"[T]he burgeoning Nads were young Republicans. They had gathered at the Capitol Hill Club to drink cheap beer..."

"... in a room decorated with porcelain elephant statues and photographs of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. John McCain, and listen to a well-built man with a five o’clock shadow and an Australian accent tell them that '"nasty women" are coming for two things: your mind and your testicles!' In some ways, Adams’s shtick is conventionally conservative: He’s Christian, he’s very concerned about there being only two genders, he rails against 'woke.' In other ways, his version of MAGA manhood is so over-the-top, so uncanny that it almost seems like performance art.... He writes about how if your wife is 'high-maintenance' then you’re a 'loser' no matter how hot she is. And about his love of steak. 'Alpha males don’t care about time changes, we wake up at 4AM every single morning regardless of the circumstances,' he wrote on X last month, a few days after the clocks sprang forward for daylight saving time. '64oz tomahawk ribeyes aren’t going to eat themselves!' Is Nick Adams serious?... 'You remember Andy Kaufman?; Adams’s hired security guard told me, referring to the late comedian who was famous for never breaking character.... 'This is not a character,' Adams told me. 'This is not a bit. It’s not trolling. Anyone who thinks this is not me, that I don’t eat steak, that I don’t drink ice-cold domestics, that I don’t repel woke beer, they’re wrong. They’re absolutely wrong.”

Writes Ben Terris, in "The deeply silly, extremely serious rise of ‘Alpha Male’ Nick Adams/Meet the Trump-backed raconteur who is teaching America’s young men the art of being hard to deal with" (WaPo, free access link).

"Nads" = Nick Adams Disciples.

I hadn't heard of Nick Adams until this article. The issue of when a comedian is "serious" is kind of intriguing. I don't think the point of reference should be Andy Kaufman. It should be Andrew Dice Clay. I already lived through that. Another thing I lived through was the TV show "The Rebel." Don't reuse a name that already means something to some people who still roam through the west.

ADDED: As pointed out by William in the comments, there's also Nick Adams, the Hemingway fictional character. I don't have a problem with this new Nick Adams adopting the name in a reference to those stories from a century ago, just as I'd accept a comedian who called himself Hamlet or Captain Ahab. "Nick Adams" was taken as a showbiz name back in the 1950s, and I don't like seeing it reused.