Influencers

Andrew and Tristan Tate, social-media influencers in the infamous "manosphere," returned to Florida today after two years of judicial confinement. The Tate brothers were arrested in December 2022 on charges of rape, trafficking of minors and money laundering. Although they have never been formally convicted, the brothers have been in legal limbo in Romania while the investigation is underway. They have only just received permission to visit their home country, the United States, but they are still under judicial controls, meaning they must return to Romania when summoned. Andrew and Tristan were both former professional kickboxers who began gaining notoriety by voicing controversial opinions online.

I promise I’ll get to the hurricane stuff, but first I just want to take a moment to appreciate how rare it is that I’m even writing this — and how special it is that we can gather together like this inside my sentences, in The Spectator, a place that is famously way more boring and more well-respected than my social media or my books. (Although the Washington Post DID call Scammer “a masterpiece” and the New Yorker DID say “Scammer is funny, engaging, and full of genuine insight,” which is what I would like my tombstone to say when it finally is my time to go!) There’s a lot of writing in print and online about me and comparatively none at all by me. This is by choice. I’m not complaining!

Cockburn never would have expected a porn influencer to bring religious discourse back to the public square, much less one who cosplays as anime characters. Yet months after her come-to-Jesus moment, OnlyFans starlet Nala Ray has TikTok theologians arguing: “Is she too far gone to be saved?”  Ray, a self-described nerd who grew up a pastor's kid, started her OnlyFans account in 2020. After being drawn to pornography because of the beauty of the human body (what else?!), Ray is “giving it all up for Christ.”  Conveniently, Ray is leaving OnlyFans after making over $9 million as one of the platforms top one percent of earners. She has deleted all but one video from the website since her conversion.

In the sinister annals of the men's rights activist internet back in 2017, an alt-right personality called Matt Forney popularized the term, or depending on your outlook, slur, “tradthot.” According to Forney, a “tradthot” (a portmanteau of “tradwife” and “thot”) was a woman who entered the alt-right pretending to believe in traditional gender roles but, in reality, wanted to exploit a male-dominated audience by catering to their fantasies.  Forney, although not well-known for his charitable views about women at the time — he's since repented, naturally — may have been onto something.

There is a girl on TikTok, a bleached-blonde New York transplant who just passed a million followers, whose videos I cannot stop watching. The secret to her rise was “Get Ready with Me” storytimes in which she sat in front of the camera applying mascara and retelling — in painstaking detail — her lurid misadventures. Some highlights: throwing up on a guy’s bed after a wine-fueled hook-up and then realizing he had a girlfriend of two years, battling Montezuma’s revenge at a restaurant in Cabo, getting a UTI so bad she thought it was a kidney infection, inadvertently shipping a ton of “hot girl summer whore clothes” to a guy whose white sheets she bled all over after acquiring a polyp.

Jimmy Kimmel announced a new segment on his show last Friday, titled, “Will George Santos Say It?,” in which he "pranked" the former congressman by paying for Cameo videos under anonymous names, requesting that Santos read out absurd messages. The first video in the series, “Jimmy Kimmel Pranks George Santos on Cameo,” brought in 1.4 million views in just three days on YouTube; but Santos may have the final laugh. Having been booted from Congress on December 1, the self-described “People's Princess” has continued to serve the public through Cameo, a site where fans can pay celebrities for short, personalized messages.

T​​he hottest new influencer isn't the gym bro or food guru. It’s the affiliate marketing mom of two working from her pool deck. If you’ve stumbled upon her Instagram, she’s most likely bragging about her two-hour workday and the new house she just bought with her six-figure income stream. And you know she's got a link in her bio directing you to the class she took to learn it all.   These new "entrepreneurs" are flooding social media. Some have just a dozen followers, others hundreds of thousands. But they are all part of a new scheme that promises to make you millions working from home as a freelance marketer. The catch — the course they're selling is how they're making their money; they're not actually using it to build a business. And their advice for you?