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Monday, July 6, 2026

Whatever Happened to Daveigh Chase?

On June 16, 2026, Daveigh Chase died in Los Angeles at 35 years old. She was homeless, having been living on Skid Row, or taking shelter inside one of the many mobile crack houses that line the sidewalks nearby, depending on who you ask. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office later listed the cause of death as AIDS, with chronic polysubstance use noted as a contributing condition.

If you were a kid in 2002, you knew her face. She voiced Lilo in Lilo & Stitch, Chihiro in the English dub of Spirited Away and she played Samara Morgan in The Ring. Daveigh Chase won an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain for her performance in the English Adaptation of Ringu. She was everywhere for about four years, and then, suddenly, she wasn’t. She stopped acting by 2016, and by 2019, her mother had lost contact with her entirely. In December 2025, six months before her death, her mother saw what she believed was a video of Daveigh on Reddit. She was severely emaciated, slumped over, trying to push the camera away.

[VIDEO]

Daveigh Chase started in commercials at age three. Her mother, a former nurse, relocated from Oregon to Los Angeles for her daughter’s career. By twelve, she had voiced two of the most iconic animated characters of the early 2000s and starred in one of the decade’s defining horror films. She had also won an Annie Award and an MTV Movie Award before she was old enough to drive.

An interesting moment worth noting is that, at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards, Shaun “P Diddy” Combs presented Daveigh, then 12, with the Best Villain award alongside Ashton Kutcher. On camera, backstage, he asked her if she was “coming to the afterparty tonight.” She nodded yes. Combs laughed and yelled “Yeah!”

[VIDEO]

Whether she actually attended is unknown.

By the time the clip resurfaced, Combs had already been arrested on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges. Attorney Tony Buzbee was representing 120 accusers, 25 of whom were minors at the time of the alleged incidents. The youngest was nine years old, allegedly approached at a Bad Boy Records audition. Buzbee described a consistent pattern: luring young people pursuing entertainment careers with promises of stardom, then taking them somewhere private. Combs was ultimately convicted on two prostitution-related charges and sentenced to just over four years, though he was acquitted on the trafficking and racketeering counts.




None of that connects Daveigh to anything specific. The clip is what it is: a 33-year-old man, at an industry event, asking a twelve-year-old girl to come to his party. In 2003, it aired without comment.
Chronology of Use

So far, two versions of Daveigh’s addiction origin exist in the public record.

Her father, John David Schwallier, told the New York Times that she had been struggling with drug addiction since age 13, around 2003. He said he became estranged from her around the time she turned nineteen in 2009, and that she became distanced from her mother around the same time. His account implies a long, continuous addiction history.

Daveigh’s mother, Cathy, tells a different story. In her account, the downward spiral began after a 2016 motorcycle accident, when doctors prescribed oxycodone for a back injury. The addiction, by her telling, was iatrogenic: a medical intervention that opened a door Daveigh couldn’t close. “She was seeking drugs and was partying with the wrong people,” Cathy told the Daily Mail. “I never kicked my daughter out. She wanted freedom and these people got her hooked on some drugs. That was the beginning.”



Daveigh’s mother spent years watching her daughter collapse at a distance, with countless nights scrolling through Reddit, Google, and the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s website, searching for any trace of her. She was checking the coroner’s unidentified bodies list, hoping Daveigh wouldn’t appear.

These accounts don’t just differ in degree — they locate the problem in completely different periods of Daveigh’s life and assign it completely different causes. One version has addiction running through the height of her career. The other has her career ending more or less cleanly, with a pharmaceutical trigger arriving years later.

Daveigh may have been on prescription stimulants (Adderall being the obvious candidate for a working child actor navigating a demanding schedule, as seen with Amanda Bynes) that her mother categorized separately from “drugs,” while her father counted everything together. At minimum, that’s the most generous explanation for the discrepancy that doesn’t require either parent to be lying. It also fits a pattern that recurs throughout child star history: legal prescriptions serving as the on-ramp, the line between “medication” and “addiction” blurring slowly enough that no one notices until it’s too late.


Neither version is definitively sourced. Both come from grieving, estranged parents who had limited contact with their daughter for years. What they agree on matters more anyway: by the time anyone tried to intervene, there was nothing left to grab onto.
Business as Usual

The Hollywood child-actor pipeline is designed around output, and children who move through it fastest are the ones with parents who subordinate everything else to the industry’s demands. This is something that Melissa Gilbert, who worked briefly with Daveigh, observed publicly after her death. “When a parent or parents lose sight of who they are, of what their true responsibility is, and their lives revolve solely around their little star child,” Gilbert wrote on Instagram, “that’s where the trouble begins.” Gilbert was careful not to name names.

It goes without saying that a child star is famous before they have any framework for understanding what “fame” is. In some cases, their income supports the family, and their performance schedule shapes the household calendar. They are told they are talented, special, and all of that is contingent on continued performance. When the roles dry up, as they inevitably do, the identity scaffolding collapses with them.

For Daveigh, the roles started drying up around 2012. She made her last film credit in 2016. According to her former manager John Ryan, she had been “sober a while” before they lost contact in late 2015. Ryan had been developing a documentary about her disappearance from Hollywood before her death.



In the days following Daveigh’s death, a man named Roy Hernandez identified himself to TMZ as her boyfriend. He launched a GoFundMe to cover cremation expenses, writing that after “a difficult childhood and a painful falling out with her family, Daveigh was bullied and struggled to find safety and happiness in downtown L.A.” He framed their relationship as protective: “When we met, I promised to protect her and give her the love and comfort she deserved.”

Her former manager John Ryan responded directly, urging fans not to donate. “That GoFundMe is not going toward ANY expenses for Daveigh,” Ryan told Deadline. He stated that Hernandez “brought her into the hospital in terrible condition and didn’t let any of the family know until she passed so he can control the dialogue,” and characterized the fundraiser as an attempt to “make it look like a Romeo and Juliet situation to benefit his own pockets.” Ryan noted there were no medical or funeral expenses to cover.

Hernandez had initially told TMZ that Chase died of meningitis and sepsis. The coroner’s office later determined the cause was AIDS.

The cause of death is worth sitting with, because it tells you something specific about the conditions Daveigh was living in. HIV transmission via shared needles is possible but statistically less likely than other bloodborne infections. Hepatitis B and C transmit far more efficiently through the same route. The baseline risk per needle-sharing exposure is roughly 0.3 percent, though that rises to around 5 percent with a high-viral-load source. Reaching an AIDS diagnosis (late-stage HIV, CD4 count below 200) requires years of untreated infection. It means no access to antiretroviral treatment, no consistent healthcare, no one who could intervene at any earlier point in the disease’s progression.

The entertainment industry generates enormous cultural meaning through the labor of children, and then, when those children are no longer commercially viable, it generates no infrastructure for what comes next. There is no off-ramp, but instead an assumption, that normal adolescence and early adulthood can proceed in parallel with an all-consuming, Hollywood career.

The people who knew Daveigh describe someone who was talented, warm, and funny, and who found herself increasingly surrounded by people with no interest in her wellbeing. “She was surrounding herself with the worst of the worst people,” said a musician who had been close to her between 2018 and 2023. “It’s such a tragedy because no one cared for her best interests at all.” He got clean in 2023 and hadn’t seen her since. The industry that made her famous at twelve did not consider itself responsible for what happened at thirty-five. The credits rolled, the contracts ended, and the rest became someone else’s problem.
Sources

Sources

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Monday, June 29, 2026

The Death of Kosher Conservatism


There is a specific kind of political commentator that dominated the mid-2010s. He was smart enough to sound credible, careful enough to stay monetized, and vague enough to avoid committing to anything that might cost him a sponsor. He talked about facts and logic, debated college students, building his brand around being the reasonable one in the room. These operations peaked around 2021 and have been quietly contracting ever since. The through-line connecting all of them is the use of bot networks to simulate cultural relevance and careful brand management to stay palatable to advertisers. If you want to understand how this brand of conservatism operates, and why it is failing, the Daily Wire is the most instructive place to start.

The Daily Wire was built by Orthodox Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro alongside co-founder Jeremy Boreing, with funding from Texas oil billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks, who also bankrolled Dennis Prager. What they got for their investment was the institutional home of what you might call Kosher conservatism: pro-Israel, willing to fight meaningless culture war battles on trans issues, DEI, and Hollywood, but careful to stay within certain limits. Never too edgy, and always advertiser friendly. The kind of conservatism that wins debates and changes absolutely nothing.

For a while, it worked spectacularly. The Daily Wire became one of the most-watched conservative media operations in the country. Then Facebook substantially altered its algorithm in 2021 in ways that disadvantaged political content on the platform. The Daily Wire’s subscriber count peaked that year and has been declining since.

The audience moved on but the Daily Wire did not. The culture kept shifting. The institutions kept going in the same direction. Facts and logic, it turned out, are not a functional counterstrategy when the people running things do not care about them.

There is also the question of authenticity that the bot situation raises. The view counts that made the Daily Wire look like a thriving operation appear to have been substantially assisted by purchased traffic. When the spending on that stopped, the numbers reflected something closer to reality. A video featuring both Shapiro and his beloved Shabbos goy Matt Walsh pulling 7 live viewers is not the signature of a healthy media empire.



Boreing stepped down in early 2025 amid rumors of internal drama and serious concerns about the company’s financial health. The vanity projects, particularly the film division and the broader attempt to build a conservative Hollywood, had reportedly burned through enormous resources without producing equivalent returns. Shapiro’s daily program still has an audience, but the trajectory is clearly trending downward with no obvious path back up. His pro-Israel positioning has become a liability.

Shapiro is not the only figure whose brand of careful, advertiser-friendly conservatism is running out of road. The same audience attrition, the same gap between the performance of relevance and the reality of declining numbers, shows up across every major figure who built their career on the same model.

Tim Pool started his career during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, when he rigged a consumer drone with a camera and streamed live footage to the internet, giving people a view of the demonstrations that the mainstream press could not easily block. The Guardian called it a clever loophole. He was twenty-five years old, working as a citizen journalist, and producing content that actually mattered. He went on to work for Vice and Fusion, building a reputation as an on-the-ground reporter willing to go places other journalists would not.

Then, somewhere around 2017, he stopped going anywhere and started sitting in a room reading other people’s articles into a camera.

The transition happened gradually and then all at once. Pool built a YouTube channel around a carefully maintained persona: the left-leaning skater kid from Chicago who was so troubled by what the left was becoming that he felt compelled to document its excesses. He called himself a liberal. He insisted he was not right-wing. He said “I don’t know” and “it’s complicated” so frequently that it became a running joke among his critics and eventually among his own audience.

Tim’s fence-sitting was deliberate. He must have known on some level that his audience was watching because he gave them permission to drift rightward while maintaining plausible deniability about having done so. If Tim Pool, a self-described liberal, thought the left had gone too far, then maybe you were not a bad person for thinking the same thing. This worked well through the early Trump years, until Pool’s content calcified into a formula so predictable that multiple people independently charted it out. Minute one introduces a topic. Minutes two through ten repeat that topic in slightly different words. A Marvel reference appears somewhere in the middle. Civil war gets mentioned at some point. The audience is reminded to buy doomsday prepper food buckets from that day’s sponsor. Every day, five videos a day at peak output, the same topics recycled endlessly with the energy of a man who had long since stopped caring.

Meanwhile, the compound he built in rural West Virginia, which acquired the affectionate nickname Beanie Ridge among the people tracking his career, became a soap opera unto itself. His million-dollar crowdfunded news venture, SCNR, collapsed after co-founders accused him and his brother Chris of botting and promoting fraudulent sponsors. Tim fired the entire staff and revoked their access to the YouTube channel, the AdSense account, and the bank account. He allegedly held his former business partner’s cat as leverage in the subsequent dispute, which required police involvement and got covered by the Daily Beast.

In 2023, Tenet Media, a content venture Pool entered alongside Dave Rubin and Lauren Chen, was allegedly funded by $9.7 million from RT through shell companies and fabricated investor identities. Two RT employees were federally indicted over it. The DOJ indictment names Pool as “Commentator-2” and reveals he had negotiated $100,000 per weekly episode before signing on. Lauren Chen and her husband appear to have known where the money was coming from. Pool claims he did not. What the indictment also reveals, almost incidentally, is that RT was frustrated with him because he only shared one Tenet video that week. He was a bad return on investment for a foreign intelligence operation, which is either exculpatory or just a different kind of damning depending on how you look at it.

Meanwhile, at Beanie Ridge, Pool employed a dedicated skate park manager, listed his girlfriend as COO, and built out a roster of dozens of employees and contractors across multiple overlapping projects with no apparent organizational structure holding any of it together. He invested roughly half a million dollars in a coffee shop venture, spent around a million on the skate park, and put $15,000 into a sword. His Pop Culture Crisis side channel, which he promoted heavily as a brand expansion, was pulling under 5,000 views per video. When a graphics card died on set and nobody replaced it, he threatened on air to shut the entire IRL operation down, then spent the episode cataloguing how nobody he had hired was managing anything while acknowledging that he had made every hiring decision himself.

His music career is worth a brief mention. In 2022 he released an official music video called “Only Ever Wanted,” recorded while wearing the beanie, which sounded like late-era Linkin Park attempting to be U2. The production buried what was apparently a decent natural singing voice under layers of autotune, and the drummer’s practice pads were visible in the shot, indicating the recording space had not been properly soundproofed. He spent multiple consecutive episodes responding to the mockery the video received, which made everything considerably worse.


By the time Pool appeared in the White House press pool in April 2025, still wearing the beanie he has not visibly removed for the better part of a decade, the distance between where he started and where he ended up was almost too large to process. He used his White House question to complain that journalists had been mean about the new media seating arrangement. He did not ask about policy. He reportedly only removes the beanie in the presence of Jewish interviewers, a detail that is either deeply funny or deeply revealing, and is probably both.

The core grievance Pool cannot let go of is that the mainstream press refuses to take him seriously. The problem, which he has never appeared to fully reckon with, is that he spent a decade positioning himself as an enemy of the establishment press and is now confused that they treat him accordingly. He mistakes being contrarian for being insightful, which is exactly what happens to the kind of person who intellectually peaks in college.

Pool’s arc, from citizen journalist with a drone to a man reading Daily Mail articles about a train derailment thirty miles from his house, is at minimum the story of someone who started with something real and lost it. Jeremy Hambly never had the something real to begin with, which makes his version of the same trajectory somehow even less flattering. He watched what the bigger channels were doing, identified the formula, and copied it. The problem is that he was copying Tim Pool at Tim’s lowest-effort period, which meant he was already working from a degraded template before he even began.

The mechanics of Jeremy’s operation were straightforward once exposed. He purchased bot engagement to inflate his YouTube analytics, tailored his uploads to whatever was trending on Google or Twitter, and built his entire content strategy around latching onto popular topics and grinding them into dust. Star Wars. Marvel. Brie Larson. The Karmelo Anthony case. He produced dozens of videos on each; some built on speculation presented as fact, with tweets and comments sections treated as sourced reporting.

What makes Jeremy a genuinely interesting case study, rather than just another mid-tier grifter cycling through the same outrage topics, is how transparent the envy became over time. The deeper you look into his career, the more obvious it is that he wanted what Tim Pool had: the compound, the audience, the aesthetic of being part of a movement rather than merely adjacent to one. The difference is that Tim Pool, whatever his considerable failures, was once a working journalist with real sources and real networking ability. Jeremy is a guy from Wisconsin who would be more naturally suited behind IT help desk.

For the full drama breakdown, MikeyNoMoh covers it in far more entertaining detail than I could manage.

Jeremy Hambly is the furthest this business model could degrade before it stopped functioning entirely, which makes him a useful place to stop and take stock of what all three of these careers actually have in common. The through-line is not an ideology. It is the specific way each of them mistook audience capture for influence. Shapiro won debates, built a company, and changed nothing about the culture he was supposedly fighting. Pool positioned himself as a journalist while building an increasingly elaborate compound from which he covered the news by reading newspaper articles out loud. Hambly watched both of them and concluded that the formula was the point, that you could skip the credential entirely and go straight to the content farm.

They were all, in different ways, right about that for a while until the algorithm changed, the bot spending dried up, and the audience that remained started noticing what they were actually getting in exchange for their time and money. The reasonable conservative brand, the one built on facts and logic and careful brand management, pro-Israel positioning and never saying anything that would get you demonetized, turned out to be a product the market eventually stopped wanting.

References

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Monday, June 15, 2026

When Did Punk Become so Fucking Lame?

As you walk into one of your old favorite punk venues, the smell hits you first: stale beer, cigarettes, weed, and whatever they’re burning on the grill in back. The walls are a collage of band flyers and stickers, old and new. The kind of visual noise that used to mean something dangerous was happening here, and you let yourself believe that it still does for a moment, until you spy that familiar set of flags on the wall.

The progress pride flag, often accompanied by the trans flag, with that triangular stripe of black, white, brown, pink and blue bolted onto the front of the original rainbow like a bumper sticker on a bumper sticker. The flags are positioned at eye level, which is how you know they aren’t simply decoration but active indicators of the politics and policies of the space you’ve just walked into. Next to it, or near the door, or sometimes on its own folding signage, is often a list of rules: No racism. No sexism. No homophobia. No transphobia.

I have become accustomed to finding these same symbols in any space that advertises itself as a home for alternative culture: the pride flags, the posted rules, the promise of radical inclusivity extended warmly to every conceivable identity.

It’s in these moments I stop and ask myself: when did punk become so fucking lame?

The original punk venue was not a safe space and was never meant to be. The crowd was unpredictable, the bands were hostile, and nobody was particularly interested in making you feel validated. Punk was antagonistic toward everything and everyone, including the left, and especially including you. It was nihilistic, uncomfortable, and deliberately offensive, and that was entirely the point.

There’s a specific moment in the life of every subculture where it stops being a place people escape to and starts being a place people escape from their own boredom. Punk hit that moment somewhere in the mid-2000s and it’s been accelerating ever since. The kids showing up weren’t running from anything real. They were running from comfort. When the primary audience of a subculture is suburban kids looking for an identity that feels dangerous without actually being dangerous, the subculture reorganizes itself to serve that market. The edges get sanded down, the hostility becomes performative, and the danger becomes an aesthetic choice rather than an unavoidable consequence of showing up.
The Underdog Myth Killed Punk from the Inside


The underdog myth didn’t originate in punk spaces but it fed directly into them. Lauren Southern’s recent essay traces how Hollywood spent two decades building a cultural framework where social failure was repackaged as moral virtue, where the outcast wasn’t just misunderstood but secretly superior to everyone around them. Punk absorbed that mythology completely. The aesthetic of marginalization became aspirational, which is a contradiction that should have been fatal but instead became the product.

Once being an outsider is something you can purchase and perform, the outsider has become the establishment. The patch collection, the record crate, the right zines, all of it functions as the underdog myth made wearable. You’re not rebelling. You’re cosplaying someone who did.
Retail Therapy for Radicals


Stores like Hot Topic are underrated villains in this story, and not for the reason people usually cite. The standard critique is that they commercialized punk, that they took something raw and sold it to mall kids, and while that’s true as far as it goes, the more interesting and more damaging thing Hot Topic did was engineer the order of operations in a way that made the politics feel like a natural conclusion rather than a sales pitch.

Growing up in the 2010s, you didn’t buy the politics first, you bought the aesthetic: the “Blood on the Dancefloor” band tee, the rainbow-studded belt, the black skinny jeans. The aesthetic came pre-loaded with a set of cultural associations, a tribe, a vocabulary, and a list of acceptable opinions that nobody handed you directly but that you absorbed through proximity the same way you learned the words to songs you never consciously memorized. By the time the politics arrived, the groundwork was already laid, you had already self-sorted into the tribe and already knew what the tribe believed, and dissenting from those beliefs didn’t just mean having a different opinion. It meant losing the aesthetic, the community, and the identity simultaneously, which for a teenager is not a political cost but an existential one.

Counterculture has always had a complicated relationship with commercialization, but there’s a specific cynicism in selling dissent as a lifestyle product when the dissent in question is fully aligned with the dominant institutions of the moment. A patch that says “smash the patriarchy” is not threatening to anyone with actual power in 2026, and everyone in the room knows it, even if nobody says so out loud. It is a loyalty signal, a way of communicating party membership and tribal affiliation to the other people in the room who already agree with you, which is the opposite of resistance in every way that actually matters.
Defanged, Declawed & Neutered


The visual language of punk, the aesthetics, the venues, the zines, got repurposed to carry a value system that is, at its core, deeply institutional. Academia preaches it, corporate HR enforces it, and legacy media publishes it, and the fact that it arrives wearing a leather jacket and a circle-A patch does not change what it is or who it serves. It was absorbed by a new establishment that learned to speak the language of rebellion while building its own rigid orthodoxy underneath it, and when the New York Times, Human Resources departments, and your local punk venue all agree on the rules, you are not looking at a countercultural movement anymore.

If punk is defined by antagonizing the dominant cultural institution, then the genuinely countercultural position right now is not what’s being sold in those venues, on those shirts, or in those zines. The punk spaces you can find on Google Maps, with their posted rules and their progress flags and their promise of radical inclusivity, are not places where anything threatening to power is actually happening. They are where the narcissistic queers in power go to feel edgy on a Friday night, after a couple of poppers and a Slippery Nipple, surrounded by sycophantic handmaidens who all showed up wearing the same uniform of dissent and call it a revolution.

Real counterculture doesn’t advertise itself, doesn’t have a dress code or a flag or a posted list of approved opinions by the door, and it was never designed to make you feel safe or validated or welcome.

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