Jestermaxxing has always been the meta at the club.

There’s something in the water. There has to be. Or maybe everyone’s just finally drinking the same poisoned water that freaks like me have been sipping.

We all know what it is. I’ve been outlining some version of this piece in my head since new year’s eve, and when I finally started putting fingers-to-noteapp about it, I saw Wired published Everybody Speaks Incel Now and 404Media published We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons. Both of these pieces tackle the topic from a certain angle. Louis Theroux released his newest documentary, Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, exposing even more people to the radiation that’s already deep in my skin. Two weeks in a row, a podcast favorite of mine, Panic World, both covered the topic and made references to it repeatedly. The thing in the water is Clavicular, but more specifically it’s the looksmaxxing Manosphere offshoot of incel culture that has been given more and more mainstream attention over the last few years.

What has grabbed me about this, all of the various incel slang that I see more and more populating otherwise normal people’s feeds, is the way people act likes it’s strange. Sure, the actual culture it spawns out of, the particularly weird brand of dudes who think microfracturing their face bones will eventually make them look enough like Handsome Squidward to (IN THEORY) attract women, is weird. But the fact that all of these incel phrases like mogging and munting and foid, and God knows what else I’m forgetting right now, caught on isn’t a shock to me.

But there are many, many, many people who genuinely don’t know anything about the Manosphere looksmaxxers that chronically online freaks like me are aware of. They’re still out there throwing around versions of this incel slang, though, or willingly accepting more of it from other people who are plugged into the nightmare hell world. The reason for that: most of this language was already mainstreamed in non-4chan spaces.

No, seriously. I’ve already depicted you as the virgin non-understander and myself as the chad hypothesis explainer. I’m absolutely brainpilled right now, and I am knowledgemaxxing to a crazy degree. People have been making versions of these memes on every non-4chan social media for years and years now. We let [blank]-pilled and [blank]-maxxing in before Clavicular hit a man with his Cybertruck or met Peter Thiel. How long have people been making jokes about alphas, betas, and sigmas?

On Panic World, Ryan Broderick briefly mentions to a confused Hank Green that the reason incel speak seems to make up half of Gen Z slang is because it was mainstreamed by Donald Trump’s presidential victory and the culture it encouraged. I suspect his opinion on this topic extends beyond just that moment, something more nuanced and built-out, but it pushed me to finally get this piece together.

Because yes, there is a truth to that. Culture that a decade ago might have been referred to as the radical/extreme/alt-right has completely shifted in its position on the political spectrum. The Overton window is a hole in the wall in 2026, and those positions that were considered fringe are now the main viewpoints of those running the top spots in government. Now, they’re all just the “far-right” because their opinions have become normalized and mainstreamed. Those people that are currently occupying the most important seats in U.S. government (and creeping their hooks into every country ready to hear their culture war talking points) mostly spawned out of the GamerGate movement, which itself came from 4chan. The idea of the incel that currently occupies the cultural imagination spawned out of the same milieu on 4chan as well.

Here, I’ll make it clear that incels did not first appear on 4chan. They spawned out of a fairly innocuous internet community in the 90s. Mostly, it was shy people trying to overcome their social anxieties and get advise on putting themselves out there. (Reply All did an episode on this origin story back in 2018, if you’re curious.) But this group started radicalizing when it made contact with communities like Reddit and 4chan in the 2000s. It’s easier to talk about how bitter you feel about women and the world when the only thing the moderation team cares about is quashing people posting My Little Pony memes, so a place like 4chan is perfect. The cultural outlook of a place like 4chan’s /pol/ or /r9k/ boards, that the world is generally fucked and not getting better, means they’re perfect places for this kind of community to settle in. /r9k/ especially fit, since it’s a great place for memes, telling personal stories about how you messed up a social interaction, and a wonderful place to talk about the “beta rebellion.”

4chan terminologies and incel slang overlap considerably, to the point they basically are the same dictionary. Clavicular’s assemblage of women-hating, Heil Hitler-singing framemoggers (“[blank]-mogging” meaning you show your superiority over another), and the countless moids (male-oids) who care about their content, are using these slang terms without an ounce of irony in their bones. Many unfortunate anons posting on 4chan will probably also insist their usages are ironic, but you’ll find many without irony truly describing themselves as genuinely “blackpilled” (describing a sense of profound hopelessness and nihilistic apathy, usually spawned out of being “redpilled” [like being woke except it makes you hate women and minorities]). Memes are a brain poison, and slang is the most poisonous of memes.

Snapcube put out their various seminal Sonic The Hedgehog Real-Time Fandubs years ago that spread around the clip of Memphis Tennessee telling Silver The Hedgehog “That just makes you a beta cuck.” Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s a joke poking at weird incel gamers from as far back as 2019. But it’s in the air, and it’s a slang that sticks in the mind and then people start saying it. It’s ironic at first, that’s what people insist. Eventually, though, it stops being ironic, stops being a reference for you and your in-group, and it just becomes part of your lexicon. Folks who subscribe to the worst of 4chan’s culture will often insist to some extent that it’s ironic, that it’s a joke. Clavicular’s clip of him and the boys (Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Myron Gaines, Sneako, Justin Waller) bopping to Ye’s Heil Hitler in a Miami club, and then the back of a van, was blown off by Clavicular saying it was “funny.” Maybe he still believes that, I’m actually quite certain he still believes that, but the people around him have certainly shown that there’s no irony in it for them.

The thing about all of this strange terminology being turned into jokes and memes for a generally online audience is that it does begin to normalize these things. As it spreads, there’s this certain expectation that people are joking, and it makes the tiniest amount of space for the people who aren’t. We let them blend in, stretch that Overton window a little bit more and a little bit more. Suddenly, they’re talking about bonesmashing and jestermaxxing! With no jokes in sight!

And yet we were already so primed to let jokes from 4chan’s slurry out into the world. Before 4chan changed the world, I always heard the common refrain that 4chan’s culture is horrible, but it has the best memes. You can’t really deny the amount of entertaining brain poison that has spilled from 4chan and simply become part of us all.

I’ll get to examples in a moment, but I want to start by saying that many were harmless. Some of them are genuinely funny. 4chan has always been a strange little terrarium that we liked to look inside of and tell stories about, but it wasn’t always deadly. Toxic to your health, certainly, but it took a long time to get deadly.

4chan sprouted up on the internet in the same time periods of far too many kids flooding into weird little chatrooms and the earliest attempts at social media. It’s hard not to see a parallel progression of the Rawr x3 lol So Random humor of the 2000s alongside the rise of 4chan memes as simple as the lolcat and lolspeak. It’s mind-boggling to think of how many memes are now just vocal ticks and expected responses from just about anyone, not just the deeply online.

There are Navy SEALs with 300 confirmed kills who are ready to tell you that “Shrek is love, Shrek is life” or that “Hitler did nothing wrong.” I have a collection of Rage Comics absolutely burned into my brain from when they were the main form of comedy you’d find online. I’ve never stopped seeing greentext stories, themselves a reliable meme farm. Burger King Foot Lettuce has become a reliable meme mocking the Top 10 video format that dominated a certain few years of YouTube’s algorithm, mostly targeted at a particular creator’s style, but I still hear it. Not just online, but out in the wild.

The trollface and Pepe the Frog have a attained a certain cultural cache. The trollface seems generational as a tool. While on Twitch it’s mostly been replaced by the Kappa, the trollface still pops up here and there, usually having been strangely or horrifically edited to match the new meta of modern mememaking. Pepe the Frog, meanwhile, is ubiquitous in a lot of places, but has especially taken hold on Twitch. I don’t have to talk about the attempts, successful or not, to make Pepe the Frog a white supremacist calling card, but the fact it has that association and is everywhere? Well, we’ll be back here.

Do you know how popular Minecraft is? No, really, can you fathom just how big Minecraft has consistently been since its release? I can’t, not really, I just know it’s massive. And Herobrine, this mysterious, villainous little meme, has been interwoven into the DNA of Minecraft for as long as I can remember. It’s yet another meme spawned out of the depths of the slightly-less-horrific boards of 4chan, from a bygone age.

Rickrolling has never really gone away. While all of 4chan’s other memes and terms have floated into the consciousness of the internet to lesser or greater degrees (Pedobear, Femboys, that stupid shopping cart theory idea, Kekistan, >be me, The Rules of the Internet, NEET, Wojaks, etc), Rickrolling is the earliest that I’d ever say 4chan was truly something that was mainstream. Mainstream in the sense that it was existing not just beyond 4chan, but in front of millions of people who probably wouldn’t have encountered it otherwise. Sure, Rickrolling spread around the whole internet pretty quickly; it was an unavoidable experience to receive the link to Never Gonna Give You Up expecting it to be literally anything else. It’s never gone away either! I think Rickrolling reached the lofty heights of the mainstream at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2008. Cartoon Network had a float for their show Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, which suddenly became an impromptu Rick Astley performance, ending with the character Cheese loudly declaring “I like Rickrolling!”

And this is only talking about the jokes! I could spend more time talking about things like The Backrooms or SCP, any of the things that have been incredibly creatively popular online.

By the time GamerGate came around, 4chan had calcified into a cesspit of toxic memes and ironypoisoning so lethal that it had just become a radicalization machine. It should never be said that GamerGate is what made 4chan radical and toxic, though. GamerGate only made 4chan politically relevant. The place had stopped being a funny meme farm and had become the place everyone knew was horrible. It was a deeply conservative, increasingly radical space where you were allowed to post anything, where the majority of moderation was how insulting people could be towards you. This is where modern incel culture spawned from.

Another 4chan meme, the concept of the soy boy, is relevant here. Roughly referencing the idea of someone whose behavior is pathetic, or unmanly. It’s become another vocal tick for many, to refer to people as soy, especially to turn it back towards the conservative chuds who exhibit soy mentalities. (Chud, by the way, another 4chan term spawned to make a meme out of a mass shooter who simply believed all of the GOP’s ideas. How ironic.) Soy, I think, is the gateway to the rest of the incel terminology.

From soy boy, you wander into phrases like Low-T, alphas and betas and sigmas, Chads and Stacys. In writing this, I was tempted to try explaining these terms in detail, but there’s no reason to. For one thing, they’re mostly roundabout nonsense, references to ideas that just are not reality. For another, they’re all just attempts at establishing a hierarchy of people where women are generally at the bottom and men are divided into arbitrary categories.

Most importantly, the people making the categories are the ones at the bottom. Incel ideologies are inherently self-loathing and made for anger. You have to be constantly beating yourself up to view yourself as socially crushed down. You blame women for being the ones who crush you down, even though they’re below you and owe you their bodies, and you look up to the men above you because they’ve unlocked the ability to attract women, usually through superior genetics. The Manosphere, now including Clavicular, spawn out of this. Angry incel grifters who vaguely promise to show men how they can attract a mate, but soon begin to hammer home the idea that women are inherently valueless and worthless.

The basic incel ideology is an inherently eugenicist one, believing that some people are simply genetically better. The twist is that some incels think that they can overcome this perceived inequality. If you’re that deep in the ideology, there’s two paths ahead for you: become a mass shooter or a looksmaxxer.

I’ve done my best to avoid bringing him up, but I can’t anymore. In May 2014, a few months before 4chan’s crowning moment with GamerGate, Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California. If people know anything about incel culture, it’s probably Rodger’s violence. Most people who know this attack are also vaguely aware of his manifesto, a 140-page screed about his oh-so-tragic life and how much he hates women. There have been many instances of incel-related violence since Rodger. Many of these incidents specifically reference, and valorize, Rodger and his actions, or, if they don’t reference him specifically, they exist in communities that lionize him.

Rodger’s manifesto is genuinely nonsense. I’d only seen snippets before deciding to work on this piece, but it is truly incredible how incoherent it is. And pathetic, while I’m at it. It does feel like the writing and worldview of a childish man who doesn’t understand anything. I find it hard to simply explain how much it reads like 2010s Reddit Atheist-speak, or like an edgy 4chan poster who only speaks in copy-pastas unironically. It’s not surprising. It’s what you’d expect from someone unironically titling the memoir-manifesto “My Twisted World” when they’re in their goddamn 20s.

But, the audience for this message, the people who responded most to his murders, are these self-loathing, woman-haters who are desperate for any way to lift themselves from the dirt that they buried themselves in. Rodger gave them a way to do it. Commit a grand act of violence for the cause, become a hero. Maybe become An Hero while in the process. Maybe this is obvious to people who’ve been chronically online since Rodger’s murder. I almost feel stupid writing it because it’s obvious. This keeps happening.

Because I had to suffer, you have to suffer. Here’s a quote from Rodger’s manifesto, near the end, that I think is illuminating to 2026:

Rodger’s vision of the world is horrific, impossible, and, frankly, stupid-as-hell. But, he did get his wish. Fanatically loyal troops. Every one of the blackpilled online communities that fed into the worst parts of the modern fascist right eventually get their Elliot Rodger moment. An terrible act performed by a delusional individual that his communities can memorialize, enshrine, or turn into a big meme.

The 2018 Toronto van attack (not to be confused with the 2018 Toronto shooting, which I will admit I sometimes mix up because they’re both incel-related) is when I first registered where the incels had gone since Rodger. The attacker, Alek Minassian, posted a message online before the attack. It read: “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” He tried to die for the cause and was arrested instead.

The perpetrator of another instance of incel violence in Toronto, the 2020 machete attacks, evoked Minassian and Rodger. Fanatically loyal troops, only loyal to the idea of ending up like Elliot Rodger, but even the idea of it is perceived as better than their current realities.

An applicable quote about this comes from The Worst of All Possible Worlds co-host Brian Alford, when describing a different wrongly lionized internet folk hero, The Sky King of Seattle: “Our American culture littered by fascists and easy access to tools of mass murder has created loose networks of people who worship death, but only if it is spectacular… If you must die, you must be talked about. And if you cannot be talked about in life like some Conquistador, then a spectacular death can be your ticket to— not immortality because we can all see how short the news cycles are these days, but to your fifteen minutes of fame. The brief moment of celebrity subsumes all.”

I can only speculate how many self-identified incels still talk about Rodger. His worldview, however, has been internalized by and constantly spouted back by incelfluencers. His actions are taken as tacit permission to radicalize and perform extreme violence.

At some point, the 4chan memes that caught on were not these inherently weird, somewhat-random little internet gags that spread naturally. The memes became people looking into the terrarium and picking the spider out of it. They show it to the world, some anon poster saying something without an ounce of irony and filled to the brim with weird terms that spawned on the boards. People outside of those spaces start to use it ironically, a little in-joke for friends and others who are deeply online. Then it ingrains itself, and soon it becomes a good shorthand. You can convince yourself you’re still using it ironically, but, at some point, that stops being true. Incel culture became just another facet of that. As incel culture itself continues to radicalize into more and more bizarre places, we just keep reaching in to get more.

This is where my take on all of this intersects with Ryan Broderick’s. The 2016 election is the moment when it became clear that this subculture was going to rocket upward into a more mainstream position. With a more mainstream position comes infinitely more confidence, and that’s what the Manosphere becomes. Incel self-help gurus who subscribe to the most radical ideas. The more prominent these figures become, the louder their language is heard. Over the following decade, there’s a collection of compounding issues that become clear:

2016 is a point-of-no-return for this, but the groundwork of normalization was a decade old. As we’ve been unable to rid ourselves of these incelfluencers in the decade since, they’ve been able to drag more and more of their weird slang out of the terrarium. And we keep using it. It makes them seem like one us when they’re using the same phrases. alphas, beta, sigma, Chad, -pilled, -maxxing, -mogging. Sure, it’s brain poison, but, if you don’t know who these men are, it will seem like the same brain poison anyone else online is using. It lets them start to get away with saying that they bonesmash, for example. It allowed them and their followers to keep using their more dehumanizing phrases like foids (female-oids) or shocking phrases like munting (a particular act of necrophilia I won’t explain, but TikTok has been throwing it around). They take it as an excuse to keep talking about cortisol levels (which, at the time of writing, has become its own meme and new mainstream irony phrase).

It’s hard to write this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like I’m saying the slang of the youth is immoral or whatever. I don’t believe that. Language and symbols are just words and lines, mostly, but they are a brain poison. They take on a meaning and that meaning sticks in the mind.

Incels have compounded their subculture through repeated acts of violence and consistently violent rhetoric. Their beliefs incestuously mix with extreme political ideas of their neighbors on other image and message boards. An inherently eugenicist ideology is, unsurprisingly, filled with neo-nazis and tech-fascists. Clavicular has caught public attention, but he’s running in circles with Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers, for fuck’s sake. You can find some of the most insane posts I’ve ever seen of people who revere this subset of micro-niche internet celebrities. While this piece was in the editing stages, Clavicular was arrested for an alleged battery charge.

It’s also not like incel slang and subculture is the only issue at this moment. There’s an awful cross-section of nihilistic, accelerationist, angry, radicalized communities that sit in the middle of a Venn Diagram of genuine horrors barely within my realm of comprehension. And you can’t really point at 4chan for everything, or the incel subculture that blossomed on Reddit that I haven’t even really touched on. The communities that led us to 2016 is a horrific mixture of groups from every corner of the nightmare world, 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, Something Awful, Stormfront, and more. After 2016, all of the communities that existed on 4chan have fractured outwards. They’re everywhere now. Twitter is the most obvious place to find this kind of person, but they’ve been on YouTube forever too. They’re all over Discord, they’re in the lobbies of your favorite video games, they made their own websites or shifted to other Chan sites chasing after Q. Most of the culture that’s spawning up around Clavicular right now are on Kick and TikTok.

And they’re in the government. It’s old news at this point, but official U.S. government social media has become a specific kind of meme-generating propaganda machine. The Department of War, at the start of March, tweeted that they were “low cortisol” and “Lethalitymaxxing.” Last Week Tonight read out a response they received from DHS claiming they were “Homelandmaxxing.” These are the most recent instances at the time of writing, relevant to what I’m discussing here, but all White House propaganda right now is dogwhistles and shibboleths.

The thing is, I don’t even believe that the incels are the ones saying this stuff on government social media. Certainly, I believe some of the people from these incel communities are close to the halls of power, or were in DOGE, or are in ICE. But I think “Lethalitymaxxing” and “Homelandmaxxing” are genuinely just some fascist social media interns trying to use the slang that has caught on to the general public, maybe slang they picked up from their own time on the websites at fault for all this. The fact that I can’t tell for certain is what worries me.

I don’t have a solution. I’m not stupid enough to presume that the way out is for people to stop going to websites they hate in search of weird terms and memes. Mostly, I’m just trying to make it make sense to myself.

Many publications have been tackling the incel stuff that has rapidly become a default lexicon. They’re trying to make sense of the origins of incel culture, who the current Manosphere characters are, and why the hell the government is tweeting this stuff. All in the effort to understand how these phrases were normalized. But I don’t see anyone bringing up the lolcat, the Rickroll, the Rage Comics.

There’s a good reason for that. Firstly, because it is very stupid. But we live in very stupid times, and have for long time.

Secondly, because it isn’t a straight line. We find out more and more that things are more convoluted and more complicated. It’s taken me so much effort, for example, not to bring up Epstein in this piece and all of those recent revelations. But memes are the language of the internet, and they always have been. If everyone associates everything with a meme, it becomes normalized. Doesn’t matter if that meme is now cringe or a sign of being terminally online, you know what the meme is. It’s just normal. It only takes a few determined people to grab that meme, or the community around it, and turn them into a radicalized force. GamerGate, for example, was just one side of it, and also just the beginning. When the people who use the memes unironically start hitting the Heil Hitler, I feel like it’s worth it to start wondering why the meme exists and where it came from.

Also, of course, not every meme comes from 4chan. Not every 4chan meme makes it far outside of the image board. A lot of 4chan memes end up like Pool’s Closed, /b/lackup, An Hero, Moon Man (another white supremacist dog whistle made from a character 4chaners found DHS posted, lodged within their infamous ICE Pokémon Theme song post) among others. Maybe you know about them through osmosis, or because you saw a video essay about Mac Tonight or something. Often, the memes are a little too repugnant, or the implications of them are at least, or they’re simply too esoteric, too online.

There’s one more meme I want to bring up. A number of years ago—Know Your Meme claims as “early as July 2014”—4chan spawned up a meme: Nothing Ever Happens. Always bet on Nothing Ever Happening.

It’s a simple meme. You use it to express the way that things don’t seem to ever change in the macro sense. Huge events happen. Then you wake up the next morning, and the people in charge are still in charge and your life is the same. It’s similarly broken containment and become a constant refrain from most folks on the political spectrum. Even more so now that everything and everyone is online, and the US belongs to a podcaster government.

But 2014 was a long time ago. 2026 looks very, very different. I don’t think Elliot Rodger or the incels of the mid-2010s could have imagined Clavicular as being the mainstream heir to their ideas. I don’t think any of us could have imagined that Epstein actually shaped all of our lives in ways that boggle the mind. I don’t think anyone really expected the ways that a global pandemic would absolutely cook the minds of everyone trapped inside their homes and drive them to storm the capital.

Nothing Ever Happens is a funny meme. It captures something, like a good meme should. But it’s a brain poison, and there are people who believe that it’s true because, to them, it was never ironic.

Things do happen, though. They happen slowly, painfully slowly. Like stalactites forming on cave ceilings. They take forever, but there is change there. The original incels that spawned on pre-4chan webpages changed slowly into the angry, violence-mongers we associate them to be. The funny and weird memes that spawned out of 4chan and spread across the internet shifted into white supremacist dogwhistles and slang used by the people who are currently sitting in government offices. TikTok was a place where people did funny dances that could turn them into pop stars, and now people on there are saying shit like munting and preaching great replacement theory.

And the people who want to push back against the neverending horrors have grown louder and angrier. The benefit of hindsight means that we can see how things have changed and trace every single line from then up to now. I have to believe that tomorrow will be better. That tomorrow will be funnier. And I have to pray that I never have to know who Clavicular is ever again.