One could tell Clavicular’s lawyer by his jurisprudential profile, even before he got out of his car. Middle-aged, raincoat, grown-out and grayed Julius Caesar haircut and the confident, portly bearing of a lifetime of legal accomplishment. He was brash. You could feel how brash he was from behind the glass, how much Jameson he could put away in victory or late-night reconnoiterings. He opened his door and kicked his rumpled pant legs straight, before striding to the middle car and giving the window a curt knock of his knuckles. A young Jewish couple with a dog exited the other car on the left of the triumvirate. The man wore the largest yarmulke I’ve ever seen, so big you could see it from the front like a beanie. He and his girlfriend looked dressed for a high-school semi-formal in a Disney script. The TikTokers prowled some distance away as the lawyer and the dog-bearing friends converged on the middle car with Nevada plates. You knew who was in there. 

First out was a dark-haired middle-aged woman who, I thought, could only be Clavicular’s mother. They looked alike: same nose, same flex to the high cheekbones when she clenched her jaw. She had a maternal concern and loving gravity about her, as she held the door open for Clavicular’s spray-tanned girlfriend, Lily Snyder. Snyder is one of the smallest women you could ever see. In addition to the proverbial 10 pounds, the camera must put on half a dozen inches. Then, out he came, Clavicular in the flesh, with a gaggle of tall dorkish pals who looked as if they’ve been slouching on their looksmaxxing regimens. 

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For more than a year, Clavicular, or “Clav” as people call him, has dominated social media — and even made it into the style pages of The New York Times — for encouraging young boys to chisel their jawlines by smashing their faces with hammers, grow their penises by hanging weighted shopping bags from them for hours, and take meth to curb appetite. This is called “looksmaxxing,” and looksmaxxing allows one to “mog,” which means to dominate or overshadow someone in person. It’s worth noting that the term “mog” was derived by recluses on internet forums, who spend as little time as possible in rooms with real people, where “mogging” might come into play. Clavicular teaches that you can mog someone financially, or with your height or looks. Clavicular thinks he’s so handsome and buff that he mogs everyone just by appearing in front of them.

The press casts a jaundiced eye on him but largely allows that he is handsome. But nothing can prepare you for how very, very small he is in the flesh. As he passed the windshield of my car, it looked like he’d been shirking on his own looksmaxxing. Or perhaps there’s not much you can do with his physique. There is no way this self-proclaimed aesthetic model of masculinity is six foot two as he claims. His shoulders are small and narrow, and not a hint of musculature was visible through his tight suit jacket. His obsession with bodybuilding suddenly seemed warranted: he has no body. He dapped up his Jewish friend with the dog five-foot-ninedly. The friend went into the dap with the energy of someone who has watched too much Entourage, saying something like, “Whaddup playa. Let’s get this, boi.” The group all turned to go get it, and the friend transferred the leash of the dog to Clav. They formed a posse 10 people deep, and Clavicular didn’t exactly stride to the courthouse doors; perhaps it isn’t within his gait to stride. He is so short his head floated among a barrage of shoulders. 

There were no more than three local news stations and one national outlet at the doors of the courthouse, and yet as the Clavicular posse approached the steps, the lawyer screamed at the paltry sum of newscasters. “Let him through! Clear a path! Get out of the way! This is ridiculous! Let him through!” The dog began barking, and the media backed up to keep clear the already-open path. The young TikTokers came from behind and began shouting, “We’re with the BBC! Black c—k loves you, Lily! We’re with the BBC!” BBC, get it? They’d been practicing this accosting earlier. But rather than go into the courthouse, as is their constitutional right, they seemed frightened and peeled off from the group and ran back to the woods.

All their talk about the BBC was directed at Clavicular’s tiny little girlfriend, Lily Snyder. In Clavicular’s world, where the libido and sexual expectations have been formed entirely by the internet and porn, every woman is assumed to ultimately prize penis size above all else. And who, pray tell, has the largest penises? Not Clavicular and his friends, who film themselves discussing Gaussian distribution probabilities that prove conclusively that every girl they meet has had sex with at least one very large penis. Penises much larger than their own. They despair about it. 

That’s why Clavicular hangs shopping bags full of weights — or produce, it’s unclear — from the end of his penis. But we’re not there yet. 

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This was a revelation of the full scope of the Clavicular algorithm, internet pathology breaking into the real world. A premier brand of Vixen, one of the largest porn companies in the world, is “Blacked,” whose content focuses on white women cheating on their white husbands and boyfriends with black guys with very large penises. Clavicular’s content lives algorithmically within this cuckolding pathology. If you watch his videos on Twitter, say, to learn a little more about him before covering his rape arraignment, suddenly your video feed is filled with cynical slop podcast clips about penile insecurity, interviews with vapid white pornstars talking about the biggest black penises they’ve ever filmed with, how they recover afterwards with ice and days on the couch, and then those horrible softcore-porn fruit videos, in which AI-generated fruits have hypergamous sexual misadventures. (Those horrible, horrible fruit videos.) There’s also him consoling a depressive friend, who was recently cuckolded by a black sex performer after he lost a pathetic “boxing” match to him. You are but one thumb flick away on your feed from Clav to the “cuck” chair.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the mainstream young-American algorithm. At any rate, Clavicular does not have a very large penis; he has a normal penis, and he’s insecure about it. In Clavicular’s world, you can “mog” someone with your face or your finances, but there is no outmogging a very large penis. The frightened TikTokers have tried to symbolically “cuck” him, before cucking themselves by running away into the woods.

We filed into the court and sat in the pews. There is a courthouse physiognomy: faces that only a cop, military vet, or armed guard possess, and such faces abounded. There is also a physiognomy of the arraigned — the actual people who may or may not have committed some crime, assembled here. They appear sad, tired, nervous, accommodatingly polite, hopeful. A protester came in with a roller suitcase. Everyone looked at it and then at the guards with the same thought: it’s a bomb. The protester had tried to film himself arraignment-maxxing outside the courthouse. That is, he filmed the film crews and complained about how there was no story there. “Most journalists are Ivy-League educated and here they are sitting around doing nothing. Nothing’s going on here.” He refused to turn his mic off in the courthouse, and the guards escorted him out.

Clavicular’s lawyer waddled in at high velocity. With him was the woman whom I took to be Clavicular’s mother, but no Clav. The “mother” was very pretty but very thin. Out of vanity, she has made herself too thin as she deepens into middle age. She has a kind of beauty that is negated at the wrong turn or vantage, but amplified at the correct angle. This is the physiognomy that becomes obsessed with the camera, obsessed with its intimate angles. She knows what her good side is. 

She has the same nose as Clavicular, the same cheekbones, the same frame, the same vanity. Even with Clavicular out of the room, I felt they were webbed together. I could feel the genealogical join. She looked like she had done some crying leading up to this date, tears she had kept to herself. Courtrooms are asexual spaces, but any large gathering of humans will create a sexual field. She had the only sexual presence in the room.

Suddenly, out he came, walking in on his little legs alone, no average-sized males towering over him. We’ve seen him before, of course, but optimized for the American internet stream and not with our own eyes. I’ve long believed that Clavicular did not come to look the way he does through one-man hammer parties in his bedroom, but by the archaic process known as aging. But this belief did not hold up to scrutiny in the courtroom: he looks like he’s never aged. Clavicular looks like a little boy. But a chiseled little boy. Imagine a cherub making gains at the gym without growing a day older, and you get a sense of the confused physiognomy he’s cut the ribbon on. His testosterone levels are not exactly in orbit. He has no physical presence. There is no sexual energy about him. He is, after all, infertile (he says so himself) and one can feel it in his anti-magnetism. His arms are weird, and his biceps sit oddly high and near the armpit as if the structure was never meant to develop them, and his musculature is bewildered as to where to place them. I took back everything I had ever thought: his looksmaxxing is completely warranted. His frame was never meant to be big. He had to do something about how small he is. He has no legs.

He was small and nervous. There was a long, dry, white stain running down the bag of his right trouser leg — raw milk, semen, the possibilities are endless with a character like him. You could see it clearly when he stood up. He stood between his lawyer and the woman I thought was his mother. They are the same exact size. They have the same muscle mass. Clavicular has the body of a too-thin middle-aged woman. He sat down and stared ahead. He was handling himself well, but you could see a nervous twinge every now and then. When his lawyer bent over to whisper to him, he thought he was supposed to stand and jerked almost to his feet, but his lawyer indicated he could stay seated. He was such a little boy, I felt almost sympathetic. 

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Finally, the judge strolled in 20 minutes late, and we all rose. It felt a bit like the opening of a Catholic mass, and then we sat back down. But Clavicular was up first, so he and his lawyers stood back up. He had already surrendered his passport. The bail was set at $10,000. The judge asked if he understood all this. “I do, Your Honor.” There was neither contempt nor apathy in Clav’s voice. He was nervous, polite, good-willed, scared. He was a scared child trying to be polite. The judge rattled off more procedural prose, and Clavicular leaned into his microphone and said eagerly, of his own respectful volition, “Thank you, Your Honor.” But the judge was shuffling papers and missed this act of a respectful little boy on his best behavior. This tugged somewhat at the heart. The judge mogged Clavicular. 

The woman I thought was Clavicular’s mother turns out to be Melinda Thompson, a lawyer. But I do not throw my psychoanalytical intimation out with the bathwater. Standing side by side, the way she looked at him, I maintain there was something libidinal in her gaze. She saw herself in him. She loved him. And if this woman can love Clavicular, can gaze upon him with concern and worry, can I do that too?

I can’t. You see, Clavicular’s birth name is Braden Peters, and while Peters is something of a surname glowdown from “Clavicular,” that “Braden” carries vital information directly to the American gut. If we knew nothing about Braden but his name, we could intuit with no small accuracy his class, his bearing, his destiny: solvent, suburban, no personality, generically handsome and insecure about the size of his penis. If nomen est omen, then the Clavicular arraignment was really the story of the American “Braden.” The facts of his biography and the allegations of the case are all things a Braden would do. 

First, Braden was born in New Jersey. This is not a crime, but an affluent genesis in Hoboken — with a businessman for a father and a stay-at-home bodybuilder for a mother — does not bode well for the development of a personality. He attended a private all-boys Catholic high school, was bullied for being very small, and started experimenting with testosterone — formerly known as “going through puberty.” However, Braden belongs to a generation that has distinguished itself by thwarting the course of puberty and outsourcing it to third parties, and so he began taking testosterone, hitting himself in the face with hammers, and attaching weighted shopping bags to his penis. You know, to permanently stretch it. 

Braden was kicked out of Sacred Heart University in — you saw this coming — Connecticut, for selling drugs after just three weeks. This sounds halfway promising, until one realizes Braden was not inviting classmates into his room to get high, but to take off their pants and bend over so he could shoot them in the buttocks with steroids and help them make big gains in the gym. Expelled, Braden worked at a restaurant, polishing his 18-pack, hitting himself in the face with hammers, and microdosing meth to curb his appetite. Without college, Braden was sexually educated by porn and, insecure about his penis and having never seen Austin Powers, he got earnestly into penis pumps and began diversifying his natural penis-enlargement techniques from the rudimentary weighted shopping bag. 

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As all people do who are going up in the world, Braden went down to Florida and started streaming his life on Kick, the medium that has replaced reality television and monetized boredom. His manosphere predecessor is a bald, closeted delta male who feigns wealth by renting luxury cars and mansions. I’m speaking of Andrew Tate who, now caged and whimpering from jail for sex trafficking, has left Braden the last unwittingly self-satirical protagonist among the internet ruins; the lone voice expressing nausea at cunnilingus and explaining that attempts at producing a female orgasm are a bad ROI — better to optimize one’s ejaculato praecox.

This brings us to the innocence of Cape Cod. One summer during his rise in fame, when tiny little Braden was still 19, he filmed himself getting a 17-year-old girl drunk on his stream. (Correcting for Gen-Z psychology, they were then 13 and 12, respectively.) Braden had Ubered her over to his grandmother’s seaside McMansion with the promise of helping her become famous. According to the police report, the girl said hello to Braden’s grandmother and mother before climbing the stairs to Braden. Braden, she alleges, instructed her to say she is 18 on the stream and to pretend the vodka he gave her was water. 

On the stream, she becomes visibly flushed and intoxicated and says to Braden, leaning in for a kiss a floor above his granny, “Wait, I’m so drunk, though,” to which Braden says, “It’s OK,” and kisses her. 

After the camera turned off, Braden allegedly took the drunk young woman to his bed and began “throwing [her] in different positions,” as the criminal complaint alleges. When she woke up the next morning, it was to Braden already having sex with her and “pushing her head backwards.” When he was done, the complaint continues, he “coldly” ordered her the Uber home she’d expected the night before and — we imagine — gazed out over the ocean, brooding on the size of his penis. 

The world in its present form would not exist without the internet. We wouldn’t have the 1,001 gender identities without the fractalizing sales funnels of technocapitalism’s targeted marketing and audience segmentation. We wouldn’t have cancel culture without the medium from which to be canceled and through which to lodge anonymous protest. We wouldn’t have President Trump without Twitter’s creation of a “public forum” and  Trump’s presence and aptitude in such a place. And finally, we wouldn’t know who Braden Peters is without this ecosystem. We wouldn’t, in an analog world, open up the newspaper and find an interest piece on a guy named Clavicular going around to obscure college campuses encouraging young men to put their penises in tubes and vacuum pump them. In a parallel, still-analog world, “Bradens” are still allegedly inviting young women to their grandmother’s McMansions, getting them drunk to have sex with them, waking them up in the morning by having sex with them, and then coldly whisking them away — we just don’t hear about it nationally. 

The defining feeling of this century and driving force of technocapitalism is boredom. Mankind’s attention span has been caged these three decades in the visual medium of the internet, whose momentum relies entirely on monetizing the metadata this boredom gives off. Boredom and brief reprieve from boredom: ejaculation. The video gamer takes a break from gaming to ejaculate to porn. The pornstars — Sky Bri, Mia Malkova — now take a break from porn to stream themselves playing video games, oftentimes with dorkish video gamers. It was inevitable that the pornstar would find her way into a deeper intimacy with her true audience. Clavicular would not exist without the internet, but he also would not exist without porn. If porn is tails, Clav is heads, and together they make the Janus-face of the internetic structure.

Outside of figures like UnHerd’s Yanis Varoufakis, most of the Left has never woken up to this reality: when automation replaces labor, the exploitation of user metadata replaces the exploitation of labor. In so doing, we continue widening the frontiers of what we outsource to the computer: we have outsourced natural memory to the “download” and the “file save”; we have outsourced public discourse to tweets; writing to podcasts; sex to masturbation and pornography. If we are indeed building a machine god through the internet and AI, porn is its cybernetic libido and sexual imagination. This is Braden’s world. Braden’s “stream.” He is a next-gen narcissus staring at his reflection. You are driven by boredom to his stream, and he makes money off your observation. But you are not looking at him, you are looking at his reflection. Braden Peters is making money staring into the mirror and you’re staring in it with him. Marshall McLuhan clarified the meaning of the Narcissus myth in Understanding Media: the viewer does not see their reflection as their reflection, but confuses it for an external object. Clavicular, a tiny little fella, has conclusively confused himself for his buff internet image. I went into this wanting to push his face into the water. But the tenor of our age is irresolution, and I must say I’m not bored by what I’ve seen. Not at all. In fact, I think I’ll come back Nov. 24, for the next hearing on probable cause, in the flesh, for the human observation of Braden Peters. I don’t want his face to fall through the water just yet — not until society is ready to give him a swirlie.

Heading out of the courthouse, Clavicular is height-mogged by everyone: his friends, the guards, the newscasters. His tiny head bobs in a sea of normal-sized people. He is asked for comment from his right. He turns his head so far right that he gives the newscaster his left profile all the way behind her. Jawlines and profiles become very important to people so shy they can’t look others in the eye.

His lawyer is chewing everyone out again. “Clear a path! Let him walk!” And the TikTokers meet him at his car. They yell: “BBC owns you! BBC owns you!”

Back when Covid hit, Clavicular — still a spotty, autistic Braden — was locked-down at his parents’ home in Hoboken, New Jersey, where there was little to do but prowl Los Santos on Grand Theft Auto and dwell in the shadow realm of 4Chan. There, “blackpilled” by the incels, he discovered an awful truth: that women only desire attractive men. But there was a solution: “looksmaxxing”. This neophilosophy posited that beauty was much like a sport or a musical instrument — if Peters put in the requisite effort, the 10,000 hours, he could make himself beautiful too (like his hero, the actor Matt Bomer). If Clavicular could be beautiful, then he could be desired. If he could be desired, then he wouldn’t die alone. He set to work on his face with a singular devotion.

He mail-ordered testosterone to inflate his muscles, until his parents discovered and confiscated his stash. He set up his own PO box to which he would order hormones and peptides and, it seems, crystal meth. He persisted with methods increasingly grotesque as he steadied the tiller of his errant puberty toward his beautiful majority. TikTok depicts his painful “ascension”: for some time, his face — pockmarked with fat jabs and carpeted with pubescent beards — initially resisted attempts at contortion until he started bonesmashing, as traumatic as it sounds. No longer a looksmaxxer, Clavicular was a hardmaxxer — famous less for his beauty than for his willingness to suffer anything in pursuit of perfection. His destiny, after all, was to become beautiful.

His first big break came in November last year, when he appeared on a Kick Channel belonging to Cheesur — a “chaos streamer” known as much for racist trolling and high-stakes gambling as for his much-publicized claim that he helped the US military track down cartel lord “El Mencho”. Cheesur and Clav met to chat about hair-loss treatments, but instead assessed the merits of meth. “I do meth,” said Clavicular, “to — you know, basically — suppress my appetite and try to get leaner.” He methmaxxed to gauntmaxx.

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But was it worth it? Upon ascension, he became less interested in obsessively documenting his beauty and his practices, and more interested in banally provocative livestreams — shouting the n-word on a street, crying over a “raw” steak, or being “brutally framemogged” by the ASU Frat Leader. There were girls, too, of course, but few ever seemed to linger. Back in November, he injected one with a fat-dissolving drug. “Now that we’re doing Aqualyx,” she says, as she presses her face with varnished fingers, “these fat cheeks will go away.” He is unexpectedly delicate, as he dabs her face with alcohol and gently slides in the needle.

But “slaymaxing” with a succession of obsessive “foids” can be tiresome. And he entertains his gormless retinue with tales of Grandma. How he was sent off to her house in Connecticut when he pissed off his parents, and how lived with her while serving as a “wagecuck” — a waiter, that is — after being kicked out university when his drugs stash was uncovered. “I like to see peoples’ faces when I wake up in the morning,” he tells a cluster of scantily clad groupies during one livestream. “That’s why I liked living with my grandma,” he tells her, before lamenting the fact that she won’t come to Florida. “She’s too old to go on flights.” He was beautiful but damned to loneliness.

Of course, he never helped himself — not when he emptied a pistol into a dying alligator, nor when he ran over a fan. But for that, he might have been forgiven, had he not sung “Heil Hitler” in a Florida club (he was always in Florida clubs; last night, he launched his own Florida club) while flanked by the Tate brothers and Nick Fuentes, or intimated a sort-of primitive eugenics when he called JD Vance “subhuman” on account of his “recessed side profile”. (That’s why he’d vote Democrat in 2028: because “Newsom mogs”.) In his empty quest for beauty, Clavicular had damned himself to become a cipher for the issues of the day. The more interviewers attempted to label him (a Nazi, an Incel, a Lost Boy) the more he’d insist that he wasn’t interested in “political jestering”. He was just “a looksmax guy”.

None of this made him a massive streamer — only 295,000 followers on Kick, 890,000 on TikTok — but that hasn’t stopped his content from becoming some of the most influential ever made. Overnight, it seemed, everyone was speaking Clavicular. The Mayor of London was “Londonmaxxing” and the Office of the Under Secretary for War for Research and Engineering captions a tweet: “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethality maxxing.” As much as Clavicular insists that all politics is “jester” he has become political.

For under the mask, there is an ugliness. In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia this week, after fielding questions about his friendship with Andrew Tate, he responded with petulant childishness and informed his interviewer that he “didn’t have time to look into who your wife cheated with” before ending the call (the interviewer smiled; saying he is unmarried). Last month, when The Atlantic journalist Will Gottsegen requested an interview with Clavicular for an article, he responded via email with a photograph of the magazine’s boss, Laurene Powell Jobs, on a beach with Ghislaine Maxwell. But when Clavicular shared Gottsegen’s contact information online, The Atlantic writer said he “had never experienced so many direct violent threats, and so much virulent anti-Semitic hatred” as those he received from Clavicular’s fans.

And the closer the boy came to that perfect face, the more monstrous he was. “I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful,” Oscar Wilde wrote. Clavicular, by now impotent, meth-addicted, and specter-thin, passed endless nights in endless joints, heckled and clawed at and plied with free drinks, his life live-streamed into such formlessness that, by the time he overdosed this week in a Florida club on a “pentastack” — the cocktail of Adderall, DXM, Ketamine, BDO, and Pregabalin which sustain his livestreams — his life had relinquished almost all pretense of meaning. Like Dorian Gray, he would emerge from each scrape (with drugs, the feds, or women) unblemished. His face was calcified in its youth. “The worst part of tonight,” he joked the morning after his overdose, “was my face descending from the life-support mask.” But, by the time he was streaming again, it looked like nothing had happened. Somewhere, surely, inside or upstairs, there must be a trace of his self-destruction.

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“Whatever bad happens,” Andrew Tate once told him, “I hope you sit there and go: ‘At least I was real. I was me. I said what I meant.’” And yet the tragedy of Clavicular is that he could never be real. Following this week’s unfortunate events, he announced that things would need to change — that he can’t do what he does without drugs, and that he can’t risk another overdose. Had he chosen life-over-fame, age-over meth? Towards the end of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian ponders “a new life” until guilt forces him to slash his portrait and so kill himself. “Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in the heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.” Dorian’s story is a tragedy because he has the capacity for self-reflection.

But Clavicular? From his soulless mansion, haunted by hangers-on, he broadcast to his fans that he must learn “either to practice mogging sober, or just find a new form of content”. But then, only hours later, there he was at the launch of his “Bacara Club”, looking as spectral as ever, as if doomed to party into his twilight. It seems this wasn’t the end of Clavicular’s tragedy — just a scene-change after the first act.

AOC’s feet, appallingly, then became a “thing”. It was one of the endless instances of Cortez being harried by men’s porn-flecked fascination with her; in perhaps the most egregious, a “provocateur” comedian (reliably the worst kind) heckled her outside the Capitol, calling her his “favorite big-booty Latina”. This should have been the point at which the electorate resolved never again to comment on the hotness or otherwise of politicians, so sordid was the spectacle of an elected official being reduced to a porn category. But it was not to be; thirst for bangable Left-wing contenders continues apace. Some Democrat strategists are even chalking up the failure of the Biden era to the administration’s physical haggardness and intimate a similarly fugly future. They point to a well of unsexiness for voters’ indifference towards the party: offputting “purity politics”, too much “academic-sounding language” and a lack of “thirst-traps on the ticket” are to blame. One former Biden staffer told The Bulwark that the attractiveness of those in government had become “a foundational brunch-time conversation” in DC; put simply, “It’s easier to elect hot people.” The staffer’s hot-ness was not recorded.

Fortunately, in this shallow climate, the party is blessed with a few good-looking rising stars: the campaign for New York’s 34-year-old mayor, focused intensely on his supposed attractiveness. Remember the Hot Girls for Zohran? And the superficiality of that campaign latched on to something ugly in the zeitgeist: the looksmaxxer Clavicular famously said he’d vote for Gavin Newsom over JD Vance — a very likely 2028 ballot — because the former “mogged” the “subhuman”, “obese” vice-president with a “recessed side profile”.

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Vance responded in his own way to the looksmaxxer’s slight, telling a rally in Michigan last week that his wife Usha was 22 weeks pregnant and bragging that he was “persuasive” when she expressed doubts about carrying a fourth child. Like a latter-day Henry VIII, his prowess is predicated less on the shapeliness of his calves than on the headcount of his swelling brood. His brand of masculinity is not Mamdani’s — bashful, gentle, good-guy “allyship”; Vance conducts himself as the gruff patriarch (in guyliner), the straight-shooting sire with a codpiece to prove it. Sexual display, not pretty-boy looks, puts power over charm; fecundity — as with Pete Hegseth’s huge, blended family — is a manifesto in itself.

All this image-curation may seem like meaningless window-dressing, but physical impressions really do count. A 2010 MIT study found that participants in the US and India were able to guess, with exceptional accuracy, the outcomes of elections in Brazil and Mexico based only on a brief exposure to candidates’ photos; the groups tended to select the best-looking options and were correct that those options won between 68 and 75% of the time. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that female candidates were often deemed more attractive but were less likely to be elected than their correspondingly attractive male counterparts: fit men were taken more seriously than fit women. One economist speculated that voters preferred good-looking politicians because they “enjoy watching” them on television — “or think that they are better in social interactions”. The logic is this: in a crunch summit on nuclear disarmament, wouldn’t we rather send a young and vital charmer than a late-stage Yeltsin, red-faced and profusely sweaty?  Selecting beautiful leaders banks on their beauty translating to credibility; ugliness, conversely, must denote corruption and incompetence.

This was the reasoning that saw JFK snatch the 1960 presidential election — the first with televised debates — from a pallid Nixon who was sweating under studio lights, still recovering from an illness. The story, possibly apocryphal, goes that radio listeners thought Nixon “won” the face-offs, his experience and substance trouncing the young Democrat; TV audiences preferred this tall, tanned, relaxed Kennedy who, unlike Nixon, was nothing if not telegenic. The first framemogging, and certainly not the last.

The problem is that the symmetricality of a person’s face is hardly a guarantee of competence in office. Obviously. If the Democrats were to take this guff seriously and stuff ballots with megababes to turn voters’ heads, they risk abandoning meaning and mission while the Republicans crack on with running the country. It seems a depressing endpoint of the populist race to the bottom that any party would deliberately parachute in smokeshows just to claw back some credibility — and a catastrophic overcorrection of the Biden-era gerontocracy. Fitness for office is nothing to do with fitness: this applies as much to mumbling seniles as it does to doe-eyed himbos. Voters may be libidinous, conducting their own subconscious sniff-tests based on whether they’d personally boot someone out of bed, but this should be seen as an unfortunate inevitability and not something for strategists to hack.

Surely there’s a case to be made for the “mids”: they seem far more trustworthy than a host of twinkly-eyed slickers. Nobody wants a Capitol that looks like a casting call for The Whale, but a return to boring old expertise — and the bookish, fuss-free types who tend to have it — is welcome. I accept this may be a British instinct, given that our Parliament more closely resembles an episode of  Coach Trip than Love Island; but America is an altogether different kettle of fish and worse off for it. Here virility is pushed to almost chaotic limits; the secretaries of war and health compete to do the most push-ups (see: the “Pete and Bobby Challenge”), a far cry from Thérèse Coffey, our erstwhile health secretary best remembered for an infamous ruddy-faced night-out snap in which she chomps on a cigar, clutching a glass of fizz. But does this mean that the clean-cut, gym-hitting politicians are “better”? I’d say both six-packs and smoking are irrelevant to the job in hand.

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Looksmaxxing is the new trans

By Nikos Mohammadi

The problem is not that voters are shallow — this instinct is ancient and ineradicable — it is that we cannot have parties transforming into poor-man’s casting agents to fill ballots with would-be models out of desperation. If Democrats are indeed spending brunch speculating about which candidates must flash a bit of ankle to make up for their own political irrelevance, that is a sorry state of affairs indeed. With midterms around the corner, strategists will be schooling up hopefuls for the big gubernatorial races; the Republicans face real congressional jeopardy. Parties must not patronize voters, and demean their rising stars, by insisting that electoral success is all about square jaws and sexy toes. The downward spiral of populism has claimed many victims so far: complexity, nuance, moderation. Don’t let it take the uggos too.

Galloway — investor, entrepreneur, blogger, professor, public intellectual — is as inescapable now as Peterson was in his heyday. The Washington Post bills him as one of the people shaping American society in 2026. He rears his bald head often on Instagram and TikTok; his voice is a mainstay on the podcast circuit. “I’m good at being right”, he tells Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom; “I’m not good at being effective”. Galloway was first propelled into the spotlight back when he used to teach a brand strategy course at NYU’s Stern School of Business; to become more effective, he has created a brand of his own.

Brand Galloway promises to make young men fitter, happier, more attractive to women. Indeed, his advice is markedly similar to Peterson’s: show up early, have good manners, be a protector. Rather, the difference between Peterson’s “clean up your room, bucko” and Galloway’s “get your shit together”, is one of tone, not substance. The difference reveals something interesting about the two sides of the American culture war: conservatives want their gurus to dress up their life advice in Jungian psychoanalysis and confused allusions to the Book of Genesis; liberals want theirs to be sweary management professors who speak in the language of McKinsey slides — hardly the stuff to keep kids flocking back over the long term.

Before Galloway was a lifestyle guru, he was a finance guru — and reviewing his career, one might reasonably ask why his advice now ought to carry much weight. After all, his knack for bad analysis once caused him to become the butt of the joke. A few years ago, some finance wags came up with the Anti-Galloway Index, allowing punters to earn their fortune by betting against Galloway’s predictions. Since October 2019, the Index tells us, “tech companies that the Professor has predicted would fail have outperformed the S&P 500 and seen a whopping 61.48% return”. The greater part of this was due to the continued growth of Tesla, on which Galloway’s powers of prediction are clouded by personal animus. Galloway believes, incidentally, that Elon Musk has locked him out of X.

Galloway has long presented himself as the enemy of Musk and his ilk. In The Four, published in 2017, he made the case for breaking up Big Tech. Today he speaks with revulsion about those Silicon Valley CEOs who’ve prostrated themselves before the Trump administration, and has launched a campaign against them, called “Resist and Unsubscribe”. Recently, he seriously weighed up running for the presidency.

Life advice is the continuation of politics by other means. Galloway’s tips are spliced with political calls to action — for free education, housing reform, even national service along the lines of the IDF. These are tucked away in his books, hidden beneath a pile of snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom. His works of self-help have big font on small pages; the chapter headings often take the form of equations, like “Credentials + Zip Code = Money”, or “Car < Lion” (which means that you should invest in experiences over things). According to Galloway arithmetic, “1 + 1 > 2”. Instead of just using the English language to tell young men to drink less, we get a picture of a martini = sad face emoji. Perhaps this helps the message stick in the minds of his audience. Peterson, it must be said, always expected slightly more from his readers.

Why, then, is Galloway so popular? Why, given he once said that “taking life advice from a depressed and insane professor may not make sense”, does he get feted by liberal stalwarts on both sides of the Atlantic? The answer is simple: for all the mockery he gets from himself and from others, in truth he is one of life’s winners. He looks and sounds the part. He’s six-foot-two, well-dressed and well-spoken. He has that air of competence. Plenty of his business ventures have failed, but enough of them have succeeded. He owns a townhouse in London by Regent’s Park, a home in Florida, and a sumptuous Manhattan apartment. He reckons his lifestyle costs him $350,000 to $425,000 a month.

Peterson’s earthly successes occurred after his pivot from academia to self-help; Galloway’s were present before. The point of Peterson’s “12 rules for life” was not that young men might, by adhering to them, become more like him (and, certainly, Peterson nowadays seldom takes heed of his tenth rule: “Be precise in your speech”). With Galloway, it’s different. His breezy references to his own personal shortcomings are part of that air of humility which successful people are expected to cultivate. He knows that young men would quite like to enjoy a lifestyle that costs $350,000 to $425,000 a month. The object of Brand Galloway is to mentor young men into becoming more like Scott Galloway. In this respect, his way of keeping his audience captivated has more in common with Andrew Tate than Jordan Peterson: he is selling them his own story, a story of success with money and with women.

His story is much enhanced by its rags-to-riches element. His parents got divorced and his mum was poor; he talked his way into UCLA, despite bad grades, where he smoked weed, memorized every line of Planet of the Apes, and “majored and minored in horniness”. When he speaks of his success, he is always careful to underscore — herein his woke credentials — that he won the lottery by being born a white heterosexual male in California, and that this allowed him, along with some good old-fashioned elbow grease, to climb up the ladder. He doesn’t drop his guard on matters intersectional: when expressing concerns about the plight of young men, he is eager to add that the issues and challenges that they face are “especially acute among young men of color”. He doesn’t believe in God, and therefore hasn’t followed Peterson down the torturous path of mystical and metaphysical speculation. Still, he prays as a mark of gratitude, especially for his mother and family. “The reason I am wealthy”, he recently told Esquire, “can be distilled down to one word: women“.

Galloway has thought hard about how his own successes can be translated into general life lessons. Everything in the Galloway universe exists to impart lessons; life is one grand preparation for that job interview where you’re asked about what challenges you’ve overcome. He pays his children to do chores, to instill them with a hunger for work; and then sometimes he mugs them on the way back to their room, “as that, too, is a life lesson”. Everybody in the Galloway universe speaks the way he does, in a series of catchy and obnoxious made-up names for complex human experiences. During the breakdown of his first marriage, he visited a counselor, who asked him: “What city do you want to live in, Marrytown or Singletown?”. This sparked an epiphany. He had already set up shop in Singletown.

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A tough-love tone permeates Galloway’s latest meditation on masculinity, Notes on Being a Man. “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach”, he declares, “big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory”. Peterson, of course, was never quite so crude. But more than that, Galloway’s point is undercut by a certain mawkishness: for it appears that one can grow one’s big-dick energy, according to Galloway, by being kind. Masculinity, moreover, is perfectly compatible with vulnerability. Like Peterson, and like much pop culture directed at young men in the last decade, Galloway is a passionate evangelist for crying. Unlike Peterson, however, he knows to hold himself together in public. It is hard, in fact, to imagine him crying, even though he says he does so often. It is so incongruous with what is ultimately a conventional, alpha persona.

And yet, despite the macho self-presentation, the title on the front cover of Notes on Being a Man appears in a noticeably feminine hand, with rounded curves and flowing loops. Here, perhaps, a clue as to how its publishers have imagined its typical buyer. “My biggest fans are young men”, Galloway tells Triggernometry; “my biggest supporters are mothers”.

The problem for Brand Galloway is this: young men do not want to read things their moms approve of. They would want to read Page 3 or Nuts Magazine, if only they still existed; nowadays they seem to content themselves with Clavicular, Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker — and Andrew Tate, who Galloway so tentatively tried to mimic. Jordan Peterson could compete, for a time, but only because he was supposed to be subversive. It never mattered that he was telling young men what their moms were telling them already — clean up your room!; he was popular, in the end, because he was “controversial”, went against the current on trans and gender issues, and totally OWNED Cathy Newman. There was a certain frisson to Peterson at his peak, a frisson which Galloway is unlikely to match — whatever his current popularity with the Guardian or the The Washington Post. The lady in Adolescence was never going to direct the boy in her charge to 12 Rules for Life, but it’s easy to imagine her enthusing about Notes on Being a Man. Much of Galloway’s advice for young men is right, but, in the spirit of the Anti-Galloway Index, you should bet against it being effective. The liberal Jordan Peterson eluded us for so long because it was always a contradiction in terms. 

Across the river, in an all-male houseshare, a warren of twenty-something Bushwick bros live amid permanent clouds of vape smoke. In their fridge is scarcely anything: a takeout box half-consumed; glossy chicken breasts thawing in the open air; a White Claw left by some girl. But there at the back is a small cluster of vials with funny names — CJC-1295; BPC-157; semax; MOTS-c. The roommates ordered them on WhatsApp from a warehouse in China; they’ve joined the biohacking gold rush, and delight in boring women at parties with insights on fat loss, boosted sleep, ligament healing and telomere extension. Much of it is experimental; the vials declare them only to be “research peptides”, but the bros believe they are at some frontier, and everything — from their hairlines to their form at CrossFit — can now be optimized. 

What unites these fridge owners is this: peptides. These are substances made of short chains of amino acids; essentially, they are signaling molecules. Many, like GLP-1s, have been approved by regulators and are used by millions of people. Some of these drugs are making it into more user-friendly pill formats: Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill was released last month. These kinds of peptides can be prescribed or purchased. Two years ago, a mini culture war began when run-of-the-mill fatties were clearing the shelves of Ozempic to the detriment of “real” patients. 

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Other peptides exist on a very gray market indeed: compounds principally sourced from Chinese labs have extremely limited human data, and they are marketed carefully so as to avoid seizure at borders. These off-label peptides are coveted by young men knee-deep in optimization culture — the looksmaxxers, the bonesmashers, the Hinge no-hopers shooting up growth-hormone secretagogues with the determination of doping cyclists. Clavicular, the 20-year-old streamer who hawks courses to help his followers mog, was filmed injecting his 17-year-old girlfriend with a peptide. This is a young man who thinks the problem with JD Vance isn’t his politics — it’s that he’s “fat”. For these new-gen biohackers, nothing matters more than a defined jaw. 

Until very recently, most people’s everyday interactions with medicine were centered on managing pathology. Meanwhile, the hazy border between pharmaceuticals and cosmetics was the realm of our Manhattan lady’s spenny medspa. But the mainstreaming of biohacking culture has dissolved this boundary — peptides, one way or another, are now available to all. The taboo of using compounds to self-enhance was once comparable to that around plastic surgery: as with invasive general-anesthetic-assisted procedures, the question was always why take the risk? But an injection of Silicon Valley frontierism has transformed peptides from a plausible element of Patrick Bateman’s weird morning routine to a casual addition to the daily life of a young man about town: Minoxidil, peptides, coffee. Their meaning is not contained in physical results — gym gains, better REM sleep — so much as their pseudo-spiritual claim: that biology is not destiny; the body is becoming negotiable. 

To the uninitiated, all this must seem baffling and dangerous. One imagines an elite of glossy, perfected superhumans whose performance and endurance have been tinkered with, leaving the rest of us stuck in a stumpy, unbeautiful, thin-haired underclass. There is something frightening about peptide culture’s Ayn Rand-ness: a brutality, an aggressive individualism that shuns the public good and tramples on the collective. 

The fear might be that peptide culture is the preserve of the rich: it doesn’t help that the initial, and very expensive, release of Ozempic catalyzed an anorexia epidemic among celebrities. And yet the truth is, if peptides are to be agents of inequality, the problem will lie in the asymmetric risk taken on by white- and gray-market consumers. The former can pay more and will be taking better, safer substances under the supervision of medical professionals. Meanwhile, somewhere out there, a poor peptide bro is fighting the worst nausea of his life with only a rudimentary Chinese chat support box to save him.

The New Man of 2026 — and coverage of the peptide craze has tended to code it masculine — is too daring for the glacial normies in the FDA or MHRA. Time is of the essence: just like with crypto, the key is to jump in now. It wouldn’t do to be outpaced by a bigger, faster, stronger league of intrepid chads. This sense of urgency should light a fire under government health bodies, which may end up entrusting their citizens’ wellbeing to a laboratory in Shenzhen. 

Before our eyes, pharmaceuticals are warping from a public-health resource to a consumer luxury. The problem is that the lines are blurred. These compounds might not just give us glossier hair and deeper sleep: downstream, they could secure cardiovascular health, delay frailty, even curb addiction. At what point do these effects become public entitlements to be subsidized by taxpayers? Collectively we invest in childhood vaccines, but we’d never blow state money on anti-aging serums. So what happens when pharmaceuticals invade both categories? Our medicinal morality has scarcely evolved from the age of public sanitation in the Industrial Revolution; preventing, not perfecting, is the responsibility of governments. The decisive variable in whether peptides help general populations is not chemistry but policy. 

In the end this isn’t about the drugs themselves, revolutionary though their manufacturers tout them to be. It’s about a psychic shift in our perceptions of the body, from a constantly degrading old banger which limps through MOTs and is periodically fitted with new wheels to an infinitely customizable kit car that can be souped up at the driver’s will. There’s something of the magic potion about these odd little pens and vials stored in the fridges of those who can stomach the cost and side effects. What remains to be seen is whether, as always must happen in fairytales, these particular potions incur a hidden cost.

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.

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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.

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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.