June 2015, Helsinki, Finland. At the height of their stratospheric popularity, just months after announcing the departure of founding member Zayn Malik from the immensely popular boy band One Direction and at a concert on the group’s On the Road Again tour, a fan threw what appeared to be a plastic baby doll onto the stage.

With a casual and well-natured remark of “it’s not real!”, Louis Tomlinson tossed the doll back into the crowd — at the time, with no knowledge of just how long the shadow of this offhand statement would live to haunt him into the future.

A few weeks later, when Louis announced that he was expecting a child with then-partner Briana Jungwirth, social media exploded with rampant speculation. Especially loud and difficult to ignore in the cacophony of voices was the Larry fandom (individually, ‘Larries’), an established subset of One Direction fans with the foundational belief that Louis Tomlinson and bandmate Harry Styles have been in a secret homosexual relationship since the group’s inception on The X Factor in 2010 — and a tendency to interpret almost any event as proof of this belief.

The Larries coined this sequence of events Babygate, speculating that the pregnancy was fabricated as a cover for Louis’ supposed secret relationship and that the baby doll incident at the Helsinki concert was a covert message for fans in the know, assuring them that the forthcoming pregnancy news was not real.

To any sane person, this level of conspiracism in connection with the personal life of a relatively minor celebrity sounds detached from reality — and maybe even a little concerning. To the terminally online, this event barely even registers on the scale of absurd behavior that fan communities engage in on a regular basis in the modern age of the internet.

How did we get here?

TELEVISION KILLED THE RADIO STAR

Once upon a time, celebrity fandom was an almost entirely passive endeavor. Celebrities were untouchable, existing only across a screen or beyond a wall of security (think Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, or the Beatles). You saw them only in movies, on television, or at a sporting event from afar. At most, you might be able to run into them if you queued at a meet-and-greet or fan event or camped out by their hotel or studio long enough to catch a glimpse as they entered or returned. Fans already had overwhelming attachments to these celebrities — but they lacked the interactivity, access, and intimacy that would come in the decades after.

Then, in the 1990’s and 2000’s, the landscape shifted thanks to the rising popularity of reality television. Shows like The Real World, Road Rules, Big Brother, The Simple Life, The Hills, and (perhaps most importantly) Keeping Up with the Kardashians robbed fame of its mystique. Celebrities became people, simply living their lives — just like us, only faster and much more glamorous.

Fans began to feel like a fly on the wall in the homes of the rich and famous, enjoying unparalleled access to their daily lives, routines, and personalities. Instead of larger-than-life faces and names devoid of personality, celebrities became three-dimension beings. More than ever, enthusiasts felt like they really knew the objects of their obsession in a true and intimate way.

Gone were the days of waiting hours to catch a singular glimpse of your favorite personality. Now, you could simply turn on the television set and live a day in the life of your favorite celeb. The continuous access to their lives changed the nature of fandom. It was no longer necessary to be talented or charismatic. Instead, by saturating popular culture with your presence, you could become a known quantity: comfortable, established, and familiar — kind of like a friend!

The rise of reality television was a marked step toward intimacy with celebrity figures — but only observational intimacy. True interactivity between celebrities and their fandoms was yet to be achieved — but it was coming soon.

THE DOT COM BUBBLE

The missing piece was, of course, the internet. In the early 2010s, thanks in large part to the already-massive-and-still-swelling online notoriety of One Direction, a new type of celebrity fandom began to emerge. Superfans (or “Stans,” in reference to the 2000 Eminem hit) were collaborating on Twitter to pinpoint the exact geographic locations of their favorite celebrities, speculate about their intimate personal details, attack their perceived enemies, and coordinate streaming, voting, and charting efforts en mass.

The age of the internet brought along with it a level of global interconnectivity that previous generations would have found unthinkable. It turned fandom from something that was mostly passive into something active by nature. Celebrities were suddenly within reach at all time. Even if they never actually interacted with you — for the first time, it was a real possibility that they could!

First, the rise of YouTube and podcasts led to the creation of micro-celebrities on social media that changed the expectations of fan interactions for a generation of young people that grew up with the website as the homepage of their browsers. You could listen to hours-long conversations between Joe Rogan and company — and it felt just like sitting around smoking weed with your own stupid friends. YouTubers like Shane Dawson, Ray William Johnson, and Smosh released weekly videos wherein they spoke directly to the camera from their bedrooms, actively replied to their subscribers’ comments, and overshared personal details in their lives.

Fans were now in constant, apparently reciprocal contact with their favorite celebs. If they tweeted something funny or interesting enough, they might even get reposted or replied to.

Twitter, especially, offered mainline access directly into the minds of celebrities in a way that previously seemed impossible (see Kanye West, Charlie Sheen, Ashton Kutcher, and Alec Baldwin). Twitter’s algorithm rewarded authentic behavior — even when poor or nasty — leading to a system in which the boundary-lacking behavior of such celebrities became normalized.

“[O]nline groups formed around the basis of a parasocial relationship were creating genuine, honest, interactive, and personal relationships and friendships with others — and in so doing, they created their own positive feedback loop. ”

Suddenly, there was significantly more incentive for fans to behave more and more radically in response to celebs’ increasingly common and expected lack of boundaries. If they did something crazy enough to separate themselves from the horde, then they might just be the lucky one to receive the acknowledgment that seemed just out of reach. After all, there was always a chance that Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, or Ariana Grande might be browsing Twitter at just the right moment and engage with them.

Meanwhile, and somewhat paradoxically, the rising vigor of fandom communities was reflected in the strengthening bonds between the individual members of such communities. Fandoms were planning, organizing and hosting meet-ups wherein members would travel from halfway across the world to spend quality time in fellowship of their fandom. They were missing major life events, alienating friends and family, and spending thousands of dollars to attend concerts with strangers from the internet who were united in their uncompromising love for a celebrity.

In this way, online groups formed around the basis of a parasocial relationship were creating genuine, honest, interactive, and personal relationships and friendships with others — and in so doing, they created their own positive feedback loop. Their drive to attract the attention of their heroes led to that which they were really craving: actual attention from real people who knew who they were.

In the mid-to-late 2010’s, some micro-celebs, like Colleen Ballinger (“Miranda Sings”) and Gabbie Hanna, learned to exploit this process by personally engaging in their own fandom communities, where they enjoyed status approaching godhood. They created subreddits, private chats, and discords in which they became unethically close to their (often underaged) followers and regularly talked about intimate details of their lives — like sexual proclivities, relationship statuses, and interpersonal drama.

But these celebrities weren’t just using their fandoms to stand in for friendships and therapy that might have otherwise been lacking in their lives. They were also getting something more valuable out of this arrangement of foregone boundaries: human weapons. In exchange for exclusive access to the thoughts and attention of their favorite celebrities, these young fans were implicitly required to mobilize in response to the requests of the celebrities they followed.

In response to implications dropped by Ballinger and Hanna, among others, fans learned to carry out harassment campaigns against critics and perceived enemies, “swatting” them or calling their family or employers in the hopes that they would receive recognition from their community.

THEN WE NEED A VERSE FOR THE SWIFTIES

Along came Taylor Swift.

Swift puts all previous parasocial fandoms to shame. Building on the framework of what came before, she pours significant effort into building the illusion of a true friendship between herself and her rabid fans. She actively encourages the type of parasocial behavior that celebrities like Louis Tomlinson tried so hard to avoid.

She leaves secret messages behind in almost everything she touches, from songs, to album liners, to instagram posts — and more. By continuing to drop breadcrumbs that fuel fan theories and conspiracies, while carefully avoiding outright confirming them, she fuels the parasocial engine of her fanbase, stoking the flames day after day.

Take, for example, the Gaylor conspiracy — the contention that Swift is a closeted queer woman. Swift has historically used queer-coded aesthetics and wording to promote her songs and albums (including a 2019 tweet which read “ME! Out Now!”) and included lyrics which reference queer signaling (such as “you could hear a hairpin drop” from the 2020 bonus track Right Where You Left Me off the album Evermore).

In 2014, she took things to the next level, hosting private events (so-called “Secret Sessions”) wherein she invited individual fans to her own home for food, homemade baked goods, and a private listening party for her soon-to-be-released album 1989 (she repeated this practice for her later albums Reputation and Lover). By opening her home to a select number of fans — in combination with other practices such as encouraging fans to make and bring along friendship bracelets to her concerts — she broadcasted the impression that her fans actually were her friends, blurring the already fuzzy line between reality and fantasy for her fanbase. And you’d be willing to do just about anything for a good friend, right?

Taylor Swift never makes a controversial political statement. She never makes music that is too challenging, or wears clothes that her followers wouldn’t. She is the ultimate projection screen: her fans see her as a close friend because they see themselves in her. She’s the perfect imaginary friend — a blank canvas who can be whoever you need her to be. Her following has become somewhat of a religious phenomenon: fans cry at the first note of their favorite song from the parking lots outside of her shows, routinely embarrass themselves in their own social circles, and expose themselves to significant liability to get her attention.

And with a following of millions, Swift learned quickly how to weaponize her ‘friends’ — just as YouTubers did in the late 2000’s. She makes casual comments about other celebrities and her followers descend on them with a righteous fervor, falling over themselves to carry out her will with campaigns of harassment, vitriol, threats, and doxxing. They are willing to engage in crazy, illegal, and downright antisocial antics in the hopes that she will recognize them as a superfan — and, perhaps, allow them access to a world just so barely out of reach.

Most of all, Taylor Swift — the ultimate culmination of parasocial entertainment — is nothing if not a capitalist. She exploits fan fervor to sell album variants, price-inflated concert tickets, and low-effort slop-merch — all to tremendous success.

CONCEPTS OF A PLAN

From Taylor and others, the savviest among political elites discovered the lengths to which some celebrities were able to push their fanbases in furtherance of their own goals. They found themselves living in a world in which constant access was no longer negotiable. To win elections, you had to build a modern brand — which entailed continuously living in the public eye and existing in every social media space on the internet.

Then, an actual reality television star ran for president.

Trump was a celebrity that already understood the fandom game. He was comfortable living completely in the public eye with little to no boundaries. Beginning with his television show, The Apprentice, which ran for over ten years, he had already achieved household recognition and familiarity for and with Trump and his brand.

What came next was an even more robust fandom than even that of Taylor Swift, combining the scandalous attention-grabbing culture of 90’s and 2000’s reality television with the drip-feeding machine apparatus of modern social engineering.

His politics are completely vibes-based, leaning heavily on his charisma. He runs a cult of personality, without any actually policy platforms beyond self-enrichment. He has no morals, integrity, or true allegiances — and this is all just part of his brand as a shrewd businessman. If any other politician were to do or say the things Trump does on an average day, their career would have been finished a thousand times over. But not Trump — because, to his followers, Trump isn’t so much a person as he is a character on a TV show.

And his inability to coherently stand for anything actually serves to drive the fervency of his fanbase. Like Taylor Swift, Trump functions as a blank canvas for reactionary conservative social and political thought. His supporters project their own feelings and values onto him.

The religious right is able to pretend that he is a man of god, sent from heaven to destroy the ‘satanic’ left — even though he’s a philandering, lying, cheating, prideful, lecherous, wrathful, greedy rapist. So-called ‘economic conservatives’ are able to pretend that he is a great businessman — even though he’s declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy six times, defaulted on countless loans, committed fraud, and filed false financial statements.

“Like anything else, being a celebrity has become more about being a brand than a person. We don’t even worship people anymore, much less vote for them — just corporations wearing human skin.”

And Trump plays into it by surrounding himself with a coalition of advisors and cabinet members that represent a wide array of cultures, values, and schools of thought — at times parroting the talking points of each of them, but never too explicitly.

His constant, non-stop tweeting (and ‘Truthing’) allows his followers to feel as though they have open and insider access to his thoughts, compounded by his absolute candor (or is it dementia?). On Truth Social, in headlines, on television, or in the Oval Office, he’s always exactly the same guy — one who says and does insane things, in complete detachment from reality. Put simply, his supporters feel like they really know him.

He drops breadcrumbs like Swift does, too, hinting at his support for various conspiracies like QAnon and groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers — all while avoiding outright approval. Just like Swift, he weaponizes his fanbase, using them to carry out his will while distancing himself from their poor behavior (see January 6, 2021). He even shovels his slop-merch the way Swift does, leaning into fan fervor to sell useless and predatory goods and services with his name slapped haphazardly on the side of the box.

Similar to other modern fandoms, Trump supporters travel to meet up for rallies and political speeches like they’re concerts or meet-and-greets. MAGA Republicans exist in a group delusion, having alienated most people in their lives with their obsession. Finding kinship with other Trump supporters — when their personal lives are more than likely devoid of meaningful friendships and familial relationships, in part due to their political beliefs — is even more positive reinforcement that they’re making the right decision, consolidating their fervor and allowing them to double down on their delusional beliefs.

They may not have any family left that wants to talk to them — but hey, they’ll always have their Facebook friends!

WE THE PEOPLE, INC.

Ultimately, the internet has radically reshaped what it means to be a public figure. Success is no longer about achievements, talent, or charisma. It’s just about access and recognizability. Like anything else, being a celebrity has become more about being a brand than a person. We don’t even worship people anymore, much less vote for them — just corporations wearing human skin.

We’re so starved for friendship and genuine human connection that we forgot what it feels like, settling for cheap imitations sold by billionaires who are trying their damnedest to separate us from our hard-earned cash.

Today, Duke Bootee’s words from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 seminal hit, The Message, remain as resonant as ever:

“My son said, ‘daddy, I don’t wanna go to school

‘Cause the teacher’s a jerk, he must think I’m a fool

And all the kids smoke reefer, I think it’d be cheaper

If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper

Or dance to the beat, shuffle my feet

Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creeps

‘Cause it’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny

You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey.’”

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and share this post if you enjoyed it. If you’re feeling particularly generous, consider buying us a coffee. This publication depends entirely on reader support.

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December 2014, Charlottesville, Virginia. You’re a loyal GameStop employee. For close to minimum wage, you find yourself frequently running an entire retail store all by yourself, ripping off kids (and their unaware parents) to maximize corporate profits, and consistently dealing with some of the most socially unaware — and smelliest — man-children in existence.

Sometimes, the fanaticism that enters your door crosses over to delusion and, rarely, even violence.

Tensions are never higher than Boxing Day — the day after Christmas — when the store is crowded, wallets are fat, and school break is in full swing. During the morning rush, a large, long-haired man wearing purple My Little Pony sunglasses bursts through the door, screaming incoherently about Sonic the Hedgehog. After you gently and politely ask him to leave, he whips out a pink can of mace, screeches, and unloads it directly into your face before turning tail to Naruto-run out of the mall.

Who, you think as you perplexedly scrub your tumid eyes, was that repulsive ogre of a man?

First arising to internet fame after an article detailing his semi-autobiographical webcomic was published to 4chan and the Something Awful website, Chris Weston Chandler (i.e., “Chris Chan”) is what’s known online as a lolcow: someone who is milked by their audience for laughs, usually at his or her own expense.

Beginning in 2007, via Lulu.com, 4chan, and his personal YouTube channel, Chris unabashedly broadcast his antics to the world, such as harassing women at his college campus (including the dean), running over the manager of his local game shop with his car, burning down his family home in an electrical fire, forming a doomsday cult, and declaring himself a living reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

Unlike musicians, actors, or even influencers, lolcows are not famous because of their talent, charisma, or — frankly — any other positive attribute they may possess. In fact, quite the opposite is true: their fame is a direct result of their spectacular failures, lack of character, and inability to do anything worthy of note or praise. People pay attention to them for the same reason that, one would assume, some people watch NASCAR: they’re hoping to see a car crash.

Classic lolcows like Chris Chan are defined largely by their borderline unbelievable levels of naivety, failing to ever understand that their popularity is underpinned by people laughing at them — and finding revelry in their every failure and embarrassment.

Take, for example, Jordie Jordan (also known as “Wings of Redemption”), who was a talented and well-respected Call of Duty player in the late 2000’s. After rage-quitting a game against another highly-ranked player in 2011, his audience turned on him, trolling him for his inability to accept criticism and his massive weight gain, among other things. Before long, he was breaking controllers, shoving his wife, and in several cases, crying — all on camera. He has made myriad controversial and bizarre claims on public record, including that he killed a cat by trapping it under a bucket, that he forced his grandmother to stick her finger into his rectum to alleviate a painful defecation episode, and that he drank his own urine.

Or, a more modern example: Joshua Block, or “World of T-Shirts,” is a 24-year old who habitually blacks out drinking on livestream and engages in depraved and unsettling behavior, such as killing a fish by stomping on it repeatedly, saying the n-word, spitting on people, vomiting on public transit, and starting fights in foreign countries.

“A lolcow with a large enough audience is like a wildfire in a defunded national park: it can grow, and grow, and grow — unfettered and without any discernible stopping point.”

Most lolcows, like Chris, Jordie, and Joshua, continue on at exactly the same speed for their entire careers, without ever achieving any level of self-awareness. They embrace their role as a punching bag, enjoying the little attention and money that their participation in the milking generates.

Eventually, though, some begin to notice a pattern: the worse they act, the more attention they get — and the more attention they get, the more revenue they’re able to generate. Recognizing that bad behavior grows their audience much faster than good behavior, they double down on weaponizing their poor behavior as spectacle.

“DarkSydePhil,” or just “DSP,” (legally, Phillip Burnell), is one of the most notorious intentional lolcows on the internet. His livestreams consist mostly of begging his audience for money and whining about his financial situation while he plays video games — poorly — in the background. His highlights include: masturbating to completion on stream (presumably without realizing he was on video), inadvertently showing his own bank statements on-screen (which demonstrated his degenerate spending on gacha-based mobile games), and berating a fan for sending him the “wrong type” of expensive gaming laptop as a gift. As his almost two-decade long career progressed, his behavior became progressively worse. Today, he is a caricature of a human being who goes out of his way to act as poorly as possible at every given opportunity.

Another personality-turned-lolcow, Steven Jason Williams (i.e., “Boogie2988”) was a beloved YouTube personality who descended into lolcow status after being caught for faking a cancer scare. After his heel turn, he was the principal in a blatant crypto-rug-pull scam and would later go on to expose himself on camera during a livestream, reveal a fresh face tattoo (which turned out to be Sharpie), and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of viewer donations (which he claimed were for food and rent) on sex workers. He defended the Holocaust, screamed violent threats at a disabled guest on his podcast, and fired a gun at a online adversary during a physical confrontation.

Even Clavicular, a name with which readers should by now be very familiar, has quite recently begun to lean into his status as a lolcow. After several close-encounter-drug-overdoses on stream, legal troubles stemming from a hit-and-run, an animal cruelty incident, and an alleged sexual assault, he returned to his stream with a brand-new face — and an audience that had changed its tune toward him. He learned that he could increase viewership by engaging in inflammatory behavior on stream: like injecting young women with filler, crying over the inclusion of cheese on his delivery hamburger, and complaining about his height. Unfortunately, he did not fully realize how making such buffoonery a mainstay of his brand would effect the way the internet perceives him.

Eventually, larger celebrities began to learn from lolcow culture. As it turns out, the problem with personalities like Chris Chan and DarkSydePhil wasn’t that they were too deep into toxic, parasocial relationships with their audiences. On the contrary — they just weren’t thinking big enough. A lolcow with a large enough audience is like a wildfire in a defunded national park: it can grow, and grow, and grow — unfettered and without any discernible stopping point.

George W. Bush, a man who proved time and time again throughout his political career that the greatest mark of an American politician is being a good hypothetical drinking buddy, was perhaps the first to see real success as a proto-lolcow. He frequently misquoted famous sayings (e.g., “fool me once”), never seemed to be able to zip up a jacket or operate an umbrella, winked at the Queen, fell off a Segway, ducked two shoes thrown at him by a Baghdadi journalist, and fainted in the White House after choking on a pretzel (a legitimate health scare). In short, he was a deeply unserious man in most ways — except, of course, his innumerable war crimes.

In the wake of the internet age — and with W as a test case — other politicians began to realize the bankability of attention. These politicians did not care why eyes were on them, as long as they were, in fact, on them. They understood that poor behavior is often superior to good behavior in pursuit of this goal: voters, especially in the U.S., were bored and jaded: they were happy to poke something with a stick just to see what happens.

Perhaps the most famous pre-Trump example is Sarah Palin. Palin, the governor of Alaska during the 2008 presidential election, ran on Republican nominee John McCain’s ticket as the vice presidential candidate. Clearly lacking any knowledge in policy matters (except for the fact that she could see Russia from her home state of Alaska), she was a fully vibes-based politician who spoke openly about being a ‘hockey mom,’ frequently asked aides what exactly the vice president’s job was, and regularly incorporated catchphrases such as “doggone it” and “you betcha” into her interviews and debates.

Palin helped launch the Tea Party after her foray into the national political spotlight ended — a party which would lay the groundwork for the rise of MAGA Republicans and, indeed, the first Trump presidency.

To make a comprehensive list of Trump’s lolcow moments as president would be a herculean endeavor. The lowlights include: looking directly into the solar eclipse, coining the term “covfefe,” obviously drawing over a map of Hurricane Dorian’s progress with a Sharpie, describing his cognitive test as though it was a bar exam, clearly misunderstanding how windmills work, holding a press conference in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping after mistaking it for a luxury hotel chain location, serving McDonald’s at sports championship team dinners, boarding Air Force One with toilet paper stuck to his shoe, installing a ‘Diet Coke button’ in the Oval Office, throwing paper towel rolls at Puerto Ricans, and speculating on live television whether disinfectant could be “injected” to combat the covid-19 virus.

Trump and his ilk have taken the Joe Jackson approach to marketing: be as loud as you possibly can and act a buffoon in public at any opportunity — just make sure that you’re always in the headlines, at any cost. Trump adopted the lolcow ethos, absorbed it, and made it his entire ethos. Politics are no longer about being a dedicated public servant, or positively impacting the lives of the citizenry. Instead, the most important factor for winning elections is now brand recognition: the more outrageous your antics, the more likely you are to succeed.

And in a political landscape transformed — and still led — by Donald Trump, Republicans have to play along with his reality television approach to leadership. As Trump continues to up the ante as to just how insane and deluded a president can act in office, those who wish to remain in the conservative limelight must walk alongside him. As a result, we’ve seen a sharp rise in conspiracists, lechers, perverts, blowhards, and scam artists in Congress and the executive branch.

“Now, we’re living in a world where it’s almost impossible to get elected as a conservative in America unless you agree to be hooked up to Trump’s lolcow milking machine.”

George Santos (R), a New York Congressman in 2023, claimed that he worked at Goldman Sachs, that he was of Jewish descent (which he later revised to “Jew-ish”), that he had been a star athlete in college, that his mother was in the World Trade Center during September 11, that he produced a Broadway musical, and that he survived an assassination attempt, among other things — all of which were blatant lies. He reappropriated campaign funds for his own personal vacations, beauty treatments, and designer goods. Once he was caught, he doubled down, escalating his lies until he was expelled from Congress. Even now, he still makes money as an internet celebrity, hosting podcasts and appearing as a guest on those of others.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R), a former Congresswoman from Georgia, is perhaps the most quotable of the politicians spawned in the wake of Trump. She claimed that “Jewish space lasers” were responsible for California wildfires, referred to the Nazi secret police force as the “Gazpacho,” questioned whether September 11 was a conspiracy, openly supported QAnon, spoke publicly about the weather-modification abilities of world governments, and harassed mass shooting survivors.

Lauren Boebert (R - Colorado), repeatedly made racist comments about her fellow members of Congress, vowed to carry a gun through Capitol Hill, and — most recently — was kicked out of a Denver live theater performance of Beetlejuice for vaping, singing loudly, and engaging in sexual activities with her male companion from their seats.

Nancy Mace (R - South Carolina), instructed her personal staff to create and operate ‘burner accounts’ on Reddit to boost her popularity online, spoke openly on the House floor about her sex life (multiple times!), consistently uses the term “tranny,” and even (and this is absolutely true) shared blown-up images of her own nude body during a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing.

And these are some of the most popular Republican politicians in recent history.

Now, we’re living in a world where it’s almost impossible to get elected as a conservative in America unless you agree to be hooked up to Trump’s lolcow milking machine. He uses it to avoid accountability, print money, stay in power, and attack his enemies. When faced with scandal, he ducks ownership by either hiding behind his deeply unserious persona or by offering up a sacrificial lesser lolcow — like in the cases of Matt Gaetz, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi.

U.S. politics are deeply rooted in capitalism and market demand. Trump, the absolute populist that he is, recognized this and gave the people what they wanted: a living meme in the White House. Every day he livestreams his stupidity to the world, and every day he is rewarded for his braindead, attention-seeking, childish antics.

He’s the head of a major political party and a two-term president.

Lolcows are undoubtedly the new political meta — and America loves it!

The Republican Party can never go back. Democrats are clamoring for a left-wing populist who is willing to ‘get their hands dirty,’ instead of “going high” when the Republicans “go low.” We have adjusted to our new normal, aided by the coming-of-age of an entire new generation that can’t remember a political debate without mud-slinging or name-calling. In the words of Christof — played by the immortal Ed Harris — in the 1998 classic The Truman Show: “we accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.”

“Somebody help me, I’m being spontaneous!”

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and share this post if you enjoyed it. If you’re feeling particularly generous, consider buying us a coffee. This publication depends entirely on reader support.

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December 2016, Washington, D.C.. What would you do to save the innocent victims of a child sex trafficking ring from certain peril? Would you be willing to — say — drive more than 350 miles across state lines, force your way into a combination-public-table-tennis-facility-and-savory-pie-joint at gunpoint, and desk-pop a 9mm AR-15 rifle into a locked storage cabinet which might contain said kidnapped children?

Edgar Maddison Welch was.

After reading online that the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria was harboring underaged sex slaves, the 28-year-old drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C. to take the matter into his own hands, where he was promptly arrested and charged for his subsequent actions.

The conspiracy theory which so gripped him — “Pizzagate” — had originally gone viral online during the 2016 presidential election. After the personal emails of John Podesta (Hillary Clinton’s then-campaign chair) were published online by the leaked document hosting website WikiLeaks, conservative pundits and members of alt-right forums like 4chan, 8chan, Twitter, and subreddits like r/TheDonald spread a conspiracy: that the emails contained coded language that connected a series of high-ranking Democrat figures with a child sex trafficking ring. In a haze of marijuana smoke and Hot Cheeto dust, MAGA internet sleuths connected one such coded term, ‘cheese pizza’ (allegedly a reference to child pornography), to Comet, a favorite dive of D.C. lawmakers.

Although Pizzagate stands out as the modern genesis of the conspiracy-minded groupthink that would become a hallmark of the neoconservative movement, Americans have actually been enamored with this sort of conspiracist ideation for decades.

In 1964, American historian Richard Hofstadter published his seminal essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in Harper’s Magazine. The piece examines Americans’ propensity for — and as a consequence, the efficacy of politics in the vein of — sensationalist paranoid conspiracy. According to Hofstadter, American politicians, both left and right, have long used fear as a means by which to incite voters toward support for one political party or another.

Hofstadter submits McCarthyism as a stereotypical (and then-topical) example of the Paranoid Style: a political movement characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” it allowed demagoguery to flourish under the auspices of protecting the citizenry from a looming and terrible threat.

In modernity, G.O.P. voters seem especially susceptible to appeals to grand conspiracy. After all, American conservatism is best characterized by a desire to return back to a perceived golden age. As such, conservatives are particularly distrustful of the increasingly progressive political platforms adopted by academia and the traditional media which, although rooted in science and reality, seem to fly in the face of their deeply seated beliefs. Conspiracies help them make sense of the world by attributing such changes to bad actors instead of poor thinking.

This phenomenon is further compounded by conservatives’ swelling embrace of a progressively post-factual world.

“Trump, with his promise to “Make America Great Again” — firmly in the camp of Paranoid Style politics — cleverly tapped into the fears and misconceptions already present in his voter base.”

Conservative media lacks ideological coherence compared even to that of neoliberal corporate-teat-suckling outposts like CNN or MSNBC. Take, for example, some of the most popular conservative media figures in the American right during the Obama administration: figures like Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and yes, even Donald Trump.

Beck, a professional prevaricator who speaks with the cadence of a daytime televangelist and looks like the lovechild of Colonel Sanders and Porky Pig, made a name for himself by peddling tenuous conspiracy theories on Fox News including, among other things, that George Soros — a Holocaust survivor — was collaborating with Nazis, that President Obama was organizing concentration camps for political dissidents, and that the Affordable Care Act included plans for “death panels” to determine which citizens would be entitled life-saving care.

Carlson spent a great deal of his tenure as host of Fox News’ record-breaking Tucker Carlson Tonight aggressively hawking the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Proposed by homosexual-white-supremacist icon Renaud Camus (what’s with all these gay Nazis?), the theory claims that a shadowy global cabal of elites have been influencing American demographics via mass immigration, resulting in the usurpation of white people as the country’s dominant ethnic group. Specifically, Tucker asserted that “legacy Americans” were being replaced by “more obedient people from faraway countries” in an effort “to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors live here.”

Jones — by the far the most erratic and detached from reality of all the colorful characters on this list — has spent decades destroying his own credibility by means of parroting veritable insanity on various podcasts, television shows, YouTube channels, and Joe Rogan Experience guest appearances. He insists that the Sandy Hook shooting, the Parkland shooting, the Oklahoma City bombing, and September 11 were all false flags. He claims that large corporations are actively colluding with a secret world government to manufacture economic crises, fund terror attacks, control the weather, and turn the world population gay. Coincidentally, he was also one of the loudest voices amplifying Pizzagate.

Limbaugh, a spoiled sausage casing of a man who dutifully extruded rotting meat and solanine fumes from between his hypertrophied lips until his eventual expiration in 2021, was one of the most prominent voices in the conservative conspiracist community for decades. Most notably, he — along with Donald Trump — pertinaciously promoted the “birther” conspiracy theory for years, contending that Barack Obama was not eligible for the U.S. presidency based on a fallacious contention that he was not born in the United States.

While this steady diet of delusional conspiracy theories was being steadily drip-fed to conservatives in every aspect of their media consumption, their newfound fears were being simultaneously confirmed by the public failure of seemingly every longstanding institution.

In 2008, in the midst of the financial crash and in an effort to rage against the causes of what would come to be known as the Great Recession, the Tea Party movement was founded. For the first time since Barry Goldwater, a major political movement emerged which was rooted almost entirely in anti-establishment skepticism. For the members of the Tea Party — if not the greater American population as a whole — faith in the political establishment had never been lower.

By the time the Tea Party ceased to exist in 2016, most of its ideas and members had been normalized, absorbed by a Republican Party deep in the throes of a Trumpian coup.

Trump, with his promise to “Make America Great Again” — firmly in the camp of Paranoid Style politics — cleverly tapped into the fears and misconceptions already present in his voter base. He pledged to “drain the swamp” and “close the revolving door” of lobbying in Washington. He ran a campaign as a total outsider: the only person willing and able to stop all the corruption, cheating, and collusion between big business and government.

Of course, these were only Trump’s public policy platforms. In the aftermath of Pizzagate’s extreme popularity and acceptance, more online conspiracies had begun to emerge in the same vein, stoking fears of shadowy elite societies preying on innocent children — but now, they were painting Trump as a heroic white savior on a noble quest to deliver America from this pedophilic cabal.

Beginning in 2017 and 2018, on 4chan’s /pol/ board, a user named “Q Clearance Patriot” started uploading cryptic posts alleging, among other things, that a snuff film was in circulation amongst political elites depicting Hillary Clinton assaulting, murdering, and drinking the blood of a young girl in an effort to consume her ‘adrenochrome.’

The popularity of these posts cannot be overstated.

Soon, an entire community of followers organized around the poster, referred to simply as “Q,” somehow arriving — through a series of incoherent 4chan posts and mundane public actions taken by Trump (such as drinking from a water bottle) — on the principal tenet that a cabal of Satanic government officials and business executives have for years been engaging in a child sex trafficking operation, and that Donald Trump is the only man in the world with the reach and wherewithal to stop them.

Although it began as a fringe online movement situated around a niche forum, these “QAnon” posts were quickly and voluminously disseminated in more accessible spaces like Facebook and Instagram, where mainstream audiences were able to consume them. Before long, the line between QAnon followers and MAGA Republicans was blurred to the point of obscurity. By 2021, almost a quarter of all Republicans identified as “firm QAnon believers.”

Accordingly, claims of election fraud — and calls to overturn the results of the election — espoused by the QAnon faithful in response to Trump’s 2020 loss were parroted by the wider MAGA community. Leaning into this sentiment, Trump retweeted assertions from members of the QAnon community that voting machines were hacked to remove millions of Republican votes.

“Capitalizing on this, Trump in 2024 became the Paranoiageist, orchestrating a furious, competent, and frenetic campaign which understood and consolidated its own strengths — and its voter base’s weaknesses.”

In the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021, Q-related influencers spread online messages encouraging the community to go to Washington D.C. to participate in the upcoming riots. Trump himself tweeted on December 19, 2020: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, be wild!” Many such participants documented their activities through photography, videography, and citizen journalism — often proudly displaying Q-related paraphernalia.

After years upon years of conditioning, Republicans had finally decided to, like the Party members in George Orwell’s 1984, “reject the evidence of [their] eyes and ears.” Trump didn’t turn them into crackpot conspiracy nutjobs — but he certainly wasn’t shy about taking advantage of their dispositions, either. Like frogs being lowered into boiling water, the individuals who would go on to become MAGA and QAnon supporters didn’t realize that they were in danger until it was too late. They got so comfortable with the rising temperature around them that it started to feel normal — and maybe even kind of nice.

Capitalizing on this, Trump in 2024 became the Paranoiageist, orchestrating a furious, competent, and frenetic campaign which understood and consolidated its own strengths — and its voter base’s weaknesses.

He blustered and pointed fingers like Glenn Beck, stoked xenophobic sentiments like Tucker Carlson, made copious podcast appearances like Alex Jones, and embraced his own spiritual defecation and physical decay à la Rush Limbaugh. He made comments suggesting he would release the JFK assassination files, records relating to UFOs and aliens, and even — perhaps most famously — the Epstein Files. He continued to repeat claims that the 2020 election was stolen, made countless references to the ‘Deep State,’ doubled down on his public distrust of mainstream media, and associated with conspiracist lunatics like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, Mike Lindell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Laura Loomer.

Ironically, Trump and his political advisors had so deeply conditioned his supporters toward conspiracy thinking that even Trump himself could not escape their scrutiny. Calls for the release of the Epstein Files became too great to ignore, and with each disclosure, the obvious nexus between Trump and Epstein tightened into a hangman’s knot.

Now, in a haze of epistemic paranoia, Trump supporters, like Rachael in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), are being forced for the first time to confront the idea that their reality — all that they believed to be true — may have been deceitfully constructed by something much larger and more nefarious than themselves.

And, although we hope they use this opportunity to break free from their programming for good, they’re much more likely to double down further on their blind loyalty to the cult of Donald Trump. Their fear and paranoia — of that which they do not know, of that which they do not expect, and of that which they do not understand — is simply too great. It’s much easier to just sit back, relax, and listen to the angry man on the television screen.

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and share this post if you enjoyed it. If you’re feeling particularly generous, consider buying us a coffee. This publication depends entirely on reader support.

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September 2025, Orem, Utah. On a sunny day at the Utah Valley University Campus, about twenty-three minutes into a speaking engagement for the American Comeback Tour, Turning Points USA founder and prominent racist Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck by a single bullet from a Mauser model 98 rifle.

In the wake of the shooting, blame was cast in myriad directions, including that of ‘radical liberalism’, ‘transgender ideology’ and — most interestingly — Groypers, the young white followers of conservative firebrand, neo-Nazi, and burgeoning gay porn star Nick Fuentes, a vocal ideological adversary of Kirk’s from within the American right.

Although Fuentes immediately condemned the shooting and disavowed any followers who would choose to “take up arms,” the rumors were not completely unfounded. Fuentes’ history of violent rhetoric provided plenty of reason to suspect that the shooter may have been influenced by him, at least in part.

But what is a Groyper? Who is Nick Fuentes? And what could he have possibly said and done for so many people to credibly believe that he might have inspired the public execution of a fellow American conservative?

Nicholas J. Fuentes was born in 1998 to a Roman Catholic family in Illinois. As his surname suggests, he is partially of latino descent — ironic, given that he is a xenophobic, traditional Catholic (“trad-Cath”) neo-Nazi who opposes immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and the existence of pretty much any type of minority group.

By all accounts, though he was politically engaged at quite a young age, Fuentes held middle-of-the-road conservative opinions up until college. As a freshman at Boston University, he attended the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for which he later claimed to have received death threats. The rally appeared to have taught Fuentes a formative lesson that he clearly took to heart: that controversy and outrage can provide attention and — crucially — a genuine political platform.

Galvanized by this epiphany, Fuentes dropped out of college and — literally, from his mother’s basement — launched America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes, an overtly white-supremacist livestream which spewed Nazi talking points couched in edgelord humor to an astonishingly young male audience.

His genius was in the realization that he could say almost anything he wanted, no matter how detestable, as long as he did it with a wink, a charming smile, and an air of plausible deniability. The king of weasel words, Fuentes made insanely anti-Semitic comments that were so drenched in irony that many of his teenage viewers could not tell whether they were serious. Over a long enough time, his consistent neo-Nazi propaganda desensitized his viewership to his heinous political ideas.

Among other things, Fuentes routinely questioned the historical validity of the Holocaust (“If I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has fifteen ovens working twenty-four hours a day, every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make six million batches of cookies?”), claimed that the protection of the First Amendment should not apply to “Muslims or immigrants,” declared that it was “time to kill” the “globalists” who he claimed controlled the media, and insinuated that CNN leadership should be “arrested and deported or hanged.”

“[Fuentes’] following quickly became much more about the cult of personality quickly forming around his controversial and attention-seeking behavior rather than any coherent worldview.”

Fuentes dubbed his supporters “Groypers,” in reference to an internet meme popular among 4chan’s /pol/ posters and r/TheDonald Redditors, which featured a sassy white nationalist frog. Memes and trolling were a large part of Fuentes’ recruitment of young, disenfranchised white men on the internet, appealing to an existing infrastructure of incels, edgelords, and unemployed losers by adopting their language and mannerisms.

Although initially founded as a means to drive support online for Donald Trump and right-wing populism generally, his following quickly became much more about the cult of personality quickly forming around his controversial and attention-seeking behavior rather than any coherent worldview. Accordingly, he often targeted other political figureheads with harassment, thriving off the attention and increased engagement that such antics drove.

One major example of this phenomenon is the so-called “Groyper War,” in which Fuentes, in opposition to Turning Point USA and other conservative new media organizations (i.e., “Conservative, Inc.”), directed his followers to confront Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump Jr., Lara Trump, Ben Shapiro, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and others at public speaking engagements.

With Fuentes’ encouragement, his followers engaged in a campaign of entryism, posing as casual attendees at such events and asking loaded questions about immigration, US support of Israel, LGBTQ+ rights, and race realism in an effort to prove the ideological differences between Fuentes’ following and that of the ‘mainstream’ new conservative media.

For example: “how does anal sex help us win the culture war?”, “can you prove that our white European ideals can be maintained if the country’s majority is no longer made up of white European descendants?”, and various leading references to the 9/11 “dancing Israelis” conspiracy theory.

As a result of Fuentes’ activities during this period, he became a pariah among the American right and was disavowed by many other rising stars within TPUSA, Fox News, and the Trump administration.

Fuentes was an outspoken supporter of Trump in 2016 and 2020, arguing that the Trump presidency was a vehicle through which conservative alt-right populism could flourish in America. Following Trump’s loss to Biden in the 2020 election, Fuentes and several other prominent Groypers were present at the January 6 Capitol attack, flying the Groyper flag and celebrating the riots.

Several Groypers were arrested and charged for their part in the attack, including Riley Williams, who stole Nancy Pelosi’s laptop from her office, Joseph Brody, who assaulted a Capitol Police officer with a metal barricade, and Anthime Gionet — also known as “Baked Alaska” — a terminally stupid online personality who live-streamed his own storming of the U.S. Capitol building.

In 2022, while acting as an advisor to rapper Kanye West’s brief presidential campaign, Fuentes attended a Donald Trump-hosted dinner at Mar-a-Lago as West’s personal guest. Trump claimed at the time that he was not aware of Fuentes’ political views and did not receive advance notice that Fuentes would be attending the dinner.

Later that year, alongside West, Fuentes appeared for the first time on Infowars, an internet show hosted by Sandy Hook denier, crackhead carnival barker, and homeless street lunatic Alex Jones — the man who famously claimed that the U.S. government was “putting chemicals in the water to make the frogs gay.” It was in this interview that Kanye West, clad in a full-face black balaclava, asserted that he “love[d] Hitler” and that the Nazis “didn’t kill six million Jews,” claims which with which Fuentes appeared to agree.

Fuentes was later fired by West after a scandal became public involving Fuente’s friend, Ali Alexander, who allegedly engaged in sexual predation of minors — but not before West recorded his single, Heil Hitler, in front of Fuentes, who at the time, claimed the record would be the “song of the summer” (later, in 2026, Fuentes would be banned from Vendôme in Miami Beach for playing the song and dancing to it alongside Andrew Tate, Sneako, and Clavicular).

But Fuentes’ star was rising with so much velocity that even Kanye West couldn’t drag him down. He spent most of 2024 and 2025 accumulating pop culture influence by making regular appearances on popular livestreams, like those of Adin Ross and NELK, and internet shows like Alex Jones’ Infowars, Myron Gaines’ Fresh & Fit (wherein Gaines pays women to suffer his sexist schoolyard-child-level insults), and the PBD Podcast — hosted by Patrick Bet-David, a blustering multi-level-marketing grifter who markets his brand as “Valuetainment.”

Trump’s 2024 presidential run saw Fuentes’ first major ideological split from the Republican Party during an election cycle. Opposing Trump’s politics for falling short of outright white nationalism, Fuentes called for 'Groyper War 2,' directing his followers to pressure the Trump campaign into embracing far-right policy platforms. He also criticized Vice Presidential candidate and 2000’s-emo-band-bassist-lookalike J.D. Vance, calling him a “fat race-mixer” for marrying a woman of Indian descent.

Though he ultimately proved to have less political sway than he anticipated in 2024, Fuentes’ recognizability continued to grow after the election. He made appearances on mainstream news broadcasts like The Tucker Carlson Show and Piers Morgan Uncensored and admitted on the latter to being a 27-year-old virgin, claiming that while he is “attracted to women,” they “are very difficult to be around.”

But Fuentes, unscrupulous little Nazi that he is, was about to become embroiled in yet another scandal. Later in 2025, Fuentes again appeared on Fresh & Fit to argue with leftist debate-lord Steven Bonnell, known online as Destiny. Shortly thereafter, a video was leaked on alt-right forum KiwiFarms which appeared to depict Fuentes and Bonnell engaging in sexual acts with each other. This trans-political bisexual hate-fuck tape became so popular that it crashed the KiwiFarms website. Both parties involved denied its veracity— but many viewers still seemed convinced.

“Fuentes is on a quest to weaponize the ignorance of the young, the ornery, the uneducated, and the frustrated, directly against their own interests.”

Today, Fuentes is more popular than ever. Still the same little shit-stirrer as when he began streaming in 2017, he has only become more polarizing with time. He, like many other figures in the online conservative space, has mastered the art of maintaining cultural relevance through any means necessary. Like Donald Trump himself, he has accumulated a diehard fanbase who worships his every move, regardless of ideological incoherence.

Nick Fuentes has reshaped the online alt-right — brick by brick — through his cult of personality. Even his mistakes have meaningful ripple effects across the conservative landscape. His actions online (like his “your body, my choice” movement) have led to cognizable upticks in abuse against women and minority groups on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (“X”), and Reddit.

He’s cunning — much more than the media often gives him credit for. Thanks to Fuentes, ideas that used to exist on the fringe have now moved far closer to the mainstream, despite their obvious absurdity — ideas like Holocaust denialism, Christian nationalism, and autocracy. Nazis on the internet used to hide in the shadows, resorting to code-speak on specialized forums to avoid public ridicule. Thanks in large part to Fuentes’ targeted outreach toward young white teenagers, Nazism has once again become acceptable, if only as a joke — but, remember what seems to be Fuentes’ guiding principle: ‘that which is tolerated with a chuckle today will be embraced with a salute tomorrow.’

His followers in the real world engage in widespread, coordinated, and effective harassment campaigns that have actual consequences in the physical world. His bombastic outbursts and calls for action cut across all social, political, and economic lines; he is just as likely to call for the head of a liberal commentator as he is for a conservative one who, in his own estimation, lacks appropriate dedication to the far-right cause.

Is it any wonder, then, that some people speculated in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination that Tyler Robinson — the shooter — may have been a Groyper? Fuentes called for “war” against Kirk’s media organization and has an extensive history of giving calls to action which spur on political violence. It seems entirely possible that Robinson, a disenfranchised young white man living in a rural setting, could have been a Groyper — even if, as it very likely now seems, such allegations turn out to be false.

And — to set aside the thousands of other thresholds which Fuentes has crossed — when it becomes plausible that you could have feasibly inspired a public execution, you know you’ve gone wrong somewhere along the line.

On March 28, 2025, Nick Fuentes stated the following on his America First livestream:

“Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise . . . [white men] just need to run everything.”

Fuentes is on a quest to weaponize the ignorance of the young, the ornery, the uneducated, and the frustrated, directly against their own interests. He asks his followers to forsake their humanity in the furtherance of his own political conquest, with no regard to reality, ethics, or their dignity — and he doesn’t even have the courtesy to maintain a coherent ethos. Fuentes is an autocrat, a despot, a dictator, and, of course, a Nazi.

In the hopes that a would-be Groyper might one day come across this piece: please don’t allow yourself to make decisions based on the whims of an impossibly lame Nazi virgin in denial about his own sexuality. Consider the following call to action from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 classic The Great Dictator:

“Don’t give yourself to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!”

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and share this post if you enjoyed it. If you’re feeling particularly generous, consider buying us a coffee. This publication depends entirely on reader support.

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July 2019, Hove, England. The summer before Covid, Belle Delphine got famous. Like, really, really famous. Originally a PG-rated cosplayer with a mild online audience, her sudden pivot to bizarre, edgelord-esque thirst traps and shock content was immediately rewarded with a swell of more than 3 million additional Instagram followers — over a 400% increase to the modest fanbase she started the year with.

She drove engagement by posting lewd videos of herself draped in e-girl aesthetics, often wearing wigs, stockings, cat ears, and an ahegao facial expression. Her content consisted mainly of provocative glamour shots and vanity posts — but every so often, she would post an unsettling video of herself playing with dead animals or eating raw eggs, accompanied by confusing and upsetting captions. One such video even depicted Belle dancing around with a gun as a song referencing suicide played in the background. Either of these types of videos alone would have grown her following, but taken together, she — quite understandably — blew up.

The 18-year-old Delphine quickly capitalized off her newfound fame, creating a PornHub account that heavily featured clever, misleading titles that trolled the viewer by leading to parody videos which did not include any sexual content.

For example: “Belle Delphine gets SCISSORED,” in which she used scissors to exaggeratedly cut pieces of paper, “PEWDIEPIE goes all the way INSIDE Belle Delphine,” wherein she ate printed pictures of the YouTuber, and “Belle Delphine strokes two BIG cocks,” in which she literally stroked two roosters (which were, in fact, quite plump).

That year, with so many new eyes on her online persona, Delphine found an opportunity to flex her entrepreneurial muscles. She began selling her own bathwater online as “GamerGirl Bath Water,” which she advertised by posting a photo of herself in the bathtub with the disclaimer, “[t]his water is not for drinking and should only be used for sentimental purposes.”

People were very interested in this product.

“Delphine is perhaps the best example of a young woman taking using her sexuality to her advantage, taking her career into her own hands, and profiting off of those who deserved it — like a neko Robin Hood.”

Within 3 days of the bathwater hitting her online store, she sold out her entire stock. Beyond the money she earned on the endeavor, though, she accumulated attention, controversy, media coverage, and most importantly, immortality via memehood.

Belle Delphine had successfully dragged terminally online fetish culture into the daylight, normalized it, and even profited off of it. For years, she successfully ran a genius platform of poking fun at porn audiences while simultaneously profiting massively from them.

Her best content, which existed somewhere in the cosmos between pornography and performance art, dangled her sexuality in front of her audience, but importantly, never actually delivered it in earnest. Although she did eventually delve into the world of hardcore porn when she launched an OnlyFans account in earnest, the real stuff never actually brought her as much money, fame, or allure as her tongue-in-cheek trolling did.

Delphine is perhaps the best example of a young woman taking using her sexuality to her advantage, taking her career into her own hands, and profiting off of those who deserved it — like a neko Robin Hood. But unfortunately, although sex has never sold better than it does on the internet, not all women in the business are in control of distributing their own product.

As is generally true for all the darkest parts of the internet, online porn is deeply entangled with the world of live streaming. Although platforms like Twitch were notorious for swiftly banning any streamer who had the audacity to include nudity (even accidental) in their stream, this hard-line stance began to soften in 2021.

Amouranth, a popular professional cosplayer who quickly shot up the charts once she began streaming, was one of the main contributors to the popularity of a new, aptly-named genre: “hot-tub streams,” wherein she and other female streamers would perform streams in revealing swimwear from — you guessed it — a hot tub.

Users and creators alike were confused when this new category began dominating the viewership of the platform. Most popular streaming channels focused largely on gaming, commentary, or people acting poorly in public, but the women in these hot-tub streams weren’t doing much at all aside from flirtatiously interacting with chat. Essentially, they were softcore camgirls, with the added benefit of operating on one of the largest entertainment platforms on the internet.

Like Belle Delphine, Amouranth kept her sexuality just out of reach of her audience for years and profited heartily from it. However, unlike Delphine, she was working long, arduous hours for her money. She streamed almost every day for dozens of hours at a time, often seeming tired, unfocused, and miserable. Eventually, she even began doing explicit porn.

Although she was not in a public relationship, it turns out that Amouranth had a secret husband who was controlling her finances and forcing her to stream. In October 2022, while he audibly hurled insults and obscenities at her from behind the camera, she tearfully admitted to her audience that her husband had threatened to murder her dogs if she didn’t comply with his demands. She claimed that she didn’t have any desire to create sexual content.

However, even after he was out of the picture, she continued to livestream and produce porn — likely because it had become her only dependable source of income. After almost a decade of lewd content, her career prospects outside the space had dwindled. The course of her life had dramatically changed because a man forced her down a path she hadn’t anticipated. All she was guilty of was trying to survive a bad situation.

Sadly, Amouranth’s husband wasn’t the only man forcing women to do porn on the internet — and some were even more cartoonishly evil in their pursuit of profit.

In 2020, the FBI published a news release detailing sex trafficking, fraud, and coercion charges levied against Ruben Garcia and Michael Pratt for their involvement in a scheme to trick barely legal women into creating pornography videos for GirlsDoPorn (at the time, a well-known pornography company).

The men posted advertisements online purporting to seek women interested in traditional modeling. Upon responding to the ads, the models were told that they would actually be performing in pornographic videos — which, they were assured, would never be posted online or released to the public. Within a day or two of agreeing to participate, Garcia and Pratt would schedule flights for their victims. The quick timeline was designed to ensure that the women would not have enough time to renege.

“Garcia and Pratt callously ignored each and every request to remove these nonconsensual videos from the internet. They were each sentenced to over 20 years in prison for their crimes.”

Upon arrival, they were forced to sign contracts before being offered alcohol and drugs. During the shoots, the camera was usually placed directly in front of the hotel room door — the only available exit on set.

If the victim changed their mind and asked to stop filming, Garcia and Pratt would proceed to blackmail and intimidate them, threatening to initiate lawsuits, cancel return flights, and post the videos publicly online (which, unbeknownst to the women, they were already planning to do). Then — as a final ‘fuck-you’ cherry on top — they paid the girls much less than originally promised.

Garcia and Pratt callously ignored each and every request to remove these nonconsensual videos from the internet. They were each sentenced to over 20 years in prison for their crimes.

While some of these online predators, like Garcia and Pratt, take a scattershot approach to their victimization of women, and others, like Amouranth’s husband, focus on long-term single targets, a few select degenerates opt to blend the two approaches, becoming legitimate ‘digital pimps’ who compel stables of women to perform sexual acts online.

One such man is Andrew Tate. During the height of his fame, Tate, a slack-jawed, cue-ball-headed, salmonella-infected meat stick whose name precedes him, spoke often and openly about his status as a “pimp." He was a practitioner of the “loverboy method,” also known as “Romeo pimping,” wherein he would find and date young, vulnerable women, present them with gifts, and treat them to expensive dinners and lavish vacations.

Then, he would convince them to leave their homes and move to Romania with him, promising marriage and homeownership. Upon arrival, he would steal their passports, physically and emotionally abuse them, and intimidate them into becoming pornographic performers.

He was eventually charged with sex trafficking in Romania, and with rape, human trafficking, and actual bodily harm in the UK.

Though not all digital pimps are as stupid and forthright with their heinous crimes as Andrew Tate, they often use many of the same predatory tactics. There is an entire industry made up of “OnlyFans managers,” who, while they might not steal any passports, trap women in inescapable financial situations. Some of them — like notorious infertile narcissist and meth addict, Clavicular — are actually quite famous, and use their fame as leverage against the women they pimp out.

One such ‘manager’ is a young, mealymouthed little hobbit by the name of Jack Doherty, who initially rose to internet fame by flipping small office items on camera and getting kicked out of his local Wal-Mart. Jack, who wrecked his supercar in 2024 while texting and driving and was arrested in 2025 for amphetamine possession, has somehow amassed a YouTube following of over 15 million, despite being undoubtedly one of the ugliest and most illiterate gremlins you ever saw or heard. And — of course — he’s also a popular streamer.

Jack is, in some ways, an inspiration: he’s not tall, he’s not handsome, he isn’t charismatic, he has no discernible skill or talent, he’s pale, he clearly doesn’t exercise, he can barely form a coherent sentence, and he never learned how to dress himself; yet, he successfully runs his own OnlyFans account which purportedly generates significant annual revenue. He actually did so well that he eventually expanded into management, which he treated the same as all of his other online endeavors: carelessly and with no reference to governing law.

Like an even more mentally disabled chibi-Andrew Tate, Doherty would allegedly reach out to small female creators via Instagram DMs, offering to fly them out to South Florida to appear on his YouTube channel — a life changing opportunity, given the size of Jack’s platform — and to add them to his OnlyFans ‘team,’ which, he claimed, offered unparalleled viewership opportunities.

Once a girl agreed to his offer, Doherty would demand control of not only their OnlyFans page, but all of their social media accounts. Reports vary as to his exact split of his talents’ profit, but they’re unreasonably high — somewhere between 50% and 80%, depending on the source.

Most notably, Jack’s ex-fiancée, McKinley Richardson, alleged that, while they were dating, Doherty pressured her into signing an OnlyFans management contract after she initially declined. She gave him full control of all of her social media accounts and signed over 50% of her total revenue. Allegedly, their prenup included a clause requiring Richardson to pay Doherty a lump sum of 10 million dollars, and sign over 100% of her OnlyFans revenue in perpetuity, should she ever cheat on him.

“[A] man like Jack Doherty, whose IQ is not much higher than his height in inches, is bound to make a costly mistake sooner rather than later.”

The ages of the women he targets are often suspect, as well. His livestreams frequently feature underaged women; most notably, during his 2025 “Yacht Stream,” he allegedly invited two 17-year old girls onto his boat, where they remained for hours in the presence of alcohol before he finally kicked them off (apparently, immediately after discovering their true ages).

Other streamers, like Natalie Reynolds — who has a significant personal and professional history with Doherty, with whom she regularly streamed and created content for years — alleged that Jack has a pattern of emotionally conditioning these young girls for years. According to Reynolds, he introduces them to his high-visibility world of attention and fortune, grooms them, and then immediately pressures them into management contracts on the day they turn 18.

Although plenty of women have spoken out about Jack’s illicit tactics, he has yet to face significant public or legal backlash. The wait shouldn’t be that long, though: a man like Jack Doherty, whose IQ is not much higher than his height in inches, is bound to make a costly mistake sooner rather than later.

Sex work is real work — and online sex work is, too. But as empowering as such online sex work can be when the worker herself profits from it, it is equally as disenfranchising when those profits are stripped away.

Just like in the physical world, these gray market industries are dominated by cowardly and predatory men who want to make their money off of the hard work and positioning of others— men who, like Jack Doherty, willfully exploit others, who hide behind their money, privilege, and bodyguards, who shout much more than they listen, who allow their insecurities to govern their behavior, and who cannot stop lying, bullshitting, and manipulating anyone with the misfortune of being near them.

Doherty, like the signifying monkey in Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite, should be much more careful with what he does and says. His downfall is inevitable, it will be self-wrought, and it’s coming very, very soon.

“Now the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree, bullshitting the lion every day of the week. Well, every day before the sun go down, the lion would kick his ass all through the jungle town.”

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and share this post if you enjoyed it. If you’re feeling particularly generous, consider buying us a coffee. This publication depends entirely on reader support.

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September 2021, Austin, Texas. Wake up, babe — the dead rat on your pillow is sizzling again. It’s time to give the world your opinion on intergenerational ethnosocioeconomic conditions.

If you’ve ever perused the top 10 channels on Twitch.tv (the most popular live-streaming platform on the internet, where online celebrities broadcast content directly to large audiences), you’ve likely come across a man who bears remarkably little resemblance to his contemporaries. Hawk-eyed and almost always wearing a soiled white t-shirt, Zack Hoyt has a face like one of those age-progressed renderings of kidnapped children from Dateline NBC.

A prolific streamer, a literal neckbeard, and the poster man-child for Chipotle-induced anemic malnutrition, Hoyt, also known as “Asmongold,” “Asmon,” or “The Roach King,” to his combined online audience of almost six million, is the spitting image of Beans from the Emmy-winning Disney Channel original television show Even Stevens — twenty years, a nasty divorce, and a midlife lupus scare later. He rose to fame via his witty World of Warcraft commentary, raw and unedited persona, and astounding open preference for filth and squalor — the pure spectacle of which has driven massive engagement with his stream.

When he’s not literally picking live roaches off his own shirt on camera, he doesn’t hesitate to share stories of his truly harrowing hygiene practices — like foregoing bathing for months to cultivate a protective “exoskeleton,” routinely wiping blood from his disintegrating gums directly onto the walls of his bedroom to avoid getting up for a cloth, “eating around” mold and maggots on forgotten food he rediscovers around his house, and almost never changing his rotting, yellowed pillowcases.

Perhaps most famously, he even once admitted on stream to purposely leaving a dead rat next to his bed to act “as an alarm clock,” waking him once the rising sun heated the carcass just enough to allow the scent of putrefying flesh and blowfly dung to once more grace his defiled nostrils.

But Asmongold’s mouldering home and neglect for his own health aren’t the only rotten things about him. He also has a penchant for unloading wilteringly poor political takes onto his credulous audience — despite hosting a stream purportedly dedicated to video games and related news.

“If there is one thing Asmon absolutely will not stand for, it’s the influence of DEI (i.e., ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’) in games, a phenomenon which he contends exists only to serve as a hollow impediment to engrossing gameplay and competent storytelling.”

Much of Hoyt’s initial political toe-dipping could be explained by his uncompromising, all-consuming love for video games. It was this love, Asmon alleged, that drove him to finally speak out against the maleficent woke mind virus infecting his favorite hobby in the mid-2010’s and early 2020’s. That the rhetoric he employed in defense of gaming neatly reflected his wider worldview was, of course, merely a happy coincidence.

If there is one thing Asmon absolutely will not stand for, it’s the influence of DEI (i.e., ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’) in games, a phenomenon which he contends exists only to serve as a hollow impediment to engrossing gameplay and competent storytelling. He reserves particular vitriol for character or storyline revisions intended to promote diversity in long-standing franchises, claiming that such changes alienate their most supportive fans.

Accordingly, in 2024, his first earnest foray into the political world was prompted by a controversy now known as GamerGate 2.0 (in reference to GamerGate, an earlier canon event in online gaming culture), which centered around Sweet Baby Inc., a company which provides consulting services to game studios in furtherance of promoting gender and racial diversity in game narratives.

At the time, groups of online reactionary activists, organized through web forums such as Kiwi Farms, 4chan, and Reddit, were on a years-long rampage against the perceived “woke agenda” in video games. Any game with prominent female or gay characters was regularly targeted and review-bombed, regardless of its mechanics, graphics, or storytelling. Accordingly, when a user named Kabrutus published a list of games associated with Sweet Baby on Steam (an online video game storefront that allows users to publicly curate game collections), this anti-woke community quickly mobilized, promoting boycotts of every game with which Sweet Baby had any involvement.

When Sweet Baby reported the list to Steam (correctly, for violating the platform’s code of conduct), the GamerGate 2.0 rose to the level of an organized harassment campaign against the company and its individual personnel — justified by popular creators like Asmongold as a righteous crusade against unethical censorship.

Unfortunately, Asmon’s pearl-clutching seemingly extends only to the purity of video game culture. Other appeals to morality appear to have almost no effect on him.

In reference to the (as of today, still-ongoing) Gaza genocide, Hoyt expressed extreme indifference in late 2024, opining that Palestinians were “terrible people” who were not owed his empathy due to their opposing religious and cultural beliefs. Although he later apologized for these statements, and even stepped back from leadership positions in the multiple companies he helmed, the controversy resulted in increased attention on his stream. The stage had been set for his full turn toward politics, with social and political commentary now comprising an increasingly significant portion of his content. Unfortunately, nowhere along the line did he bother to become any more educated on these new topics — as would soon become clear the following calendar year.

In March 2025, while live streaming, Hoyt called Congressman Al Green a “fucking retard” for interrupting Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress (Green shouted “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid” in protest of Trump’s support of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act). Later, he would go on to express more of his deeply-held beliefs: that transgender children are groomed “victims” of “mental[ly] ill” parents, that voter suppression is desirable and should be institutionalized, and that ICE should accelerate arrests and deportations (even going so far as to claim that ICE protestors should be punished with “compelled slave labor”).

As an encore to his strong showing for the year, Asmon went full mask-off in December, openly expressing support for neo-Nazi groyper and alleged pedophile James Fishback’s gubernatorial campaign in Florida.

But Asmongold is far from the only popular streamer parroting right-wing talking points under the guise of ‘moderacy’. An entire rogue’s gallery of internet personalities has found an audience (and thereby, a monetary pipeline) by appealing to the narrative that their viewerships are being held hostage by a culture which amplifies ‘radical left-wing’ beliefs to the detriment of their special interests.

“Although streamers like Asmongold, Sneako, and Adin Ross may not be fully aware of the impact of their actions on American culture, they damn well ought to be.”

“Sneako” — Andrew Tate disciple, muslim-larper, and popular children’s Kick streamer — has propagated enough anti-semitism online to earn himself a lifetime visa ban from Australia, openly praised authoritarian governments, and argued against the very concept of democracy. Adin Ross, who impressively built one of the largest and most ubiquitous streaming empires in the entire world despite his borderline illiteracy, threatened in 2024 to leave the U.S. if Trump lost the election and later hosted infamous neo-Nazi and white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his stream. Even “xQc”, the sixth-most followed Twitch streamer of all time, wore a Donald Trump campaign shirt in a 2024 live stream and provided an endorsement of the then-presidential candidate.

Sure, the algorithm rewards such alt-right opinions with more viewers — and appealing to conservative advertisers is an easier payday now than ever — but these guys sure do seem to really believe what they’re saying, too.

Interestingly, the so called ‘far-left’ views that act as the frequent object of these ‘moderate’ streamers’ derision seem to be, well, not quite so radical at all: support for common-sense causes like health care reform, increased corporate tax rates, protective climate policies, protections for gay and transgender rights, decreased costs for higher education, and heightened social safety nets.

Compare these positions to the views of the online far-right: white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, anti-humanism, traditionalism, hyper-masculinity — even Nazism, neo-feudalism and an obsession with the impending techno-monarchy.

The Overton Window has shifted, and celebrity personalities have overwhelmingly come to acknowledge the legitimacy of alt-right views (in large part thanks to the concerted efforts of clandestine political actors like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon). Such views have become increasingly accepted as normal, and even ‘centrist’ — despite how obviously conservative they might actually be — because political centrism has been successfully conflated with ideological moderacy in this country. Regressives are now conservative, conservatives are now moderate, and party-line democrats (neoliberal as they may be) are now, somehow, extremists.

Although streamers like Asmongold, Sneako, and Adin Ross may not be fully aware of the impact of their actions on American culture, they damn well ought to be. With such behemoth audiences and the near-undivided attention of the youth, they have a responsibility to care about more than just their bottom lines.

In a perfect world, regressives, monarchists, and flat-out Nazis such as these would be too ashamed to share their hateful opinions with polite society.

Instead, our cultural elites are more like the Front Section Passengers in Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer: stupid, lazy, comfortable, entitled, greedy, consumeristic, and — more than anything else — entirely full of shit.

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and share this post if you enjoyed it. If you’re feeling particularly generous, consider buying us a coffee. This publication depends entirely on reader support.

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April 2022, the Bay Area, California. Some readers — depending on how chemically experimental their high school years were — may recall a mid-century American novel from freshman English class entitled The Butterfly Revolution. Usually assigned as a comparative analytical supplement to the much more popular (and less scandalous) Lord of the Flies, the book is about a summer camp whose teenage attendees successfully stage a violent mutiny and subsequently establish a semi-competent governing authoritarian state.

Even if you haven’t read William Butler’s 1961 classic, you might still recognize the now-infamous political theory with which the book shares a name — a political theory which singlehandedly molded the contemporary landscape of the American political right, served as the foundation for Project 2025, inspired the neofascist radicalization of prominent figures in business and politics like J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, and influenced the second Trump administration to consolidate dictatorial authority over government.

And it’s actually much worse than it sounds.

Like the novel, Curtis Yarvin’s homonymous think piece focuses on the underlying motivations behind, and the consequences of, a carefully planned seizure of political power — but the two authors come to markedly different conclusions. Butler’s story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of authoritarianism, the corruptive nature of blind ideology, and the importance of safeguards on power. His subject revolution ends in abject tragedy: sexual assault, murder, and loss of innocence abound.

Meanwhile, Yarvin, a neo-feudalist, white supremacist, power fetishist who bears more than a passing resemblance to Grima Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings, sees nothing the matter with autocracy.

He heralds a future in which a dictatorial Trump, acting with unchecked authority as “America’s chairman of the board,” succeeds in “truly mak[ing] America great again.” American representative democracy, he argues, is an inefficient form of government and a failed state; it should be replaced instead by a quasi-corporate monarchy, wherein the largest shareholders (“lords”) elect a sovereign dictator whose power is encumbered solely by his accountability to such lords.

Aside from being laughably asinine and comically evil, such a political system would be notably anti-liberalism, anti-democracy, pro-tyranny, and pro-suffering. Though Yarvin imagines a society in which such totalitarianism extends only to the political world (i.e., one in which social freedoms such as religious tolerance, same-sex marriage, and protection from discrimination are upheld), it seems naive to think that such a system — one which places all available power in the hands of a select few at the top of the economic system — would not result in the complete and timely erosion of all personal liberties, to the immediate benefit of oligarchs.

“[Yarvin’s] unique style of prose and unorthodox thinking — in concert with the intellectualized justifications he offered for technocapitalism — contributed in large part to [his] growing popularity”

Yarvin’s Butterfly Revolution is a description of the process by which his neo-monarchy would be implemented. The Trump regime — at the time, still nursing its wounds from the 2020 election — would present itself as a “harmless caterpillar,” playing along with the expected behavior of a normative American political party.

Meanwhile, it would quietly accumulate an army of true believers: willing but inept stooges with “no prior political experience,” standing in wait to replace every existing government employee and, once deployed, carry out any and all of Trump’s dementia-and-diet-coke-addled whims. After finally regaining power, the caterpillar would emerge from its cocoon — now a glistening and triumphant butterfly — and weaponize its existing infrastructure to mortally wound democracy through entirely legal means.

Based on the striking similarities between Yarvin’s plot and that of the 1984 comedy classic Revenge of the Nerds, it should come as no surprise to discover how quickly his ideology was embraced by the Silicon Valley elites with which he rubbed shoulders in the early 2000’s — people like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan.

But Yarvin’s writing captivated a wider array of scumbags than just his own small circle of friends. His unique style of prose and unorthodox thinking — in concert with the intellectualized justifications he offered for technocapitalism — contributed in large part to the growing popularity of his blog, Unqualified Reservations. Offering up a tasteful blend of tongue-in-cheek neoconservative trolling, studied historical recall, and frankly, an absurdist and appalling worldview, the blog laid the groundwork for the burgeoning ‘classical liberalism’ subculture which would soon emerge in popular culture as a response to the rising tide of political correctness.

It also sparked a wave of faux-academic race realism among the online right, especially on 4chan, Hacker News and Reddit — some of the few social media platforms left which provide some amount of anonymity to users — where alt-right users did their best to amplify Yarvin’s views. For the avoidance of doubt, Yarvin claims that white people are generally smarter than black people, admits that he is “not exactly allergic to” white nationalism, and frequently voices his hearty disapproval of civil rights programs. His dicta also supports the existence of structural racism in America — usually implicitly, but he often says the quiet part out loud.

Perhaps that’s why he inspired such a cult following among the most prominent white nationalists in politics: people like disco-peptide vampire Thiel and his suspected sugar baby J.D. Vance, Breitbart boss Steve Bannon (a professional human botfly and the former campaign advisor to Trump), and — maybe most notably — Michael Anton, speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani and Robert Murdoch, managing director for BlackRock, Trump administration crony, and contributing architect for Project 2025.

Anton, when he’s not smoking brimstone cigarettes or kicking small children for pleasure, keeps in frequent contact with Curtis Yarvin. In 2017, Yarvin even gifted him a copy of one of his favorite contemporary texts: a regressive, 77-chapter, solipsistic manifesto called Bronze Age Mindset, written with intentionally poor grammar by a Yale Ph.D. graduate named Costin Alamariu.

Known online as “Bronze Age Pervert,” or sometimes just “BAP,” Alamariu is a far-right, reactionary eugenicist who subscribes to the so-called ‘Great Man’ theory, or the assertion that history can be explained by the presence and actions of singular ‘great men’ who drive the human race forward.

He gives great deference to the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch, describing most men in contemporary culture as ‘bugmen,’ or docile, spiritually-cucked beta males who avoid conflict and risk in favor of comfort and security. The cause of this epidemic, BAP claims, is the rise of egalitarianism in western society — the development of powerful women has led to the production of less and less powerful men, as it were.

Students of history should recognize BAP’s eugenicism, his selective handling of Nietzsche, and his anti-pluralist, anti-egalitarian worldview as hallmarks of Nazism — likely a strong contributing factor as to why Anton wasn’t the only staffer in the Trump administration to appreciate Alamariu’s philosophy. After all, the Republican Party is chock-full of neo-Nazis that can’t help but continue to engage in public humiliation rituals.

Bronze Age Mindset was a global best seller and a particularly monumental hit on right-wing Capitol Hill, where it inspired a wave of young conservatives to fall over themselves at the chance of an internship with regressive think tanks like the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

By now, you should have an inkling of what happened next: Alamariu’s unassuming clownery acted as a gateway for the more pernicious Yarvin to reach an audience of young, developing conservative elites in policy-making roles. The Heritage Foundation, which had been on the lookout for a new regressive demagogue to champion since Reagan began leaving his keys in the fridge and referring to the dog as ‘Nancy’ in the late 1980’s, found a path back to power with Donald Trump.

“It may be confusing to some that a person clearly as intellectually gifted as Curtis Yarvin — a man of virtually no renown, who was not born into significant wealth or status — would be content with the United States’ descent back into monarchy.”

Then, in 2022, shortly after Yarvin’s seminal article was published to his blog, the Heritage Foundation began preparing a roster of ideologically aligned civil servants (‘true believers’) as part of Project 2025, a policy blueprint for taking partisan control of the federal government via legal mechanisms. The Butterfly Revolution had begun in earnest.

Since then, things have gone more or less as Yarvin predicted. Trump ran a campaign which generally maintained the conservative status quo, and he managed to personally distance himself from the most unsavory ideas and thinkers behind his plans for reelection. He even went so far as to plainly deny any knowledge of Project 2025’s existence. Then, as soon as the presidency was once again in his mouldering, makeup-stained clutches, the caterpillar began its metamorphosis.

Among others things, Trump abruptly ended all DEI programs within the federal government and hired Elon Musk to slash the budget of vital scientific research and soft-power-generating-programs like USAID. He fired tens of thousands of dedicated federal employees and replaced them with his own loyalists. He stripped and neutered the Department of Education. He implemented mass immigrant roundups and deportations. He removed or weakened civil rights protections in connection with hiring and housing. He weaponized the Department of Justice against his political enemies and issued executive orders targeting law firms. He even exerted undue influence on the Supreme Court to make way for his regressive policies.

And we, the captive audience of this nonconsensual revolution, are unable to do anything but watch from below as the wings of Yarvin’s Butterfly unfold, spewing meconium and afterbirth directly into our frightened eyes.

It may be confusing to some that a person clearly as intellectually gifted as Curtis Yarvin — a man of virtually no renown, who was not born into significant wealth or status — would be content with the United States’ descent back into monarchy. Seemingly, a man such as he would stand to gain little to nothing from the implementation of his own revolution.

But Yarvin, like the Burma bandits described by Alfred in The Dark Knight, doesn’t have a coherent worldview. He isn’t looking to accomplish anything, or change the world for the better, or — clearly — even look good on camera. He didn’t plan his Butterfly Revolution because he was an ideologue — he did it because he was bored, and he thought it was funny.

Sadly — confusingly — heartbreakingly, “some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed it.

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August 2014, Boston, Massachusetts. It all started with a blog post — a disgruntled, rambling, six-part exposé accusing a recent ex-girlfriend of, among other things, deception, manipulation, infidelity, and, perhaps worst of all, non-monogamous cuddling.

The ex was emergent video game writer and developer Zoë Quinn; the author, freelance programmer and general washout neckbeard Eron Gjoni. The post itself, originally uploaded to popular forums like Something Awful and Penny Arcade before being swiftly deleted and rehosted on 4chan and Eron’s own WordPress page, eventually came to be known as the Zoe Post. And the fallout that resulted from it led in large part to the first election of Donald Trump, via an online movement it ignited called GamerGate.

Here’s how it happened:

In the early 2010s, YouTube was the summit of the online content world, boasting unparalleled reach and offering enormous financial incentive for its most prevalent creators. One of the trendiest genres at the time, so-called “commentary videos,” served two hardcore, frequently-overlapping audiences: atheists and gamers. Many such videos consisted of a disembodied voice dubbed over frenetic first-person shooter footage, haughtily dismantling Christian propaganda points while the player character massacred scores of digital adversaries in the background.

By the time 2014 rolled around, though, male intellectuals on the internet had already begun to progress from their previous hyper-fixation to a new one: feminists.

Labeled “the new religion,” third-wave feminism became the in vogue target for erudite internet dudebros. Countless male creators in the mid 2010’s — adopting the mantle of “anti-SJW” (i.e., “anti-social justice warrior”) — earned their salt by inventively ridiculing women who dared to harbor opposing views on gender relations. Oft-favored targets included transgender women, female gamers, and various Tumblr subcultures.

“Before long, GamerGate became the hottest topic on YouTube, pounced on by popular creators [including] a young, bleached-blonde firebrand by the name of Milo Yiannopoulos.”

These enlightened men of YouTube were deeply invested in theoretical ethics, moral relativism, and post-hoc rationalization. It should come as no surprise, then, that in their view, every intellectual enemy also happened to be deeply unethical.

Take the Zoe Post, for example. What was clearly a scorned lover’s depraved manifesto — intended to incur public humiliation on his alleged abuser — was instead championed by anti-SJWs as a wide-reaching call to action with respect to ethics in gaming journalism generally. This phenomenon, GamerGate, hinged on a solitary detail buried in Eron’s schizophrenic jumble of footnotes and SMS screenshots: one of Quinn’s alleged affair partners was none other than Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson.

For her part, Zoë — whose game portfolio leaned heavily on themes of mental health and feminism — had already established herself as somewhat of a polarizing figure by the time the Zoe Post was published. In late 2013, she made claims of harassment against an online support group for anonymous male virgins over 30 known as Wizardchan (yes, really). Now, in the wake of the Zoe Post, incels and anti-feminists alike finally had an ostensibly empirical reason to hate Quinn, amid claims that her supposed relationship with Grayson constituted a quid pro quo for favorable coverage of her work. In actuality, the reporter had only written substantively about Quinn once, in March 2014 — before their alleged romantic involvement ever began.

Before long, GamerGate became the hottest topic on YouTube, pounced on by popular creators like Matt Jarbo (“MundaneMatt”), John Bain (“TotalBiscuit”), TJ Kirk (“The Amazing Atheist”), Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”), Jim Sterling (“Internet Aristocrat”), and, last but certainly not least, a young, bleached-blonde firebrand by the name of Milo Yiannopoulos.

Milo would go on to become the subject of a lifelong ban from Twitter and Facebook for blatant racism, publicly defend pedophilic relationships between gay men and boys, serve as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional intern, work with the open white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and consult on Kanye West’s 2024 presidential campaign (confusingly, all in that order). But at the time, in 2014, he was just a writer and pundit for Breitbart News, the far-right, misogynist, racist, and hilariously conspiratorial news outlet led by then-executive chairman Steve Bannon.

Bannon, whose name you should recognize for all the wrong reasons, has always had his little-piggy fingers in far too many pies. Like a dying slug, you can trace the trail of his viscous putrescence through every decrepit corner of the alt-right political underworld. After co-founding Breitbart in 2007, he went on to serve as a V.P. of Cambridge Analytica, the consulting firm that infamously and illegally spied on millions of Facebook users’ data without their consent and sold that data to Donald Trump’s 2016 political campaign. Then, he became the chief executive of that very same campaign, serving as Trump’s consigliere and key strategist, before later providing media relations advice to Jeffrey Epstein leading up to his 2019 arrest and subsequent death.

Bolstered by Bannon’s support, and in great part due to his admittedly quick wit and boyish charm, Milo Yiannopoulos quickly became the most popular and controversial figure in the GamerGate movement. With feminism, social justice, and political correctness serving as the most frequent inhabitants of his crosshairs, he unloaded daily pithy commentary in the form of think pieces, university-campus speeches, and YouTube videos, often employing his own gay identity as ammunition with which to criticize progressivism.

Milo and his ilk expressed open contempt for traditional media, describing it as dishonest, ill-intentioned, and “fake news.” He decried gender ideology, liberals, and progressives as rising social evils and threats to classical liberalism. He coordinated organized harassment campaigns against publications, journalists, and famous women with which he personally disagreed, and constantly made crass and outlandish statements in public (see his Twitter ban, for example). If these patterns of behavior seem familiar to you, that’s because they mirror the greatest hits of the political career of Donald Trump — a man who Milo has continuously and salaciously referred to as “Daddy.”

After all, Yiannopoulos and Trump were both being fed the same strategy, by the same man, to accomplish the same goal: a complete overhaul of the global political landscape by shifting the Overton Window — the mainstream range of socially acceptable beliefs — firmly toward the alt-right. And, as you’re sure to have already realized — it worked!

Although Yiannopoulos’ career as a semi-serious intellectual would fizzle out shortly after Trump was elected, he set the stage for a whole host of bad actors with similarly contemptuous beliefs to follow in his wake. Suddenly, white supremacists, racists, and misogynists were vying for a seat at the table of legitimate online political discourse.

Take, for instance, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist, best-selling author, Klonopin addict, and cognitively-impaired carnivore whose male fragility and practiced victimhood made him an anti-SJW star in 2016, in part following a now-unlisted viral video in which he hurled verbal abuse at student supporters of Canada’s Bill C-16 (establishing gender identity as a federally protected class) on the University of Toronto campus where he taught; or take failed comedian Steven Crowder, who briefly enjoyed a popular anti-SJW following with his YouTube show, Louder with Crowder, before facing widespread scrutiny for an incident in which he verbally abused his pregnant wife on video — after complaining on air about her legal right to file for divorce without his consent; or the late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, pernicious debater of university students nationwide, and alleged poster boy for fetal alcohol syndrome.

“The men of the alt-right have always existed on the fringes; the all-too-frequent object of polite society’s derision, they’ve only recently crawled out of our sewer drains and into our bathtubs.”

Milo and his antics even helped spawn post-modern white supremacist movements like Nick Fuentes’ Groypers, neo-nazis who depend on plausible deniability to spew hateful nazi rhetoric with an irony-steeped smile (“if I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has 15 ovens working 24 hours a day, every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make 6 million batches of cookies?”).

Now, more than a decade later, we are still struggling with the social ramifications of a contemptible WordPress post that got way more attention than it deserved. Behavior of the sort which previously would not have been tolerated in the most toxic of online spaces is now lauded from the South Lawn of the White House. Media has all but completely lost its credibility. The Republican Party has a serious nazi problem (as in, that’s what almost all of them now are), and the Democrats are little more than controlled opposition. All this because the human embodiment of Jabba the Hutt saw an opportunity to capitalize on video games becoming a little too ‘woke.’

The men of the alt-right have always existed on the fringes; the all-too-frequent object of polite society’s derision, they’ve only recently crawled out of our sewer drains and into our bathtubs. Perhaps that’s why they share such a strong mutual identity — one that often fills the gaps left in a life otherwise bereft of meaningful human connection. And perhaps that’s why they exhibited such righteous anger — such wrath — in their onslaught of women and progressives during GamerGate. Maybe, like Jules in Pulp Fiction, they misguidedly saw themselves as protecting a principle worth upholding:

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.”

If only — like Jules — they had, at some point, decided to stop being the ‘tyranny of evil men’ and tried a little harder to be the ‘shepherd.’

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, sports, tech, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed it.

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March 2020, Your Home Office. The world has just been stunned by a once-in-a-lifetime event, the first of many to take place in the coming decade. You, along with everyone else on the planet, have just been relegated to an indefinite sentence in a wholly digital plane. The only available sources of social interaction are a FaceTime call, a Zoom meetup, or a Discord chat — cheap facsimiles that just leave you longing for the real thing. You yearn for a return to the physical world: to work with your hands, to see real people in front of you, to look up at the sky and breathe fresh air.

You hit your vape, reach for your phone, open Twitter (yet to be the subject of the now-infamous ketamine-and-envy-fueled mono-glyphic rebrand), scroll, and then — something captivating crawls across your feed. A breathless, straw-haired woman in denim overalls stands in the foreground of what is clearly a small cow farm, a similarly towheaded infant in her arms. The early morning sun illuminates a handful of perfectly dressed toddlers in the barn behind her. Beneath the photo, the caption joyfully exclaims, “A little day in the life!”

What, you think, is this lifestyle? Who could this effortless, insouciant woman be?

Meet Hannah Neeleman. The principal behind the family-run farm and homemaking brand known as Ballerina Farm, Hannah is a practicing mormon, Juilliard-trained ballerina, and former Mrs. Utah. Her company packages and sells beef, pork, chicken, eggs, dairy products (including — you guessed it — raw milk), baked goods, candles, honey, sourdough, kitchen supplies, clothes, and most importantly, Hannah’s own lifestyle in the form of social media content.

Hannah’s looks, wardrobe, values, and affectation all reflect a person of a different era — one in which women were submissive to their husbands, remained in the sphere of domesticity, and took pride in what they perceived as their main source of value: mothering. Hannah is a tradwife: a traditional housewife living in the twenty-first century. But in order to understand Hannah and her place in the wider tradwife movement, you first have to know something about the far-right online political world to which she and it belongs.

“To these women of the alt-right, female empowerment comes hand-in-hand with submission to a more powerful male figure.”

In the 1990’s and early 2000’s, an online culture made up of disenfranchised men came to fruition on message boards like A Voice For Men and the subreddits r/MensRights and r/MGTOW. While this group — “MRA” (i.e., men’s rights activism) — was initially concerned with custody and divorce issues, suicide, and male depression, it rapidly flourished into the internet’s first hub of rampant misogyny. The most radicalized wing of MRA, known as the “Red Pill” community, saw themselves as, like Neo in The Matrix, awakened to the actual order of reality — namely, that men are the true victims of the social hierarchy, suffering under the unrelenting boot of third-wave feminism.

This nescient worldview would soon prove non-exclusive to male stewardship, however. In the early 2010’s, the Reddit community r/RedPillWomen was founded as a home for women who similarly rejected contemporary feminism (“RPWs”). It advocated for a return to traditional gender roles, classic femininity, and male-centric gender relations. Emphasizing inherent biological differences, RPWs argued that gender equality was unnatural; instead, women should strive to be the best possible “First Mate” for their male “Captain”. To attract a man worth of captainship, women should increase their “sexual market value” by becoming more traditionally beautiful (read: by conforming to cultural body standards).

To these women of the alt-right, female empowerment comes hand-in-hand with submission to a more powerful male figure. Take, for example, Ballerina Farm: Hannah’s husband and business partner, Daniel, is the son of billionaire airline tycoon, and founder of WestJet and JetBlue Airways, David Neeleman. Although Ballerina Farms is carefully curated to give the impression of a small settler family, living off the land, the truth is almost the exact opposite: the Neelemans are one of the most financially and socially privileged families to ever exist, in the entire history of mankind.

This should come as no surprise, after all: the tradwife movement, like Men’s Rights Activism and the Red Pill Women phenomenon before it, is a grift. Hannah and other tradwife influencers online are cogs in a machine designed to print money by appealing to the base desire of female conservatives: to return to a mythical time in which the lives of women were much simpler and easier to navigate.

The truth is that the lives of women in pre-feminist America — even the white ones to which the tradwife movement overwhelmingly appeals (see: Taylor Swift) — were, to put it plainly, not so good. This is, or least, really should be, an obvious and irrefutable fact. But tradwives rely on the historical ignorance of their audience to push their false narrative across. In this respect, the movement hit a goldmine in the 2020’s. Covid-19 caused significant and lasting declines in education outcomes, leading to a generation of young adults that know less than ever about the world around them and their own place in it. Simultaneously, tradwives found themselves benefitting from the swelling voice of scientific illiteracy in politics and entertainment.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., heroin addict, animal carcass enthusiast, and alleged sex-pervert, has proven to be one lasting source of such scientific disingenuity. After running for U.S. President in 2024 on a platform comprised of conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine sentiment, and raw milk consumption — with support reaching as high as 10% of voters in polls before dropping out — RFK Jr. was nominated for, and confirmed as, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services for the Trump Administration. Now, he advocates for a return to simplicity in health, science, and nutrition. Advances in science, he appears to believe, have only brought us farther away from the human body’s natural processes.

“Political affiliations aside — if you’re willing to ignore experts and history, you’re welcomed with open arms.”

To his credit, RFK Jr. really has lived the naturalistic lifestyle for which he advocates: he suffered from mercury poisoning in the early 2000’s due to fish overconsumption, had a “dead parasitic worm” (probably a pork tapeworm larva) removed from his brain in 2010, and has been hospitalized several times for atrial fibrillation likely caused by high iron levels linked to chronic hepatitis C. As the director of the HHS, he has reduced access to vaccines, promulgated beliefs linking Tylenol to autism, decried the practice of public water fluoridation, and launched an initiative to reduce the prescription of antidepressants. Oh, and most importantly, he really, really wants you to drink raw milk.

Like RFK Jr., the tradwife movement’s juxtaposition of traditional beliefs about gender relations — most often associated with American conservatives — and the witchy, pseudo-scientific health practices and crunchy diet culture of online white liberalism might strike you as contradictory. However, instead of repelling both sides of the political spectrum like you might expect, this little-of-everything ethos has acted as a unifying principle. Political affiliations aside — if you’re willing to ignore experts and history, you’re welcomed with open arms.

And in our post-fact world, is it any wonder that young women are turning a blind eye to reality in favor of their own aesthetic preferences? Self-proclaimed “soft girl” Nara Smith, model, mother of children Rumble Honey, Whimsy Lou, and Slim Easy, and maker-of-gum-from-scratch, has an audience of over 12 million followers on TikTok. Ballerina Farm boasts upward of 10 million followers on Instagram. Some women, it would seem, really enjoy this particular brand of cognitive dissonance.

They want an escape, an ideation — something to be envious of, reality be damned. And, like Richard Pryor in The Wiz, tradwives are willing to sell an image to them, whether it exists or not. What they present to the world might not be true, but it certainly does look pretty. Just don’t look behind the curtain — all you’ll find is a scared little girl, and a bunch of cow shit.

“Everything they say about me is true! I’m a phony — I got no powers!”

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, sports, tech, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed it.

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October 1992, Washington, D.C.. After a year of senate hearings which found betting on sports games to be a creeping issue of national concern, and supported by the likes of David Stern, then-commissioner of the National Basketball Association, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was signed into federal law by the coke-bottled-trifocalist-in-chief himself, President George H.W. Bush.

Colloquially referred to as the ‘Bradley Act,’ the law prohibited states from, among other things, “operating” or “authorizing” any “betting scheme based on competitive, professional, or amateur sporting events,” exempting only Nevada from its purview — a narrow and begrudging exclusion necessitated by the state’s long history of economic reliance on gambling.

“As most sports fans today will tell you, it’s difficult to overstate the extent of the disruptive emergence of national sportsbooks.”

Prior to the Act, sports gambling was largely an issue of states’ rights, and almost every state had exercised its right to criminalize gambling activities by the early twentieth century. But desperate times fray moral fibers, and most forms of gambling were legalized by Nevada in 1931 in an attempt to combat the worst effects of the Great Depression on the state (then not much more than a series of minimally populated gold- and silver-mining towns, which had effectively run out of both gold and silver).

Due to the efforts of Nevada lawmakers, and because the only alternatives were dismal state-sponsored sports lotteries in Delaware and Oregon, the not-yet-glittery streets of Las Vegas soon became home to the largest sportsbook in the country. As a gray-market endeavor, sports gambling would quietly flourish from its seat on the Vegas strip — always present, but never attracting too much national attention.

Then, in 1989, sports betting was thrust into the spotlight. After years of speculation — and half a decade into his tenure as manager of the Cincinnati Reds — Sports Illustrated published a bombshell cover story detailing allegations that Pete Rose, 17-time all star and all-time hits leader to this day, had been placing bets on his own baseball games. The extent of his alleged gambling, as revealed by Major League Baseball’s subsequent investigation, would attract nonstop national attention until Rose was banned from the game later that year.

As for its impact on the sports world: imagine the Pope defecating in public, or the sitting President of the United States tweeting, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait”! For the first time, the country was viewing with wide eyes what could previously only be glimpsed from the shadows. And so it was that just a few years later, the Bradley Act received widespread public support, helmed by the commissioner of the NBA — a league whose public image appeared to be on the opposite trajectory of the MLB’s.

The financial windfall dropped into the lap of the NBA by the final decade of the twentieth century was welcome, if a bit unexpected. Gone were the cocaine-snorting, bleary-eyed, artery-blowing cowboys of the early 80’s, replaced instead by slick, PR-trained superstars like Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, and most importantly, Michael Jordan. But as godlike as Jordan’s image was in the public eye, he was, after all, just a man — one who happened to be extremely talented at putting a ball through a hoop. In late 1992, during a money laundering investigation in Michael’s home state of North Carolina, the IRS discovered a $57,000 check made out by His Airness to cocaine-dealing bookie James “Slim” Bouler.

More checks from Jordan — who would later testify in court that the Bouler payment was intended as compensation for gambling debt — continued to turn up in black-market gambling probes along the North Carolina coastline that year. The rumors reached a fever pitch in 1993, when the NBA opened a series of inquiries into MJ’s alleged gambling activities — but before the investigations concluded, Jordan retired from the game of basketball. Although the Bulls legend would return to the NBA a year and a half later, fans speculated that his first retirement was a poorly disguised suspension designed by Commissioner Stern to protect the newfound advertiser-friendly professionalism of the NBA. While we might never know the truth, the muddied waters around the personal life of basketball’s biggest ambassador were more than enough to solidify public sentiment toward gambling on U.S. sports.

Accordingly, for twenty-six years, and with little opposition, sports gambling was a federally prohibited activity. Then, in 2012, it was legalized by the state of New Jersey, whose legislature was very shortly thereafter sued by every major sports league in America — and the U.S. Department of Justice. The litigation that followed led to Murphy v. NCAA, a 2018 Supreme Court case in which the Bradley Act was challenged and overturned on constitutional grounds. Although the Act purported to federally criminalize gambling activities in connection with sports games, the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reserves to the states all governmental powers not specifically delegated to the federal government. This includes, as particularly relevant in this case, the power to regulate intrastate commerce (i.e., business within state bounds). Thus, after a brief two-and-a-half-decade-long interlude, the states were once again entitled to legislate around the issue as they saw fit.

In a post-Murphy world, thirty-nine U.S. states and Washington D.C. have legalized some form of sports gambling. As most sports fans today will tell you, it’s difficult to overstate the extent of the disruptive emergence of national sportsbooks. DraftKings and FanDuel seem to inhabit every third advertisement on sports radio, television, and podcasts. The companies have deals in place for broadcast segments, branded awards, and in-game marketing with most major American sports leagues. Even traditional gambling platforms have moved into the digital space, with Caesars and Circa offering individual-game betting direct to consumers online and striking logo jersey patch deals with National Hockey League teams (the Capitals and Blackhawks, respectively). Gambling is, simply put, a significant part of the sports-viewing experience in 2026.

“To many, gambling may well be considered a vice — an evil, a sin, a dark pit inside that can reach out with shadowy tendrils to claim your job, your family, your home, and even your life.”

However, there still remain several states and territories in which citizens may not engage in sports gambling — or at least, they couldn’t, until the rise of peer-to-peer prediction markets. Polymarket and Kalshi, the two most prominent examples of this type of business, skirt gambling regulations by offering the purchase of “YES” or “NO” shares in relation to almost any world event (although generally opposed, Polymarket has removed few controversial markets from its platforms, such as whether the U.S. would detonate a nuclear bomb during its war with Iran in early 2026).

Here’s how it works: instead of betting against a sportsbook with fixed odds, these predictive markets allow users to set their own — collectively, and mostly without regulation. Each “winning” share is paid out at $1, while the value of “losing” shares drops to zero after the occurrence of the world event. Users can purchase vast quantities of shares for an outcome on which they are bullish; if they start to lose their nerve, they can hedge their bet by purchasing shares representing the opposite outcome. Effectively, then, live share prices on Polymarket or Kalshi reflect that market’s perceived probability of any given outcome, at any given time. Due to this structure, Polymarket’s contention (as supported by the CFTC) is that it does not offer gambling propositions subject to state legislation but rather, federally regulated investment derivatives.

Although clever, the companies’ efforts to work around state laws might be catching up to them — some state governments have passed legislation to attempt to regulate the platforms, and most recently, Polymarket was the target of a class-action filing in New York. Only time will tell whether peer-to-peer markets will act as the next evolution in legalized sports gambling, but if not, trust that something else will claim that title — perhaps something even more adept at parting a sports fan from his money.

To many, gambling may well be considered a vice — an evil, a sin, a dark pit inside that can reach out with shadowy tendrils to claim your job, your family, your home, and even your life. But in America, gambling is just a business. When business flourishes, so does greed. And in the immortal words of Gordon Gekko, “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” So gambling, in this America — and especially on the ballgame — must, too, be good.

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, sports, tech, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed it.

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February 1999, Boise, Idaho. Before Donald Trump was elected president, before Andrew Tate served a prison sentence for human trafficking, before Clavicular took a hammer to his own face — there was Bodybuilding.com.

Though mostly dedicated to the exchange of bodybuilding information and encouragement, the website prominently featured one section dedicated to off-topic discussion. This “Misc.” subforum — by far the most popular on the platform — hosted threads with lighthearted topics varying between the proper method by which to calculate the number of days in a week (is it seven or eight?) and the feasibility of a human beating a gorilla in a fistfight. But many of these discussions would eventually take a much darker turn.

By the early 2000’s, forum threads emerged dedicated to, among other things, procuring anabolic steroids and locating the best leg-lengthening surgical clinics. In hindsight, and as disturbing as some of these topics would become, the manner in which Bodybuilding.com users — almost entirely young men — interacted with each other was much more concerning than the actual substance of their conversations. Although they didn’t then realize, visitors to the website were experiencing the early groundwork of what would eventually become incel culture.

“These feelings of depersonalization, derealization, and hopelessness often lead to outbursts of misogynistic rage — and in extreme cases, mass violence.”

Incels, or “involuntary celibates,” are a group of predominantly young, terminally-online men who express what can only be characterized as extreme frustration in connection with their inability to attract female attention. Essentially, incels are convinced that physical characteristics are the only relevant factor in determining attractiveness, and they are obsessed with trying to validate this belief. Take, for example, their propensity (in astonishing disregard of science and history) for borderline-phrenological charts which categorize celebrities into bands of attractiveness based on facial symmetry, jaw width, and bone structure.

For those who manage to improve their appearance (or in incel-speak, “ascend”) through exercise, diet, drugs, surgery, or otherwise, this wholly materialist view of romance regularly leads to a complete disregard for any manner of self-improvement outside of the physical. Those who cannot ascend often “take the black pill” (in quasi-reference to The Matrix film), becoming nihilistically resigned to their celibate fate, which they are certain can only be attributed to immutable biological characteristics. These feelings of depersonalization, derealization, and hopelessness often lead to outbursts of misogynistic rage — and in extreme cases, mass violence. Most famously, after uploading a video manifesto to YouTube detailing his desire to punish women, the Isla Vista shooter, self-identified incel Elliot Rodger, murdered six people (and injured fourteen others) on and near the University of California, Santa Barbara campus in mid-2014.

However, the incel ethos goes far beyond just phrenology, ascension, and violent ideation. Most young men become ensconced in the culture not out of a desire to commit violence, but to feel a sense of belonging as part of a larger community. Accordingly, the wide array of inside jokes and insider terms used by incels online would eventually grow beyond the confines of Bodybuilding.com to spawn a full-fledged subculture — one which would quickly become popular with the internet at large. The newfound immense virality of incel memes, amplified by forums and websites such as 4chan.com, were beginning to gain the attention of the wider internet-viewing populace.

While Bodybuilding.com may have been the primordial soup within which the component elements of inceldom were formed, 4chan was the evolutionary stage upon which it would flourish. Launched by Christopher Poole (aka “moot”) in October 2003, the website would go on to act as the incubator of all things incel for the next two decades. Genuinely detestable thoughts and ideas would arise in subforums like /pol/, rough around the edges, only to be clipped, laughed at, and passed around the rest of the internet via aggregation websites like Digg, Reddit, and YouTube. After enough time in the tumbler, they would re-enter the cultural zeitgeist in earnest, blunted by cynicism, polished, and consequently, much more tolerable to general audiences.

Enter Andrew Tate. A former professional kickboxer and the son of a chess international master, Tate rose to prominence in 2022 off the back of a virality campaign which leveraged subscribers of his scam web course (dubbed “Hustler’s University”) to artificially amplify his online visibility. His content, which endorsed a hyper-masculine, traditionalist view of romance and relationships, was essentially neatly-repackaged incel rhetoric mixed with a splash of heinous ideological regression. Frequently targeted directly toward adolescent boys, his viral videos encouraged viewers to claim their birthright — literal ownership over women — by becoming a “high-value male” (i.e., a high-earning, physically fit, and emotionally domineering man). Women, Tate claimed, should “shut the fuck up,” “get back in the kitchen,” and be willing to do anything to please their male partners.

Tate had unknowingly birthed an online space that would soon come to be referred to as the “manosphere,” which would shortly grow to become a sprawling network of charismatic figures with similarly hyper-masculine views. Audiences, numbed to Tate’s terrible ideas due in large part to his extreme oversaturation, became vulnerable to more sanitized versions of these opinions, viewing them as increasingly moderate. With the online political spectrum successfully shifted, manosphere topics were then amplified to wider audiences by socially-acceptable both-siders like Joe Rogan (and further legitimized in the process).

In 2024, the manosphere — embraced, of course, with open arms by the Trump campaign — became actualized, playing a significant and vital role in Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential re-election. Although Tate would find himself serving a prison sentence in Romania for human trafficking, rape, and associated organized crime charges during the election cycle, other right-leaning social media figures with newfound cool-kid status, such as Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross, and NELK, all did their part in sane-washing the obviously far-right (and clearly cognitively declining) Trump — just as they had with Tate.

“For millennia, young men have grappled with the difficult question of how best to attract the attention of women — and for millennia, they have found new and more interesting ways to fail in doing so.”

And that is how the ideas and opinions of a community of involuntarily celibate, body-building man-children on the internet led directly to the second term of a 34-time felon who is more than likely the third- or fourth-worst President the U.S. has ever seen.

But the story doesn’t end there.

In late 2025, a new player emerged onto the manosphere scene, more nimble and much more popular than any of his predecessors. Clavicular, most prominently a TikToker and Kick streamer, calls himself a “looksmaxxer” — in other words, an incel who is willing to go to extreme lengths to ascend. Braden Peters, or “Clav,” as he is affectionately referred to by his online community, has spoken openly about his “softmaxxing” (workouts, diet, grooming, height-boosting insoles) as well the more polarizing “hardmaxxing” techniques he employs to achieve what he believes to be a more perfect physical appearance — things like methamphetamine use to stay skinny, anabolic steroid injections to grow muscle, and “bone smashing,” or repetitively hitting himself in the jawbone with a hammer in an attempt to re-form it into a more aesthetically-pleasing shape.

Looksmaxxers like Clavicular see themselves as “stat-dumping,” in reference to a video game technique wherein the player forgoes investment in all but one aspect of their player-character in order to optimize that such chosen aspect. These young men believe that maximizing their physical beauty (and thus, forgoing any other means of personal growth) can eliminate what might be the largest individual source of their anxiety — the need to engage women verbally, intellectually, or emotionally. It’s a synthesis of early incel ideals and manosphere beliefs: if I ascend, then I can unlock my innate birthright — the attention of women.

This time, though, it’s much more lame. Clavicular, who just recently turned twenty years of age, is addicted to meth, physically impotent via chemical self-castration, and, on April 14 of this year, he appeared to overdose while live streaming in front of the Moxie’s in Brickell in Miami. Yet somehow, his viewership continues to expand rapidly. Clearly, his message is resonating with young men and boys in the same way incel rhetoric always has: by appealing to, and preying on, their most base insecurities.

For millennia, young men have grappled with the difficult question of how best to attract the attention of women — and for millennia, they have found new and more interesting ways to fail in doing so. They just can’t help it — their pride gets in the way and, like the lemmings in White Wilderness, they run off the cliff en mass, falling into the rocky waters below. And, as Count Dooku warned the man who would one day become Darth Vader, “twice the pride, double the fall.”

But at least Darth Vader never did meth.

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, sports, tech, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed it.

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