Who Cares What Clavicular Thinks At A Time Like This?
It is a red flag. It is being waved. We are the bull.
Healthy Futures is free to read and always will be. Paid subscribers get Wellness Debrief, The Shelf, and a few paid essays per month. If you’re not ready for that but want to support the work, you can also leave a tip via PayPal. Now, let’s get into it.
Dave Chappelle1 has a bit about how, in the days after 9/11, he turned on MTV, and there was Ja Rule giving his opinion about the attacks. Chappelle, with a sharp note of disdain tinged with disbelief, asked a question that has since become shorthand for a specific kind of media pathology: Who gives a fuck what Ja Rule thinks at a time like this?
I’ve been thinking about that bit for weeks now, about the media’s instinct to reach for the nearest available mouthpiece during a moment that demands something, anything, else.
We are currently living through a news cycle in which one recurring figure is a 20-year-old named Braden Peters. You likely know him as Clavicular, a looksmaxxer adjacent to the manosphere. For those of you blessed enough not to know what looksmaxxing is…I’m jealous, but, in short, it is Gen Z’s version of eugenics, like millennials were quantifying ourselves. He’s publicly claimed to have injected enough testosterone to render himself infertile, has discussed how to smash your own cheekbones with a hammer to achieve “facial harmony,” and was hospitalized after overdosing during a livestream a few weeks ago. He has become, by some collective decision, someone the serious press has determined is worth airtime. Over the past several months, he has been the subject of a New York Times profile, an equally lenient follow-up on The Daily from the same reporter, a Piers Morgan sit-down (Two racists walk onto a set…), and a steady churn of interviews across outlets, all chasing the same clicks. He is, by every visible measure, trying to become a celebrity—because that is one of the machines through which ideology enters the mainstream in this country. Once he’s asked about something other than his dogma, he abruptly ends the interview, which is another reason the press should stop talking to him.
Around this, the usual swirl of questions has coalesced. Is looksmaxxing a fleeting teenage subculture or something more sinister? What do we do about youth radicalization, about the boys who are reaching for him, about the parents who don’t know what their sons are watching, about the platforms that amplify him, about whether we should be platforming him at all? These are legitimate questions. But the way they are being asked—in a recursive spectator’s loop that keeps circling back to him—is, to borrow a line I wrote in a different decade about a different man pushing an adjacent ideology: an exhausting, pointless conversation that serves no true function.
I wrote that sentence in 2019, for HuffPost, about the press’s inability to call Donald Trump a racist. At the time, the media was consumed by a meta-debate about whether it was a journalistically appropriate word to apply to a sitting president who had just told four congresswomen of color to go back where they came from. I was, like a lot of Black journalists then, over it. The argument I ended up making was not, in truth, my argument. I borrowed it from Toni Morrison.
Seven years later, I find myself reaching for her again.
In her 1975 keynote at Portland State University, Morrison described what she called the “very serious function of racism”:
Where racism exists as an idea, it was always a confidence game that sucked all the strength of the victim. It really is the red flag that the toreador dances before the head of a bull. Its purpose is only to distract, to keep the bull’s mind away from his power and his energy, to keep his mind focused on anything but his own business…
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Instead of pinning this spectacularly dangerous figure to the center of the umpteenth rebranding of eugenics, the interview circuit around Clavicular is channeling our finite energy toward the inner world of a young man who is mutilating himself in public. It is a red flag. It is being waved. We are the bull.
Potential disciples are being introduced to some deeply racist, misogynistic, weird shit by prestige media organizations through reporters who, no shade, don’t have the range to write about these topics critically or in a way that serves those who would be integral in preventing young men from getting swept up in the storm. If you think this is an overstatement, consider how, on The Daily, the reporter who profiled Clavicular was asked about his documented, incessant use of the n-word. The answer? That these guys don’t really understand the impact of what they’re doing.
Meanwhile, we are being taken from. On April 7, Trump threatened to level “a whole civilization” if Iran didn’t agree to a ceasefire. One was announced the following day, and hours later, Israel dishonored it and killed at least 357 people in Lebanon. At least 75,200 Palestinians died violent deaths between October 2023 and January 2025 alone, according to research published in April, an estimate that is likely more on the conservative side. The UN has projected that at least 101,000 Gazan children under five will suffer acute malnutrition through October, more than 31,000 of them severely.
The 9/11’s happening on American soil are more domestic. Men continue to murder their families, most often the women, the children, or both. Children are being detained by ICE. In the first four months of 2026, the CDC has confirmed 1,748 measles cases—on pace to surpass 2025, which was already the worst year in three decades. The collective net worth of the 12 richest billionaires has more than quadrupled since 2020. Nearly half of American adults cannot cover a $1,000 emergency.
Who gives a fuck what Clavicular thinks at a time like this?
Since Chappelle’s bit—which was, at its core, about celebrity worship—the awe captured by mouthpieces with millions of followers has only metastasized. Now is the time to do the disciplined work of channeling your attention with purpose. The attention economy is engineered to exhaust, fragment, and keep us reactive, overstimulated, and proving the shape of our own heads. The interview circuit around Clavicular is one small expression of that machinery. Knowing about him does not make us more informed.
It is a red flag. It is being waved. We are the bull.
Do what the bull cannot: look away.
The irony, of course, is that Chappelle himself has become a Ja Rule, considering that he’s spent the last decade accepting microphone after microphone to deliver his thoughts on trans people, on cancel culture, on whatever the discourse is asking of him that week.