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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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Thursday, May 28, 2026

From the TikTok Slop Abyss: Xiao Xiao, the "Chinese Kick/Junk Food" Girl

One of the most revealing TikToks of Xiao Xiao, the “Chinese Kick Girl”, is one in which she hauls a large speaker through the street, dressed in traditional Chinese children’s clothing. An AI narration explains in that familiar hollow, robotic female voice that she is off to work. We cut to her performing TikTok dances in a crowded street while passersby poke and prod her, smartphones raised, each hoping to capture their own viral moment.

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“Girl” is hardly an appropriate word for Xiao Xiao as she is 39 years old. She is a street performer from rural Sichuan, China, born with Seckel syndrome and primordial dwarfism. She stands just over a meter tall and weighs less than fourteen kilograms. Xaio Xaio’s father left when she was young, with her disability being given as the reason, so her mother raised her alone. The two receive modest government allowances from the local Disabled Persons Federation and Women’s Federation, which have supported them since 2011.

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Her body always appears worn, pained, covered in scrapes and bruises. Whether self-inflicted from the kicking and flailing that won her Western internet fame is unclear. In several videos she appears with a large wound across her face, which heals slowly over time into what looks like an unset broken nose. What caused it is never addressed, of course nobody in the comments section thinks to ask.



Scroll through the comments of any Xiao Xiao video and you will find image after image of shoes, switches, and paddles, objects associated with corporal punishment in the rural, impoverished households of the Global South, posted with gleeful suggestions of beatings. It is a particular kind of cruelty, one that reveals more about the commenters than they intend. There is something about Xiao Xiao, be it her size, her volatility, her unruliness, that triggers in a certain type of viewer a sadistic, primal desire to inflict pain. The same impulse drives the monkey torture communities that have flourished in the obscure corners of YouTube and TikTok: small, vulnerable, visibly distressed creatures made into objects of entertainment for a perversely sadistic audience.



It doesn’t seem that Xaio Xaio’s mother initially set out to become her exploiter. When her mother began selling homemade honey, she began filming her daughter to help sell it on a social media platform called Kuaishou. Their profile was a way to document their lives, build an audience, and sell honey that supplemented their government allowance. It worked well, and the account grew to 140,000 followers. People were drawn to Xiao Xiao, intrigued by her size, her expressiveness, and her volatility.

It was not the first time Xiao Xiao had been put in front of a camera – as a child she had appeared on television, paraded as a curiosity, her small body treated as spectacle. Her mother claims she was never compensated for these appearances.

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There are reports, difficult to verify, of a Chinese documentary or television segment featuring a child matching her description, a small girl from rural Sichuan with primordial dwarfism. Whether this is Xiao Xiao is not certain. Her name translates roughly to “little little,” a generic term of endearment applied to small children, which makes tracing her history through Chinese-language sources considerably difficult. She is not the only girl with primordial dwarfism to have received media attention in China under that name.

In August 2022, village officials reviewed the Kuaishou profile, found several videos to be inappropriate, and requested its removal. The Chinese government had begun cracking down on accounts deemed to showcase antisocial or inappropriate behavior around this period, so the account was permanently banned. When Xiao Xiao’s Kuaishou account was banned, rumors of her death began circulating online. She later resurfaced through Mei Niang Xinxin’s Douyin lives in mid-2023, and by September of that year a clip of the two was circulating across every platform globally.

Mei Niang Xinxin is a man in his forties from Sichuan who began featuring Xiao Xiao in his Douyin livestreams. A cross-dresser and singer with an established following, he is known for his loud, performative energy. Douyin live performance operates on a gift economy: viewers send virtual gifts during streams which convert into real money for the performers. The more compelling the content, the more gifts flow. Xiao Xiao’s presence, her dancing and the unpredictability of her outbursts, helped the streams generate significant engagement. Wolong appears in the background of several of these videos as well. She is another woman who exists in Xiao Xiao’s orbit without ever quite entering the frame fully.

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The power differential is obvious, but Xaio Xaio is a middle-aged woman who has been navigating these arrangements her entire life. She seemingly has spent nearly four decades being poked, prodded, filmed, monetized, and managed by people who benefit from her presence more than she does. Xaio Xaio naturally has a short temper, something local officials noted in their 2022 investigation.

The TikTok account @chinesejunkfood2023 reposted the clip with Mei Niang Xinxin in September 2023. It received 16 million views. Within days of the clip going viral, Western TikTok had named her “Kick Girl” first, then “Chinese Kick Girl,” then “Chinese Junk Food Girl” after the account that had introduced her to them. On FlopTok, a corner of TikTok organized around ironic celebrity worship and heavily edited fan content, she was absorbed into an existing collection of meme figures. Fancams were created, edits circulated, and a whole aesthetic apparatus was built around her image by people who had watched a twenty-five second video.

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In Latin America, Xaio Xaio’s distinctive hairstyle, her high pigtails bound with multiple rubber bands, loose pieces hanging down, spawned a trend called “Penteado Xiao Xiao,” were young women recreate the look on TikTok for their own engagement. During Halloween, Japanese TikTok users dressed as her, performing street dances in qipao, which generated its own cycle of “cultural appropriation” outrage from Chinese media.

In 2024, Xiao Xiao’s mother was allegedly jailed for exploitation. The details beyond this are sparse on English language Tiktok and the Chinese sources are difficult to verify through translation alone (a caveat that applies to much of what is known about Xiao Xiao’s life) where the distance between what happened and what was reported and what was then translated and then paraphrased on TikTok by an AI voice narration is considerable and worth keeping in mind.

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What is known is that someone stepped in to fill the vacancy her mother left. Reports variously identify this person as a coworker, a neighbor, a cousin, a collegue she had a crush on. The inconsistency is either a translation problem or a reporting problem or both.


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She is still livestreaming on TikTok. Recent videos confirm she is alive, which is worth stating plainly given that rumors of her death have circulated more than once. Whoever her current handlers are appear to be leaning into deliberate ambiguity about her age, listing it anywhere from 9 to 26 on her English-language profile. Xiao Xiao is being dressed in increasingly juvenile outfits: toddler-style princess dresses in soft pastel colors. The AI narrations added to her TikToks push the same angle, framing her circumstances as maximally pitiable to drive engagement. All of it is calculated to reframe her on-camera meltdowns as the endearing fits of a child rather than the justified rage of a grown woman who has spent four decades being managed by people who profit from her presence more than she does.



Sources

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