Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
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 Claviculara 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 Charlie is 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 nihilism, 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.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Aidan Walker: 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. That’s why he’s going to say the N-word on stream. That’s why he’s going to read the humiliating text from his father on stream. It’s a total commitment to that project. Because I think his existence just sort of proves that the gatekeepers are gone.
[Music]
Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzell, 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 livestreamer 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, 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 of 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 livestreaming on Christmas Eve while apparently running a man over with his Cybertruck. 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 “looksmaxxer,” and that’s part of this online subculture that is obsessed with going to extreme lengths to achieve a chiseled-faced 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 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 is 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.
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.”
Clavacular’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 J. D. 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. Clavicular himself said on a stream recently: “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.
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. 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.
Take Nick Shirley. The 23-year-old YouTuber whose video on alleged fraud at Somali-American day cares in Minneapolis went viral late December. A lot of Shirley’s claims had been debunked, and Shirley is by no means a serious journalist. But people in the Trump administration listen 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 actually are these influencers? Where do they come from? And crucially, how seriously should we be taking them? Joining me today is Aidan Walker; he’s a writer and internet-culture researcher.
He’s currently the new-media manager at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And he spent years documenting the evolution of memes and online culture at the site Know Your Meme. When it comes to content creators, he knows of what he speaks, because he runs a popular TikTok account himself. And Aidan is just the perfect person to situate Clavicular, Fuentes, and his cast of characters into a broader context of online and political culture. He joins me now.
Aidan, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
Aidan Walker: Happy to be here.
Warzel: So we’re gonna walk through this. This is gonna be some hand-holding, 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 I’ve been in those swamps myself. I dip in and out of them.
But I wanted to do something here where 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 is Clavicular? I don’t even know if I’m saying his name right. Who is he?
Walker: 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 looksmaxxing forums, which—some of it overlaps with 4chan. -Not all of it is 4chan. But he’s out here talking about body modification, essentially.
Warzel: That’s what looksmaxxing is for people.
Walker: Yes.
Warzel: Gotcha.
Walker: 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 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 Kik actually. So livestreaming his actions, his adventures, his misadventures.
Warzel: So 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, tell me what the looksmaxxing community, what do they—do they believe anything? What do they believe? Tell me about his involvement and that community.
Walker: So the thing to know about looksmaxxers—and I want to be careful with my words, because the lore here is deeply complicated and controversial—but 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 looksmaxxers 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 microfractures. “Science” in scare quotes, of course. 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 you can kind of like—
Warzel: It’s like structuring your jaw, right? Like biting down on something, or doing basically jaw exercises to work it out—as you would if you were curling your biceps or something like that.
Walker: Yeah, yeah—to make it sharper. To make it more muscular. And in a way, it kind of ties into this pseudoscientific health stuff we see with the RFK [Robert F. Kennedy] Jr. 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.
Warzel: So what did Clavicular do in this? Did he have a pretty normal trajectory on this? Did he break off from this? He just sort of reached people’s radars late last year. But 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?
Walker: Yeah, it’s funny that you use the word ascended, because that’s the word they use to describe going from having a soft jawline, looking 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 Steel–ing the camera, like Zoolander. But then including all these “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 hot.
And so he was prominent in the niche, but he was far from the No. 1 kind of person there. And as to what he did to become prominent: He hit a dude with his Cybertruck during a livestream, and he told a conservative podcaster that he supported Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance because Gavin Newsom is a 6’3” Chad and Vance is fat and ugly.
Warzel: So it’s a lot to take in. But what’s interesting about that 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 the most ridiculous things. To your mind, how has this idea of looksmaxxing—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 its rise been as a culture?
Walker: So looksmaxxing 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 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. The looksmaxxers aren’t all, like, fallen lost boys who can’t be saved.
Warzel: Who are other looksmaxxers who’ve kind of broken through in this? Or is Clavicular the first that you feel like has achieved this kind of Twitter main-character level of fame?
Walker: 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 looksmaxxing influencers for years. But the roots of it, really, are like in this sort of anonymous 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 looksmaxxing 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; I go out and make videos of myself dancing; I talk about hitting on girls. And so he’s kind of married the two together. And to my mind, I think, he’s one of probably the first really big, famous looksmaxxers to kind of break through into a category of more general fame. Which probably says something about the derangement of our society.
Warzel: Yeah, I think probably. But you have Clavicular, and we’re kind of working toward something here where Clavicular is this character to come out of this corner of the manosphere that is very extreme. About doing extreme, sometimes, 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?
Walker: 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 Clavicular endorsed Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance is that anyone on 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. Like, the reason he’s endorsing Gavin Newsom isn’t because he is against the [Trump] administration or wants a certain policy outcome. It’s because that cold logic of looksmaxxing 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 just, you know, What degree is his canthal tilt?—which is the way your eyes are in relation to the bridge of your forehead. And so it’s a total evacuation of 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 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 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 a metric for evaluating something. So it’s anti-political, maybe, in a way.
Warzel: So, okay, so we’re gonna 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.
Walker: 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—they’re called the Groypers, after a version of the Pepe meme that’s sort of an unappealing toad. And his main platform now is: He does these livestreams 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 Groyper war against Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA—where Kirk would go around campuses and do these events, have people asking questions, do these debate bro–type things. And Fuentes and his Groypers would come into the audience and then ask these questions that would push Kirk to take two steps further to the right than he already was: to endorse something blatantly anti-Semitic or blatantly racist, when Kirk might’ve just been doing the dog whistle before. And so that’s kind of how he soared into prominence as like the furthest stretch of the alt-right. And now, post–Charlie Kirk’s death, Fuentes sort of got mentioned a bunch more. And his stream has kind of been continuing all these years, and now he’s kind of the big bad boy of the online right.
Warzel: Yeah, he went on with Tucker Carlson. He’s sort of, he’s taken his shots with other people. And it’s just been sort of, on the right, like—there was a big blowup with the Heritage Foundation and whether or not to, you know, basically attack Tucker Carlson for having Nick Fuentes on. And this idea that the Heritage Foundation wasn’t going to weigh in. And it was this feeling that Fuentes is always pushing just what he was doing, in the quote unquote “Groyper war” with Kirk, right? He’s always trying to push, even with his presence. People have to disavow or not disavow him. And he does have this meaningful constituency of Groypers. What do Groypers believe? Do they believe anything?
Walker: Good question. I think within the Groypers, 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 the 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 toward minorities, toward Jewish people, but also toward the center-right: like the Charlie Kirks of the world, kind of the establishment. 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 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.
And Fuentes himself has a bit of like a white-nationalist type. You know, solidarity politics in a way. It’s hard to even call it solidarity of, you know, saying to young white men or to others of like, 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-text stories on 4chan, or just these various memes, is: I think a lot of these men who are into Fuentes are marginalized, for lack of a better word. They’re disabled; they’re neurodivergent; they come from a poor background; they come from a familial-abuse background. And a lot of the content is about that. It’s about that kind of—
Warzel: So that’s what they’re confessing in those threads, you mean? Like, you’re not surmising this? This is actually what they’re saying in their threads.
Walker: Yeah. 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 get with girls, you know. I’m ugly, I’m fat, I can’t figure anything out. 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 it is: They choose the Groyper Toad as their emblem. You know, that’s not a jackbooted, strong character. 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, you know, accepted in this freak brotherhood. Where all you have to say to have this sort of all-encompassing, you know, ever-loving group is: You just say the slur. And then you’re on the other side of that Rubicon. It’s like a gang. It’s that kind of initiation ritual. And it seems to solve these people’s problems sometimes. But I think it always leads down very destructive paths.
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, edgelords or people who are just, you know, out-and-out, proud racists and love to engage with other racists. But there is this level of disaffected feeling.
And then you have the looksmaxxing community, right? Which is also—there is potentially just as much of a home for disaffected people there, or people who feel, you know, I’m ugly or I’m a drain or I’m whatever and want to optimize themselves in this way, or find that to be really appealing. So this brings us to this video that came out a couple of weeks ago that went pretty viral on a lot of my different feeds—mostly with a lot of people feeling this was like the end times. But it was a meeting of Clavicular [with] the manosphere influencer who I believe has been indicted in different countries for sex trafficking, Andrew Tate, and Nick Fuentes, among others. There’s a few other characters there who we don’t 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 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 clip, seems to be totally okay with in that moment. And I think watching that, so many people felt like, What the hell is happening? And so, I would ask: What the hell happened there?
Walker: Yeah; it’s horrifying. And they’re blasting that song in the rented limo going to the club beforehand.
Warzel: Okay, I didn’t see that.
Walker: So that was, I think, always the plan. And Kanye, Ye, I think is like the representative artist for some of these guys. Because, you know, the verses of that song before the horrible chorus are about how he can’t see his kids anymore, and he’s a drug addict and a washout and a sleazebag 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, 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 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 away 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’s the ringleader of it in a way.
Warzel: Before, and correct me if I’m wrong, but before they went to the club, I believe Nick Fuentes, this guy Sneako, and Clavicular sit down for this livestream, right? You said that this was, like, a very rich text, right, for someone who wanted to understand the differences between these people. You have Clavicular—who is younger, very young—and then you have Fuentes and Sneako, who are in their late 20s. That wouldn’t seem like a huge difference, but in these online-influencer worlds, it actually is. There’s so many cycles in between them of how to think about content, how to think about their politics.
You wrote that it seemed like, in the stream—which I just 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 very not charismatic. Sometimes Fuentes comes off on his own show as very charismatic. Here, he’s just kind of hunched in a chair, very uncharismatic, having these conversations that seem sort of brain dead, honestly. Like, they’re racist and whatever, but also just kind of not animated, or very even interested at all. But you write that Fuentes is interested in this stream, or it seems, about describing his political project around this white identity—that there’s this coherence, almost, to what he wants to do. How he wants to sort of 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, you know,
sort of older Gen Z and younger Gen Z in that sense.
Walker: Yeah, that was—I mean, it’s a horrible stream to watch. I kind of just inflicted it on myself, I guess, because I have a professional—anthropological, sort of—interest in these spaces. And I think also, just on a personal level, being the age that I am—same age as Fuentes and Sneako—I think you just kind of grow up, and you see a lot of kids in your high school or whatever kind of get pulled down that path. In the same way you see kids 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 kind of 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.
Warzel: This is like a “buy gold” thing, right? Sorry to interrupt.
Walker: Yeah, like a “buy gold” thing, like the classic, you know, alongside like survival-prep stuff that supports right-wing radio. 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—
Warzel: He does seem to use the N-word quite a bit.
Walker: Yeah; exactly. But he’s not interested in remaking the state in the same way that Fuentes seems to be. He just seems to be interested in making himself as handsome as possible. In this totally, I guess you could say, like, Randian, 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.
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, whom we would think of as extremely online and using an online movement to some effect—obviously, attention hijacking, growing an audience, etc., still having institutional desires. Right? Still wanting some kind of political power. Whereas Clavicular seems to only want … like, he rejects institutions almost fully. Right? In his sort of incoherent, you know, left-right politics or whatever. But also in the idea that he really only cares about the algorithm.
Walker: Yeah; he only cares about 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 just this total lack of belief in anything that is social, anything that is, you know, institutional. Which, to me, it translates as kind of 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: These are people who have this set of distorted values about the world but that have somehow found visibility and attention. And why, exactly, is that? 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. That’s why he’s going to say the N-word on stream. That’s why he’s going to read the humiliating text from his father on stream. It’s a total commitment to that project. Because I think his existence just sort of proves that the gatekeepers are gone.
It kind of proves that these weird, sleazebag, disaffected, angry young men—that there’s nothing holding them back. The fact that Clavicular is there is proof that you’ve won. And I think Fuentes, being a little bit older, had this formative experience of the gatekeeper still being there. 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. And 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.
Warzel: You write—and I thought this observation was really clarifying—that this is nihilism by default. That 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 really interesting, because one way that I look at the internet, throughout generations of it, is like: The culture’s always layering stuff on top and absorbing the thing that came before it, right? Everything’s a little more of an abstraction, right? Like, the Groyper is an abstraction of the Pepe meme, which was its own abstraction 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. It’s just sort of like what they saw on the internet from this community and they’re just adopting it. That’s kind of—that’s terrifying, man.
Walker: Yeah. And, I mean, it’s the difference between resenting the idea of adult supervision, I guess, because you think you’re oppositional, or better than the adult. And then the feeling of there just 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 the central figure in American politics.
I think that was even something Clinton said in 2016—that it’s going to be a generation of people raised 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. But I think it’s just years and years of that there’s not even any juice to be had in opposing the establishment, because the establishment is so absent from your life, honestly.
Warzel: Yeah; I heard—this is a slight tangent, but somebody who is part of Gen Z was saying to me: The reason why the “democracy dies in darkness” stuff doesn’t resonate with us is because Trump’s been around since the very beginning of this. He’s the only thing I know about American politics, from my own experience. What are you talking about? What is a functional feeling there, right?
And I think that 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 institutions, or the appeal to, you know, norms or civic virtues or values or whatever—liberalism even—that it’s not on the radar, almost. And that is concerning, I guess.
Walker: Yeah. It’s not even opposed, necessarily. It’s just not legible. And I think it’s important to point out, too, that the majority of Gen Z people are not nihilistic looksmaxxers 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 the old coordinates—of whatever the old order does—have just been gone for so long.
Warzel: Well, and this is where I’ll—I’m glad you brought that up. This is 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 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: How popular are these guys? How do you think about it? How do you quantify it?
Walker: So, I mean, you could look at subscriber counts and stuff. And my impression is—forgive me if I don’t, viewers can look this up at home—I think Fuentes has around 100K on his Telegram channel, which is a bit more of a closed, intimate social media. Actually more used overseas than in the U.S., I think. But there’s sort of two ways to measure it. I think it’s like you can go for raw overall count. In which case, of course, Mr. Beast is bigger; mainstream influencers are bigger. They have more people. But then there’s the sense of like, as an influencer, you probably would rather have 100 paying subscribers vs. like 100,000 people who will just like your video.
And so, I think some of what allows these fringe figures to throw a disproportionate weight around on the online ecosystem is that once they have a fan, they have 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 guy’s taking up a lot of your time and a lot of your life—in a way that’s someone who’s a fan of a more mainstream creator, they probably aren’t. And we saw the same phenomenon with 4chan: pretty small platform in terms of user base, but has this disproportionate influence on internet culture because of how committed and fiendish they all are. And so, I think these guys are definitely someone that most young people will have heard of. They’re definitely on their radar. Which is where they want to be. But I don’t think they’re at all the dominant influence on people. They’re an option on the menu, which is troubling, but they’re not the main course, maybe.
Warzel: My overarching question here though, I think, is: How much should we be paying attention to these guys? And I know that’s sort of impossible to ask. But there is 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. There’s just no reason to give this any oxygen. And then you see the audience continue to grow, the specter continue to grow.
Then in the right-wing-media ecosystem, they’re platformed by just 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 it’s a person who has to be dealt with now. And then it doesn’t matter whether you think there’s enough oxygen, or you should give them oxygen or not.
How do you think about paying attention to these guys as a culture and a society? Because it’s lame. Like it feels like in a just society, it’d be like, These guys are absolute freaks. We don’t need … like, this is not worth anyone’s time. And yet, that’s not happening.
Walker: Yeah. I think that’s always been kind of, 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 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 right-wing-media ecosystem and the administration. But it’s the same thing. The DHS account; the kinds of memes they’re posting. The fact that after Kirk died, J. D. Vance went and took that podcasting chair. These guys—in terms of clout, in terms of the way they speak to the base, in terms of the way they inform policy—Ted Cruz sits down with Tucker Carlson.
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 thinking about its place in the world. And I think from another angle, one thing you see a lot 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 No. 1 and then like the No. 6. And I think with the right-wing ecosystem, 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 this moment and that administration than a lot of kind of the analyses that are like, you know, Look what they’re doing to the courts, or Look at this latest order. 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 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.
Because the last point that I always sort of try to make—thinking about it generationally—is like John Ganz, the writer, makes this point of Groyperfication within the government. A lot of these young conservative staffers—guys who are like 35 now—10, 15 years ago, they were the kids on 4chan. And that’s the person who’s been empowered. That’s the milieu that’s coming out of. And I think that’s part of why I really pay attention to this. It’s that I find that, you know, it helps to sort of know what’s going on and what’s driving it at a deeper level.
Warzel: Where do you think this goes? Because, again, when we think about the layer cake of nihilism, so to speak—you’ve written about some of these guys that they burn so bright with their trolling and one-upsmanship and content-first mentality that it’s not sustaining, right? They will eventually probably 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 their galaxy kind of burn out.
Walker: I think it goes to death. Both for them personally, and then probably for social media, the internet, the country. There’s no image of the future. It’s just this race to the bottom. Break every taboo, break every rule, destroy your body.
Warzel: You mean death, like, literally?
Walker: Like literally, yeah. 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. It’s a form of death worship. And I think it’s also, to the extent that what the looksmaxxers do—like, part of why that interested me is that it feels so poetically kind of apt to describe the whole thing as 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 first thing they destroyed was the institutions, and now they’re trying to destroy the rest of us and themselves—it’s like, Where do we stop it? Where do we detach from that project? And I think it’s something that … I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m an internet-culture analyst. I don’t know about national politics, in the end. But it’s like: We just need to find another option. And I think it’s important to tell young people that this project ends in death. This is a guy who’s destroying his life for a livestream. And they’re destroying the country for clicks.
Warzel: I think that’s a great place to leave it. A depressing place to leave it. But also, I would just say—as someone who has covered this stuff for 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 politics.” So I wouldn’t sell yourself supremely short. We’re not geopolitical analysts, but this stuff has bled into the highest levels of, at least, American politics right now. So I think the perspective is worthy. Aidan Walker, thank you for coming on Galaxy Brain.
Walker: Charlie, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here and talk about a terrible topic.
Warzel: Yeah. Into the abyss together, you know?
Walker: Yeah; better than going alone.
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.
