My new theory is that Tucker is a leftist who’s deep undercover, using his perch at Fox to try to thin the herd of Republican voters.

Having spent months trying to convince them that COVID vaccines are useless at best and dangerous at worst, he’s now pivoted to trying to persuade them to irradiate their balls.

If you can’t kill ’em, sterilize ’em!

He has a new special out called “The End of Men” whose promo is, uh … it’s something. As one Twitter pal put it, if you showed this in a classroom in Florida you’d be arrested.

I promise you are not prepared for Tucker's latest montage pic.twitter.com/8tdvYTW2cn

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) April 16, 2022

What’s up with the guy standing in front of a red light aimed point-blank at his crotch, you may ask? The answer:

In his new special on how to raise testosterone levels in men, Tucker Carlson’s guest suggests “testicle tanning” using infrared light as a “bromeopathic” therapy. pic.twitter.com/PirerBMRyr

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) April 17, 2022

Is that really the solution to America’s alleged low-T epidemic? Putting a little color on your man-purse?

Some guys think so. One account published five years ago in Men’s Health describes the writer’s experiment with an expensive red-light therapy machine. He turned it on, pulled down his drawers, and gave his boys five minutes of exposure. Result: “The rest of the morning, my crotch felt warm. Alive. So I did it again. Glancing out my office window to make sure the lawnmower guy wasn’t tooling around in the grass, I pulled down my drawers and bathed myself in the heavenly, warm, tingly glow, this time for eight minutes. That night, my wife and I made love. Admittedly, I felt – well – a unique heavenly, warm, tingly glow in my crotch. Nice.”

He later upped his exposure to 20 minutes and, well, you can read the article yourself to see his results. This is a family publication, after all. Apart from the occasional posts about nutsacks.

So there’s really something to this, is there? Actually, no — at least, not that science has been able to substantiate so far. Lifehacker notes that the hypotheses for how this is supposed to work, such as by increasing Vitamin D or boosting mitochondrial activity, are based on reactions to red light within skin cells. But in that case, there’s no obvious reason why the light needs to be aimed at scrotal skin specifically; you can up the amount of Vitamin D in your system by tanning any part of your body. Lyman Stone also has a long but worthy thread on whether it’s actually true that testosterone levels have declined in men over time (hard to tell since T levels vary widely by situation) and whether that’s really a problem since men don’t need much testosterone to reproduce. Even if there is a problematic decline, we may be confusing cause and effect in studying it. That is, instead of low T causing certain health problems like depression, depression may be causing low T.

If you stop doing the drugs (including alcohol) and you instead go outside more, get exercise, and join a social group which supplies narratives of meaning and significance, you may find your "low-T" symptoms mysteriously dissipate, because actually you had mild depression.

— Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 (@lymanstoneky) April 18, 2022

These effects are mild and evidence for them is far from rock-solid, but it's wild to me how many dudes in mid-life are like, "man, really having low T" and it's like "no, you just never developed the habits of a mature adult through your 40-year-long-childhood, you manchild"

— Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 (@lymanstoneky) April 18, 2022

Americans eat poorly and don’t get enough exercise or sleep. Address those problems and more specific health issues, like low testosterone, may resolve.

As for why Tucker cares about any of this, Lifehacker is doubtless correct in thinking it’s a quirky little front in the ongoing revolt against the expert class:

So why do some guys think it must work? The light therapy proponent in the video clip, Andrew McGovern, was probably correct when he said that people embrace what he calls “bromeopathy” when they “don’t trust the mainstream information.” That sounds accurate to me, and it’s a phenomenon that powers all kinds of pseudoscientific practices, as I learned firsthand when I went looking for health advice at the Goop summit. It’s the same thing all over again. Shining a light on your balls has the feel of a secret health hack that doctors don’t want you to know about, and yet you can do it yourself for free with the sun. Or you can feel like an expert by researching light therapy devices, then checking your email and calling your mom while standing in front of one with your pants down, as biohacker Ben Greenfield wrote about his experience.

Others on social media also made the Goop comparison this weekend given that Gwyneth Paltrow’s “lifestyle brand” likewise happens to feature off-the-wall suggestions on how to improve reproductive health. The phenomenon Lifehacker describes was present in the populist crazes for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as secret cures for COVID that the vaccine-peddling science cabal was supposedly trying to suppress, a narrative that unsurprisingly also got lots of play on Carlson’s show. “Get people from feeling isolated and guilty about their fringe beliefs, and instead celebrate those people as correct, as embattled truth-tellers fighting the establishment” is how Philip Bump describes the general M.O. whether the subject is COVID or ball-tanning or even UFOs.

And really, it was a matter of time before Tucker made the alleged decline in masculinity a key part of his cultural complaint. I doubt there’s a nationalist movement in any country in the world that doesn’t think its society is too “soft” and by extension its men too effeminate. The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with “sissy men” among its own population, for instance. If you want to have an authoritarian society, men will never exert and exemplify authority in their fitness and behavior enough to suit you. When Beijing rules the world, tanned testicles won’t just be recommended, they’ll be mandatory.