The Manosphere Breaks Containment

On this week’s “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel takes listeners deep into the internet’s fever swamps to examine how figures who once would’ve stayed on the fringes now dominate mainstream feeds. The episode charts the rise of Clavicular, a young livestreamer who’s gone from an absurdist curiosity to a fixture in the manosphere and its adjacent right-wing influencer culture. Using Clavicular as a lens—his extreme body modification, relentless self-documentation, and a willingness to do anything for attention—Charlie discusses the rise of nihilistic Zoomer influencers. Then he’s joined by the internet-culture researcher Aidan Walker, who helps situate Clavicular alongside figures such as Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, revealing how the “looksmaxxing” movement collides with grievance politics and an anti-political, “algorithm-first” ideology. Together they explore what happens when the gatekeepers are gone, and when nihilism becomes a default way for budding attention hijackers to build an audience. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:20Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  You know, their very existence is proof of something not working. And so in a way, their project is to exist, to be seen, to be popular. You know, that's why he's gonna say the N-word downstream. And that's why he's going to read the humiliating text from his father downstream. You know, it's a total commitment to that project.

• 1:10Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel, staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we are going to expose ourselves to a lot of really awful internet content so that you don't have to. We are really going to plumb the depths of the online fever swamps here. Or maybe it's more appropriate to say that the characters from the depths of the online fever swamps moved up in a rather concerning way from the fringes all the way into popular culture. Over the past few months, a very young live streamer named Clavicular has risen out of obscurity and become part of a stable of Manosphere influencers and right-wing online figures. Now, if you're a normal person who is not chronically online,

• 1:54Charlie Warzel?

  you probably don't have the faintest idea who Clavicular is, and I'm sorry to ruin that for you. But Bear with me. Pretty much everything about Clavicular is preposterous. One of his first brushes with internet fame was when this photo of him went viral on Reddit. He was flexing in the mirror and it was taken by this old disinterested lady. In December, he made headlines for live streaming on Christmas Eve while apparently running a man over with his cyber truck. In interviews, he's claimed he's hit his face repeatedly with a hammer to crack his jaw and sculpt it. He said he's done methamphetamines to get hollow cheeks. He seemingly takes all kinds of steroids and meticulously documents all of it. Clavicular is a looks maxer, and that's part of this online subculture that is obsessed

• 2:38Charlie Warzel?

  with going to extreme lengths to achieve a chiseled face notion of perfection. It's an online community that's gained a fair amount of notoriety in recent years, in part because there's this overlap there with these other online groups that all cater to disaffected and vulnerable men. It's always a little bit difficult to categorize these groups, but I think it's safe to say that in Clavicular's case, he's somebody who represents this slice of the manosphere, this big group of popular influencers who traffic in blatant misogyny, online nihilism, and all kinds of destructive trolling behaviors. Now, historically, somebody like Clavicular would be strange enough and arguably off-putting

• 3:20Charlie Warzel?

  enough that he might toil on the fringes for quite a while and slowly build up this audience and influence in some of these backwater, like-minded communities. But instead, the opposite has happened. Clavicular has blown up extremely quickly. He's been palling around and collaborating with these manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, who's arguably one of the most significant media figures on the far right. As we'll discuss, Clavicular went viral in part because he seems to be willing to do or say absolutely anything and associate with absolutely anyone in order to be famous.

• 3:57Charlie Warzel?

  This is how he ended up in a club in Miami a few weeks ago with Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, singing along to Ye's song "Heil Hitler." Clavicular's rise is pretty interesting, in part because he represents this edgelord, manosphere influencer who also has a pretty incoherent politics. He hangs out with Nick Fuentes, yes, but he's also called JD Vance "fat and ugly and subhuman." Now, I know what you're thinking, there's arguably a little bit of risk in taking all of this deadly seriously, in part because Clavicular and all these guys are really young, and also there may not be a lot going on up there.

• 4:38Charlie Warzel?

  Clavicular himself said on a stream recently, quote, "All I think about is content. I'm sorry, bro. Like dude, I literally only think about content. You've got to understand." End quote. Good stuff.

• 4:54Charlie Warzel?

  And yet, I think Clavicular's rise and the rise of these influencers that he's associating with may actually reveal a good bit about the direction of online culture, in a world where Nick Fuentes and these nihilistic zoomers seem to be gaining influence online.

• 5:09Charlie Warzel?

  It's really easy to dismiss these guys when you watch them online. It all just seems so bankrupt and vain and often racist and sexist and just kind of devoid. It's a worse version of the 2016 pro-Trump shock-jock ecosystem that was led by now mostly forgotten influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos. But this is not the media ecosystem of 2016, and it's not just Fuentes who has reach, ending up on Tucker Carlson's show and vexing Republicans who'd rather not have to side with him or disavow him.

• 5:43Charlie Warzel?

  Take Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old YouTuber whose video on alleged fraud at Somali-American daycares in Minneapolis went viral late December.

• 5:52Charlie Warzel?

  A lot of Shirley's claims have been debunked, and Shirley is by no means a serious journalist. But people in the Trump administration listened to that. The media circus online around his video was used by the administration to justify the surge of ICE agents in Minneapolis. In other words, Shirley's provocation, which is content that is made just for the algorithm, broke off the internet into the real world, leaving violence and chaos in its wake. Things right now that can seem trivial or beyond the pale or just so stupid in the second Trump administration often aren't. So who are these influencers? Where do they come from?

• 6:35Charlie Warzel?

  And how seriously should we be taking them? Joining me today is Aidan Walker, and he's a writer and internet culture researcher. He's currently the new media manager at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he's spent years documenting the evolution of memes and online culture at the site KnowYourMeme. When it comes to content creators, he knows of what he speaks because he runs a popular TikTok account himself. And Aiden is just the perfect person to situate Clavicular, Fuentes, and his cast of character into a broader context of online and political culture. He joins me now. But first, a quick break.

• 7:16Speaker 00

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• 7:50Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Modarese-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 8:27Charlie Warzel?

  Aiden, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Happy to be here.

• 8:32Charlie Warzel?

  So, we're gonna, we're gonna walk through this, we're gonna do, this is gonna be some handholding, I think, in general, because you are a student of the fever swamps, of the meme craziness that I think a lot of people do not ingest to the same degree. And, and I, I've been in those swamps myself, I dip in and out of them, but I wanted to do something here where we, we really kind of walk people through all of this. So I want to start, let's just hope that people haven't had the pleasure, but who, who is Clavicular? I don't even know if I'm saying his name right. Who is he?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Well, okay, to start from the very beginning, Clavicular is a dude named Braden. He started posting on the internet as a teenager. So when he was around 15, 14, he was on these looks-maxing forums, which some of it overlaps with 4chan, not all of it is 4chan, but he's out here talking about body modification, essentially.

• 9:37Charlie Warzel?

  That's what, that's what looks-maxing is for, for people.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yes. So maximizing your looks through various methods. And for a while, he's posting, you know, like many teenagers on social media, gathering a bit of a following. And in the past two months, essentially, I mean, I first heard of him in, in December, and as you said, I spent a lot of time in the fever swamps, he kind of vaulted to this level of viral prominence, mostly for stuff on Twitch that he was doing, and, and Kick, actually, so live streaming, his actions, his adventures, his misadventures.

• 10:09Charlie Warzel?

  Tell me a little bit about what, you know, he started doing this when he was much younger. What was he doing in that community? Like, like, tell me what the looks-maxing community, what do they, do they believe anything? What do they believe? Tell me about his involvement and, and, and that community.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  So the thing to know about looks-maxers, and I want to be careful with my words, because the lore here is, is deeply complicated and controversial, but there, there's an adjacency to incels. The core of it is kind of this philosophy that the only thing in life that actually matters is how attractive you are. Everything else is sort of a scam. Everything else is a lie. Women only care about how good you look. Men only care about how good you look. And grades don't matter. Nothing matters. And so the rational person faced with this situation will do anything they can to look better. And so the looksmaxers will do everything from steroids to kind of famously hitting themselves in the face with a hammer or another hard object. The science is that it'll make micro fractures, science in scare quotes, of course.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  And that'll reform your facial bones so that you look more like a Chad. You have a sharper jawline. And they'll also do things like mewing, named after a Dr. Mew, which is the sense that like you can kind of like.

• 11:25Charlie Warzel?

  It's like structuring your jaw, right? Like, like, like biting down on something or doing basically jaw exercises to like work it out as you would like if you were, you know, curling your biceps or something like that?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, to make it sharper, to make it more muscular. And in a way, it kind of ties into this like pseudo-scientific health stuff we see like with the RFK Junior BS that goes around. But it's very much like these young, alienated men on the internet doing anything to make themselves look better. And then kind of posting constantly about the insane lengths you'll go to like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to look good.

• 11:59Charlie Warzel?

  So what did Clavicular do in this? Was, did he have like a pretty normal either trajectory on this? Did he break off from this? Was he, you know, he just sort of reached people's radars late last year. But was he, was he someone of prominence here in this world as far as you know? Or was he someone who just kind of ascended late in that?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny that you use the word ascended because that's the word they use to describe going from, you know, having a soft jawline, looking, you know, like a virgin, and then you ascend to look like a Chad. So Clavicular prior to kind of popping off in November, December, had sort of transferred over to posting on TikTok and doing kind of the classic posting that attractive people do on TikTok, you know, like dancing, kind of like blue. Stealing the camera like Zoolander. Um, but then including all these like ascension content where he'd have a picture of himself when he was young and pimply and then one now where he's kind of sculpted and and hot. And so he was prominent in the niche, but he was far from the number one kind of person there.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  And as to what he did to become prominent, um, he hit a dude with his cyber truck during a live stream. And he told a conservative podcaster that he supported Gavin Newsom over JD Vance. Because Gavin Newsom is a six, three chat and Vance is fat and ugly.

• 13:21Charlie Warzel?

  That's it. It's it's a lot to take in, but what's interesting about that is is simply the degrees to which one can become famous now, also the degrees to which somebody like that can kind of pop out of nowhere for for for the most ridiculous things. How has to your mind, how has this idea of looks maxing again? It's not something a lot of people were talking about even, you know, two or three years ago. How has that ascended? What is what is its rise been as a culture?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  So looks maxing is very old, like probably 10, 15 years old. And some of kind of the earliest very active meme subcultures on the internet are like bodybuilders and then, you know, incels and not that every bodybuilder online becomes an incel. It's a funnel. It's a pipeline. Not everybody goes down it, which is important to remember, you know, like the looks maxers aren't all like, you know, fallen lost boys who who can't be saved.

• 14:17Charlie Warzel?

  Who who are who are other looks maxers who've kind of broken through in this? Or or is is Clavicular the first that you've that you feel like has achieved this kind of Twitter main character level of fame?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  So I think Clavicular is the first that has achieved this level of main character fame. And I think one reason for that is there's definitely been people who maybe I'm not aware of that have gotten big on Instagram for doing this. There's been looks Mexican influencers for years. But the roots of it really are like in this sort of anonymous, you know, image board kind of culture where people aren't necessarily hustling for the fame. And I think Clavicular's Innovation is that he kind of married that looks maxing niche, which is very strong, very vital has been for years. With sort of this general niche of like, I'm a young hot person on TikTok. I go to the club. You know, I, I go out and make videos of myself dancing. I talk about hitting on girls.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  And so he's kind of married the two together. And to my mind, I think he's one of the, probably the first, like, really big, famous looks maxer to kind of break through into a category of more general fame, which probably says something about the derangement of our society.

• 15:30Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, I think, I think probably, but you have Clivicular and, and we're kind of working towards something here. Where Clivicular is this character to come out of these, this corner of the manosphere that is very extreme about doing extreme, sometimes, you know, damage to your physical body in order to look good, but also is part of this incel kind of disaffected male culture that has a political valence? Would you say that it has a real political valence? Or would you say that it doesn't really?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  So it has a political valence, but it doesn't map very neatly onto right, left. So I think part of the reason why it was shocking that Clivicular endorsed Gavin Newsom over J D Vance is that anyone in the internet would expect a dude like that to be kind of right wing, in part because it's kind of incel adjacent. But more than anything, there's this kind of nihilism to it. Of like, the reason he's endorsing Gavin Newsom isn't because he is against the administration or wants a certain policy outcome. It's because that cold logic of looks maxing says the only thing that matters is the sharpness of a guy's jawline. Nothing else in the world actually applies. There's no morality. There's no rationality. It's, it's just,

• 16:49Speaker 02

  you know, what degree is this campbell tilt, which is like the, the way your eyes are in relation to the bridge of your forehead? And so it's, it's a total evacuation of like, all the other things that people care about. And just a total replacement of it by, you know, A, how do you look? Is it good? Does it fit the metrics? And B, how does it perform on the platform? And so if it has a political valence, I don't think it's like Clavicular, you know, wants a strong social safety net. I think it's like Clavicular believes the way that everybody else talks is stupid and that he's going to performatively just insist upon this on the surface bizarre and yet strangely cohesive system of just describing the entire

• 17:31Speaker 02

  world, describing all human relations by reference to how people's faces look. So it's a total lack of belief in anything social, anything beyond just like, oh, that guy's hot or not hot as like a metric for evaluating something. So it's anti-political, maybe in a way.

• 17:47Charlie Warzel?

  So, okay, so we're going to put a pin in that. Then there's another character in this universe. They're all going to join together in the worst possible Avengers way. Tell me who, and I think plenty of people will be familiar with his name, but tell me who Nick Fuentes is.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's interesting, Nick Fuentes and Clavicular, after Clavicular's glow up, have started to collab and still are. Fuentes is about my age, born in 1998. He is a Gen Z white nationalist political commentator who first got big around 2019. He has a group there, they're called the Gropers, after a version of the Pepe meme that's sort of an unappealing toad. And his main platform now is he does these live streams where he takes questions, he kind of impersonates a news anchor, and he's always drilling down on these like Steve Bannon-esque points, but even a bit more like explicit and further out. And he kind of got to the scene in 2019 by starting this griper war against Charlie

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Kirk and Turning Point USA, where Kirk would go around campuses and do these, you know, events, have people asking questions, do these debate bro type things. And Fuentes and his grippers would come into the audience and then ask these questions that would push Kirk to, you know, take two steps further to the right than he already was, to endorse something blatantly anti-Semitic or blatantly racist, when Kirk might have just been doing the dog whistle before. And so that's kind of how you soared into prominence as like the furthest stretch of the alt-right. And now, post Charlie Kirk's death, you know, Fuentes sort of got mentioned a bunch more. And his dream has kind of been continuing all these years. And now he's kind of the big bad boy of the alt-right.

• 19:29Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, he, he went on, on with Tucker Carlson. He's sort of, he's taken his shots with other people and, and it's just been sort of a, on the right. Like I, there, there was a big blow up, right? With the Heritage Foundation and like whether or not to, you know, in basically attack Tucker Carlson for having Nick Fuentes on. And this idea that the Heritage Foundation wasn't gonna, you know, wasn't gonna like weigh in. And it was this, this feeling that Fuentes is like always pushing. It's just what he was doing in the, in the quote unquote, griper war with Kirk, right? He's always trying to push, even with his presence, people, you know, have, have to disavow or not disavow him. And, and he does have this meaning, meaningful constituency of grippers.

• 20:13Charlie Warzel?

  What do grippers believe? Do, do they believe anything?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Good question. I think within the grippers, there's probably a lot of diversity of belief. But I think they can kind of be understood as a subset of the alt-right, kind of more radical edge of it. I think that most of the, not to generalize, but most of the animosity that they feel is probably channeled towards minorities, towards Jewish people, but also towards like the center, right? Like the Charlie Kirks of the world, kind of the establishment that most of their viral clout has been gotten by Fuentes being the dude that these people say, that's too much. This guy's too crazy. And then all of like the most crazy disaffected young people will say, oh, really? The guy who's too edgy for Charlie Kirk? That's right for me. And so I think they're just kind of into pushing that edge.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  And Fuentes himself has a bit of like a, you know, like a white nationalist type, like solidarity politics. In a way, it's hard to even call it solidarity of like, you know, saying to, to young white men or to others of like, this is, you know, this is your group, go with this, oppose everybody else. And so to the extent that they do believe something, it's kind of just like being racist. And I think one thing you really start to notice when you spend time in the fever swamp and you study things like green tech. Stories on 4chan or just these these various memes. Cause I think a lot of these men who are like into Fuentes are are marginalized, for lack of a better word. You know, they're mentally ill, they're they're disabled, they're neurodivergent, they come from a poor background, they come from a familial abuse background.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  And a lot of the content is about that. Um, it's about.

• 21:47Charlie Warzel?

  So that that's like what they're confessing in those threads, you mean? Like you're not, you're not like surmising this, this is like actually like what they're saying.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:55Charlie Warzel?

  In their, in their threats.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  I mean, in as many words, yeah, I mean, they're posting threads about, you know, can't get a job. I'm a drain on my family. My mom hates me, you know, can't can't get with girls. You know, I'm I'm ugly, I'm I'm fat, I can't figure anything out. Like, like it's guys who are stuck in that situation. And not everybody who's in that situation or a situation like it makes that choice. So they should be held responsible, but I think one thing to understand about is like they they choose the Groyber toad as their emblem. You know, that's not like a jackbooted, strong character, that's a, that's a chubby, off putting, gross toad. And so I think a lot of what that movement does, the service it provides is it allows them to feel.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  You know, accepted in the, in this freak brotherhood where all you have to say to have this sort of all encompassing. Ever loving group is is you just say the slur and then you're on the other side of that Rubicon. It's, it's like a gang, it's that kind of initiation ritual and it. It seems to solve these people's problems sometimes, but I think it always leads down very destructive paths.

• 22:58Charlie Warzel?

  This is interesting too, then in the convergence, right? Because you have someone like Fuentes, you have a group of these people. Obviously not all of them are like, you know, feel like they are horribly marginalized, some of them are just, you know. Edge lords are people who are just, you know, just out and out proud racists and love to. Engage with others racist, but there is this level of disaffected feeling. And then you have the look maxing, looks maxing community, right? Which is also, there is potentially just as much of a home for disaffected people there. Or people who who feel, you know, I I'm I'm ugly or I'm a, I'm a drain or I'm whatever.

• 23:39Charlie Warzel?

  And want to optimize themselves in this way or find that to be, you know, really appealing. So this, this brings us to this video that came out a couple of weeks ago that went pretty viral on, on a lot of my different feeds, mostly with a lot of people feeling like this was like the end times. But it was a meeting of clavicular, the Manosphere influencer, who had, I believe, has been indicted in different countries for sex trafficking, Andrew Tate, and Nick Fuentes, among others. There's, there's a few other characters there

• 24:20Charlie Warzel?

  who we don't like need to get into. They're at a club in Miami. They are goofing around, seemingly having a good time, and I guess goad somebody in the club to put on the Kanye or Ye as he's known now, song Heil Hitler, which is its own provocation. And the idea is that, you know, they're all dancing to it, but that the whole club is dancing to it. And it's this sort of moment of total trolling, but also this like out and out proud racism that everyone around in that, in that clip seems to be totally okay with

• 24:58Charlie Warzel?

  in that moment. And I think, you know, watching that, so many people felt like, what the hell is happening? And so I would ask, what the hell happened there?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's horrifying. And they're, they're blasting that song in the, in the rented limo going to the club beforehand. So that's, that was always the, I think always the plan. Kanye, Ye, I think is like the representative artist for some of these guys because, you know, the verses of that song before kind of the, the horrible chorus are about how he can't see his kids anymore. And he's a, he's a drug addict and a, you know, a washout and a sleaze bag and all this stuff. And I think that they definitely staged this moment in the club for maximum shock value. So that it goes across people's feeds. And I think there's sort of two sides to it. The first is that You know, if you transgress in that way and you get people outraged and shocked,

• 25:54Speaker 02

  that's the only play these guys have ever done, you know, from Gamergate to today, from 2016 to today. They've just always pushed the boundary and then been rewarded with clicks and attention, even if there is pushback. Then I think the other side of it is just this, this sort of violent show of like, oh, we can get away with it, right? Like, this is the one thing that liberals would say you can't get away with. And just by doing that, having the video go everywhere on X, they've said, hey, we got to wait with it. And they've done this summit of all these guys. And Clavicular's status there is interesting because he's the newest one and he's the youngest one. And he, uh, he, he's the ringleader of it in a way.

• 26:31Charlie Warzel?

  Before, and correct me if I'm wrong, before they went to the club, I believe Nick Fuentes, this guy Sneko, and Clavicular sit down for this livestream, right? And you said that like, this was like a very rich text, right? For, uh, for someone who wanted to understand the differences between these people. You have Clavicular, who is young, younger, very young. And then you have Fuentes and Sneko, who are in their, in their late twenties. That wouldn't seem like a huge difference, but in these online influencer worlds, it actually, you know, there's so many cycles in between them of, of how to think about content, how to think about, you know, their politics. You wrote that, you know, it seemed like in the, in the

• 27:15Charlie Warzel?

  stream, which I do have to say to people who might not seek this out on their own, it's so lame. Like, it is just so deeply lame. These guys are like pulling up computer chairs, wearing suits, nice clothes. It's like people walking around in the background. They're in a living room and they're just like, very not charismatic. Sometimes Fuentes comes off on his own show as very charismatic. Here, he's just kind of like hunched in a chair, very uncharismatic, having these conversations that seem sort of brain dead, honestly. Like, they're, they're racist and whatever, but also just kind of like, not animated or, or very even interested at all. But, but you, you write that Fuentes is interesting, interested

• 28:00Charlie Warzel?

  in this stream, or it seems, about describing his, his political project, right? Around this, this white identity, that there's this coherence almost to, you know, what he wants to do, how he wants to sort of like, take conservatism from the mantle of the boomers and move into something else. And you write that Clavicular seemed totally uninterested in that. And tell me a little bit about that and the differences that you saw between someone sort of older Gen Z and younger Gen Z in that sense.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, I mean, it's a horrible stream to watch. I kind of just inflicted it on myself, I guess, because, you know, I have like a professional anthropological sort of interest in these spaces. And I think also just on a personal level, like being the age that I am, you know, same age as Fuentes and Sneako. I think you just kind of grow up and you see, you know, a lot of kids like in your high school or whatever, kind of get pulled down that path in the same way you see kids, you know, get into drugs or something and it ends up badly for them. And it's always been this force, just like in the internet. So I think that's part of the fascination. And where Fuentes is describing his political project, most concretely for me, it's when he's talking about getting this gold sponsorship that used to be, I think, Mark Levin's, who's

• 29:18Speaker 02

  kind of like a boomer conservative commentator. And Fuentes is very hung up on getting this sponsorship because I think for him, it would mean that he's beaten the boomers and now he's the mainstream of the conservative movement.

• 29:30Charlie Warzel?

  This is like a buy gold thing, right?

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a buy gold thing, like the classic, you know, alongside like Survivor.

• 29:36Charlie Warzel?

  Right wing radio.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Supports right wing radio. You know, there's no reason for it to matter to Clavicular, but it still matters to Fuentes and to some extent to Sneako. And so I think there's a difference between kind of elder and younger Gen Z in that for Clavicular, I mean, I'm sure he's not a nice guy. I think he's probably a racist. I think that someone who isn't hateful wouldn't do the things that he's done, but he's not like-

• 30:00Charlie Warzel?

  He does seem to use the N word quite a bit.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. But he's not like interested in remaking the state in the same way that Fuentes seems to be. He just seems to be interested in, you know, making himself as handsome as possible in this totally, I guess you could say like randy and self-interested, whatever. Whereas Fuentes has some desire to be seen by the institutions or to be seen beating the institutions. For Clavicular, it's irrelevant from the jump.

• 30:26Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, you described it as the exchange corresponding to the overall idea of an algorithmic ideology replacing an institutional ideology. That is really interesting to me. The idea that someone like Fuentes, who we would- Think of as extremely online and using an online movement to to some effect, obviously, attention hijacking, growing, growing an audience, et cetera, still having institutional desires, right? Still wanting some kind of political power.

• 31:05Charlie Warzel?

  Whereas Clavicular seems to only want, like, he rejects institutions almost fully, right? Like, like in his sort of incoherent left-right politics or whatever, but also in the idea that, like, he really only cares about the algorithm.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he only cares about that, that cold logic of like, algorithm, how many views can you get for saying this or doing this? You know, how many aura points can you get for mutilating your face in this way? There's this total lack of belief in anything that is, that is social, anything that is, you know, institutional, which to me, it translates as kind of like a, an anti-politics. But what I sort of meant by ideology, and this is maybe something I do with my content, a little tongue-in-cheek, and then maybe it starts to become sincere, is you look at these guys and you look at this boring, horrible stream as a rich text, and I think what you can sometimes extract from it is like, these are people who have this set

• 32:03Speaker 02

  of distorted values about the world, but that have somehow found visibility and attention. And why exactly is that? You know, their very existence is proof of something not working. And so in a way, their project is to exist, to be seen, to be popular. You know, that's why he's gonna say the N-word on stream. And that's why he's going to read the humiliating text from his father on stream. You know, it's a total commitment to that project, because I think his existence just sort of proves that the gatekeepers are gone. You know, it kind of proves that these weird, sleaze-bag, disaffected, angry young men, that there's nothing holding them back. You know, the fact that Clavicular is there is proof that you've, that you've won. And I think for Fuentes, being a little bit older, had this formative experience with the gatekeepers still being there.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  You know, he got famous by being the guy that was too radical for Charlie Kirk. And so he needs there to be a Charlie Kirk there, or some figure like that. I think Clavicular doesn't have that need, which I think testifies to kind of the moment we're in and that they're able to self sustain just by being this beast of the algorithm.

• 33:03Charlie Warzel?

  You write that, and I thought this observation was really clarifying, that this is nihilism by default. Clavicular is nihilism by default. And the elder Zoomer, maybe the Fuentes ideology, is a little bit of a nihilism by disillusionment. And I think that that is is really interesting because one way that I look at the internet throughout generations of it, right? Is that the culture is always layering stuff on top and absorbing the thing that came before it, right? Everything's like a little more of an abstraction, right?

• 33:39Charlie Warzel?

  Like, the the Groypa is an abstraction of the Pepe meme, which was its own abstraction of of a thing from, you know, a cartoonist that got popular on 4chan. These things layer on top of each other, and it's interesting to think of the nihilism being layered on top to the point where you get these people who are just like, they don't know why. They have this lol, nothing matters, disaffected feeling is just sort of like what they saw on the internet from this community and they're just adopting it. That's kind of a, that's terrifying, man.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, it's it's the difference between like, you know, resenting like the idea of adult supervision. I guess because you think you're like oppositional or better than the adult. And then the feeling of there just like having never been an adult in the room, you know, like I think someone like Clavicular, since the time he was conscious, you know, Donald Trump has been, you know, the the central figure in American politics. I think that was even something Clinton said in 2016, that, you know, it's going to be a generation of people raised, you know, watching someone who breaks every rule, gets away with everything and gets wildly rewarded for it. And there's tons of other figures in American and global life who are not Trump, who exhibit that kind of behavior as well.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  But I think it's just, you know, years and years of that, there's not even any juice to be had in, you know, opposing the establishment because the establishment is so absent from your life, honestly.

• 35:06Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, I heard, I, this is slight tangent, but somebody who is part of is part of Gen Z was saying to to me.

• 35:17Charlie Warzel?

  Like, you know, the reason why the democracy dies in darkness stuff like doesn't resonate with us is because like Trump's Trump's been around since the very beginning of this like he is he's the only thing I know about American politics from my own experience, right? Like, like, what are you talking about? Like, you know, what is a functional feeling there? Right? And I think that that is, that is a really interesting piece of, you know, if we're describing the water that a lot of people are swimming in, especially like a much, much younger generation, that dysfunction that nihilism doesn't not feel the same way, but also that the appeal to like institutions or the appeal to, you know, norms or civic virtues or values or whatever liberalism,

• 36:01Charlie Warzel?

  even, you know, that it's not on the radar almost. And that is, that's concerning, I guess.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not even opposed necessarily. It's just, it's just not legible. And I think it's important to point out, too, that like, the majority of Gen Z people are not nihilistic looks maxers, you know, who want to burn down civilization. It's just some people kind of make that choice or get drawn to it. But I think there is just overall a sense of like, you know, the old coordinates of whatever the old order does have just been gone for so long.

• 36:34Charlie Warzel?

  Well, and this is where I'll, I'm glad you brought that up. This is where I would, where I want to try to push back a little on all of this, right? And get a sense of, I would say, first off, can you describe the size of all of this? Because like you say, it's not everyone. It's, it is its own, like, there's a strange thing that's happened where the fringe has become not the fringe anymore. And yet, it still obviously is part of a fringe of some kind of thing. It's a little hard to understand, but like, I mean, how popular are these guys, right? Like, how do you, how do you think about it? How do you quantify it?

• 37:13Speaker 02

  So, I mean, you could look at like subscriber counts and stuff. And my impression is, forgive me if it don't, viewers can look this up at home. I think Fuentes has around like a hundred K on his Telegram channel, which is a bit more of like a closed intimate social media, actually more used overseas than in the US, I think. But there's sort of two ways to measure it, I think, is like you can go for raw overall count. In which case, like, of course, Mr. Beast is bigger, like mainstream influencers are bigger. They have more people. But then there's the sense of like, as an influencer, you probably would rather have a hundred paying subscribers versus like a hundred thousand people who will just like your video. And so I think some of what allows these kind of fringe figures to throw a disproportionate weight

• 37:53Speaker 02

  around on the online ecosystem is that once they have a fan, they have like a zealous follower, they have a devotee. You know, it's so radical, it's so extreme to get to this position where you're gonna post and say, I'm a fan of Nick Fuentes. Like that, that guy's taking up a lot of your time and a lot of your life. In a way that someone who's a fan of a more mainstream creator, they probably aren't. And we saw the same phenomenon, you know, 4chan, pretty small platform in terms of user base, but has this disproportionate influence on internet culture because of sort of how committed and fiendish they all are. And so I think these guys are definitely someone that most, you know, young people will have heard of. They're definitely on the radar, uh, which is where they wanna be. But I don't think they're at all probably like the dominant influence on people.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  They're, they're, they're an option on the menu, uh, which is troubling, but they're not, you know, the main course, maybe.

• 38:43Charlie Warzel?

  Overarching question here, though, I think. Like, how much should we be paying attention to these guys? And I know that's, it's sort of impossible to ask, but there's a sense, I've gone so back and forth on this in my own coverage, in my own thoughts with all these different people where you're like, you know what? This guy is an out and out horrible racist type person, like, there's just no reason to give this any oxygen. And then, you know, you see the audience continue to grow, the specter continue to grow. Then in the right wing media ecosystem, they're platformed by just, you know, a big enough person, say, Tucker Carlson and Fuentes, and then it's like, the New York Times is writing about him every day. And, you know, it's like a person who has to be dealt with now, right?

• 39:28Charlie Warzel?

  And then it doesn't matter whether you think there's enough oxygen, uh, or you should give them oxygen or not. How do you think about paying attention to these guys as like a culture and a society? Because it's lame. Like, we should, it feels like in a just society, it'd be like, these guys are absolute freaks. Like, this, this is not worth anyone's time. And yet, that's not happening.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's always been kind of the, as you point out, the concern with kind of internet culture journalism and covering these people. Because the thing they love most in the world is, you know, The Atlantic talking about them. Like, that's their, that's the goal, in a way, or one of the goals. But I think they're worth paying attention to because I think we still often make this distinction between like, right-wing media ecosystem and the administration. But it's the, it's the same thing, right? The DHS account, the kinds of memes they're posting. You know, the fact that after Kirk died, J.D. Vance went and took that podcasting chair. Like, these guys, in terms of clout, in terms of the way they speak to the base, in terms of the way they inform policy, like Ted Cruz sits down with Tucker Carlson.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  I think Tucker Carlson is the more powerful figure there, in terms of the right-wing. So I think it's crucial to pay attention to them if we kind of want to understand the way that this administration is consolidating power and like, thinking about its place in the world. And I think, from another angle, one thing you see a lot, like, when you look at online niches, is that you sort of have these big whales, and then there's other creators. There's like, a big delta, I guess, between the number one and then like, the number six. And I think with the right-wing ecosystem, you know, the, the big whale is Trump, and then there's sort of different flavors of that, and all of them collaborate and sort of help each other, and then repost and work off of the big guy. And so I think understanding that and paying attention to it, sort of tells us more about

• 41:17Speaker 02

  this moment and that administration than a lot of kind of the analyses that are like, oh, you know, look what they're doing to the, to the courts, or look at this, you know, latest order, or let's think about what's the reason for the tariffs on XYZ country. You know, the reason for the tariffs is the same reason Clavicular hits his face with a hammer. It's to get attention, it's to mobilize the base, it's to, it's to prove a point that there's no rules anymore. And so I think that the structure of these radical communities tell us something. About what the government itself is doing. Cause the last point that I always sort of try to make thinking about it generationally is like John Gans, the writer makes this point of like glorification within the government. You know, a lot of these young conservative staffers, guys who are like thirty five now, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, they were the kids on four gen.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  And that's the person who's been empowered. That's the milieu that's coming out of. And I think that's kind of part of why I really pay attention to this is that I find that, you know, it helps to sort of like know what's going on and what's driving it at a deeper level.

• 42:17Charlie Warzel?

  Where, where do you think this goes? Because again, when we think about the, the layer cake of nihilism, uh, so to speak. You know, you've, you've, you've written about some of these guys that, you know, they burned so bright with their trolling and, and, and one upsmanship and content first mentality that it's, it's, it's like not so, it's not sustaining, right? Like they will eventually probably like immolate in some way on a creator level. But at the same time, the culture nudges forward, right? It becomes a little more extreme, even if those stars in the, you know, the, the, their galaxy kind of burn out.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  I think it goes to death, you know, both for them personally, and then probably for like social media, the internet, the country. You know, there's no image of the future. It's just this race to the bottom, right? It's break every taboo, break every rule, destroy your body.

• 43:10Charlie Warzel?

  You mean death like, like literally?

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Like literally, yeah. If, if you sort of agree with the analysts who kind of see this moment as fascist in one way or another, I think that's where fascism leads. You know, it's a form of death worship. And I think it's also to the extent that what the looks maxers do, like part of why it interested me is that it feels so poetically kind of apt to describe the whole thing is that you destroy your body, you destroy your life chances for the sake of an online public that really doesn't care about you. Because the incentives are always for them to double down, always for them to do more. The only place it ends is with their self destruction. And the question is whether the rest of us go along with that. And I think that in many ways, insofar as the, the first thing they destroyed was kind of the institutions.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  And now they're trying to destroy the rest of us in themselves. It's like, where, where do we stop it? Where do we detach from that project? And I think it's something that. I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm an internet culture analyst. I don't know about like national politics in the end, but it's like, we just need to find another option. And I think it's important to like, tell young people that like, this project, you know, ends in death. This is a guy who's destroying his life for a live stream. And they're destroying the country for clicks.

• 44:25Charlie Warzel?

  I think that's a great place to leave it, a depressing place to leave it. But also, I would just, I would just say, as someone who has covered this stuff for like, getting close to two decades, and always being like, this internet culture stuff, it's not politics. And then every year, being like, it's kind of, it's kind of politics. So like, I would, I wouldn't sell yourself in supremely short. We're not, you know, geopolitical analysts, but this, this stuff, this stuff has bled into the highest levels of at least American politics right now. So I, I, I think, you know, the, the perspective is, is, is worthy. But Aidan Walker, thank you for coming on Galaxy Brain.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Charlie, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here and talk about a terrible topic.

• 45:10Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, in, into the abyss together, you know?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, better than going alone.

• 45:15Charlie Warzel?

  That's right.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, En-As-In-News-Nerd, press.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Modorese-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:26Charlie Warzel?

  Thank you again to my guest, Aidan Walker. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe to The Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts about clavicular. And if you want to support this work and the work of all my fellow journalists at The Atlantic, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet.

• 47:04Charlie Warzel?

  This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Claudina Bade. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme music is by Rob Smersiak. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, Press.