Aubrey Huff wants to be a good father to his sons. He wants to set an example for them.

He wants to show them what it means to be a man, and what it means to be an American.

Lately, he’s been selling t-shirts through his patriotic brand, Alpha American . As an outspoken advocate for both freedom and masculinity, he’s had his verified accounts banned on both Twitter and Instagram.

But if you knew about Aubrey Huff before all of that — you knew him from baseball. Huff played 13 seasons in Major League Baseball. He finished his career with the Giants, and won two World Series with them. He loved being part of that team and speaks fondly of those times and told me that he still keeps in touch with some of his teammates. However, as a Trump supporter and masculinity advocate, the San Francisco-based Giants organization has tried on several occasions to distance itself from him.

Huff reached out to me after reading The Way of Men , and after watching the big tech establishment collude with political organizations to target and silence outspoken voices like his, I decided to fly out to San Diego to interview him for CHEST. As a former Major League Baseball star, Aubrey Huff is a well-known, mainstream figure who is remembered and appreciated by millions of baseball fans across America, but he presents as a friendly, down-to-earth guy who could just as easily be a general contractor. I brought the guy I live with along with me, because he is a lifelong Giants fan, and Aubrey happily offered him a baseball card from his drawer and signed a Giants baseball for him. We sat down at Huff’s kitchen island to talk about his past, the present state of masculinity, and the future of America.

I’ve noticed over the years that there is a tendency and even a strong desire among many to believe that particularly masculine or accomplished men simply emerged from the womb or from the smoke from some lightning strike exactly as are now or as they were in their prime. We want our heroes to be divine and there was a tendency even in the ancient world to mythologize the lives and even the childhoods of men who rose to prominence or who did great deeds. Many women and homosexual men want the truly masculine man to be some alien “other” who is and has always been unshakably confident, firm, and certain. They want to believe that he simply “is” and that he never had to create the man that they see before them from some confused or hesitant boy.

It is also true that men want to believe that the men who they follow are special and gifted. The word hierarchy itself essentially means holy order, or rule by the divine order. When someone’s at the top of the hierarchy, we want to believe that there’s some magical reason why.

While there has always been a desire to believe that these men are some kind of supernatural “other,” I believe that the reality of their personal transformations is far more inspiring. While some men do seem to be guided into a confident masculinity by strong father figures, and I believe that’s how it should be, many of the most vocal advocates for masculinity are men who corrected something that they found lacking in themselves. They create a light in response to an internal void or perceived void. Their confidence is a response to self-doubt. We could call it the “Roosevelt Effect,” after Theodore, and it came up recently in my interview with Ian Smith, who described himself as a “feeble” kid who avoided challenges. Detractors would say that they are motivated by “insecurity,” but I’m inclined to wonder in response what motivates the kind of people who would say that, and indeed, what their preferred motivator might be. Many of the men I’ve met who have achieved something notable have confided that they’ve always felt they had “something to prove” in some way or other.

Aubrey Huff — who grew up to become a successful Major League Baseball player and one of the few well-known men today who is risking revenue and reputation to stand up against big tech — that guy told me that once upon a time, he thought of himself as a “mama’s boy.” Aubrey’s father was murdered while trying to stop a domestic dispute as a bystander in Texas when Huff was only 6 years old. He and his sister were raised by his hard-working mother, who encouraged them in athletics. Still, growing up without a father, Huff told me that he was uncertain and lacked confidence and didn’t even manage to find a girlfriend until he was in college. When he made it to the major leagues, he said, he had to “grow up quick.”

Huff said he learned a lot about being a man “in the clubhouse,” which taught him about leadership and building relationships and learning how to work together with other men as part of a team. He said it’s something that he missed a lot after he retired, and we compared it to some of the challenges men face when they leave the military and lose that kind of camaraderie — though Aubrey was quick to point out that “those guys are heroes” and that he was just “playing a kid’s game.”

Huff said his marriage and divorce also taught him a lot about being a man. When he was playing baseball in the major leagues, he had that alpha energy and that’s what his wife signed up for. When he retired, though, he decided to encourage his wife to “go pursue her dreams” and he stayed home to “cook and clean and do the shopping and take the kids to school and fold the laundry.” He did that for a few years, and said that he felt,”like a caged lion.” He went through some depression, and even though he was doing what progressive society says that men should do, he wife was less attracted to him. Eventually, they drifted apart, and he says that, looking back, he blames himself for allowing himself to become a “beta male.”

“She signed up for an alpha male.”

He said he did a lot of research into men’s books and referenced Rollo Tomassi and Richard Cooper.

“Kill the beta before it kills you.”

As he came to understand what happened, he realized that helping other men understand that became part of his mission.

“Don’t allow yourself to become feminized by this pussified society that is trying to assassinate men’s character and their strength.”

Huff’s boys are in public school now, and that’s where he sees a lot of the programming start. He tells his kids to listen to their teachers when they are talking about math or science, but when they start to spew their “political bullshit” or tell them that they’re being “too aggressive or competitive, I want you to pretend like they are the Charlie Brown teacher. ‘Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.’”

“I talk to my sons like they’re men. I don’t tell them that the world is full of puppy dogs and ice cream, because it’s not. You’re not a special snowflake. The world’s not going to be fair. But when you figure out what your gift is and what you want to do — I don’t care what it is — you go out and do it with everything you have. At the end of the day, you can lay your head down knowing that you did your best.”

And that is Huff’s primary concern now — preparing his boys for life. He said that as a Christian man, he always wanted marriage and family life, but his divorce taught him a lot about the court system. “It’s become a business.” He said a lot of men have very little to gain and everything to lose by getting married, so while he’d like to find another woman to spend his life with, he doesn’t see himself getting legally married again.

“I believe in marriage the way it was when Jesus talked about it back in the day, right before the government got involved in marriage and fucked everything up like they always do.”

POLITICS

Today, Aubrey Huff is known — and sometimes hated — for supporting conservative causes, but he told me that while he was growing up and even while he was playing baseball, politics wasn’t really on his radar. As a baseball player, he went to The White House and shook Barack Obama’s hand and his thought at the time was that it was a great opportunity and something he was looking forward to telling his kids about. “I got to meet the President of the United States.” He wasn’t paying much attention to politics in those days — he said he was too busy “hitting bombs and cashing checks.” But after retiring from baseball, he started paying more attention — especially to the way that the media fawned over Obama and then switched to trashing Trump. Huff remembers that the media seemed to love Trump and treated him like the American Dream when he was known as an entertainer and a celebrity, but as soon as he was elected, he was portrayed as a “racist” or a “joke” or a“piece of shit.” Aubrey slowly came to the conclusion that “both parties were playing us,” and it seemed like Trump was being strangely targeted and disrespected because he was “in the way.” He said watching the media bias throughout the Trump presidency really “red-pilled” him.

Naturally, the biased media coverage of COVID-19 and the censorship of anyone who questioned the official narrative on any issue surrounding it made him even more concerned.

We talked about the obvious relationship between weapons confiscation in Australia and the gross human rights violations and overt oppression that is occurring there now. Huff believes the biggest attack right now is on “patriotic, Alpha male American men” and the women who support them. “If you can take out the alpha male[s] as a government, then you have all the control.” He said that there has been all kinds of overreach, and a lot of men are tired of it, but they’ve been waiting for something “big” to happen. In the case of masks, a lot of people have just been ignoring it and going about their business. But for Aubrey Huff, the vaccine coercion is the last straw. “When you start coming at me saying I have to get the vaccine to go into a store, or you’re coming at my kids with a vaccine — you’re putting a lion in a corner.” He believes, and from what I can tell, I agree, that there are thousands of men ready to die on that particular hill. Huff says he isn’t necessarily anti-vaccine or anti-all-vaccines, but he is anti, “you’re telling me I have to take the vaccine.” As he put it, we don’t know the long-term effects, and “once you put that in someone, there is no way to take it back out.”

A lot of men are being forced into a tough position right now, and many have written to Aubrey asking for advice about making the choice to refuse the vaccine even if it means losing their livelihood. Huff is sympathetic to that, because he knows he isn’t in the same situation financially. But he asks them, “is it worth sacrificing your beliefs, values, morals, and freedom?”

He reminds men that, “alone, you’re weak, but together, you’re strong.” If a company has a hundred people in it, it’s easy to fire one, but it’s a lot harder to fire half of the staff. Aubrey tells people they need to work together to push back.

So many of the old labels and expectations about “left” and “right” and “Republicans” and “Democrats” seem outdated and inaccurate in this new political environment. This unification of workers against big corporations was once the domain of the left. Today, those who claim to be “liberals” support mandates and draconian regulations and firing anyone who doesn’t comply — while it is those who would have once been associated with the “right” who now represent “the people” banding together and standing up to big business and totalitarian state interests.

Huff said that sometime during 2020, he was watching the riots on the news with this boys, and they asked what he was going to do if it kept going on. At the time, he joked that, “if this keeps going on, dad’s going to get up off his ass and we’re gonna go full John Connor.” (The leader of the resistance in The Terminator films)

Months passed and California politicians started to talk about lockdowns and masks again, and one of his boys asked, “Dad, are you ready to go full John Connor, yet?”

His boys remembered that, and he felt like he had to stand up and do something, so Aubrey Huff held his own political rally with a few other speakers. He said about 1,000 people showed up.

“You can only post and tweet for so long.”

ALPHA AMERICAN

A few months into the pandemic, Aubrey Huff decided to start a t-shirt brand named “Alpha American.” He said that he’d been kicking it around for a year or so, inspired by guys like Sean Whalen, who converted his “Lions Not Sheep” message into a successful apparel brand. In part it was his Texas born-and-raised response to the “man buns and soy lattes and skinny jeans” he was seeing everywhere. He remembered his time in baseball and said that “in the clubhouse, every one of those guys was an alpha male.” He came up with the name for the brand by combining his belief that men should strive to become more masculine with his love for America. Huff is concerned about the future of his country, and like Anthony Dream Johnson (though he didn’t phrase it this way or quote him), seems to believe that a “revolution in masculinity” is required to right America’s path.

Aubrey Huff sees “Alpha American” as his response to what he sees as the “victim mindset” and the “participation trophy” mentality.

“There was never a guy I met in baseball who had that victim mentality — and if he did, he was  gone the next week. You grind your way up there and work your ass off and it is kill or be killed. You look at that pitcher in the eye and you’ve got that killer instinct and you think ‘you are not taking food off my family’s table, I don’t give a shit.’ It’s a badass attitude every athlete has. It’s a confidence and belief in yourself that you’re going to make it happen.”

“That’s why I love what I’m doing now with Alpha American — It’s a dying breed in today’s society. Everyone wants free shit.”

“The Alpha American…you live your life and don’t ask permission.”

Aubrey took me downstairs to show me his operation. His boys help him fold the t-shirts, and right now, he still ships them himself. That may change at some point, but right now he is enjoying the challenge of running a business and connecting with his audience.

He offered us both t-shirts, and showed us his paintings. Aubrey likes drawing superheroes digitally, using Procreate. He has his illustrations printed in high definition and mounted on canvases, then adds three dimensional elements like broken wood or glass or chicken wire to add interest to the composition. He seems to really enjoy the process and was proud to show us what he’s been working on. I particularly liked his “jacked Jesus” painting. I decided to photograph Aubrey in front of his paintings, because it shows an unexpected side of his personality.

I’m glad I made the trip to meet him, and was struck by how similar the conversation we had was to the conversations I’ve been having with other men around the country from totally different backgrounds. I believe that there’s a strong, sensible middle position rising among American men despite our differences, and Aubrey Huff is right — we sure do need a lot more “Alphas.”