I started reading Richard Hanania’s Kakistocracy on my parents’ porch a month ago, watching my son play with his friend in the backyard blowup pool. I had a few free hours and figured I’d knock out a couple of chapters on the sofa.

My dad and I cannot be in the same place without talking about politics. We’ve been trying to do it less lately, because we disagree too much and both enjoy fighting far too much to stop once we’ve started. But it’s the thing we did together when I was growing up, and it’s the thing we always come back to.

He thinks I’ve become infinitely jaded. He has maintained loyal MAGA support through thick and thin. So I figured, if anyone could get a bit of skepticism into him, maybe it could be Hanania. It certainly wasn’t going to be me. I’m his daughter. Far too close to home.

I started reading out loud while he blew up a pool toy for the kids. Initially he was nodding along. He nodded through Hanania describing his right-wing friends standing by him during a HuffPo hit piece about his old alt-right writing. He nodded through the section on the real economic damage done by woke policy and the weaponization of race. Absolutely, yes, obviously.

Then Richard touched on the shift. The slow creep that anyone who’s been inside the right watched happen as its cultural power rose. The move away from accredited sources. Away from any standards in education or journalism. Into pure slop and clickbait centered around profit margins and view counts.

Soon Richard was launching into a full on critique of friends in the tech space who had fallen hook line and sinker for stories claiming the 2020 election was stolen.

My dad couldn’t hold it in.

“Oh, that’s absolute bullshit. I’ve read that piece.”

We then argued about the 2020 election for an hour. The pool toy got fully inflated. The children were, I assume, fine. When I tried to steer us back to the introduction, he was done.

“Why would I want to listen to any more of what this guy has to say? He’s lost all credibility with me. He’s just a liberal. Totally turned on the right… sort of like you.”

Oof.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Richard Hanania is not a sympathetic figure. (I can relate)

He is disliked by an enormous number of people, many of whom have perfectly good reasons. He clearly enjoys being contrarian in a way that occasionally shades into enjoying being disliked. If you’ve spent five minutes on his X timeline you already know whether you want to punch a wall. I certainly don’t agree with everything he says.

But here’s the thing about Hanania that I think people miss when they’re busy being annoyed by him. He didn’t start out as a right-wing figure because he loved the right. He started out there because that was where the contrarian slot was. Saying those things in 2016 got you excommunicated, and he said them anyway.

Now the right holds the floor. It has the White House, the podcasts, the money and the momentum. And Hanania has turned around and started kicking it. I know a lot of people will view this as a man who has no centre, but I see quite the opposite. To me this is what consistency looks like when you’re willing to hold the masses intellectually to account no matter which direction the hysteria or mob goes.

I think it’s a shallow analysis to assume he just says this stuff to wind people up, because contrarians are load-bearing. The entire ideological space that people are now defending exists because a handful of people were willing to say unsayable things and eat the consequences. The people who should be thanking him for clearing that ground never will, because the sort of person who picks up a ready-made ideology is by definition not the sort who wonders who made it available.

He tends to be right about cultural shifts four or five years early. Nobody gives him credit when everyone catches up. And I think it’s worth paying attention to people who hold that role no matter your personal thoughts on them.

So what’s actually in the book?

The core move is a shot at the constant “elites bad” drivel that gets an and everybody clapped award from every corner of the political spectrum. Hanania wants us to try something braver and consider, just for a moment, that the locus of control might not be entirely external.

Elites deserve blame. Obviously. They have vastly more power to set the terms of a narrative and they’ve abused it, and Hanania spends a decent chunk of the book saying as much. But he also asks the question nobody in this space wants asked, which is what the public got wrong. And, more uncomfortably, why one wing of the intellectual class looks at ordinary people and concludes they need managing.

Obviously, this lands badly.

There’s a class of people who think they’re better than the rest of us. They get things wrong. We hold them to a higher standard, correctly, because they have more power.

Yet in doing this persistently at every level of conversation among the masses, self-accountability has almost entirely disappeared.

I hear “the elites hate us” constantly. I almost never hear an explanation of why. The assertion is more of a case closed subject than a question. Which ironically is exactly the thing we (us normal POORS out here) accuse the elites of doing. Stating a conclusion and expecting deference to it.

Which made this book even more interesting to me, because it seems to be a terrible business decision. Every creator right now is doing the opposite for good reason. “You’re right, it’s them, it’s all a few rich people, it’s the government, now buy my VPN code.” is a far more successful formula than “hey dipshit, have you tried reading past headlines? Buy my book to find out why you might also be the problem.”

Of course the book isn’t entirely this angle, but it might as well be in comparison to the current status quo of opinions being spoon fed to the public by creators. And you’ve got to give Hanania his due for that, at minimum.

Though, I can already hear the rage boiling up in people “give Hanania his due? For what, selling out to the establishment?” He’s an “elite” as an author and academic, the elites will reward him for this work. He’s clearly just angling for a seat at the table!

While the knee jerk reaction is understandable given the public’s assumptions about the political space, having actually worked in this world for over a decade I can tell you this gets the money exactly backwards. The people praised by the institutions are on fixed salaries. That’s the deal. You get a byline at a legacy outlet, you get respectability, and you get a number that goes up three percent a year.

The dissident space is a Wild West and there is vastly more money in it. A thousand dollars a tweet. Crypto arrangements that are questionably legal. Job offers well into six figures attached to ventures that are… structurally creative. And on top of all that, far more eyeballs, because the general public wants populist opinion and will hand you their attention for free if you provide it.

The idea that there’s more money in going along with “establishment narratives” whatever that even means - is one of the greatest misconceptions in politics right now. There isn’t. There’s more money in the other thing. That’s why so many people moved. It’s why the political class adopted the talking points. It’s why Bezos and half of Silicon Valley found themselves suddenly available for dinner with Trump.

Which produces the funniest feature of the current moment: a right-wing populist movement that appears constitutionally unable to notice that it is the establishment now.

So when Hanania critiques populists, and yes, when he occasionally says something nice about an institution, he is clearly not licking the boot. He is holding power to account. The populists have the power.

Which is a major question the book chews on, if the American people are fed up with elites, which elites exactly? And does Donald Trump count?

He obviously should, but he never seems to.

Hanania puts it better than I can, in chapter six:

“Do the American people, whoever they are, have coherent critiques of elites, whoever they happen to be? Are the ambiguously defined American people even able to keep consistent track of whom they are mad at? Are they perceiving what has happened accurately, or are they being manipulated by other current and aspiring elites who want to channel populist energy toward their own ends?”

When we yell “listen to the people” that collapses as a principle if the people’s beliefs aren’t organic. If we’re really just listening to whoever built the picture the people are reacting to.

And who built it? The ones with the thousand-a-tweet money riding on it. The ones who own the platforms the discourse is taking place on. The ones who are using populist rage as a means to enter “the club” said populists are enraged about.

Hanania has a useful distinction early in the book between elites that emerge organically and the artificial kind that populist movements anoint. The artificial ones have power rooted in a direct relationship with a leader or a party. Their fortunes rise and fall with the movement, which means they can never really be independent of it, which means they can never really tell it anything it doesn’t want to hear.

His example is the “new media” invited into the White House briefing room in 2025, in many cases pro-Trump propagandists. Breitbart can gain all the access it likes and won’t be read seriously in Seoul or Berlin the way the Times is. MAGA health influencers can move the supplement market without moving a single foreign health agency, though he notes RFK Jr. at HHS is currently stress-testing that, with insurers, medical bodies and some states already breaking from federal recommendations.

That’s the title of this piece, really. The people presenting themselves as the anti-elite are an elite in formation. And the public is their crowbar.

Power to the people. Signed, power.

I don’t want to spoil too much, because you should read it yourself, but the strangest thing about Kakistocracy is the twist ending. An anti-populist manifesto that turns to the elites and tells them the solution is to… become more populist?

And in among the glazing - yes, you do deserve your positions, yes, you’re under-appreciated by a public that doesn’t understand what you do - Hanania stops to remind them that they humiliated themselves.

As “the elites,” they should be smart enough to understand why they lost the trust of the public. They should have respected and revered their institutions enough not to let them become outlets for ideological slop. Because if you actually revered these institutions, you would be the angriest people alive about… say… ideological papers with no basis in data?

Throughout 2017 and 2018, James Lindsay and his co-authors got seven hoax papers through peer review, including a chunk of Mein Kampf rewritten in intersectional feminist jargon. The journals didn’t catch it, nobody was fired over it and the academy basically just shrugged.

How are the public supposed to respond to this sort of institutional failure?

Now, some of this criticism Hanania points out is unfair.

Take the paper endlessly circulated in right-wing spaces - the June 2020 open letter signed by 1,288 “public health experts,” declaring racism a public health crisis and backing the BLM protests, while describing anti-lockdown protests in the same breath as rooted in white nationalism.

Hanania concedes the grievance first, and completely. It was outrageous, and transparently political virtue signalling. Then he actually reads the signature list. Which, as far as I can tell, nobody did at the time. Including me.

Of 1,288 names, fewer than 150 listed a university affiliation at all. He searched for federal affiliations - NIH, FDA, the lot - and found none. Zero. One state employee, from the Virginia Department of Health. Twenty listed Harvard; one indicated he was a professor. Nine listed Yale; not one held a faculty position. Seven listed Berkeley; none was a professor, and one had a bachelor’s from the school. Someone signed as “Binghamton University-SUNY” and turned out to be an English professor. Others just signed as “anonymous” “activist” or “mother”.

So the document that became a permanent monument in right-wing memory of “elite academic” failure was largely signed by grad students, nurses, undergrads and their next door neighbour LARPing as a public health expert.

So the public is, to a real degree, mistaken about who actually represents the academic and political elite. And the mistake widens the divide it’s reacting to. None of which excuses the people who genuinely bought into what figures like AOC now call “woke 1” though. I had a professor in 2014 spend a semester trying to convince a room of teenagers that correct spelling was a colonial imposition. I’m still not over it. That man did more damage to public faith in universities than a thousand Ben Shapiro monologues ever could.

So, Hanania asks the academic and political elites: work out why you’re being rejected. You’re supposed to be the smart ones. Scoffing at the working class isn’t merely unkind, it’s stupid. It’s bad statecraft. Give credit where the public gets things right, even in the many cases where the institutions are more accurate on the specifics.

It’s fairly obvious that if you alienate the average person badly enough, you cannot hold a coalition and without a coalition you cannot govern. You will inevitably lose to someone selling an illusion of something better.

I think read properly, this book is not so much a defense of elites, as it is a warning to them. He gives the same conditional logic he applies to the public. You are owed nothing automatically, legitimacy is a thing we earn continuously or lose.

So, back to my dad.

When I opened this Substack, I suspect our interaction read as a small comedy about a man being closed-minded. In the midst of our arguments I certainly feel that way at times, but I don’t think I could ever seriously argue my dad is an unreasonable or stupid man. I suggests books to him and he reads them from front to back. I’ve seen him change his mind before, and he’s made me rethink my perspectives.

Yet in the case of being asked to reconsider distrust of institutions?

Quite frankly, he’s behaving precisely the way a person who has been lied to behaves. Somewhere in the long chain of institutional failures, publishing of nonsense, scoffing at people like him from their studios and faculty lounges… they spent their credibility.

Far from being the punchline of this piece, my dad is the receipt.

Which leaves Kakistocracy in a genuinely funny position. It’s a facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings book that populists won’t read because of their feelings. It’s addressed to elites, but the diagnosis in it would be most useful to populists. It’s aimed at one audience, needed by another and potentially read by neither? We’ll see.

Ironically right before my dad wandered off to buy water guns, leaving me alone with my book, he left me with one statement.

“Always question power Lauren. Never trust these people completely.”

He’s never been wrong about that, and I appreciate him for embedding that attitude in me as a young girl. I think, that is, more or less what Richard Hanania spends three hundred pages arguing.

The only thing we disagree about is who power is now.

If you put some questions down below this post I’ll collect them for the next Q&A whenever that happens in the future. My friends refer to my timing as LST (Lauren Standard Time) - which has zero rhyme nor reason to it. Vyvanse is helping - so it should be within a more reasonable window this next time around.

Cheers,

Lauren

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My claim was simple: the culture-war fight over the new film - the casting, the endless woke-versus-anti-woke scorekeeping - missed the entire point of the story. Missed it so completely that almost nobody noticed how deeply conservative the Odyssey actually is. Small-c conservative, in the way it honors home, loyalty, and the long, unglamorous work of return. Not that a poem three thousand years old maps neatly onto our politics in the first place.

I spent this summer studying the original book for a course, which was a fascinating thing to be doing while it was blowing up online. It became incredibly obvious very quickly how few people arguing about the text had actually read it.

The worst cost of this online click war quite frankly being most people missed the depth of this story. The Odyssey has almost nothing to do with the fights you’ve seen online about it.

Homer didn’t just write a myth. He wrote a story about you. A map for your own soul and personal journey to finding purpose and character.

I unpack the whole thing in my new video. Watch it on YouTube now →

“I know for a fact it’s an abomination, an insult to history, western culture… It may go down smooth, but a drop of poison in a delicious glass of wine is still poison. I don’t know why you’re pretending like you don’t get it, but it’s weird. Kinda creepy, actually. If you’re going to keep up this pretense I think I’d prefer we stop talking.”

I read that message in something close to awe.

It was from a former colleague, sent after I suggested they watch The Odyssey themselves before deciding it was an insult to Western civilization based on Twitter’s word for it. You know X posters? Famously known for measured reasonable analysis.

I had genuinely hoped to understand his aversion to the film, but instead of getting an explanation, somehow a three-thousand-year-old story about a dude trying to get home to his family became a personal referendum on me.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the fatigue from the online right. People are sick of so-called “wokeness” getting shoved into things nobody asked for, see: the female Ghostbusters reboot, unmitigated box office disaster. I lived through the 2010’s culture policing. Where every film was too white, too male, too whatever didn’t fit into the vogue progressive ideology at the time.

But this was quite different.

Online commentators were appealing to some deep personal knowledge of what Homer intended, as if they were good friends with the guy (or guys?). Casting a black woman as Helen became “an insult to all Greeks,” rather than a modern adaptation for a global audience. In fact much of the online discourse seemed intent to imply adapting the story itself was desecration of a sacred text, which is a strange thing to say about a story that is itself an adaptation of oral tradition, one that the great tragedian Euripides himself rewrote, nearly cutting Helen out entirely.

I can’t even imagine the absolute meltdown people would have over Mercutio being cast as a black man in the 1996 Romeo and Juliet adaptation if it were released today. Let alone the pearl clutching over the desecration of Shakespeare! How dare they! Scandalous!

I signed up for a course on The Odyssey through the summer, which has made the entire hysteria even more entertaining to witness. It’s also made me into an absolutely insufferable person. When I find myself in a group whinging about the historical accuracy of the movie I’ll respond with something like “loved it, but I agree it perhaps cut too much, how did you feel about the exclusion of Phaeacia?”

Knowing damn well no one complaining has read a page. Course? Worth every penny.

It made me chuckle thinking about how Nietzsche scholars must want to shoot themselves every time they see people quoting the guy at one another online. Not that I’m any sort of scholar myself, but man I had a friend tell me once “doing the reading is a super-power” and he wasn’t joking. I spared myself endless ignorance driven outrage, and got to enjoy one of the best blockbusters of the year because of it. My cortisol has never been lower. Enjoyment of life? Through the roof.

For one, despite all the absolute menty-b’s over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o… the book just isn’t about what race Helen is. It’s about what she represents, along with the other characters as well. Homer isn’t even subtle about this either.

No one is denying it’s a story by Greeks, but It’s not a story about Greeks. Antinous, for one, isn’t really a name anyone would choose for their kid, it’s just Greek for “against purpose” or “against reason.” Same trick with the two women who raised Odysseus: his mother Anticlea’s name means “without glory,” while his nurse Eurycleia’s means “broad glory.” His mother dies of a broken heart, having given up hope of ever seeing her son again, not exactly fulfilling her purpose… There’s a reason “Odyssey” became synonymous with the word journey. Homer didn’t just write a book called Journey about a guy named Journeyman. It’s about the formation of self. You really thought this was just a wacky story about a one-eyed sheep farmer and some boats?

Hello?? Are you people okay??

Honestly, watching some of this discourse, I’m starting to suspect a real portion of X thinks The Odyssey is an archaeological record of real events rather than a myth? Slightly concerning, for people so invested in “western civilization.”

Which is, I suspect, partly why Nolan cast Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong’o, to sort a room into people who could see past the surface and people who couldn’t. Because what he’s actually doing is building modern mythology: return to order, loyalty, the weight of betrayal, hubris, the guidance of conscience. Trying to address to the masses the deeper crises of our culture; that of our individual choices, the real place where the destruction of civilization begins. Not whatever culture war gobbledygook is trending for the next 24 hours.

Are you a man or woman of character? Left or right doesn’t really matter if you don’t have that.

Which brings me to the real subject of this piece.

Nolan is doing something the right-wing media cannot do at present. He’s building culture. A shared mythology remade for the modern world. Meanwhile? The right can be found biting at his ankles between selling VPNs.

But how did they get to this pitiable place?

Growing up, the standard right-wing critique of the left was that it only knew how to tear things down, deconstruct the family, deconstruct tradition, deconstruct meaning, without ever building something to replace it. I believed that critique. I still think there was something to it.

I recall taking an English class in 2014 from a professor who spent an entire semester trying to convince us that proper grammar was white supremacy, because apparently correct spelling was a colonial invention or whatever. We studied Bill Bisset, a poet who misspelled words on purpose, as a bit. I nearly tore my hair out. The professor and I did not end on good terms.

The right has their own version of useless eternal critique.

If you remember a couple years ago when transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney appeared in a Bud Light sponsorship the controversy became a proxy war for the survival of Western civilization. Weeks of discourse dedicated to one fairly insignificant ad out of thousands. Meanwhile wage stagnation and the cost of living, I guess, were just too boring to cover? But mention a TikToker nobody’s heard of saying something absurd about men giving birth? Time to make them famous with a three-hour podcast segment!

Both sides have the same disease. Progressive deconstructionists find a way to assign white supremacy to the alphabet. The new right wing deconstructionists will assign the fall of Rome to a beer ad. Every month podcasters are predicting civil war over some nonsensical trend everyone will forget about within 24 hours.

Perhaps more concerning, is that nobody allegedly trying to save Western civilization seems to know much about the culture they’re allegedly trying to preserve. That brings us back to Nolan, of which the right’s main critique is that he is once again desecrating tradition while they are trying to preserve it.

A perspective that’s hard to take seriously once you actually look at their critiques. Hell, I saw Matt Walsh complaining that Nolan ruined the original epic by making it non-linear. The original, of course, being non-linear itself.

Funnily enough, it’s Nolan’s work that has more people reading the original text than at any other point in recent memory. A greater feat in promoting the classics than I think any dissident commentator could take credit for, aside from Jordan Peterson perhaps.

The right-wing version of “preserving culture” seems to consist entirely of starting podcasts to endlessly deconstruct those actually contributing to the current culture.

Worse still much of the commentary class are wealthy and isolated from modern life in their studios and gated communities. Perfectly happy to dictate down to the masses lifestyles completely at odds with the reality they’re living. Return to tradition! Some cry out. Without acknowledging that anyone who actually lived a hundred years ago if born today would almost certainly be cohabiting with a boyfriend or girlfriend to split rent, both working full time, and watching Love Island on weekends. Because that’s what people do, they acquiesce to the culture that makes sense for their moment.

Conservatives just telling people to go back to some vague notion of “traditionalism,” which no longer fits with our economy, what we’ve learned since, or people’s current understanding of gender dynamics, isn’t building a culture. Nor is it preserving one, because it’s embarrassingly obvious to the rest of the population that it’s a LARP.

No one is RETVRNing their iPhone, car, modern medicine, or notably their platforms built entirely on a technology that didn’t exist for 99.9% of human history. They’ll gladly keep the innovation. They just want to opt women back out of the workforce, opt families back out of divorce, and opt the culture back into a version of obedience that was only ever sustainable because women had no legal alternative.

And really they don’t truly believe in that either, it’s just a way to monetize their audiences with the political equivalent of fantasy football. A real cultural vision has to actually metabolize the world as it exists now. The left may have deconstructed tradition, but the right is deconstructing reality itself.

Sadly a movement that was born out of resentment toward the “culture policing” progressives of the 2010’s, seems to have stared into the abyss too long. The only culture I see in the dissident sphere anymore is one of culture policing. Meanwhile ordinary life just carries on without them.

The Odyssey, the thing everyone’s enjoying, is breaking box office records while dissident media insist online that’s impossible, “Go woke, go broke,” they say. Proof, mostly, that nobody’s paying dues to their culture war.

Take for example the fact that more people are attending raves now more than at any point on record. The reason being simple: they’re fun. No amount of calling it degenerate online changes the experience, same as no amount of calling the Odyssey bad online stops it from selling out theaters.

The policing isn’t working, because the culture being policed is genuinely better than whatever’s being offered instead. Try the alternative and see how it goes: got your girlfriend to quit her job to be trad, and now you can’t make rent? Cool. Very sustainable. Very based.

Conservative commentators can seethe at modern life as long as they want. But until they offer something that actually works in its place, instead of dragging the past around like Weekend at Bernie’s, it isn’t winning anything. To give the right their dues, commentators like Brett Cooper are increasingly acknowledging this vision of life as performative.

Anyone with half a brain knows that “new bad” is not an ideology.

It’s the behaviour of insufferable 2010s hipsters who insist you should only listen to music on vinyl. “Ugh, I preferred their early work, I listened to it first, I only enjoy the Odyssey read aloud in the original Greek, on a cliffside in Lesbos unlike these uncultured degenerates.”

No one cares. No one is out here calculating “cool” or “correct” that way.

I wouldn’t be so bothered by any of this if it weren’t such a colossal waste of everyone’s time.

The one real point of this piece is that this entire ideology is based around ankle biting. Sniping from the sidelines at the “man in the arena” those actually building and living in culture.

Worse still, the mental gymnastics alone required to hold these modern dissident positions together with a straight face could win you an Olympic medal. It’s no wonder they have no energy to create anything.

More ardent progressives in the 2010s would often lament that it was racist to criticize other cultures, right up until that culture didn’t let women vote or something… at which point things got very awkward and nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.

Now the right are on their authoritarian, anti-empathy arc that’s becoming increasingly hard to square with their claims of being Chrsitian. Take for example, Matt Walsh again, because of course. Walsh tweeted out recently that “for a week conservative Nolan apologists have claimed that his adaptation was secretly based and “Christianized.” Now here is Nolan himself saying he changed the story to make it less “misogynistic.” Hate to say I told you so. I will now be accepting retractions and apologies.

What exactly did Nolan cut that made Walsh feel it wasn’t actually Christianized? The original ending, the one where Telemachus brutally executes twelve maidservants for sleeping with and helping the suitors.

Listen, I’m one of those people who happens to think the film was more Christian than the original. And no, I won’t be apologizing. Mostly because I grew up reading the Bible, looking down at my “What Would Jesus Do” bracelet, and if I really think about it, really get the noggin joggin’, I’m not sure Jesus would’ve violently executed twelve women. I kinda remember him being super into this forgiveness thing. Maybe that’s just me?

Then there’s Jordan Peterson, who I’ll say upfront I genuinely respect as a person, disagreements aside. But he recently posted that “suicidal empathy was literally the sin of Judas,” the idea being that Judas’s objection to expensive perfume being poured on Christ’s feet, when that money could have fed the poor, was less about compassion and more about a performative, self-destructive empathy. I’d need to see him actually walk through this one with someone, because it’s fairly established that the sin of Judas was betrayal. Not to mention as more than a few people pointed out, isn’t suicidal empathy just the Christ story? A man who loved humanity enough to let it kill him?

Fine, have a political approach that rejects “suicidal empathy.” It’s true that certain forms of compassion can get people killed. However, trying to square that with the actual message of Christ, forgiveness and self-sacrifice, is a far more difficult sell.

The Bible may have many interpretations, but how you choose to interpret it often says more about your own internal goals than your theological knowledge. I find most people already know what they want to do, and just like quoting scripture to back up their own desires. If someone is only ever bringing up Jesus flipping tables on tax collectors, and never the Beatitudes, like come on. Let’s be so for real.

In the culture war everyone wants to have their cake and to eat it too.

Go ahead, make yourself into a pretzel trying to say all cultural approaches are equal, while girls get shot for pursuing education like Malala Yousafzai. Go win a mental gymnastics championship by claiming you love the constitution, freedom, and Christianity whilst demanding authoritarianism and total rejection of empathy.

Everyone’s allowed to have opinions! But any opinion that increasingly requires this much scaffolding to stay upright is a waste of time.

Time that could go toward literally anything else.

Which is increasingly a conclusion more and more people are coming to. Every conversation I’m having with influencers in backrooms right and left agree “we’re coming to the end of the culture wars. It’s all dying.” People with bigger shows and platforms are looking for their next pivot out of commentary.

The New York Times recently confirmed this with the numbers to back it up. Just this week in a headline titled The MAGA Media Machine Is Fracturing data showed listeners of dissident podcasts are starkly dropping.

The problem is that reality always wins in the end.

Just as the progressives of the 2010’s are now routinely mocked by even ardent leftists today as having gone off the deep end in policing culture, demanding people not play certain video games, writing a thousand think pieces tearing down anything not perfectly in line with their political vision. Creating rules for life like “consent forms” that just don’t integrate into real relationships. This moment for the right is headed toward the same backlash.

Real culture is the aggregate of how people actually live, day to day, whether or not anyone’s filming it. It’s the movies actually getting made, not the ones you think should get made. It’s people dancing on Friday nights to Fred Again or crowding into a Post Malone concert. It’s people tuning in to Bad Bunny’s halftime show instead of the TPUSA Kid Rock version.

The rights cultural project increasingly resembles the uninvited kid promising a better party that never quite happens.

You can’t replace inspiration with opposition.

In truth most of the stuff that conservatives claim to be the last line of defense for, is already occurring and will continue to occur without their commentary industry. People are starting families and building communities all around without anyone’s permission. Not to mention there’s plenty of art in the mainstream with conservative themes that never seems to be acknowledged or highlighted by the eternal critics.

I think in part this is because honestly engaging with the world as it is now, instead of constantly sniping at the odd progressive trend, would mean influencers admitting they’re not so much defending culture as they are feeding off it.

Which brings me back to The Odyssey, and the suitors specifically.

The suitors aren’t villains because they’re rude houseguests. They’re villains because they’re consuming a kingdom that isn’t theirs.

Modern influencers have far too much in common with the suitors. Not all of them of course, but a large chunk dedicate all their time to monetizing the grief of a populace with real problems they cannot, and will not solve. Launching crypto scams to siphon desperate listeners of their hard earned cash. Distracting people from dealing with their own lives.

I remember being told, at my first job in right-wing media, that a liberal government was good for us, because it meant endless content for a dissatisfied audience. As Littlefinger put it, chaos isn’t a pit, it’s a ladder. One not built for fixing low wages or high cost of living, and certainly not for repairing what’s actually broken between men and women or any other hot button issues.

To look at the culture honestly means looking at yourself inside it. That’s the one analysis influencers rarely do, because it’s the one that doesn’t end with them as the hero.

I’ll admit, even writing this, I still wonder where I land in it. I think I’m complicit too. What I’m hoping to offer here is the same honesty I’m asking of everyone else: what have I actually built, and is it good?

Unfortunately that’s not a fun question to ask myself. Because if I’m honest? The least destructive tangible result I can see now of a culture war I helped build is perhaps a guy who missed a movie he probably would’ve liked, and now seems a little unhinged to his coworkers for insisting, between meetings, that the West is ending because the movie with a Cyclops in it isn’t historically accurate enough.

I was going to end the article there, but I suppose I should end with something happy. I’m trying to gaslight myself into being an optimist lately after all.

If the eternal culture war of distraction is a mental robbery by the influencer class on a dissatisfied populace, there is always the chance for the return of Odysseus. For people to reject the distractions and seek paths forward that actually build, not just their own world but real culture. Yes, a few podcasters might have to be metaphorically slaughtered for us to get back to Zeus’s law, but thankfully, for those who wanted a slaughter at the end of the Odyssey, I happen to like the more Christianized version. (Don’t worry Matt Walsh, you get to live!)

A version of the story where no one is fixed in one role, but we’re all called to be Odysseus, and to seize our chance to return home.

I’m not going to lie: I kind of fell down the looksmaxxing rabbit hole. Not personally, of course. I’ve accepted my status as a post-wall cat lady. But intellectually, there’s something both terrifying and beautiful about it. Terrifying because it represents the raw, logical endpoint of our materialist culture. Beautiful because there’s something deeply honest about it.

I find that most people seek status through a variety of social manipulations: posting #nomakeup beneath a selfie Facetuned within an inch of its life, or signalling fashionable political views to harvest praise from fans, status-seeking thinly veiled as meaningful activism.

From girls in trad-wife cosplay clutching homemade pies and purring “feminism bad,” to performative males solemnly pulling on their The Future Is Female T-shirts… we all know what you’re doing. And honestly, I get it. Everybody out here is begging for a crumb of attention from the opposite sex. Some are just clearly more starved than others.

Looksmaxxing just breaks through all the bullshit and says yes, this is all about sex, this is all about ego and it’s all about worship. And we’re not lying about it, we’ve just embraced it.

Not to mention how can you not just love the variety of characters straight out of JoJo’s bizarre adventures. The leaderboards, the very camp zoolander-esque confrontations. Half if not all of which is almost just totally performance art.

Is ASU fratleader brutally mogging Clavicular? Androgenic has fallen 10 points in the Chad leaderboards after he had his wig snatched?? What next is going to happen in the looksmaxxing cinematic universe. I for one am hooked.

But on a serious note, I also think we’re watching some of the most meaningful philosophical and moral lessons play out on a massive stage.

The incarnation of one of the most famous gothic and mythic literary tropes.

The trope of beauty as tragedy.

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I’ve been meaning to write an article on this for the past week (I’m about halfway through), but I’ve been sidetracked by a summer road trip through the Canadian wilderness. Not the worst excuse, I suppose.

In the meantime, I wanted to make sure you all saw this. I feature quite heavily in a documentary series on foreign interference in politics - particularly the inner workings of the Tenet Media debacle.

Honestly, I learned a lot from it myself. I thought it was incredibly fair and thoughtfully done work by Nicky Woolf.

You can check it out on Audible, pretty sure the first chapter is free!

https://www.audible.ca/pd/Influenced-The-Tenet-Media-Plot-Audiobook/B0H45PPKWL

A recent controversy erupted on X after influencer Riley Gaines was caught in leaked behind-the-scenes footage asking for talking points before recording an advertisement for Patriot Mobile.

In the clip, Gaines can be seen workshopping what exactly she should say with a coordinator:

“Pro-life... First Amendment, Second Amendment, the sanctity of life, our veterans... I feel very passionately about... do you guys say the left or the right? Or is that something you try to refrain from? Like could I say something to the effect of the left is still doubling down? Okay.”

The reaction on X was predictably explosive. Critics claimed the footage exposed Gaines as a grifting fraud. She needed her values fed to her? The issues she claims to care deeply about had to be handed to her on a cue card? Shocked and appalled.

For those unfamiliar with Gaines, she rose to prominence after competing against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the 2022 NCAA Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships. After tying Thomas for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle, Gaines became one of the most recognizable critics of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. The controversy transformed her into a star on the political right overnight and helped her build a large and loyal online following.

A following that she now occasionally advertises products to.

The strange thing is that none of what was shown in the video is remotely shocking to anyone who has actually worked in media. In fact, many influencers seemed genuinely confused by the outrage.

Because from their perspective, the footage didn’t reveal some dark secret. It revealed an ad shoot. This is how the sausage is made. Which raises a more interesting question than whether Riley Gaines is authentic:

Why are people so upset by seeing this?

After the clip went viral, the much-anticipated response from Riley finally arrived. Using a technique I know all too well (and one I have become almost infamous for myself) she filmed the video outdoors in a picturesque field, bathed in natural light. Helping create a more sympathetic visual differentiation from the studio self.

In the response, Gaines argued that she had never actually been paid by Patriot Mobile, and therefore the accusation that she was taking money to repeat talking points was false.

Though to anyone familiar with the industry, this felt like very clever maneuvering. Riley may have never received a cheque directly from Patriot Mobile, but she is a paid contributor to TPUSA. One of Patriot Mobile’s largest promotional partners and sponsors.

She then insisted her audience go outside and touch grass.

I have nothing against Riley Gaines, I’m sure she’d be perfectly lovely in person. However, this is an incredibly stupid PR strategy, and you can take it from me as an expert on life destroying PR decisions.

As someone who once attempted the revolutionary strategy of telling my own audience they were taking the internet too seriously, I can assure you this does not work. At least not if you’ve spent the last decade convincing them it was important.

Should people touch grass? Absolutely.

But the reason they need to touch grass is because they believed us.

Oops. Lol.

And if you spend years building an online world, encouraging people to take it incredibly seriously, you can’t suddenly act shocked when they do. Of course they’re upset. They’re discovering that something they thought was authentic is, at least in part, a performance. Within influencer circles there’s a common assumption that audiences understand what’s going on instinctively.

“Obviously we’re exaggerating.”

“Obviously we’re playing characters.”

“Obviously the clickbait headline isn’t quite true.”

“Obviously that’s show business, babyyy.”

But no.

They don’t know that.

They really don’t. In fact many believe the opposite.

In the political world, people genuinely believe what they’re being told. They think the influencers are motivated primarily by conviction and a desire to fix the world. They think the headlines are true. They think the personalities they follow are exactly who they appear to be on camera.

They don’t realize they’re watching an industry.

Now, to be fair, even people who enjoy chicken nuggets might lose their appetite if McDonald’s started running factory farming footage in every commercial. So like with any industry, conservatives generally avoid explaining this part of the business.

I recently discussed this with Jeremy Boreing on his podcast. We ended up having a thoughtful disagreement about whether it’s better to promote good values even when you fail to live up to them yourself, or to be brutally honest about your shortcomings.

Jeremy leaned toward the former. After all, a flawed person can still point others toward something true. And I understand that argument. But having gone from being a fan of the conservative movement to working within the conservative movement, there is an undeniable disconnect there that does a lot of damage. For example, at times when the public discovered my personal life wasn’t as squeaky clean as my online conservative branding, I lost a lot of people. I had a ton of fans turn on me.

And Riley Gaines is learning the same lesson I eventually learned: there is a cost to having an audience that doesn’t understand how the sausage is made. The moment they catch a glimpse behind the curtain, they feel deceived.

What obviously makes this uncomfortable is that there is also a great benefit to having an audience that doesn’t understand how the sausage is made. In fact the benefit and the cost are the same thing. The audience most likely to be outraged by leaked footage like this is also the audience most likely to buy the products, donate the money, and invest emotionally in the movement.

Because they believe it.

The only person who is going to buy something like Patriot Mobile is someone who believes Riley Gaines is promoting it because she genuinely thinks it’s a great product. That kind of audience is incredibly valuable.

In fact, an enormous amount of the political influencer industry is built around cultivating exactly that kind of trust. I know because I participated in it myself.

In summer of 2021 I was sent something called a Freedom Phone to advertise. I remember opening the package, playing with it for a few minutes, filming the ad, posting, and then almost immediately deleting it. I couldn’t quite explain why at the time. I just had that familiar pit in my stomach telling me something wasn’t right. Turns out, the entire thing was in fact a scam.

Of course as an influencer they didn’t tell us this, they told us it was a perfectly up to standard product. However, part of the job of “influencing” and making money for it, is not asking too many questions. Especially when the affiliate program for the product offered $50 per sale using your code.

Worse still, it wasn’t exactly an issue that I was advertising a product. The internet runs on advertising. The problem was that I wasn’t selling a phone. I was selling patriotism.

The pitch of “here is a phone” vs “real patriots buy this phone” are two very different things.

Ironically the device itself was essentially a cheap Chinese Android called the UMIDIGI A9, which is currently available for $80 to $110. Now upsold for $499 with American flags on it, despite its manufacturing being done… IN CHINA. Marketed as an answer to Big Tech surveillance and sold as a superior alternative to mainstream devices.

On the surface the packaging looked impressive, but mostly you were being sold that you were saving western civilization, as it were.

Which brings us back to Patriot Mobile.

Is Patriot Mobile a scam?

No.

Is it a grift?

Well... kind of.

It’s largely the same cellular service people were already getting, (again) wrapped in an American flag and sold back to them as a political act. Patriot Mobile is a U.S.-based wireless provider that markets itself as America’s only Christian conservative wireless company.

Okay.

What does that have to do with my cell service? Do I push *3 and get God on the line? What is going on here?

When I buy a phone plan, I’m generally looking for coverage, reliability, and price. I don’t particularly care whether my carrier votes Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or worships an ancient fertility god. The reality is that Patriot Mobile is what’s known as an MVNO, meaning it doesn’t own its own cellular network. Instead, it resells access to the networks operated by companies like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. According to the internet, Patriot Mobile tends to be more expensive per gigabyte than the underlying carriers are. You’ll also often receive lower priority on those networks during periods of congestion compared to customers who buy directly from the major carriers.

In other words, the core thing you’re buying isn’t especially unique, it’s not that you’re being sold better coverage. The unique selling point is the branding.

“Okay Lauren, but they donate to conservative causes.”

Sure. But if your goal is to support conservative causes, you can simply donate to conservative causes yourself. You don’t need a middleman taking a cut on the way.

And to be clear, I’m not singling out Patriot Mobile here.

As I mentioned, a variety of advertisements I’ve done over the years could be dissected the same way. Because this is the industry. The internet figured out long ago that the easiest thing to sell isn’t a product. It’s an identity.

And the way that Gaines and TPUSA are doing this is far more ethical than most figures I’ve seen to be perfectly honest. Half the dissident sphere runs on far more obvious straight up scams.

A more prominent example is when I was invited to Romania to meet with the Tate brothers and they attempted to turn a right-wing media outlet we pitched into a front for a crypto currency called “Freedom Coin” or some bullshit to rugpull our audiences with.

Eventually Tommy Robinson used this strategy anyways when he launched UTK Coin to go along with his Unite The Kingdom march last year, telling people they’d save Britain or whatever if they just bought his cryptocurrency sponsoring the event.

Boom. Rugpulled almost immediately after.

Riley Gaines is clearly not doing anything remotely close to what the likes of Tommy or Tate do. While perhaps not the best option, Patriot Mobile is a legitimate service that offers people the product it says it will. Riley Gaines likely believes most of the values she was being coached to communicate at the advertising table.

Everyone’s got a product to sell, the internet is basically one giant ad now. By 2036 you’ll probably be able to get a doordash discount by having your neuralink simulate 10,000 years of ads into your consciousness.

Again, the problem here is when the product stops being sold as a product and starts being sold as a political act. It’s a dangerous game influencers are playing, wrapping these things in higher causes such as morality, politics and religion. A game people are rightfully upset by.

That destroys trust. Not just in the influencer, but often in the cause itself.

Which perhaps needs to happen. Honestly, I hope some of the people upset by this do what Riley suggested and log off. Sincerely, go spend time with your family. Join a sports team. Go volunteer. Go build something. The internet is not real life.

But, I also understand why people don’t.

Because I am sitting here writing an article about how people should spend less time online while simultaneously trying to convince people to buy a book or subscribe to a substack I wrote about spending less time online. I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to reconcile these two things, but I’ll give it my best shot here.

There is a phenomenon in the AI world called “model collapse”, when successive generations of AI models are trained on increasing amounts of data generated by earlier AI models rather than on original human-created data. Over time the models’ output can become increasingly distorted or nonsensical. The same thing is true for social media and online discourse. The more a person’s beliefs are generated solely by the internet, and by reactions to things on the internet, instead of by reality, the easier it is for that person to lose touch with reality and start spouting increasingly deranged nonsense. Or say… start truly believing their favourite influencers are huge fans of the products they’re selling.

The solution to this is not to log off and go live in a cabin – seriously, I’ve tried – but to understand how the internet info-machine works so you can remember to check everything with real life. That means double checking the talking points being fed to you, double checking the products you’re being sold like Patriot Mobile, to see if they really are the better option or whether their ads are just giving you an ideological lap dance.

And to be honest, as much as I understand the audience’s anger toward deceptive influencer practices, I equally understand the influencers’ fatigue toward audience outrage.

How do you not see it by now? Seriously.

No one else is ultimately in charge of our soul or our perception of reality. That responsibility belongs to us alone. It is ours to keep.

And I suspect that’s where the real outrage is coming from. It isn’t really about Riley Gaines. Riley just happened to be standing in the frame when people caught a glimpse of something much larger. What’s upsetting people is the realization that they aren’t a part of something authentic, and that everybody in it seems to be aware of that except them.

It’s an uncomfortable realization because it forces a person to confront their own role in the illusion. It’s much easier to be angry at Riley Gaines than it is to ask yourself why leaked footage of a standard advertising meeting feels like a personal betrayal.

Deep down I think most people know the answer, it’s because they believed this was all real. That’s okay, so did I. But at some point you gotta swallow your pride so you can stop feeling angry and begin to feel amused.

Because the truth is with new eyes this whole political thing looks slightly absurd. The endless ideological wars online stop feeling like world-historic struggles and more like reality television for people who think they’re too sophisticated to watch reality television. It’s just Love Island for neurodivergent people.

The more you can laugh at it instead of getting infuriated, the more real life gets louder and louder until it overtakes the delusion.

Good luck to everyone getting there x

Hollywood spent two decades feeding us variations of the same story: the people at the bottom of the social hierarchy weren’t merely misunderstood, they were secretly better than everyone else. Regina George versus Cady Heron. Peter Parker discovering he has superpowers while Flash Thompson remains trapped in the unfortunate condition of being hot.

Every awkward teenage girl eventually learns she isn’t ordinary at all, merely undiscovered.

The message was surprisingly consistent. The nerd wasn’t just intelligent, he was good. The popular girl wasn’t just popular. She was a big ole’ bitch. Even in stories like She’s All That, where the jock gets to be the protagonist, it’s only because the weird artsy girl teaches him through the power of love how to stop being such a shallow idiot. A condition (once again) he naturally suffers from because he’s athletic and attractive.

The funniest part, of course, is that the girl isn’t even ugly. Hollywood’s idea of a social outcast was usually a supermodel wearing glasses who had committed the grave sin of owning a ponytail.

And because these stories were ostensibly about overcoming stereotypes, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize they weren’t eliminating them at all. They were just flipping them upside down. Unfortunately, I found the new version extremely compelling. Looking back, it’s difficult to overstate how much of my worldview was built on that premise.

While I’m no longer the lanky acne-ridden Runescape addict I was at thirteen, desperately trying to experience romance through a CRT monitor, I still feel the echoes of these belief systems.

Hell, for most of my life I thought assessing anyone, even romantic partners, on the basis of appearance was intellectually embarrassing. Not morally wrong exactly. Just... a little beneath me. I liked wit, intelligence, and depth (I still do). I just assumed those qualities existed almost exclusively outside the category of Chads and Staceys. The people who wore the right brands and somehow knew how to dress themselves. The people who managed to become hot on purpose.

The “pretties,” as I called them.

Ironically, this was also the name of a young adult novel I read as a teenager, later adapted into a movie, in which a resistance movement fights back against an evil society of impossibly attractive people by refusing to get plastic surgery. I’m not kidding.

At some point Hollywood became so committed to teaching us not to judge people by appearances that it accidentally created an entire genre where beautiful people were the villains.

This shit went deep, okay. The programming was next level.

In my mind pretty people never went through anything difficult. They never had to develop personalities. They never had to become funny. They never had to become interesting. The world simply opened up before them like the automatic doors at a grocery store.

During my evangelical early teen years this wasn’t just an intellectual preference, it felt like a moral virtue. I was the girl who hung out with the nerds, because I was better than the social climbing bimbo’s around me. Though, in truth, I hung out with the nerds simply because I was one. But we’ve all got wonderful fantasies about how our life circumstances are actually great moral achievements.

And don’t get me wrong, I genuinely liked the nerds. There were great people among them. The problem (obviously) wasn’t that I was wrong to like nerds, the issue was that I’d somehow convinced myself that liking nerds, and being one, made me a better person.

The funniest part is that I didn’t fully realize until I was well post-puberty that other people considered me conventionally attractive myself. My sister and I were talking about this recently. She laughed and said, “I used to hate my big butt.”

Which I am perfectly aware today sounds like the opening line of a boomer-bait AI post featuring a brazilian woman with six fingers, ridiculous cannons, and the caption: “nobody will share because I’m not beautiful :,(.” However for those who remember the early 2000s, this was a perfectly reasonable thing for a teenage girl to be insecure about. You can find (depricating) jokes about women having “big butts” all over Friends, Sex and the City, Everybody Loves Raymond and basically every other show from that era.

Then, of course, culture changed.

A decade later, after I started going viral online, people began discovering photos of my sister and enthusiastically informing us that the exact feature she’d spent years feeling self-conscious about was, apparently, one of her greatest assets. Her Mewtwo build had hidden powers all along. Not exactly a Princess Diaries twist, but a wins a win!

I had a similar experience. I generally wandered through adolescence under the assumption I was an awkward little gremlin, until I essentially began cosplaying as a Fox News woman, and realized masses of other people online had arrived at a very different conclusion.

The truly unfortunate part is that this revelation didn’t challenge my worldview at all. It reinforced it. Now I wasn’t just the person willing to overlook appearances, I was the “conventionally attractive” person willing to overlook appearances. Which, in my mind, made me even more virtuous.

If you’re starting to think this bitch sounds annoying, you’re in good company.

Looking back, I think this is part of what pulled me toward dissident politics. The whole “I’m not like other girls” complex. I wasn’t choosing the shallow, status-obsessed people. I was choosing the overlooked intellectual underdogs. The people with depth that society unfairly ignored or oppressed. Or at least that was the story in my head.

In reality, I had somehow gaslit myself into believing that the chubby man running around in lipstick, wearing a dress made out of duct tape and holding a sign about how women had sexually failed, was one of the last defenders of Western civilization.

And by God, I was going to help him.

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On Wednesday, May 13th, an X user known as @Katherineortho published a Substack article titled: A Dating Crisis in the Orthodox Church? A Woman’s Perspective.

The piece was a three-part exploration of modern dating within the Orthodox Church. It began with stories from women recounting their various dating nightmares inside Christian spaces.

One woman, known online as @AmyTheArtist, recalled being told by a date that he would never marry a woman unwilling to have a completely natural home birth. No epidural. No pain relief. She must heroically bear the full weight of childbirth alone. For the love of the game, apparently. As I’m not sure there’s any spiritual or material awards given for declining modern medicine.

The second section summarized the results of a survey Katherine conducted with roughly forty Orthodox women regarding their dating lives and frustrations with Orthodox men. Complaints ranged from emotional immaturity to social awkwardness to, somewhat infamously, poor hygiene.

Katherine concluded the piece with some fairly mild advice for improving relations between men and women within the Church, while also acknowledging that women themselves bear responsibility for self-improvement as well.

On face value, the article was not especially radical. Slightly biased perhaps as it focused more heavily on women’s grievances than men’s, but hardly revolutionary. But of course, on the spiritually irradiated wasteland formerly known as Twitter, the article landed like a declaration of holy war.

The men commonly referred to online as “orthobros” — hyper-online pseudo-traditionalists with crosses in their bios and increasingly militant political-religious aesthetics — did not take the criticism well.

In fact, it was not merely an article they disliked. It was a personal attack against them specifically.

The collective response can largely be summarized as a complete inability to tolerate even mild criticism or self-reflection.

Not that Katherine’s piece was beyond critique. Any article built around one-sided anecdotes about gender dynamics will naturally contain some bias. But I suspect I would feel similarly watching women react to a fairly friendly article offering relationship advice by immediately declaring all men narcissistic demons incapable of love.

The dominant conclusion across Orthodox X quickly became that feminism had irreparably ruined women, and that modern dating dysfunction was entirely the fault of female degeneracy.

For a few days the outrage machine churned predictably along and, like most internet controversies, it probably would have disappeared within forty-eight hours.

Then Orthodox X discovered revenge porn.

On Friday, May 15th, a private photo of Katherine in her underwear was leaked online by an anonymous account.

The initial leaker was an account called @JohnSmithdzz7, who later claimed he was essentially forced to leak the images because Katherine would not respond to his messages.

Which is, of course, an extremely normal and emotionally healthy reaction to being ignored by a woman online. And certainly not the exact kind of antisocial, manipulative, deeply unwell behavior Katherine had been criticizing in her article to begin with.

Though honestly, if anything, her original piece may have been too charitable. Being awkward, rigid, or overly ideological is one thing. Publicly humiliating a woman because she ignored your DMs is behavior so deranged that even I would’ve accused her of exaggerating for dramatic effect had she included it in the original article.

In going down the rabbit hole to write this piece, I contacted several people involved in the controversy, including the Orthodox account @AmyTheArtist, a mutual of Katherine’s who had been interviewed for her original article.

She recalled the moment the situation began spiraling.

“I was the first person who saw the tweets, so I let Katherine know. She was obviously mortified. We agreed we’d report it and get our friends to report it too, but it wasn’t taken down fast enough because other orthobros immediately started screenshotting and reposting it.”

The image spread across the X ecosystem like wildfire. And suddenly the discourse was no longer about dating culture, Orthodoxy, or relationships at all. It became a public stoning.

Katherine was called a slut. A whore. A hypocrite. And thousands of supposedly devout men seemed to enjoy every second of it.

But the story continued escalating until the source of the leaked image itself was uncovered.

An ex-boyfriend of Katherine’s, known online as @wrightwingman, had allegedly shared the image privately with a friend, who then leaked it publicly onto X. As the controversy grew, he inserted himself directly into the discourse with a lengthy statement attempting to justify the situation.

In it, he framed the public humiliation of his ex-girlfriend not as gossip or cruelty, but as a kind of moral warning for the Orthodox community.

The poor man, you see, bravely attempted to “pump the brakes” before tragically succumbing to the devastating temptation of an attractive woman sending him revealing photos during a flirtatious relationship.

Naturally, the only moral solution afterwards was to help leak those images online and publicly humiliate her for the protection of Christian society.

Truly heroic stuff.

Can we be so serious for five seconds here?

This is comedy-sketch-level gaslighting. The kind of moral reasoning that sounds like a Dennis Reynolds subplot from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where he engages in revenge porn as an act of community service.

And notably, at no point in Katherine’s article does she present herself as a saint or some icon of feminine purity. You can read the piece yourself, it’s simply an account of what many Orthodox women say they experience. The “holier-than-thou hypocrite” character was invented entirely retroactively so critics could accuse her of failing standards she never claimed to embody in the first place. Critics who, let me remind you, are incensed by the fact she suggested they use deodorant.

The entire spectacle ended up resembling the oldest story in the Bible. As one account on X put it: “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”

The sin, of course, was not just disobedience, but the immediate refusal to take responsibility. Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. Nobody looks inward.

Which is more or less the defining feature of modern gender wars online: suggest even mild self-reflection to either sex and the response is rarely introspection - it’s revolt.

Furthermore, the idea that anyone in this ecosystem is morally pristine is completely delusional. Online purity spirals are fueled by two things above all else.

First: resentment. The internet rewards finding more and more people who fail increasingly impossible standards because every new public humiliation creates another lolcow to point at. Nothing boosts self-esteem quite like finding someone slightly more dysfunctional than yourself.

Second: many of the loudest moral absolutists are not uniquely virtuous people. They are often people who have never actually lived. They haven’t conquered temptation so much as they lack the opportunity to encounter it. Which is why their souls end up corrupted by sins far uglier than lust — pride, bitterness, cruelty, envy, voyeurism.

We talk constantly about people being “ran through,” but there is something much darker than being sexually experienced: being spiritually ran through. A soul so marinated in resentment and internet humiliation that it can no longer distinguish morality from cruelty.

As Amy bluntly put it to me on the phone:

“I suspect a lot of these online bullies are not social. They don’t understand the messiness of human relationships. They are shut-ins who are always online — they don’t even interact with people enough to have the opportunity to sin.”

Harsh maybe, but there is clearly a phenomenon online of people mistaking isolation for righteousness.

I came across a clip joking about the concept of “weighted bodycounts,” which honestly might be the first useful contribution social media has made to modern gender discourse. The idea was simple: don’t judge promiscuity purely by raw numbers. Judge it by acceptance rate.

If a woman receives 100,000 propositions over her lifetime and says yes to 7, her acceptance rate is 0.007%. Meanwhile if a man receives 5 opportunities and says yes to all 5, congratulations - spiritually speaking, that man is shooting a perfect 100% from the field.

At a certain point you are not celibate by conviction. You are celibate by low demand.

Of course, nobody should actually be morally reduced to a spreadsheet of sexual history in the first place. But if the internet purity police are going to insist on freezing everyone’s sins in amber and constructing advanced sabermetrics for righteousness, we should at least make sure the methodology is statistically sound. You cannot spend every waking hour online screaming “bodycount matters” while conveniently ignoring opportunity-adjusted metrics. That is junk science.

Normal people are having sex. Normal people are sending nudes. Normal people who sincerely love God and care deeply about their spiritual lives are doing these things too. They are failing, repenting, struggling, relapsing, regretting, trying again — like human beings have done for all of recorded history.

And usually they work through those failures privately. With priests, pastors, friends and authentic relationships in the real world. Not with thousands of anonymous Twitter accounts calling them whores for sport.

If you have ever fallen deep enough into Instagram reels at 2 a.m., eventually the algorithm starts feeding you the “sad literature quote” videos. You know the ones. Dostoevsky quotes over Chopin nocturnes. Kafka excerpts over black-and-white footage of rainy streets. The gut punch reels. Which now includes a whole genre where people list the insults strangers have called them online followed by what they actually feel inside.

“Whore.”

Yeah, actually I’m pretty ashamed of the things I’ve done to feel loved and chosen by people. I pray that God forgives me everyday.

“Pathetic.”

I know. I’m trying.

“Ran through.”

“No roster. I’m actually disgusted by what lust has done to me.”

These videos get hundreds of thousands of likes because, despite what sanctimonious internet morons pretend, most people are painfully aware of their own brokenness already.

After all this controversy blew up, Katherine eventually deleted her entire X account.

People do not disappear from the internet because they are proud of having intimate photos spread across it. They disappear because shame, humiliation, and mass public scrutiny eventually become unbearable. And anyone honest with themselves knows anonymous “Christian” accounts calling someone worthless is not accountability.

Accountability seeks restoration. Public humiliation seeks spectacle.

There is a genuine spiritual sickness spreading through online religious spaces — not just Orthodoxy, but every denomination infected by algorithmic outrage. I covered this in a recent video I called “Christ vs The Culture War”.

The people quietly logging off in shame are usually not the ones most lost.

The people you should worry about are the ones staying online to throw stones.

Nowhere in Christianity are believers instructed to publicly humiliate sinners for entertainment. If anything, the command is the opposite: confront privately, forgive generously, restore gently. As one commenter quoted from Isaac the Syrian:

“Spread your cloak over the person who has fallen into sin.”

Compare that principle to what happened here. Thousands of people watched a young woman be publicly degraded in real time and treated it like halftime entertainment. And maybe the bleakest part is this: many of the people doing it genuinely believed they were the righteous ones.

I do not know if Katherine will ever read this. She may.

But I hope she knows this:

Shame is not proof that you are beyond redemption. It is proof that you still have a conscience. And no mob on the internet, especially one delighting in humiliation, gets to decide whether another human being is worthy of grace.

I’ve had much bigger controversies of my own over the years, ones that might have pushed someone with a lower tolerance for public humiliation to say bye bye forever. These days, though, I mostly get a kick out of it all. But in my own small way, I’ve experienced something very similar to what Katherine went through here.

When I was seventeen, a boy at my high school persistently texted me asking for nude photos.

We were both Christians. He was a handsome jock who, oddly enough, kept bringing me nerdy fantasy novels to read. I suppose there were not many girls in his social circle interested in discussing Tolkien between youth group meetings.

Luckily for me, unlike my friends with iPhones, my parents insisted I carry an ancient Telus brick phone with T9 texting and an antenna. The thing could barely access the weather, let alone take photos. So every day I’d open these little “send boobs” texts from this guy with neither the desire nor the technological capability to fulfill the request.

Naturally, at youth group, he never mentioned any of this in person.

Eventually, during some awkward conversation about books and flirting, he clarified that he did not want anything “too sexual.” Just a picture of my butt. In underwear.

For reasons known only to God and the underdeveloped frontal lobe of a seventeen-year-old girl, I thought: honestly, whatever. I was wearing giant panda-print granny shorts. I dug out an old Nokia digital camera, took the least erotic photograph ever captured by mankind, and emailed it to his jesusfreak777@hotmail.com account. (not the exact email but it was something like this lol)

Unfortunately, he neglected to mention that he shared this email with his father.

A church leader.

Despite the fact that I had spent a year ignoring “send boobs” texts from his son, I instantly became Jezebel overnight. Persona non grata.

Meanwhile his role in the situation seemingly evaporated into thin air, largely because there was no visible text chain attached to the photo itself. Not that either of us were villains in some grand moral drama. Looking back, it was obviously just hormones, awkwardness, and two stupid teenagers making stupid teenage decisions.

And honestly? I got off easy.

Before I graduated high school, police showed up to investigate a revenge porn ring after male students began trading girls’ nude photos around like Pokémon cards. Compared to what many of my peers experienced, my humiliating panda-shorts incident was a breeze.

I’ve never told that story publicly before, because why would I? Why would anyone voluntarily offer up one of their most humiliating teenage experiences for thousands of strangers to ridicule? I’m only sharing it now because it illustrates something important: almost everyone has stories like this that the public never sees.

Because this is reality.

Reality is messy. People make stupid decisions. Sexuality is messy. Religion is messy. Young people are insecure and lonely and desperate to feel desired. As are people in their 30’s and 40’s as well. Lust exists. Shame exists. Sometimes the wrong person gets blamed. Sometimes people fail to live up to their values.

And yet online, nobody seems willing to admit any of this. People act perpetually scandalized the moment something quintessentially human makes its way onto their timelines. And all the LARPing behind digital skinsuits assembled from cross emojis, Byzantine icons, and aestheticized moral superiority ultimately does one thing:

It drives thoughtful, sincere people away from both conservative and Christian spaces online.

Even Amy admitted this controversy made her hesitate to publicly identify as Orthodox at all. “I’m not questioning Orthodoxy,” she told me. “I’m questioning branding myself Orthodox online.”

“I briefly took it out of my bio because I didn’t want to be associated with these people. I put it back in because I still want people introduced to the Church, because Orthodoxy has genuinely been good for my life. But I also want people to know there are sane, kind, normal Orthodox Christians. The online version of Orthodoxy feels completely disconnected from real-life Orthodoxy.”

She added that many longtime members are becoming increasingly frustrated by waves of hyper-political converts:

“A lot of these extremists are brand-new converts with convert zeal. They’re not the people who built or sustained these churches. They’re politically religious, not spiritually religious.”

I spoke to several other Orthodox Christians while investigating this controversy, including Tim Andrews, an ordained Reader at St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Washington D.C., who echoed a similar sentiment, assuring me it wasn’t just women or alleged “feminists” annoyed with this all.

“All Orthodox people I know were disgusted by anonymous accounts trying to attack Katherine. Not a single comment criticizing her was made by someone who dared to put their name to it. The actual Orthodox community, as opposed to online LARPers, were absolutely disgusted and repulsed by the vile anti-Christian attacks on her and the morally reprehensible revenge porn attempts that go against everything the church believes.”

In another particularly funny comment, Andrews added:

“I know for a fact all our clergy are incensed about this, but struggle because “gigachadAnimeLover” anon twitter accounts don’t correspond to reality, they never attend church they just LARP as trads for online clout.”

It’s a similar experience to one I’ve had within broader Protestant spaces too. Almost none of the online discourse about religion seems to correlate with the people actually trying to live it in the real world.

Which creates a fascinating crisis for Christian leaders: how do you protect your congregation from a force that does not physically exist? How do you fight the corruption of minds and the public tarnishing of your faith by anonymous people your church has never even met? A kind of digital parasite feeding on religion while barely participating in it.

And worse still, the battlefield itself poisons people upon entry.

When I was younger, I struggled deeply with the concept of hell. Why, I wondered, doesn’t God simply go there and save everyone from it? C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce contains an idea that brought me some peace: hell is so small that God simply cannot fit there. Love is too real, too expansive, too solid a thing to enter such a cramped and self-imposed place. The doors are locked from the inside. To leave requires growth. One has to willingly become larger than their own bitterness.

The internet increasingly feels like that kind of place. A tiny world for tiny souls. Small-minded fights. Endless resentments compressed into algorithmic cages. Everyone staring through keyholes at each other’s failures.

The real world is where healing begins. The spiritual life is where growth begins. And so there is a strange irony to this entire story.

Katherine was publicly shamed, digitally executed, and effectively driven offline.

But perhaps disappearing from this ecosystem is not entirely a tragedy. Perhaps being exiled from a place this spiritually corrosive is, in some strange way, a form of mercy.

Perhaps Katherine wins in the end.

I walked into the Renaissance Phoenix Hotel lobby and actually laughed to myself. Only two years earlier I’d walked into that exact same lobby for AMFEST 2023. That year, after spotting a few characters from the “Whatever” podcast roaming around among the usual constellation of internet personalities, I immediately made a beeline for the elevator, went to my room, and booked the first flight home. I am not exaggerating.

Ashley St. Clair and Eva Vlaardingerbroek practically smuggled me out while assuring me they completely understood why I wanted absolutely nothing to do with being there.

At that point I was nearing the peak of my disgust with the online world. Little did I know that less than a year later I’d manage to get myself cancelled by every possible faction simultaneously. Russian agent to the left, relationship scandal to the right. A real bipartisan achievement.

But it had been a long time since I’d attended a major political event. I’d spent most of the last year offline. I’d released a book, then proceeded to reject almost every interview request that came with it.

And strangely, I felt ready to dip a toe back into that world again, but with an entirely different perspective.

I wasn’t arriving as someone looking to network, climb the social ladder, or mingle. It felt more like staring into the fishbowl from the outside for the first time. My career was no longer tied to any of these people. I’d finally decoupled my identity from this world and rooted it in something they couldn’t touch.

So what did it all look like now?

Honestly, it felt a bit like attending a high school reunion.

Actually, scratch that. It felt more like showing up back at high school after disappearing for two years because of a teen pregnancy scandal.

Given how spectacularly cancelled I’d become in right-wing circles between 2024 and 2025, I was very aware of the whispering behind my back. Between publishing This Is Not Real Life - which opened a Pandora’s box of criticism about the scene itself - and my messy personal life becoming bizarrely fascinating to far too many strangers, let’s just say I was under no illusion that I’d be receiving a hero’s welcome.

Though, ironically, that is exactly what I got.

Everyone was incredibly nice to me.

Almost suspiciously nice.

The kind of nice that only exists in political and media circles where everyone has either publicly denounced you, privately (but never publicly) defended you, secretly gossiped about you, or some combination of all three.

Political people are rarely confrontational in person unless there’s an audience nearby to perform for. Though I can hardly pretend to be much better.

At one point I shared an awkward elevator ride with Elijah Schaffer after watching him livestream himself yelling prayers at random boomers while holding a giant crucifix over them. For content, obviously.

We exchanged polite small talk while I studied him carefully. It was obvious how much he’d changed since we first met years ago. Allegedly, he even met his wife at one of my speeches back in the day. The internet, or maybe just the strange low-grade fame that exists inside political media, had clearly done something corrosive to his brain. He seemed manic.

I wandered off afterward and ignored the texts he sent me pitching some kind of business venture.

Not my battle to fight today.

Though I suppose everybody says that eventually. Not my battle. And that’s probably why nothing ever improves. Everyone is operating from some level of self-preservation.

Though, in my defense, I’m not exactly in a position to become a martyr right now. I already had a few millionaires who would probably love to see me locked inside a shipping container somewhere, so let’s all extend a little grace here.

The convention itself ended up being far more fascinating than I expected. Beyond visiting old friends, I was also recording with an outlet investigating the shady influence networks operating behind the scenes in politics.

I’d made a promise to myself that if I was going to dip my toes back into this world, I had to approach it differently. Less participating. More observing. More trying to understand the manipulation and inauthenticity rather than getting swallowed by it again.

Though unfortunately, I still remain susceptible to distractions.

Particularly personal grievances.

Which, honestly, may be the primary motivator for most political personalities, even more than money.

I always loved the underlying theme in The Social Network: Zuckerberg, Saverin, Parker - all these men building world-changing companies while being driven largely by insecurity, revenge, status anxiety, and interpersonal resentment.

That’s much closer to how these worlds actually function.

On the first day of the conference I wandered through the halls and immediately started feeling nauseated. The entire thing felt grotesquely gaudy.

I descended in a giant elevator wrapped with a twenty-foot-tall image of Charlie Kirk plastered across the side, down into a convention center that looked less like a political event and more like a strange hybrid of Times Square and Universal Studios.

Once I escaped media row - filled with micro-celebrities being trailed around by fans like it was some kind of conservative cosplay convention - I passed endless booths of laughing men in blue suits recycling the same twenty right-wing talking points they’d been repeating since roughly 2015.

Then I entered the vendor hall.

Which was somehow worse.

There was a flashing neon sign that indicated some kind of: “PRAYER BOOTH.”

Beside it: hot tubs, massage chairs, and endless “CALL 1-800-555-BLAHBLAH” boomer-bait products being aggressively marketed to retirees in quarter-zips.

And worst of all, there was a replica of the tent Charlie Kirk had been shot under, repurposed as a photo-op for influencers to take selfies in front of.

Directly across from a woman selling $500 sequined Charlie Kirk jackets.

Now, I’m not above enjoying nice hotels or expensive shoes or makeup or vanity. But there are levels of materialism, especially when fused with politics and spirituality, that should make any healthy culture feel physically ill.

It became difficult to see the convention as anything other than a grotesque parody of both the man who died and the broader state of American politics.

And to be fair, I’m not indicting every individual involved. There were genuinely good people there doing meaningful work. But anyone with two functioning brain cells could still recognize the broader spectacle for what it was:

A circus.

And speaking of circuses, and my unfortunate tendency toward personal distractions, of course there had to be a few familiar acts.

Time practically slowed to a crawl when I spotted The Quartering (Jeremy Hambly) tucked into a tiny blue booth in the far back corner of the vendor hall, livestreaming with a few women I vaguely recognized from the internet, including one of Tim Pool’s rotating co-hosts.

And watching them, I was suddenly struck by how bizarre the entire ecosystem had become.

Most of these podcast co-hosts exist almost exclusively as human laugh tracks and hype-men for the main personality. I’m genuinely not convinced many of them could survive pushing back in any meaningful way against the low-effort headline-slop content strategy most right-wing podcasts have evolved into.

I’ve done both Jeremy’s and Tim’s shows. No one on these shows does any real preparation before going live. No articles sent beforehand. No research packets. Everyone just sits in a circle trying to improvise entertaining reactions using the roughly one percent knowledge they possess on any given topic, supplemented by frantic Googling on their phones whenever the camera cuts away from them.

You can literally watch everyone performing the same exhausted mental gymnastics between topic changes. Every story gets discussed for about two to five minutes before everyone collectively moves on to the next outrage pellet.

When I was younger, I barely questioned any of this. Of course not. When you’re young, you’re a genius. And when you avoid thinking too hard about anything, you get to remain a genius indefinitely.

But as I got older (and as the consequences of this ecosystem started affecting me personally), it became impossible to ignore how psychologically corrosive this entire content machine really was. And yes, obviously I’m selfish too. Most people only fully understand systemic dysfunction once it starts humiliating them specifically.

I wrote extensively about this in my book. But honestly, publishing it only gave me an even clearer front-row seat to the machine in action.

Most of This Is Not Real Life was about social media, ego, corruption, fame, loneliness, manipulation, undercover operatives, love, and the spiritual consequences of living online.

But naturally, the internet focused almost exclusively on anything involving sex.

Particularly the section discussing Andrew Tate’s assault on me.

I’m not going to relitigate the entire thing again because I’ve already written enough Substacks about it to qualify for psychological warfare compensation.

The point is: the clickbait ecosystem, especially figures like Tim and Jeremy, immediately latched onto the story because they knew it could generate engagement.

And what made it worse was how obvious it became that neither of them had actually read the material they were discussing. Now, it’s one thing to say: “Here’s what people online are claiming, I haven’t reviewed everything yet, we’ll wait for more information.”

That would at least be intellectually honest.

Instead, both of them simply went on air and declared: “She’s lying.”

No evidence presented to their audience. I never got a phone call, text or email for a statement. No invitation to respond. Nothing. Despite both of them having known me personally for years. Tim for over a decade.

But I think they understood something very important:

Accuracy doesn’t matter in this ecosystem.

They haven’t cultivated audiences that consume longform nuance or thoughtful analysis. They’ve cultivated audiences trained to absorb prepackaged opinions about headlines like babies being airplane-fed orange paste.

And there is perhaps no more profitable internet headline than:

“Dumb bitch lies about rape.”

The most revealing part is that they didn’t even bother getting the basic facts right.

Jeremy outright claimed - first on X, before deleting the posts - that I never went to the police, had zero evidence, and fabricated everything for money. Every single one of those claims was already directly addressed in chapters I released publicly, for free.

He also leaned on Tommy Robinson saying I lied. I responded to Tommy point-by-point and debunked him publicly. Since then, Tommy has done what these people usually do once specifics enter the conversation: ignored the rebuttal and moved on.

Then there’s Tate, whose “response” was essentially just “she’s lying.” Despite repeatedly threatening legal action, he still hasn’t managed to send something as simple as a cease and desist.

Of course Jeremy won’t mention any of that.

Because actually engaging with evidence would interrupt the performance. He skimmed a few sentences that could be clipped into a convenient “Lauren bad” narrative, then spent the rest of the segment whining that I declined his “very generous” job offer.

For the record: it was $200 a week.

And naturally, after all that, he called me a dumb whore.

Par for the course. Though I do wish my critics would occasionally surprise me with a new insult. The material is getting stale.

As I walked past his booth, I could feel myself staring holes through him while he rambled to his livestream audience, confidently wrong about something as usual I’m sure.

And for a brief moment I seriously considered walking directly into frame, pulling up a chair beside him with a giant grin on my face, and making him explain the details of a case he had confidently monetized without apparently spending even four consecutive minutes researching.

I grumbled and thought better of it. I wasn’t trying to turn myself into a spectacle again. I’m trying to become more mature now. Allegedly. Part of maturity, unfortunately, seems to involve suppressing one’s natural instinct for bloodsports.

So instead I wandered back across the street to the hotel where I was staying with my friend Caroline and spent the next hour getting ready for a party that evening, mentally chewing on the question of where exactly the line exists between defending yourself and getting permanently trapped inside the outrage machine.

Is it actually healthy to let people lie about you to massive audiences without consequence?

Or does trying to correct every lie just condemn you to endless public mud wrestling? Are people like TheQuartering - endless online gossiping, rage-farming, confidently lying into microphones for profit - simply an unavoidable feature of the internet now? And if you fight back, do you just end up dragged into the same swamp? You know the saying: never wrestle pigs. They enjoy it and you just get filthy.

I’ve never really figured out where the correct balance lies.

That night I went to James O’Keefe’s party and immediately found myself surrounded by a million faces I recognized from internet-land. Self-appointed groyper generals. Trad larp accounts made flesh. Conspiracy schizoids. Influencers I’d known since the 2015–2016 era of political internet insanity.

Every interaction was positive. Or at least positive on the surface.

And to be fair, there were absolutely people there I genuinely liked.

But unfortunately I have an extremely good memory when it comes to the internet.

I’d missed a lot during my hiatus, but during the peak of my cancellation in late 2024 I was still terminally online enough to remember exactly what many people had said about me.

There were only a handful of these types who actively said hello, and as they smiled and reached out to shake my hand - “Lauren! Huge fan of your work. We should catch up sometime. Want to take a photo?” - I could practically see their old tweets floating above their heads like subtitles.

“Dumb slut was never really right-wing.”

“HAHAHAHA get fucked.”

“Hope she never comes back.”

And then I’d smile warmly and shake their hand back.

Ew.

Part of me felt I couldn’t really judge them as cowards when I was also choosing not to say anything back. But the larger part of me simply could not be bothered. I kept wandering away from the crowds throughout the night just to observe things from a distance.

At one point I sat at the bar with an old fan of my work who told me he used to watch my videos in high school. I laughed at how ancient that suddenly made me feel, and then we both watched as a woman in lingerie performed burlesque inside a giant martini glass for a roaring conservative audience.

Despite how absurd the whole scene was, in some ways it felt more honest than the actual conference. I don’t recall James O’Keefe ever pretending to be some steward of traditionalism anyway.

Eventually Caroline and I wandered back to the hotel and stayed awake talking until we both passed out.

The next day was more of the same. A few interviews. Lunch with friends. More wandering and observing. That evening I was heading to grab dinner when I glanced into a crowded restaurant and spotted a few familiar faces sitting together in the corner.

And there he was.

Jeremy. The Quartering.

Sitting with members of his team alongside a few old friends I recognized from TimCast.

The part of me wondering whether I was about to make a spectacle of myself suddenly died.

There weren’t even cameras rolling.

Could it really be that bad?

The mischievous little imp living inside me - the one that has, over the years, contributed to me being banned from multiple countries - slowly began curling the corners of my mouth upward as I made a beeline for his table.

I grabbed a chair from a nearby high-top, dragged it across the floor, and slid directly across from Jeremy with a grin.

“Well, look who it is.”

Jeremy looked like he’d just seen a ghost. He physically tried looking away from me.

“So,” I said, still smiling, “why’d you make that video about me?”

“What video?”

“You know. The one where you AI-edited me pregnant with Andrew Tate’s child.”

“Oh.” He shrugged awkwardly. “That’s just the business. You get it.”

“No, not really. I actually don’t. Why did you lie and tell your audience I never went to the hospital or the police?”

“Well…” he stammered, “I don’t really know the case that well. It’s incomplete.”

I blinked at him.

“Then why did you make a video about it?”

The table had gone almost completely silent at this point.

“I did go to the police. I did go to the hospital. And I’m literally testifying in multiple cases.”

“Oh. Really?” he muttered. “I didn’t know that. Well… it wasn’t really about that anyways. I heard you were talking shit about me in some group chat.”

I actually laughed.

“...Wait. You made a video lying about a human trafficking case, called me a whore, and edited me pregnant because you heard I said something mean about you in a group chat?”

“Yeah,” he said defensively. “I don’t like being betrayed.”

“Show me the message.”

At this point the entire table was frozen in awkward silence while I leaned forward pressing him for answers. Jeremy sat fumbling with his phone while his co-host Melanie Mac stared at him from the side with the expression of someone watching a slow-motion car accident.

He scrolled for what felt like several full minutes before finally sighing.

“I dunno. I can’t find it. Anyways, when the case is done I’ll make an apology video, okay?”

“Yeah, sure buddy,” I said. “We’ll see if that ever happens.”

“I will,” he insisted. “I mean it.”

I didn’t believe him then and I definitely don’t believe him now.

As of last week, the case has already been pushed back another year due to police opening a new investigation involving additional evidence. That’s how these things always go. The people who farmed the initial outrage never have to meaningfully correct themselves because there’s always another excuse to delay accountability indefinitely.

The clicks already happened.

That’s the only part that really mattered.

I left the table and wandered back toward the hotel feeling admittedly pretty smug about the interaction. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching a man who confidently broadcasts opinions to hundreds of thousands of people immediately collapse into awkward mumbling the second he’s confronted in real life.

But even then, none of it actually felt like justice.

Nobody at the table stood up and said, “Wow, that’s actually a horrific thing to do to someone.”

Nobody walked away from working with him. Nobody corrected the record. The video stayed up.

And honestly, I understand why.

Because everyone in these systems, including me, always has an infinite supply of explanations for their own behavior.

I need my career.
I need access to powerful people.
They’re misunderstood.
They’re trying their best.

Human beings have endless moral outrage for the sins of strangers and endless extenuating circumstances for their own.

I don’t fully understand the current Quartering drama.

I’m no longer terminally online enough to follow every livestream, Discord leak, and four-hour YouTube rant, so I only know fragments from clips, posts, and articles I’ve stumbled across.

From what I can gather, he’s currently facing backlash after feuding with channels like Kino Casino.

The central controversy seems to be that Kino Casino heavily mocked and criticized him, after which Jeremy allegedly began threatening to go “scorched earth” while attempting to report, flag, or demonetize their channels.

Which, naturally, many people found deeply ironic.

Because criticizing, mocking, targeting, and publicly humiliating other internet personalities has quite literally been the business model Jeremy built his career around for years.

What’s strange for me though is that I know almost all the characters involved in these endless online wars, at least tangentially, in real life. And honestly, I care far more about how people behave offline than whatever narrative is unfolding online that week.

Kino Casino was founded in part by Andy Warski. We haven’t hung out properly in a long while, but when we were younger we used to go out in Toronto to grab brunch or hit the town. I vividly remember EDM clubbing with Andy and his girlfriend during the peak of his bloodsports era, a genre he largely founded in the early online days.

I also recently learned from Ian Miles Cheong that apparently Andy and I had a sexual relationship. News to me. Though to Andy’s credit - and unlike many men online who happily let that kind of rumor circulate indefinitely - he immediately tweeted at Ian asking what the hell he was talking about.

Which honestly made me laugh.

Anyways, the whole thing feels surreal sometimes. I have all these bizarre interpersonal connections to people constantly waging nuclear internet wars against one another over livestream clips and audience capture and online territory.

And then you see them in real life and they’re just… people.

People you’ve eaten tacos with at 2 a.m, who you’ve wandered around Manhattan bars with or watched cry over relationships, stress over work dramas or celebrate wins.

It genuinely feels at times like I accidentally grew up alongside an entire generation of internet personalities who all became progressively more psychologically damaged in public together.

And then there’s Jeremy and his circle.

I’m sure they’ve got stories like this too. Hanging out together in real life. Going to bars. Meeting girlfriends. Helping each other move apartments. Existing as actual people away from livestreams and analytics dashboards.

Because offline is kind of the entire point of all this.

That’s the weird truth underneath all of internet culture. Most creators don’t actually want “online influence.” They want the real-life influence that comes from online influence.

Most internet creators were nerds growing up. Losers even. Awkward. Lonely. Weird. Socially anxious. Mildly autistic. Overweight. Obsessed with escapism and identity construction. And before anyone gets offended, relax, a lot of those things applied to me too.

The internet just gives people the opportunity to edit themselves into someone they wish they already were.

And once people build an identity around that version of themselves, they cling to it like it’s oxygen. Because deep down I think a lot of creators are terrified that if the views disappear, or the money disappears, or the audience leaves, they’ll be forced to sit alone with themselves again. Which, quite frankly, is a terrifying experience. I just did it myself the last year and it was fucking awful.

What’s one to do without an algorithmically generated sense of purpose? Without a constant feedback loop telling you who you are?

No little stream of dopamine notifications reassuring you that you exist and people care.

Without it, you find out very quickly that a shocking number of your friendships only last as long as the money, relevance, and status do.

Which is why Jeremy is now publicly lamenting being “thrown under the bus” by old colleagues and internet allies. But were these people ever really deep friends? Or were they mostly business partners? The friendships being all part of the digital play?

Because once someone starts spiraling publicly, mass flagging channels, threatening “scorched earth,” deleting things, crashing out every few hours online… you really stop being a very appealing business associate.

Most people in these spaces are not surrounded by genuine friends. They’re surrounded by employees. Orbiters. Co-hosts. Networking connections. People whose careers are tied together like a weird little human centipede of audience overlap.

The people who actually stay in your life during a real crisis are usually the people willing to tell you you’re acting like a complete idiot. Not your employees, other podcast hosts, or people financially tied to your reputation.

Real friends can smack you upside the head and still love you afterward.

Now, I’ve seen Melonie Mac (Jeremy’s co-host) defending him through all this current controversy, and honestly maybe they really are genuinely close in real life. I can’t say. I only know the broader patterns I’ve seen after spending way too much of my life trapped in online culture.

I saw Melonie posting about how disgusting internet drama cycles are and how creators manipulate audiences into emotionally investing in endless bloodsports while farming outrage clicks off them.

And honestly?

I agree with her.

But I also had the thought that maybe the call is coming from inside the house?

Anyone who has had a public profile needs to be aware of how easy it is to get trapped in an endless dopamine loop of approval-seeking and ego protection. A loop where eventually anything threatening your public image starts feeling like an existential threat.

Which is how someone arrives at:

“It’s okay to lie about a trafficking case because I heard Lauren said something mean about me in a group chat.”

Or

“It’s okay to try to destroy someone’s income because they criticized me online.”

The self-justification just escalates infinitely because addiction escalates infinitely.

And honestly, I understand Melonie’s instinct to defend Jeremy. There’s even something admirable about loyalty sometimes, even when it’s misplaced.

There are people in my life you will simply never see me publicly attack online because the relationship matters more to me than internet points.

I think the problem starts when someone else weaponizes the machine first though.

I dealt with this after my marriage ended. My ex emailed podcasters and creators a false version of events and I spent years mostly staying quiet because I had absolutely no interest in dragging my private life online. But eventually the story just kept growing and mutating and spreading until I finally addressed it publicly.

And by then it almost didn’t matter.

The original accusation always spreads farther than the correction.

Which is why creators slowly spiral into this paranoid state of pre-emptive self-defense where they stop reacting to attacks and start reacting to the possibility of attacks.

You can literally see it in Jeremy’s explanation for why he made defamatory content about me.

He “heard I said something mean in a group chat.”

That’s how fragile internet identity becomes eventually. The reputation becomes everything. These creators are beyond truth, fairness or proportionality. They just care about protecting the avatar at all costs.

And I get the temptation because I’ve watched my own public reputation collapse multiple times now and honestly it does feel like a kind of psychological death. I also do know a variety of paths I could’ve taken to “save it” - and I sometimes envy creators who defend themselves in ways that I simply never did.

But eventually, part of you has to let it die.

Because if you spend your entire life trying to crush criticism, silence people, control every narrative, punish dissent, and protect your ego at all costs, eventually you start behaving like you think you’re God.

And no human being survives that mindset for very long.

Eventually reality humiliates everybody.

Which is why when I watch these endless online rampages now - the smears, the betrayals, the ego spirals, the attempts to destroy people - I mostly just feel strangely calm about it all.

Because maybe it takes months. Maybe years. Maybe an entire decade.

But eventually God always gets the last laugh.

The internet is full of people performing omniscience for an audience while privately unraveling under the weight of their own ego. It’s a stage where everyone demands worship and eventually receives humiliation instead.

And honestly, there’s something comforting about that.

Because the sheer inevitability with which people collapse under the fantasy of their own godhood is one of the strongest arguments I’ve ever seen that human beings were never meant to occupy that role in the first place.

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I’ve been listening to Freakin Out by Dexter and The Moonrocks a lot lately. If you’ve been on Instagram Reels, you’ve probably heard it, even if you didn’t know the name. It usually plays over montages of early 2000s nostalgia: clips of old games, skate videos, grainy camcorder footage. Then the guitar kicks in, and the caption hits: “remember who you are white boy.”

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Halo 2. LAN parties. Monster Energy. Smash Mouth. WWE. Monster trucks. It’s a very specific kind of memory, but what’s interesting is how widely it resonates. Despite the “remember who you are white boy” tagline, the clips generally receive overwhelming support from every ethnicity. Black men and women in the comments noting “yes please, we miss this kind of white guy” or saying they relate to the sentiment themselves. Among other ethnicities showing their own love and support for the trend. I’ve seen people with LGBT flags in their bios liking these clips. There’s various less popular versions for white women and other ethnic groups, but the “white boy” one is clearly the most dominant.

Largely due to the fact that the song “Freakin Out” itself is heavily reminiscent of what people now call “white boy” alt-rock music. I think of Linkin Park or Blink 182, similar vibe. That era of emo and alt-rock gave space for an intensity and vulnerability it feels like men aren’t allowing themselves to have these days. Everything now seems too polished or overly self-aware.

Of course at the time nobody was calling it “white boy” music. It was just music. There was something refreshing about that period, where people just gravitated toward whatever resonated with them, without constantly framing it through identity politics. Our main concern was whether something felt real and whether it was good.

It’s been noted extensively that had The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King been released today, there would be a litany of right-wing coded political commentators decrying it as “woke nonsense” given Eowyn’s line of “I am no man” before defeating the Witch King of Angmar.

Or think of an absolute classic like Holes, starring Shia LaBeouf. I rewatched it recently, and it reminded me just how widely loved that film was when it came out. But let’s be so for real, like LOTR it could hardly survive our current cultural scrutiny. One of its central plotlines involves the lynching of a black man over his relationship with a white woman. A woman who then goes on to become a legendary outlaw in her own right.

You can almost hear the “uhm akshually’s” from here that would resound across X dot com had the movie dropped within the last five years. Women couldn’t be bandits! Eowyn couldn’t beat the witch king! This is all woke propaganda!

It’s worth considering whether we destroyed the world we now long for.

Coming back to the “Freakin Out” Reels/TikTok trend, it’s hard to ignore how much of the response, across all kinds of backgrounds, feels almost like an olive branch. In some cases, it’s framed exactly that way. You’ll see edits where a goth girl flashes clips of Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan, symbols of the current online discourse, before the tone shifts. As the guitar swells in Freakin Out, she reaches her hand toward the camera, like she’s pulling you out of that world entirely.

Then the montage hits: early 2000s clips, grainy and unfiltered, full of life. The noise of the culture war dissolves into something warmer. A shared memory we all had.

One we all clearly long for.

In fact, Freakin Out is currently the only rock song breaking into the Top 200. It’s the lone representative of the genre on the charts right now, and it’s climbing. The track has surged across platforms: hitting #1 on Apple Music, Shazam, and alternative radio, while continuing to gain traction elsewhere. Moreso, it’s not a nostalgia act or a legacy band. It’s something new, cutting through in a space where rock has largely been absent.

And then there’s Dexter and The Moonrocks themselves. These aren’t industry-built stars. They’re working-class guys in their mid-20s to 30s. People who’ve lived normal lives: a fry cook, a concrete surface decorator, an oil field worker, a kids’ baseball coach.

There’s no obvious political angle, no sense of it being engineered to say something beyond what it is. This feels like the anthem for a generation rediscovering how to create again. To create without politics anyway. The didacticism of the 2010’s and 2020’s is officially out of fashion.

It was recently revealed that Tucker Carlson’s paid viewership is significantly lower than what many thought. The Daily Wire has gone through mass layoffs. Even Joe Rogan lost his spot as the top podcast last year. There’s a growing fatigue with the “politically captured” version of the modern man. What was framed as a kind of awakening often feels, in hindsight, like people ended up in a matrix within a matrix.

I’ve known these guys, some are friends. They were deep in the forums, shaping parts of the culture war in the 2010s through memes and right wing pages. Hosting speaking events and protests. Now they’re in their 30s, working regular jobs, looking back on the last decade with a sense of disappointment. The question keeps coming up: what did any of it actually lead to?

People who were voting for Justin Trudeau or Hilary Clinton a decade ago are now regular listeners of right-wing podcasts. Meanwhile, the more transgressive, early culture-war crowd is burned out. Able to recognize the repetition, the recycled outrage, the same handful of ideas repackaged endlessly.

There’s a shared exhaustion. A sense of wanting to go back to something before all of this, before “woke vs anti-woke” became the dominant frame. 4chan and Tumblr existed as a containment zone for the cringiest parts of our respective parties to fight one another so the rest of us could live in peace. We were never meant to all be poasters.

Across the spectrum, few people seem genuinely satisfied with where the extremes have taken things, or how much it’s seeped into everyday life.

There was something ostensibly more masculine about skateboarding, fighting in mosh pits and even playing Halo 2 with a pizza and your boys than sitting doom scrolling in bed and liking memes about going on crusades that will never happen. We can all sense that.

And in its own way, there was something ostensibly more progressive about being able to appreciate each other’s quirks and differences without constantly foregrounding race or identity. Certainly over trying to bully the working class into using words like LatinX.

We have gone backwards. We have become less authentic. More tribal. Less thinking. More focused on performing for a faction than creating anything of beauty, let alone enjoying life. We fear being excluded by the cult more than we fear not living. People are terrified of having any unique personality at all lest it be perceived as “cringe” by the masses.

Well I say the shift has begun. Dare to be cringe. Dare to reject the culture war slop. Dare to feel something again, blast Radiohead in your car, be a romantic, go dance, go live a little. We can do better than a world where the two parties, or the worst of the genders, hold us psychologically hostage.

This moment, this reaction to Freakin Out, is simple. The world is telling the boys who got caught up in the culture war… you are not hated. You are not the enemy. Not everything has to be filtered through conflict. Don’t let the media reframe things because they want to monetize your angst.

In fact, we miss you.

For a lot of people, the last decade was a slow drift away from themselves.

Well, now it’s time to remember.

Remember who you are white boy.

“Swimming eh, in this cold? You like to skinny dip? Was seeing me half naked at the gym not enough for you?”

I grimace as I see the words flash on my phone.

A guy from my gym asked for my number. He’s nice enough. Harmless, even. But sadly, the above is not an exception: we’ve exchanged maybe six messages total, and every single one has managed to veer (almost impressively) into something vaguely sexual.

Quite frankly, I cannot imagine texting something sexual to someone I just met. I would be mortified. The idea alone makes my skin crawl. But maybe I’m the problem. I can’t exactly claim expertise here - I’ve never been on the apps and haven’t dated for a few years now. I’m clearly out of the loop on whatever the current social norms are supposed to be. So I call a girlfriend of mine who has been on an absolute Hinge binge and ask if this is normal.

“Oh yeah, Lauren,” she giggles on the other end of the phone. “That’s just how they all are now.”

This is Julia.

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I grew up surrounded by religious communities, but when I look at online Christian spaces today, I struggle to recognize the values I was taught, or the message of Jesus Christ I grew up hearing. What changed? What went wrong? And why have I come to the controversial opinion that there are no Christians online? Watch my latest video essay now.

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If you’ve made it all the way here, thank you for reading. You’re probably not among the people I’m about to discuss, or perhaps you’re at the early stages of finding your way out of cult-like dynamics. I’m still making that journey myself, and I’m glad to have you walking alongside me.

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First of all, I would like to say, if you haven’t figured out that X is hell yet, both literally and figuratively, I genuinely don’t know what to tell you.

But if you’re not looking at it from that angle, that’s fine too.

Still plenty to unpack in the world of “slut, bimbo, whore” accusations on the internet, which many online fall victim to. You may have seen a few, or, let’s be honest, MANY directed my way over the last few months… or years.

Truly, it’s fast becoming one of my favourite guilty pleasures to read the ever-expanding fanfictions about my life, though sadly, I don’t have as much time for it as I’d like. Between supposedly raising (or aborting?) Destiny’s love child and juggling all my torrid affairs, I’m quite the busy lady!

I kid.

Sorry, I don’t quite live up to the hype of my supposed man-eater reputation. To address a few things I’ve seen circling online: no, I never cheated on my ex-husband or stole our son, there was no love child, affair, or secret pregnancy. Nor did I sleep with half the right wing to write all my content.

Much to the disappointment of gossip enthusiasts, my romantic life is far less dramatic than the internet insists on imagining. I’m not even surpassing the average body count numbers for my age, which is truly devastating for my legacy as Canada’s premier harlot.

Still, if you’re parched for tea, my book does serve up some delightfully scandalous chapters, both telling the truth and addressing the creative writing that’s been circulating online. The origin stories behind some of the rumours about my life are equal parts sinister and hilarious. And as for the true stories, they’re more real and complicated than anything you’ll ever see online as well.

Though here’s the thing when it comes to all the gossip… even if every wild rumour about my personal life were true, so what?

Seriously. So what.

I spent my early 20s going viral on YouTube for legally changing my gender to male for kicks and giggles, did riot tourism, got banned from half a dozen countries, was detained under the Terrorism Act, and eventually got swept up in a Russian foreign influence indictment where federal agents tried to turn me into an asset.

Like, hello?? Did you expect me to have a normal personal life??

I could maybe understand the fixation on my personal antics if I were still styling myself as some kind of “trad life” influencer, but it’s been years since I quite publicly rejected that label and critiqued the performative nature of the whole thing - and it is performative.

And sure, I probably did deserve a bit of “leopards ate your face” when my marriage ended. Oh well. We live and learn.

I’ll take the progressives getting a few kicks in while I’m down. Honestly, I prefer that to the feigned concern about my soul or my life trajectory from strangers online. I mean, come on now.

Quite frankly, there are far too many people who have never experienced having their personal life ripped from context, dramatized online, and served up for public consumption, yet feel bizarrely entitled to voyeuristically opine on every sliver of information they scrape together.

Masses of strangers have appointed themselves the moral arbiters of my existence, treating me less like a person than like a character in a story who owes them a plotline they approve of.

The version of my life the terminally online right-wing internet prefers is one where my marriage never ended, the “trad” narrative stayed on track, and I continued performing domestic bliss for an audience invested in the fantasy.

In that version, it doesn’t matter what was happening behind closed doors. It doesn’t matter if the reality involved fear, instability, or humiliation - wiping my eyes dry just long enough to post cheerful little pie photos, role-playing the perfect life because that’s what the script demanded.

They don’t care about what actually brings joy, safety, or health. They care about what fits inside a narrow, rigid template of what a life is “supposed” to look like, as if happiness is a video game: press the correct sequence of buttons and you’re guaranteed the right ending.

And of course, my life after that marriage ended - including my relationship with the liberal streamer Destiny, which I write about in my book - certainly did not fit the preferred script.

If you’re unfamiliar with the “lore,” here’s the timing: the very same day I was flying out to Ottawa in late 2024 - under threat of criminal charges - to testify before the Canadian government that I was not, in fact, a Russian spy, my old DMs with Destiny (Steven Bonnell) were leaked.

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“Tone… these bozos never even heard of the Deaf and Dumb rule. Can you believe it?”

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