It’s day three of Operation Black Site, an elite course designed to teach executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs “badass skills” from Green Berets, Navy seals, and U.F.C. fighters.
We are at Black Site Ranch, a 26-acre tactical-training facility in Southern California’s wine country, an hour’s drive inland from Laguna Beach. It features more than 30 distinct components, including obstacle courses, a live-fire shooting range, and the shoot house—a close-quarters-combat training structure designed by Tim Kennedy, a U.F.C. fighter and U.S. Army sergeant. The atmosphere is punishing: wooden structures, dirt trails, and a schedule designed to push participants past their limits.
We are herded into an empty room and lined up. A gruff voice shouts from a loudspeaker: “Split up into groups of four.” Our wrists are zip-tied, hands duct-taped, and legs bound with packing tape. I am shoved to the ground into a dead-fish position—helpless and supine.
“Now, get out,” the voice commands.
A strobe light flashes. In its flickering glow, I bite at the duct tape binding my hands. By clenching my fists when they had tied me up, I’d left just enough room to wriggle out from the zip ties and help my teammates. When we all get free, our menacing instructor starts a slow clap. But we’re not done yet.
Another exercise is held at the shoot house. A teacher with arms like tree trunks describes the scenario: “You got a call from your daughter at home. A strange man was at the door. She hung up. You tried to call back, but there was no answer. You’ve now raced home. Get inside and protect your family.”
We are split into pairs, handed airsoft Glock pistols, eye protection, and a medical kit. As real men, we must race to save our daughter. We breach the door, scanning the hallway. Clear. Then, a bloodcurdling scream.
“Don’t let me die,” she shouts. “Please. Don’t let me die!”
Inside the next room, an actor dressed as an attacker is kneeling over a young woman, who is probably 12 years old. I neutralize him, then apply a tourniquet above her wound—from which fake blood is spraying. I pause, wondering, Do I have consent to wrap this around a child’s inner thigh? But there’s no room for these types of “woke” thoughts in this situation.
Fight Camp
Founded in 2023 by entrepreneurs Bedros Keuilian and Dan Fleyshman, Operation Black Site teaches combat skills and encourages participants to “network, mastermind and have a bunch of fun with other like-minded patriot entrepreneurs” over three days for $5,000 under the guidance of “the most lethal men and women on the planet.”
The camp blends tactical training with a broader ideological mission—masculinity reigns, and the woke agenda is seen as its biggest threat.
“Imagine what happens when an entrepreneur like you is given the skills of James Bond, John Wick, or even Jason Bourne,” the company Web site states. “And if you combined all those lethal skills with your business savviness.. [sic] You’d be absolutely unf*ckwithable in both business and life.”
Participants cycle through mixed-martial-arts training, workouts, and live-fire exercises. Classes cover Muay Thai and jujitsu maneuvers, handcuffing techniques, applying tourniquets, and the lethality of gunshot wounds to various vital organs. We also learned strategies from former U.S. Marines for clearing rooms and securing houses.
The teachers are combat experts, such as Muay Thai fighter Desiree Wodicker, Marine Steve Eckert, and U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape specialist Christopher Weichman.
For some, Operation Black Site’s co-founders embody the successful American man. Keuilian, a self-professed entrepreneurial genius, has built multi-million-dollar franchising, software, and digital-marketing ventures. His 2018 book is aptly titled Man Up.
Fleyshman founded his first company at age 19 and sold it four years later for more than $9 million. He has 444,000 Instagram followers, who look to him for business advice. (Keuilian and Fleyshman did not respond to Air mAil’s requests for comment.)
I heard about Operation Black Site through Instagram ads targeting an entrepreneur’s desire to “become a human weapon.” The ads showed suave Bond types training for combat, in grueling mountain workouts, and firing guns.
The camp attracts Republicans and MAGA diehards, some converts rather than lifelong conservatives, arriving from Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Texas. A few run tech start-ups or have made fortunes in crypto-currency. One participant, a comedian from the Upper East Side, might have been looking to escape his progressive milieu.
Enrollees are essentially 90 percent male, but some women accompany their overzealous husbands. Others are instructors’ wives. Jokes that would be unthinkable in liberal spaces often land hardest with the women.
Every day, at five a.m., there’s an optional workout—“optional” being a flexible term. Those who skip it have been threatened with spending the day in a T-shirt adorned with the rainbow flag, representing the L.G.B.T.Q. movement. Congregating pre-dawn at the ranch, the group of largely out-of-shape males, myself included, huddles nervously in the desert cold.
During rope climbs, monkey bars, push-ups, mountain climbs, and the hauling of sandbags up gravelly hills, instructors taunt the men: “Trump’s back,” one says. “I can call you guys trannies now.”
Slurs—homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic—aren’t just tolerated. They’re treated as words of liberation.
“The previous administration was killing masculinity,” Keuilian says in an Instagram story. “Now, it’s coming back—in the healthiest, most awesome way.”
The men huddle in excitement as lean instructors preach the art of turning fear into fuel. When the close-quarters-combat expert recounts his tours in the Middle East, the group listens with wide eyes and inflating chests.
Throughout the weekend, they are warriors—the first line of defense, the undisputed heads of the household. They’re told America is under siege and successful men must take precautions.
“IF, in a few seconds, you’re manhandled in front of your spouse or kids,” the organization Web site warns, “no amount of money will buy back the respect they HAD for you. They’ll never feel safe and secure around you again. And the image of you being THEIR PROTECTOR will be shattered.”
“Entrepreneurs understand how to protect their assets,” adds Tony Blauer, a pioneer of the SPEAR self-defense system, “but they don’t know how to protect their asses.”
In an environment where bad people are seen to be invading the country, looking to enter your home, steal from you, or otherwise take you down, Trump’s hardline stance on immigration doesn’t just resonate—it feels inevitable.
One phrase comes up again and again: “If you make all this money, you become a target.”
Bleeding-Heart Conservatives
For a place whose mission is clearly to foster a masculine revival, the first scheduled activity after collecting our army “swag bag” was unexpected: a breath-work lesson.
We lay on our mats, and our instructor told us to treat our breath as energy and to hold it deep in our stomachs. I drifted into a peaceful slumber and woke to the men sitting in a circle, sharing their deepest vulnerabilities.
Someone to my left raised his hand. “It’s not so easy,” he said, “to get a bunch of men together to talk about their feelings like this. This is the first time I’ve been able to tune out the pain.” He confessed he had recently lost a close family member. A hush fell over the group, and beneath the bravado, a quiet sense of empathy emerged.
These men yearn for recognition in an America that they feel celebrates progressivism and spends too much time spotlighting minority groups, while their own traditional values feel increasingly out of place. But any human connection they might have come for was short-lived.
Thirty minutes later, our fitness coach strolled past. “I don’t know what kind of gay orgy you were having,” he said, “but that stops now.”
Just like that, vulnerability becomes a liability once again. For three days and $5,000, this is a man’s world.
Darius J. Rubin is a New York City–based filmmaker
