Do you remember where you were when Clavicular got brutally framemogged by an ASU fraternity leader?

Or maybe you saw the 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 any of this means.

The internet subculture known as looksmaxxing, has recently jumped from obscure message boards into the mainstream — thanks in part to a 20-year-old creator who goes by Clavicular.

Clavicular’s real name is Braden Peters. And he’s not just posting 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 appearance, politics, and online extremism are brewing in this corner of the internet, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Atlantic staff writer and host of the podcast Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full episode wherever you get podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Clavicular is a young man — he’s in his 20s. He started posting on the internet as a teenager, around when he was about 15 years old, on these looksmaxxing forums, which are forums that are dedicated to making yourself as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible through body modification.

Clavicular basically toiled in obscurity for a really long time until he allegedly hit someone with his Cybertruck while he was live streaming on Christmas Eve of this past year.

Who are the looksmaxxers?

The looksmaxxers are complicated because they overlap with lots of other communities online. There’s the involuntarily celibate community, known as incels, that have links to violent extremism. But really there’s this core feeling in looksmaxxing that the only thing that matters in all of life is how good you look, that that is tied to your self-worth in every way, and that what you should be doing is trying by all means necessary — whether that is breaking bones in your body, whether that is chewing on a rubber ball for hours a day — to get your jawline to be straighter. To get a leg up, you need to do that because the best thing that you can do is go out in the world and look better than everyone else and document the heck out of it.

What do we know about what Clavicular has done to himself?

He has said on various podcasts, etc., that he has smashed his face with a hammer. The theory there is that when your bones break, they grow back stronger.

And so he has smashed his face, his jawline, in order to strengthen it to make it look better. He started, according to him, taking testosterone when he was around 14 or 15 years old in order to speed up his puberty and get his body looking like an adult. He’s said he’s taken methamphetamines in order to hollow out his cheeks.

The looksmaxxers have their own language, which I find very compelling. Can you define a couple of the terms?

Mogging is looking better than someone looking hot. And actually what I found is it’s a sort of an acronym, but it stands for alpha male of the group, [shortened to] male of the group — MOG.

There’s all kinds of words that they’re just making up on the spot too, like jestermaxxing, which is being jocular, jovial, having fun.

What is the objective of being hot? What is the purpose of all this?

It is social dominance really, or just dominance in general. This idea of mogging comes from this alpha male of group acronym: The “alpha” part of that, and the “male” part of that are both extremely important. And so going out in public as an extremely hot person is not just to show how beautiful you are, but it’s to be dominant over other people. You want to make other people look bad. You want them to feel bad about themselves based on how unbelievably attractive you are, and you also want to basically conquer women.

I’ve read your pieces and I listened to your podcast and there’s a thing that I think you both say directly and kind of dance around, which is…this seems stupid, but it isn’t actually stupid. Explain what you mean.

I think it’s stupid on the content level. It’s lacking in substance is how I would put it. There’s the clip of Clavicular, I believe he’s in Miami. He’s with this streamer, Sneako, who’s very popular, and Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist Groyper leader, also a streamer. And they are in a living room somewhere in an apartment and having a conversation that is incredibly stilted, just incredibly vapid. There’s just not a lot being exchanged there.

Clavicular seems to react like he is one of those wind-up dolls. You pull the string and there’s like five different reactions. So one of them’s like, “Hey dude, that’s so based, sick.” And so on the substance level, there’s that.

Then there’s the element of what he means, what that vapid content means, what the popularity of someone like Clavicular means. And I think that that is not stupid. The fact that I’m writing an article about him in The Atlantic because he’s hanging out with these people. The fact that he was able to leverage his popularity into this situation where he is meeting with Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer. Fuentes, who is influential enough that he’s trying to force the MAGA coalition further towards white nationalism. That he’s able to go into a club with these guys and get them to play the Ye song, “Heil Hitler,” and turn that into this viral moment that then gets the mayor of Miami to have to react to it, to condemn it, to basically apologize on behalf of the city for letting this happen. These guys are extremely effective attention hijackers, and that is important.