Clavicular and the Post-Political Right

Internet personality Clavicular wants you to know you’re subhuman. The twenty-year-old, whose real name is Braden Peters, is the most prominent influencer in the ‘looksmaxxing’ space online and has garnered more than 305,000 followers on Instagram in the process. Motivated by the goal of improving his physical appearance, he spent the last year injecting himself with various recreational drugs, undergoing surgery, and hitting his face with a hammer. Now atop a mountain of celebrity, he uses his platform to proselytise the benefits of his physical transformation: wealth; career success; renewal in this world—objects tantamount to a salvation from social irrelevance, his great fear.

 

Although right-adjacent, Clavicular is less explicitly political than many of his associated acts. Nick Fuentes hosts a nightly politics show; Andrew Tate regularly wades into the culture wars online and even set up a political party last year (even if as a gimmick)—Peters alone says that politics is a waste of time. Of course, the similarities abound: they’re all fond of being ‘edgy’; they all take aim, with varying degrees of focus, to what they consider to be a left-wing orthodoxy. But, where someone like Fuentes spends his days opining about immigration and foreign policy, Clavicular’s conservatism consists of a liberal use of racial slurs.

 

Clavicular totally rejects the idea that politics is of any value. He cites the assassination of Charlie Kirk as evidence of its futility: ‘he was a good man trying to better society and they shot him for it.’ He again invokes his gods—looks, money, status—with the faith that they might save other young men in the same manner that he believes they saved him. They are both the solution to life’s problems as well as the yardstick against which life success is measured. It is from this self-interested sense, the belief that earthly striving is sufficient to save, that his clash with more conventional, Christian conservatism makes sense. He butts heads with Michael Knowles, a prominent Catholic political commentator in a now-viral online interview. Knowles’ vision of a society governed by Christian mores collided with an ideology based on earthly competition between people, an ideology in which a person disfigures themselves transitioning is not someone for whom we show empathy, but ‘one more person to mog.’

 

As opposed to a theology in which we are all born to sin, Clavicular’s worldview starts from the premise that an unfortunate few of us are genetically predisposed to being subhuman. For the Christian, the Ascension cements Christ’s triumph over sin and death; the distorted ‘ascension’ preached by Clavicular is the triumph over the earthly deficiencies in wealth, beauty, and status. We talk, though, not of an event at the end of history, but something promised a few months from now, provided the regime goes to plan. Where the Christian believes that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, looksmaxxing promises us that its results are tangible and imminent, and that patience is unnecessary.

 

Peters’ fixation with quick fixes means he makes for a very different type of political commentator. His belief that personal striving can solve all problems leads to a rejection of traditional political action altogether. Unlike the rest of the new online commentator class, who have always implied that their politics was effectual. Clavicular breaks from the mould. He is the flagbearer for a political movement that is detaching itself from politics.There is no call to collective action. There are no rallies, nor attempts to ‘stop the steal.’ Like so many political commentators, he speaks glumly of the world as it is. But, in the absence of a belief that political action can do anything, his conclusions are radically different from almost anyone else before him. Save yourself, says Peters. Politics is useless. Here Peters  distinguishes his thinking from that of a general alienation with politics. He does not reject established political parties in favour of grassroots collective action; he dispenses with caring about one’s community altogether. In the place of a public-facing impulse, we see a superficial focus on the self.

 

In one sense, rejecting politics is self-defeating. A refusal to participate in politics means a concession of influence—that one’s political opponents have their agenda prioritised and their candidates elected. Nevertheless, post-political political influencers are worth our attention; in fact, they should frighten us all. If you combine the belief that political issues matter with a disaffection for conventional political methods, it follows that unconventional political methods should be pursued. Even with all the strife and division that marks politics, we should remember that violence, the alternative, is far uglier. 

 

A post-political right is worthy of everyone’s lament. For all the faults of politics, its expectation that we care about the society we live in inculcates virtues that will be totally absent in a post-political sphere. Without a public forum in which to contest ideas, we turn inwards. In the case of the hundreds of thousands of people, disproportionately young men, who follow Clavicular, that inward turn means the dangerous pursuit of looks, money, and status, all while casting aside the moderating forces of other people. Politics saves people from themselves and for that, it deserves our thanks.

 

Words by Nathan Osafo Omane.