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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6666 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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J.J. McCullough put out a video a few weeks ago where he talks about a "Freak of the Year" phenomenon he's observed this decade. Since at least 2022, there has been someone who becomes famous out of nowhere for reasons that range from irrelevant to reprehensible, before dropping off the face of the earth. During their brief period of celebrity, the public will gawk at them while various smart people try to argue that they're representative of some larger trend. If you're on the left, Clavicular is representative of toxic masculinity. If you're on the right, he's representative of the insane lengths men feel the need to go to to be attractive to women in our emasculated age. Since nobody actually likes the freaks, you can feel free to use them as punching bags because nobody will come to their defense when push comes to shove, except maybe their online followers, whom the smart people all believe are morons. Clavicular is Freak of the Year 2026; previous freaks have included Nick Fuentes, Hawk Tua Girl, and Andrew Tate. If I were king of this forum, my policy would be to ignore the freaks, because anything that can be said about them is ultimately irrelevant and only feeds into the dumb media narratives that sustain the freaks' existence. Ignore them.

the dumb media narratives that sustain the freaks' existence

The existence of lolcows is not sustained by media narratives. Rather, they exist in their niches of the Internet regardless of media attention.

I think this kind of lolcow can snowball to way more monetary rewards in today's era of streaming, memecoins and online casino deals though. Previous versions of this would come and go without ever really capitalizing on it

Perhaps, but most of them aren't interviewed by respectable journalists or profiled on NPR. That's a media phenomenon.

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