Looksmaxxing is the new trans Clavicular’s cybertruck smashes conservative hope

On Christmas Eve, the 20-year-old “looksmaxxing” internet personality Clavicular ran over a man with his Cybertruck. The viral stream shows an individual, purportedly a stalker, agitating at the car’s windshield; within seconds, Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, accelerates and runs him over, to a grotesque “thumpf.” He asks, “Is he dead?” A girl beside him, panicked and gasping for air, replies: “I don’t kno—,” on the verge of tears. The streamer, apparently unbothered, declares: “Hopefully.”

In the following hours, Clavicular took to X to gleefully celebrate. One post of his reads, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” It features an AI-generated image of him running over a tatted-up black man in his Cybertruck (in real life, the man was indeed black — this matters, given Clavicular’s musings about racial IQ and his liberal use of the N-word). The first comment beneath his post asserts, “unfathomably based.” James Fishback, the ascendant and Groyper-esque Republican contender for Florida governor, tweeted, and Clavicular reposted: “@Clavicular0 did nothing wrong.” 

The stalker had apparently previously harassed Clavicular, and he’s alive and expected to survive. The streamer was also reportedly taken in for questioning by Miami Police, who did not press charges. Whether or not Clavicular hitting a man clobbering on his windshield legitimately falls under self-defense is beside the point. Normal people simply don’t shamelessly advertise that they drove over a fellow human being. (There has also been speculation that the entire affair was staged, which is a real possibility with internet personalities, but which is perhaps even worse.)  

Then again, Clavicular is hardly a normal person. He initially gained notoriety in November for injecting fat-dissolving peptides into the cheek of his 17-year-old then-girlfriend. He engages in bone-smashing, pounding himself in the face either with his bare fist or with a hammer, a practice he endorses as promoting muscular jaw growth. He takes crystal meth to stay lean. According to fellow online-Right provocateur Nick Fuentes, Clavicular is a “chad” (an attractive and confident man, in contrast to an involuntary celibate) and a “WANGHF” — “white-ass n—r going hard as fuck.” “I’m like Nietzsche … I heralded the coming of the overman,” says Fuentes, implying that he was a harbinger for Clavicular. 

On Kick, the streaming platform that is a major competitor to Twitch, Clavicular boasts 97,800 followers as of this writing. Tune in, and you might see him at a club, approaching girls, microphone-on-chest. An hour into the new year and freshly unbanned from the platform, he was on Kick, interacting with two girls in a manner bordering on coercion, pressing them to pose for him to take a photo. On the chat, multiple users were suggesting, “run over George Floyd.” After around two minutes, the connection was “lost,” I surmise because the approach did not go as anticipated.

Clavicular may seem to be an extreme case and an outlier — demented, pathetic, and dangerous in equal measures — but unfortunately for society, and especially for conservatives, he seems to have a project and a somewhat coherent set of beliefs. These were on useful display three days after the Cybertruck incident, when Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles released a  two-hour-long interview with the streamer — the first collision between Clavicular and mainstream conservatism. 

It would be hard for anyone over the age of 40, much less someone unacquainted with the lingo of the chronically online Right, to follow their conversation. Knowles — one of the more traditionalist conservatives out there — began by acknowledging the profoundly absurd nature of their rendezvous: “I’ve had the privilege of sitting down with people from a wide variety of backgrounds: priests, exorcists, scientists, refugees. Never before, though, have I sat down with a looksmaxxed, meth-head, livestream-cel.” The same week the episode was released, Knowles had also interviewed the Catholic bishop Robert Barron. 

Knowles repeatedly attempted to persuade Clavicular of his worldview: a concern for electoral politics, society at large, and faith and family. The Catholic commentator advocated for “spirituality-maxxing.” Knowles wondered if looksmaxxing for its own sake amounts to mere vanity. “In a lot of regards, it could be perceived that way,” replied Clavicular serenely. 

Here, in stark contrast, are the two grand Right-wing persuasions of the internet. Both spring from Gen Z’s concern with the direction of society and its crisis of meaning, as well as Zoomers’ very real material concerns. The first emphasizes strong communities, religiosity, and public policy in pursuit of the common good. That’s largely the conservatism of YouTube video essays, podcasts, and youth organizing. The latter, epitomized by figures such as Clavicular and Andrew Tate, says something like this: Society is decadent, morals are gone, and so I — the radically atomized individual — am going to do absolutely everything that I can to succeed. The proposition that “God is dead, and we have killed him” is the so-called conservatism of Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.

A viral segment of the interview had Knowles and Clavicular clashing on transgenderism. Knowles contended that it’s in the public interest to maintain societal order and prevent degeneracy and the mutilation of fellow citizens. Clavicular was unmoved: “The way I see trannies is that’s one more person to mog,” meaning to outshine. “Go descend yourself, that’s fine with me.” (“Ascending” is the online Right term for attaining higher status.) 

On the likely presidential matchup between JD Vance and Gavin Newsom, Clavicular argued, “JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom moggs…. [Vance]’s got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like [a] six-foot-three chad.” I suppose most Americans agree that Newsom is conventionally better looking than the vice president. But that Vance’s looks constitute him being “subhuman”? “How are you fat and expect to lead a country?” quipped Clavicular. Clavicular agreed with Knowles’s assessment of the California governor as a “liar” and “degenerate.” Nonetheless, he’d vote for him “100 times over” merely because of physical looks.

Those still wondering if there can be good-faith overlap in agenda between figures like Clavicular and traditional conservatism should retire their hopes. Knowles was desperate to find areas of agreement with Clavicular (successfully), and to persuade him to use his powers for the good of his community, his nation, and others (unsuccessfully). Clavicular shut it all down by simply not caring. Noam Chomsky’s famous analysis of Michel Foucault springs to mind: “I had never seen such an amoral — not immoral, amoral — person in my life.” 

Ironically, Clavicular’s individualism-maxxing is far more at odds with today’s conservatism than would have been the case 10 years ago. In the Right’s more libertarian days, from the 1980s to some point in the early part of this decade, the individual was the foremost unit of political emphasis. The predominant view was that people made decisions and were wholly responsible for them, and that the government had little role — if any — in making itself a vehicle for the country’s improvement. 

Trump changed this view, breaking with long-held conservative fetishizations of the free market, small government, and neoliberalism. Yet the paradox is that with Trump, young men had someone to look up to who disregarded norms, proudly belittled others, and knew how to win. Instead of asking what the winning was for, substantively speaking, a good chunk of the Gen-Z Right took to idolizing the hyper-atomized individual who could do anything alone.  

And so today, we find some of the newest members of the Right celebrating and defending a streamer who injects a cocktail of drugs into himself every day, who smashes his skull, and who got expelled from college in three weeks for hiding testosterone in his dorm room — a concoction he has been, at first secretly and now openly, injecting since he was 14 years old.

All this — even down to the testosterone — is bizarrely similar to the mistakes the young Left made a decade ago, when the common good took a backseat to hyper-individualism in the realms of sex, gender, and lifestyle. The Left’s flagship movement, of course, was trans. We saw self-proclaimed champions of rationality and of working-class politics promoting the notion that any small boy could become a girl — that he wasn’t really a boy at all. This opened the door for corporations to market Pride and “diversity,” appealing not to a collective American identity, but to boutique groups, and their supposedly morally superior particularistic inclinations. We got “Somaliweek presented by Amazon,” never mind the company’s egregious labor violations. 

The Left’s historic antiwar stance, too, was jettisoned somewhere in the apparent need to promote American-style liberal democracy abroad, justifying an ever-expanding slate of foreign wars precisely on individualistic grounds (cue “human rights”). Somewhere along the line, between watching Don Lemon on CNN and grabbing $6 iced matcha lattes, Leftist youth forgot that the advancement of our society as a whole belonged in their calculations.

Thus, Clavicular can be seen as the Right-wing embodiment of the transgender craze; the eternal pursuit of physical “betterment” that leads to nothing much, and in all likelihood to nothing better. And the tragedy is that this Right hyper-individualism, just like the Left variety, is deeply intoxicating to young minds. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts — almost certainly run by Gen Z interns and staffers — clearly recognize the power of “mogging.” In October, DHS released a reel showcasing “Life after all criminal aliens are deported” (since deleted from their official X page due to copyright issues). Spliced between images of Trump in his heyday and clips from 1980s films, appears a pale-white, freckled Gio Scotti, the Italian model and e-girl lauded by the online Right for her “genetic superiority.” Newsom, the liberal who stands for nothing more than vibes and electoral success, has realized the efficiency of “mogging,” too. In the aftermath of Clavicular’s disparaging comments about Vance, Newsom’s Press Office tweeted out an old, particularly unflattering image of Vance. Clavicular quote-tweeted, “Huge impact moment.”

The young Right would be wise to learn from the young Left’s mistakes. Or suffer the same fate in a few years, as the nation turns away, exhausted, from the politics of incomprehensible jargon, antics, and tantrums. 

 

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