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 dipshit 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 motherfuckers 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 (neo-conservative 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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