In the following hours, Clavicular took to X to gleefully celebrate. One post of his reads, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” It features an AI-generated image of him running over a tatted-up black man in his Cybertruck (in real life, the man was indeed black — this matters, given Clavicular’s musings about racial IQ and his liberal use of the N-word). The first comment beneath his post asserts, “unfathomably based.” James Fishback, the ascendant and Groyper-esque Republican contender for Florida governor, tweeted, and Clavicular reposted: “@Clavicular0 did nothing wrong.” 

The stalker had apparently previously harassed Clavicular, and he’s alive and expected to survive. The streamer was also reportedly taken in for questioning by Miami Police, who did not press charges. Whether or not Clavicular hitting a man clobbering on his windshield legitimately falls under self-defense is beside the point. Normal people simply don’t shamelessly advertise that they drove over a fellow human being. (There has also been speculation that the entire affair was staged, which is a real possibility with internet personalities, but which is perhaps even worse.)  

Then again, Clavicular is hardly a normal person. He initially gained notoriety in November for injecting fat-dissolving peptides into the cheek of his 17-year-old then-girlfriend. He engages in bone-smashing, pounding himself in the face either with his bare fist or with a hammer, a practice he endorses as promoting muscular jaw growth. He takes crystal meth to stay lean. According to fellow online-Right provocateur Nick Fuentes, Clavicular is a “chad” (an attractive and confident man, in contrast to an involuntary celibate) and a “WANGHF” — “white-ass n—r going hard as fuck.” “I’m like Nietzsche … I heralded the coming of the overman,” says Fuentes, implying that he was a harbinger for Clavicular. 

On Kick, the streaming platform that is a major competitor to Twitch, Clavicular boasts 97,800 followers as of this writing. Tune in, and you might see him at a club, approaching girls, microphone-on-chest. An hour into the new year and freshly unbanned from the platform, he was on Kick, interacting with two girls in a manner bordering on coercion, pressing them to pose for him to take a photo. On the chat, multiple users were suggesting, “run over George Floyd.” After around two minutes, the connection was “lost,” I surmise because the approach did not go as anticipated.

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Clavicular may seem to be an extreme case and an outlier — demented, pathetic, and dangerous in equal measures — but unfortunately for society, and especially for conservatives, he seems to have a project and a somewhat coherent set of beliefs. These were on useful display three days after the Cybertruck incident, when Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles released a  two-hour-long interview with the streamer — the first collision between Clavicular and mainstream conservatism. 

It would be hard for anyone over the age of 40, much less someone unacquainted with the lingo of the chronically online Right, to follow their conversation. Knowles — one of the more traditionalist conservatives out there — began by acknowledging the profoundly absurd nature of their rendezvous: “I’ve had the privilege of sitting down with people from a wide variety of backgrounds: priests, exorcists, scientists, refugees. Never before, though, have I sat down with a looksmaxxed, meth-head, livestream-cel.” The same week the episode was released, Knowles had also interviewed the Catholic bishop Robert Barron. 

Knowles repeatedly attempted to persuade Clavicular of his worldview: a concern for electoral politics, society at large, and faith and family. The Catholic commentator advocated for “spirituality-maxxing.” Knowles wondered if looksmaxxing for its own sake amounts to mere vanity. “In a lot of regards, it could be perceived that way,” replied Clavicular serenely. 

Here, in stark contrast, are the two grand Right-wing persuasions of the internet. Both spring from Gen Z’s concern with the direction of society and its crisis of meaning, as well as Zoomers’ very real material concerns. The first emphasizes strong communities, religiosity, and public policy in pursuit of the common good. That’s largely the conservatism of YouTube video essays, podcasts, and youth organizing. The latter, epitomized by figures such as Clavicular and Andrew Tate, says something like this: Society is decadent, morals are gone, and so I — the radically atomized individual — am going to do absolutely everything that I can to succeed. The proposition that “God is dead, and we have killed him” is the so-called conservatism of Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.

A viral segment of the interview had Knowles and Clavicular clashing on transgenderism. Knowles contended that it’s in the public interest to maintain societal order and prevent degeneracy and the mutilation of fellow citizens. Clavicular was unmoved: “The way I see trannies is that’s one more person to mog,” meaning to outshine. “Go descend yourself, that’s fine with me.” (“Ascending” is the online Right term for attaining higher status.) 

On the likely presidential matchup between JD Vance and Gavin Newsom, Clavicular argued, “JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom moggs…. [Vance]’s got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like [a] six-foot-three chad.” I suppose most Americans agree that Newsom is conventionally better looking than the vice president. But that Vance’s looks constitute him being “subhuman”? “How are you fat and expect to lead a country?” quipped Clavicular. Clavicular agreed with Knowles’s assessment of the California governor as a “liar” and “degenerate.” Nonetheless, he’d vote for him “100 times over” merely because of physical looks.

Those still wondering if there can be good-faith overlap in agenda between figures like Clavicular and traditional conservatism should retire their hopes. Knowles was desperate to find areas of agreement with Clavicular (successfully), and to persuade him to use his powers for the good of his community, his nation, and others (unsuccessfully). Clavicular shut it all down by simply not caring. Noam Chomsky’s famous analysis of Michel Foucault springs to mind: “I had never seen such an amoral — not immoral, amoral — person in my life.” 

Ironically, Clavicular’s individualism-maxxing is far more at odds with today’s conservatism than would have been the case 10 years ago. In the Right’s more libertarian days, from the 1980s to some point in the early part of this decade, the individual was the foremost unit of political emphasis. The predominant view was that people made decisions and were wholly responsible for them, and that the government had little role — if any — in making itself a vehicle for the country’s improvement. 

Trump changed this view, breaking with long-held conservative fetishizations of the free market, small government, and neoliberalism. Yet the paradox is that with Trump, young men had someone to look up to who disregarded norms, proudly belittled others, and knew how to win. Instead of asking what the winning was for, substantively speaking, a good chunk of the Gen-Z Right took to idolizing the hyper-atomized individual who could do anything alone.  

And so today, we find some of the newest members of the Right celebrating and defending a streamer who injects a cocktail of drugs into himself every day, who smashes his skull, and who got expelled from college in three weeks for hiding testosterone in his dorm room — a concoction he has been, at first secretly and now openly, injecting since he was 14 years old.

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All this — even down to the testosterone — is bizarrely similar to the mistakes the young Left made a decade ago, when the common good took a backseat to hyper-individualism in the realms of sex, gender, and lifestyle. The Left’s flagship movement, of course, was trans. We saw self-proclaimed champions of rationality and of working-class politics promoting the notion that any small boy could become a girl — that he wasn’t really a boy at all. This opened the door for corporations to market Pride and “diversity,” appealing not to a collective American identity, but to boutique groups, and their supposedly morally superior particularistic inclinations. We got “Somaliweek presented by Amazon,” never mind the company’s egregious labor violations. 

The Left’s historic antiwar stance, too, was jettisoned somewhere in the apparent need to promote American-style liberal democracy abroad, justifying an ever-expanding slate of foreign wars precisely on individualistic grounds (cue “human rights”). Somewhere along the line, between watching Don Lemon on CNN and grabbing $6 iced matcha lattes, Leftist youth forgot that the advancement of our society as a whole belonged in their calculations.

Thus, Clavicular can be seen as the Right-wing embodiment of the transgender craze; the eternal pursuit of physical “betterment” that leads to nothing much, and in all likelihood to nothing better. And the tragedy is that this Right hyper-individualism, just like the Left variety, is deeply intoxicating to young minds. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts — almost certainly run by Gen Z interns and staffers — clearly recognize the power of “mogging.” In October, DHS released a reel showcasing “Life after all criminal aliens are deported” (since deleted from their official X page due to copyright issues). Spliced between images of Trump in his heyday and clips from 1980s films, appears a pale-white, freckled Gio Scotti, the Italian model and e-girl lauded by the online Right for her “genetic superiority.” Newsom, the liberal who stands for nothing more than vibes and electoral success, has realized the efficiency of “mogging,” too. In the aftermath of Clavicular’s disparaging comments about Vance, Newsom’s Press Office tweeted out an old, particularly unflattering image of Vance. Clavicular quote-tweeted, “Huge impact moment.”

The young Right would be wise to learn from the young Left’s mistakes. Or suffer the same fate in a few years, as the nation turns away, exhausted, from the politics of incomprehensible jargon, antics, and tantrums. 

But America’s lethal addiction crisis is far from over. In fact, it’s worse than ever. According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control published this week, more than 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in the 12 months between April 2020 an April 2021. It is the first time the figure has reached six figures over a year-long period and represents a 28% jump on the previous 12 months.

As I have reported before for UnHerd, the pandemic quickly undid what limited progress had been made in the fight against opioids before 2020. Lockdowns left recovering addicts alone and starved of the human contact that is so central to staying sober. Relapses spiked, and with them deaths. “Isolation is the opposite of what you need for recovery,” one pastor in West Virginia told me.

But the pandemic is only one dimension of what amounts to a serious public health emergency. And the prescription pills peddled by Big Pharma that most people think of when they hear the words “opioid crisis” aren’t the biggest problem. Today’s battle is against two synthetic drugs: one that kills with terrifying ease, another that creates zombified and desperate addicts almost overnight. These have transformed America’s drug landscape, and rendered obsolete a lot of conventional wisdom about drug use, addiction and the proper policy responses. They are not the drugs fondly remembered by ex-hippie Boomers.

“I don’t know any longtime fentanyl users,” one addict-turned-counselor tells the journalist Sam Quinones in The Least Of Us, his new book on America’s metastasising addiction crisis and the two drugs at its heart. “They all die.”

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Today, fentanyl is responsible for the majority of drug deaths in America. In tiny doses it gives users a high that resembles the blissed-out pain relief delivered by heroin or prescription pills. But it is far stronger and more deadly. In anything other than those microscopic quantities, it will kill you. The other drug central to the latest phase of the addiction crisis is methamphetamine, in particular a kind cooked up using a method known as P2P, which uses phenyl-2-propanone.

This new meth isn’t like the old meth. “I wouldn’t even call it meth anymore,” an addict-turned-councillor tells Quinones. Some gangs refer to it as “weirdo dope”. One user, Kirsten, explains that it was not the party drug that used to cause her to chat endlessly and crave companionship. After using the new meth, she “had trouble talking, unless it was to herself. She heard voices.” She struggled to eat and rarely left her home: “Her once-pretty smile faded along with the enamel on her teeth, which turned black and abscessed. Her head jerked uncontrollably. She gave her son to her family to keep him safe. By 2016, she was seeing angels and demons… She began barking like a dog in public.”

Users across America were all experiencing the same thing: paranoia, hallucinations, isolation, uncontrollable limbs, memory loss and garbled speech. Together, fentanyl and meth, Quinones writes, now form “an unmercifully addictive, mind-twisting, and deadly concoction that no one demanded”. That point is crucial. No one asked for this. These designer drugs were not devised with a particular set of consumer tastes in mind.

As The Least Of Us makes clear, they are first and foremost, supply-side innovations. The supply chain found a way of making drugs that were easier to produce than their naturally occurring equivalents; far more addictive, far cheaper. The results have been immensely lucrative — and devastating.

Fentanyl was initially imported with the click of a button from unregulated Chinese producers. After a government clampdown, that then switched to Mexico and domestic production, where the raw ingredients for the rudimentary production process were imported instead of the finished product.

The story with P2P meth is a little more complicated. For years, producers had preferred the method of production that extracted ephedrine, an ingredient used in over-the-counter drugs. Meth was churned out on an industrial scale in Mexico this way, and on a smaller scale in the US, where ephedrine could be found in drugs such as Sudafed. But a clampdown on that substance on both sides of the border led to a different, messier technique. The advantage of the so-called P2P method is that the ingredients are easier to come by: a list of legal and widely available chemicals. The disadvantage is that the methamphetamine it produced is — to simplify a little — a lot dirtier, filled with all sorts of noxious stuff. But the producers didn’t care: it was cheap and easy and meant they could deliver addicts a highly addictive fix with minimal fuss. Again, supply-side issues, not consumer tastes, explained the change.

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These are drugs for the age of the gig economy. You don’t need capital, you don’t land, you don’t need armed guards. You just need an internet connection and, for fentanyl, a magic bullet blender (the brand of choice, apparently). As Quinones writes, the gadget “fit snugly with fentanyl’s disruptive allure, which was this: that with minuscule investment of learning and money, anyone — even someone in boxers in his mother’s basement, without education nor connection to mafia or trackers — could now making a killing. And beginning in about 2015, they did.”

In spite of this brave new world of synthetic drugs, we are stuck in the shadow of the Sixties and Seventies and the idea that drug use is “a form of adventure, particularly for a young man who had intellect and a thrill-seeking soul”. But that culture was formed in an era when the drugs were a far cry from the “highly potent marijuana, corrosive methamphetamine, and powerful narcotic pain pills in unprecedented supply”.

The big argument in The Least Of Us is that drugs explain the drugs crisis. That may sound fatuous, but it’s important. Yes, demand matters, but pontificating about the root causes of American unhappiness — post-industrial decline, family breakdown, listlessness and so on — misses the point. The lethal addiction crisis is, first and foremost, about receptors in our brain and the horrifying availability of chemicals that attack them with overwhelming force.

We are dealing with a chemical assault: a woeful mismatch between 21st-century compounds and our stone-age brains. In other words, it’s the drugs, stupid. Put simply, this is a fight for what it means to be human. As Quinones puts it: “Our brains are wondrous, mystifying, complex organs. From them have sprung awesome creations, innovations, inventions. Drugs dim those gorgeous lights to gray obedience. Our brain on drugs resembles the regime that imprisons its great writers, artists, and scientists.”

By messing with the pleasure circuits we have evolved in order to eat, have sex, socialise in a group and pass on our genes to the next generation — things that have kept us alive and helped us thrive for millennia — drugs diminish what makes us human, and kill all sense of community. (Understand this and you understand how the pandemic has made the problem so much worse.)

Our blindness to the potency of modern drugs also means we have ignored the spillover effects of addiction. The proliferation of homeless encampments in American communities of all sizes, Quinones argues, is first and foremost a consequence of the new meth: “Homelessness is different now — more prolific, more stationary, less transient,” he writes. “Much of it now is rooted in the voluminous supplies of meth that Mexican traffickers’ switch to the P2P method made possible.” In light of this insight, the focus on “housing-first” approaches to homelessness miss the point.

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Ultimately, the twin meth and fentanyl assault on America scrambles conventional debates about drug legalisation and decriminalisation in unpredictable ways. An addiction crisis largely started by over-prescribing addictive pain pills before has become a story of deadly illegal synthetic drugs made with ever-changing combinations of widely available substances. The question of what the law proscribes feels besides the point. On the one hand, Oxycontin and the other addictive painkillers pushed by pharmaceutical companies starting in the Nineties undercuts the legalisers’ claim that a regulated market saves people from abuse. On the other, the restrictionists will never be able to keep up with the labs, who will always be one step ahead in the hunt for cheap, easy-to-manufacture addictive chemical compounds.

First and foremost, the problem is one of supply: the challenge is to find ways to prevent the aggressive marketing, and dramatic increase in supply, of highly addictive, very dangerous drugs — legal or illegal. Here, the emergence of Big Weed and its campaign to sell high doses of THC as part of a healthy lifestyle is surely an ominous development.

For his part, Quinones says his instincts are with the liberals, but is cautious about the consequences. In particular, he believes in the need for continued criminalisation “not as a reason to send someone to prison” but as “leverage we can use to pry users from the dope that will consume them otherwise”. It is not good enough, he argues persuasively, to wait for someone to “hit rock bottom” and seek help. Today, people “are living in tents, screaming at unseen demons, raped, pimped, beaten, unshowered and unfed”.surely  If that’s not rock bottom, what is? When it comes to fentanyl, the answer is death. Coercion must be part of the solution.

The Least Of Us is a bleak wake-up call, but Quinones ends on an upbeat note. Perhaps, he argues, the misery of the drug wave sweeping America will do what other crises haven’t done and bring about much needed community reconstruction.

I’m less optimistic. Not because America’s communities, from small Appalachian towns to big coastal cities, lack resilience. But because of the mismatch between our stone-age brains and terrifyingly addictive drugs. Even as the latest overdose numbers make headlines, America is yet to properly come to terms with the seriousness of what it is up against. However, despite all the bleak headlines and grim statistics, I’m left with the horrible feeling that the country hasn’t quite hit rock bottom.