The enemy today is what I call ‘soy globalism’ […] The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed, and isolated, the better to control you and milk you for as much as economic value as they can before they kill you, that’s soy globalism in a nutshell”
The obvious counter-argument to this — that a population beset by obesity, illness and depression are less likely to work and would therefore be less fruitful for the globalists “milking” them for “economic value” that he fears, is not addressed.
Cornish-Dale’s solution is, unsurprisingly given his choice of pseudonym, a “vigorous policy of nationalism”:
“standing our ground, like men, and fighting for our birthright — our sacred nations — by pursuing a vigorous policy of nationalism and transforming the way the people of the nation produce and consume food.
Even by the standards of modern online discourse, the milieu that REN belongs to is especially reliant on memes, irony and in-jokes to convey their ideology, using coded language and plausible deniability to promote an extreme ideology without falling foul of platform moderation and local laws on incitement and hate speech.
An example of this is Cornish-Dale repeatedly posting modifications of a meme that originated on 4Chan and originally contained the n-word; replacing the slur with a different euphemism each time allows him to signal the word only to those who recognise the original incarnation of the meme.
Nonetheless, there are occasions in which Cornish-Dale allows his extreme positions to surface in a non-ironic manner. He is a keen promoter of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that western elites are deliberately “replacing” white populations with migrants, and has called for mass deportations of those already granted citizenship in the UK:
Cornish-Dale has also endorsed the candidacy of one of the most extreme candidates in the upcoming General Election, Steve Laws. Laws is standing for the English Democrats in Dover and Deal and has said of ethnic minority Britons that he “want[s] to see millions deported”, including those whose families have been here for generations.
Cornish-Dale also makes frequent hints towards his desire for violence , while often remaining careful to ensure that his posts have sufficient deniability to avoid accusations of direct incitement. In a recent Twitter post he shared a video of a tree stump being pulverised by a mechanical woodchipper with the caption “new punishment for journalists just dropped”.
The July 2023 edition of Man’s World magazine displayed a disturbing tribute to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who had died in prison a month earlier. Affectionately referring to him as “Uncle Ted”, the magazine printed what purported to be a letter from Kaczysnki to a fan, apparently holding up a terrorist who killed three people and injured dozens more in a decades-long campaign of violence as a worthy source of emulation.
Other editions of Man’s World have carried advertisements for the books Harassment Architecture and Gothic Violence by the author and former Breitbart columnist Jack Mahoney. These fiction books are marked by the glorification of extreme violence and bigotry, with little artistic merit to justify the extreme content.
There is sparse information online about Cornish-Dale’s life before launching his career as a pseudonymous egg-slonker, beyond his academic credentials. From what is available online he took an undergraduate history degree at Exeter University, going on to study at Cambridge before completing a PhD at Lincoln College, Oxford in 2018 and moving back into his family home shortly after.
His PhD thesis, titled Migrations of the holy: the devotional culture of Wimborne Minster, c.1400-1640, was on the religious history of a Dorset parish not far from his childhood home and does not appear to have much link to the topics that have preoccupied his efforts on the anonymous Twitter account that he would launch a year later.
We could only find one photo of Cornish-Dale online, taken in 2009 when an essay he wrote for his undergraduate degree got an honourable mention from the Royal Historical Society’s History Today prize.
One perhaps surprising feature of Cornish-Dale’s life, if you were inclined to trust the impression that online influencers give of their lifestyles, is that he appears to have lived with his mother since 2019, a period covering the entirety of his newfound career as a masculinity influencer.
While there is clearly nothing wrong with living with your parents in your mid-30s — a situation that many choose or find themselves in through financial necessity — it does jar somewhat with Cornish-Dale’s self-presentation as a figurehead of manliness, and one who has identified an “extended adolescence” as negating one’s manhood:
Men have ceased, in important respects, to be men. More and more young men are opting out of manhood, as it were, and choosing to live a prolonged adolescence
Cornish-Dale has also made frequent reference to an idea, popularised by his friend Costin Alamariu AKA Bronze Age Pervert, that feminism in the 21st century is reverting to an imagined neolithic “longhouse” culture, where men existed in a communal culture that left them subservient to women:
It does seem that Cornish-Dale is aware of this incongruity between his online persona and offline living situation: in an article about his dating life from 2020, he noted in a mocking way that he could not spend the night at the home of a prospective romantic partner in her mid-20s because she lived with her parents – but chose not to mention to his readers that his living situation was the same.
“Oh yes, the parents. She’s sleeping in her childhood bedroom, which still has the doll’s house in it she got for her seventh birthday. She told me.”
In article from November 2023 titled “An Actual Defence of Anonymity”, Cornish-Dale delivered an impassioned defence of the right to anonymity for online influencers like himself:
“a poster like me might have a reputation to preserve, but there’s one thing that remains as off-the-table for me […] as it does for the lowliest shitposter and that’s, of course, our actual names and faces. None of us wants, personally, to be an ‘identifiable entity’”
Yet in the same piece he boasted of the reach that he had been able to achieve pseudonymously, comparing it favourably with that of known commentators and highlighting how the internet has provided opportunities for significant social reach with none of the accountability and unwanted attention that have traditionally come from being in the public eye.
“As things stand, I have 170,000 followers and the ability to reach as far into the mainstream media as most named commentators […] Thankfully, being anonymous now offers its own distinctive routes for influence and success largely on our own terms”
Unfortunately for him, Cornish-Dale had already put sufficient information into the public domain to allow us to identify him, a possibility that he has acknowledged in the past while urging other anonymous influencers to be more security conscious in what they post online.
In the early days of his Twitter account, prior to achieving the kind of notoriety that might prompt anyone to seek to uncover his identity, he had posted photos and biographical details that helped narrow down his name and whereabouts.
These included a photograph with a copy of his local newspaper identifiable in the backdrop; a poorly-redacted screenshot of a text exchange which allowed us to guess that his name was “Charlie”, along with selfies and photos taken at his home and garden which allowed us to confirm his location for certain.
HOPE not hate decided to name Cornish-Dale as the man behind the pseudonym due to his growing reach and increasingly extreme rhetoric. Anyone is free to create an account anonymously on Twitter, and some will be able “reach as far into the mainstream media as most named commentators”, as Cornish-Dale has boasted.
But it is unacceptable to use that platform to incite hatred and use violent rhetoric against others while hiding from any scrutiny and social consequences, and HOPE not hate will continue to shine a light on those who try to do so.
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