Do you remember where you were when Clavicular was brutally framed by an ASU fraternity leader?
Or maybe you saw clips of the 20-year-old creator, alongside Andrew Tate and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, dancing to Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” at a Miami nightclub.
Or maybe you have no idea what it all means.
The Internet subculture known as looksmaxxing has recently jumped from obscure message boards to the mainstream, thanks in part to a 20-year-old creator who goes by the name Clavicular.
Clavicular’s real name is Braden Peters. And she doesn’t just post about skincare routines or plastic surgery. Peters recently weighed in on the 2028 presidential election, arguing that if the race were between California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President JD Vance, Newsom would win for one simple reason: He’s more attractive.
To understand how online appearances, politics, and extremism are brewing in this corner of the Internet, Today, explained Co-host Noel King spoke with the Atlantic writer and podcast host. galaxy brainCharlie Warzel.
Below is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Clavicular is a young man, he is about 20 years old. He started posting online as a teenager, when he was about 15, on these looksmaxxing forums, which are forums dedicated to becoming as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible through body modification.
Clavicular basically worked in obscurity for a long time until he allegedly hit someone with his Cybertruck while livestreaming on Christmas Eve last year.
Who are the looksmaxxers?
Looksmaxxers are complicated because they overlap with many other online communities. There is the involuntarily celibate community, known as incels, which has links to violent extremism. But there really is this core feeling in looksmaxxing that the only thing that matters in all of life is how good you look, that that’s tied to your self-esteem in every way, and that what you should do is try by any means necessary (whether it’s breaking bones in your body, whether it’s chewing on a rubber ball for hours a day) to make your jaw straighter. To get an advantage, you have to do it because the best thing you can do is go out into the world and look better than everyone else and document it as much as possible.
What do we know about what Clavicular has done to itself?
He has said on several podcasts, etc., that he has smashed his face with a hammer. The theory is that when bones are broken, they grow back stronger.
And that’s why he has destroyed his face, his jaw line, to strengthen it and make it look better. He began, according to him, taking testosterone when he was 14 or 15 years old to accelerate his puberty and make his body look like that of an adult. He said he took methamphetamine to hollow out his cheeks.
Lookmaxxers have their own language, which I find very convincing. Can you define some of the terms?
“These guys are extremely effective attention grabbers, and that’s important.”
Mogging looks better than someone sexy. And actually what I found is kind of an acronym, but it means alpha male of the group, [shortened to] male of the group – MOG.
There are also all kinds of words that are invented on the spot, like jestermaxxing, which is being jocular, jovial, having fun.
What is the purpose of being hot? What is the purpose of all this?
It’s really social dominance, or just dominance in general. This idea of mogging comes from this alpha male group acronym: the “alpha” part of that and the “male” part of that are extremely important. And so, going out in public as an extremely attractive person is not just to show how beautiful you are, but to be dominant over other people. You want to make other people look bad. You want them to feel bad about themselves because of how incredibly attractive you are, and you basically want to win women over too.
I read your articles and I listened to your podcast and there’s one thing that I think you both say straight out and spin around, which is… this sounds stupid, but it really isn’t. Explain what you mean.
I think it’s stupid on a content level. It lacks substance, I would say. There’s the Clavicular clip, I think it’s in Miami. He’s with this streamer, Sneako, who is very popular, and Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist leader of Groyper, also a streamer. And they’re in the living room of some apartment and they’re having an incredibly quiet conversation, just incredibly dull. There just isn’t much trading going on there.
Clavicular seems to react as if it were one of those wind-up dolls. You pull the rope and there are like five different reactions. Then one of them said, “Hey buddy, that’s very based, sick.” And so, at the level of substance, there is that.
Then there’s the element of what it means, what that bland content means, what the popularity of someone like Clavicular means. And I think that’s not stupid. The fact that I’m writing an article about him in The Atlantic because he hangs out with these people. The fact that he was able to take advantage of his popularity in this situation where he meets with Andrew Tate, the manosfera influencer. Fuentes, who is influential enough to try to force the MAGA coalition towards white nationalism. That he’s able to go to a club with these guys and get them to play Ye’s song, “Heil Hitler,” and turn that into this viral moment that then makes the mayor of Miami have to react, condemn him, basically apologize on behalf of the city for allowing this to happen. These guys are extremely effective attention grabbers and that’s important.