Hello, it’s me, your Gen X auntie who spends too much time online. I regret to inform you that I’ve been on a journey and, like Hermes bringing information from the underworld to mortals, I am here to tell you about the poor, unfortunate lost souls I’ve become aware of against my will. They have names like Sneako and Clavicular – and if I have to know about them, you do too.
It starts with a livestream and a boys’ night out, although these aren’t your ordinary frat boys or celebrities. They are some of the internet’s most infamous edgelords, caricatures of men, masculinity and fashion.
A limo rolled up to a Miami Beach nightclub and out tumbled General Groyper, Nick “America First (Jews Last)” Fuentes, the freshly un-house-arrested Tate brothers still LARPing as billionaire alphas, Sneako (Tate fanboy, now Fuentes’s twinkish sidekick), teenage looksmaxxing prodigy Clavicular (most famous for taking a hammer to his face – no, I’m not making that up), Myron Gaines (the ex-Homeland Security agent turned “high-value male” dating guru), Justin Waller (Andrew Tate’s redpilled hype man who thinks steel buildings and stoicism make you irresistible), and the rest of this clown show’s traveling circus of cameramen and security guards.
The chaos of these characters originates from niche online subcultures that fall under the umbrella of the “manosphere.” The groyper phenomenon started as a smug, plump Pepe the Frog variant from 4chan but got hijacked by Fuentes’s troll army – white nationalist, Christian nationalist anti-Semites who despise mainstream conservatives, “Con Inc,” for not being extreme enough on immigration, Israel or LGBTQ+ issues.
Looksmaxxing, meanwhile, is the obsession with “maxing” your physical attractiveness (especially bone structure) because, according to its disciples, your face determines your entire life’s worth. It ranges from harmless “softmaxxing” (gym, skincare, mewing – that tongue-to-roof-of-mouth trick teens swear reshapes their jaw) to “hardmaxxing,” like smashing your face with a hammer or begging for risky surgeries. Clavicular is looksmaxxing’s poster child: a kid on meth who turned teenage insecurity and body dysmorphia into a viral brand. Honestly, writing all that made me want to smash my face with a hammer.
In the club, someone requested Kanye’s banned track, “HH” (Heil Hitler). It’s their hype song and they sing along like sorority chicks belting out Sabrina Carpenter bangers at dive-bar karaoke. They vibed. They nodded. They awkwardly smoked cigarettes and moved their bodies. No one seemed terribly comfortable. Maybe it was the ridiculous, skin-tight suits. “I think maybe we deserve them,” said Max Meyer, editor-in chief of Arena magazine. “Clavicular hitting himself in the face with a hammer is like the biblical locusts sent to Egypt.” The clips went viral, the club issued a groveling apology, fired staff and slapped the whole crew with a lifetime ban (which I don’t think does much to dissuade these guys from their victim narrative). Even local news covered it and now Sneako and the Tate brothers are in a feud about who’s the “real G.”
If all this sounds like a reality show, that’s because it is. I found myself sucked down the rabbit hole into the world they inhabit, Discord, Twitch, Kick – the streaming world, a world in which they are famous; a world I don’t pay attention to because I’m too old. I hate to even give them attention with this column because at the end of the day, validation is all they want – and I’d been pretty successful at never learning a thing about them. I’m a geriatric mommy and I shouldn’t need to concern myself with things like groypers and Sneakos.
They are to masculinity what trans women are to womanhood, little lost boys in ill-fitting skin suits
But it occurred to me, watching clips of them interacting with one another and rating the sad girls with no self-esteem in their orbit – they are the male Kardashians. These antisocial men raised by and on the internet know the golden rule: all attention is good.
These guys are bigger attention whores than the e-girls they constantly denigrate. I got second-hand embarrassment watching the clips of them in Miami, all cosplaying as alpha emperors while radiating what the kids these days call “aura,” but an older, wiser adult recognizes as a kind of brittle insecurity that is easily shattered. They are to masculinity what trans women are to womanhood, little lost boys in ill-fitting skin suits – reactionary, narcissistic and excruciatingly self-aware, like teen girls during puberty.
Yet their star is rising. Being banned only makes them more taboo in a world where virtually nothing is taboo anymore. They project that they’re “based” but they trade in victimhood when society pushes back and says, “nah, we don’t like you freaks.”
The entire internet united for one beautiful moment branding the whole crew “gay,” “fruity” or “twinkish.” Although I doubt their homosexuality because of how badly they dress. And even gay men have more of an emotional connection to women. These are gays with no female friends, no boozy bottomless brunches.
The posters weren’t entirely wrong to point out the latent tension in the side-eye glances and mogging rituals. Beneath the chest-thumping rhetoric and obsessive woman-rating and hating, the manosphere has always been a deeply homosocial fever dream: a circle-jerk of mutual admiration, men performing for each other (and the livestream audience of mostly men). It’s homoerotic as hell. At its core, it’s less about attracting women and more about winning the endless male-status contest.
They’ll never have what they crave: class. Everything they do screams low IQ, low class. They have no idea what actual rich people do. Or how rich people dress. But I could have written the exact same thing about the Kardashians 20 years ago, and now they’re billionaires with an empire that all started with a sex tape and a reality show.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2, 2026 World edition.
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