For whom the boys troll

By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN

(CNN) — “It’s just jokes,” 19-year-old Lucas “Luke” Nevcherlian told his mother. The two were outside their family home in Edgewater, Florida, this past October, going over Luke’s internet history.

That might make for an excruciating private exchange between many teenagers and their mothers. But the Nevcherlians were being recorded on a police officer’s bodycam, as an FBI agent read out a slew of sexist and antisemitic messages that Luke had allegedly been sharing online.

“I hate women so much it’s unreal. Just seeing them makes me seethe with rage,” read one.

“Total Jewish death now, bring it forth,” read another.

“You might be thinking in your head that it’s just a joke,” his mother told him. “But it’s not a joke.”

While not admitting to sending all the messages, Luke struck a defiant tone: “I don’t care, I can say all of this, this is free speech.”

The FBI agent explained while the First Amendment protects all kinds of speech, it does not protect written threats.

On the call for “total Jewish death now,” Luke had allegedly written to another person, “It will happen soon brother. It’s all falling into place.”

Luke was arrested and charged with making a threat to conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism. His lawyer declined to comment.

In a phone call to his brother from jail, a recording of which was released by police, Luke sighed, “it was just a f**king joke on the internet.”

What makes a joke a joke?

“It’s all just jokes,” Rich grinned under the peak of his blue “America First” baseball cap.

Rich is 23, his friend John is 25, and when I met them earlier this year in Florida, they were both devoted “groypers” — the nickname given to fans of the far-right streamer Nick Fuentes.

At 27, Fuentes has made a name for himself as a misogynist, sexist and antisemite. He operates as a Gen Z blend of Father Charles Coughlin and Rush Limbaugh.

Coughlin used the new medium of radio in the 1930s to bypass traditional gatekeepers and reach millions of people directly with his nativist, antisemitic and pro-Nazi screeds. Fuentes has been banned from major social media platforms like Instagram, but fans like Rich and John run fan accounts on those platforms that post clips of Fuentes monologues. Groypers do this at such a scale that often Fuentes’ clips go viral before the platforms take them down.

And like Limbaugh, who built himself from a radio shock jock to a media titan by feeding listeners’ grievances, Fuentes tells his audience a story that encourages them to channel their anxieties and frustrations into disdain and hate for women and non-white people.

In a concise summation of his world view, Fuentes said last year, “Jews are running society, women need to shut the f**k up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise, it’s that simple.”

Language like this leads people to view the typical groyper as a hopeless, hateful loser who has poor social skills, is sexually repressed and will forever dwell in their parents’ basements.

Rich and John seem like pretty normal guys, by most measures. They get out and around; they go on dates with women. They could be your son, your brother or your nephew. They joke with each other about parties and relationships.

But then there’s the other kind of jokes they enjoy. They came of age at a weird time in America. As teenagers they witnessed the rise of Donald Trump, the reckoning of the #MeToo movement, a global pandemic, and a not so peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election. Old assumptions about authority, trust and social status were shaken if not upended.

What helped Rich and John make sense of it was the explanation that the wrong people, armed with the excessive power of cancel culture, had seized too much influence.

Fuentes, chased off mainstream platforms, expands and confirms this belief for them. What they like about him, they say, is that he is not afraid to say the things that might get him canceled. He is deliberate in his political incorrectness and in his pride in being a white man.

One of their favorite things about him is that “he’s funny” — a master in the modern art of trolling.

Just jokes, Rich reassured me. “And the things that aren’t jokes are very clear and obvious for most of us, you know?”

I had watched a lot of Fuentes, and I found the humor lacking. Offensive comments are made about women, immigrants, Black people and Jews — but there isn’t a punchline — the subjugation of groups themselves seem to be the “joke.”

“The average normie isn’t going to be enamored by those kinds of jokes,” Rich explained.

Trolling as transgression

Clearly, I am a “normie.” I’m not supposed to be in on the joke.

I am a 35-year-old millennial. Less than a decade separates me from the eldest member of Gen Z, but many of them would consider me sufficiently out of touch that I might as well be a boomer.

So, I think it’s important to acknowledge as I attempt to probe the groyper mind that every new generation revels in their own version of subversiveness. What does it mean to be young if not to antagonize one’s elders?

The current use of “normie” has its roots in online alt-right communities.

But long before there were normies there were “squares.” Lame “suits” worked for “the Man.” We millennials took to calling people “basic.”

Some of the biggest cultural figures of 20th century America were those who were willing to talk about the things that were deemed taboo by the generation before them.

The white comedian Lenny Bruce made his name in part by repeating the n-word in the 1950s and 60s — arguing that by doing so he was diluting its power as a slur.

The entire vibe of the 1970s punk music scene was designed to be ugly, to offend the pretensions of the establishment: swastikas worn as fashion, slurs used as transgression. To the extent that most “ever had a clue on what that stuff originally meant, it only went so far as their intent to shock,” the music critic Lester Bangs, himself a part of the punk scene, wrote in The Village Voice in 1979.

“It’s like a stance,” a person explained to him. “A real immature way of being dangerous.”

Boys and young men have always enjoyed the crassest of humor. Much of the male humor of my generation was shaped by “Anchorman” and “Borat.” One character was infamously sexist, the other notoriously antisemitic.

Fuentes is not a comedian. But Rich and John maintain that what we normies might perceive as pure hate is merely Fuentes trolling, using humor as transgression.

“We’re young, we just want to have fun,” John explained. “And with these older people, if they just got off our backs and stopped nagging us, and we weren’t getting the reactions out of them, we wouldn’t even do any of that stuff. We want to get a rise out of them.”

“We are at a point where we’re kind of tired of the tone policing,” he said.

But what tone policing?

RIP cancel culture

A few weeks ago, I saw comedian Shane Gillis perform in Los Angeles.

Gillis came to prominence after he lost his spot on “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 when a clip surfaced of him using an anti-Asian slur on his podcast.

Since then, Gillis has used his cancellation as a credential — he has made calling things “gay” and calling people “r*tards” a signature part of his routine.

One can argue it’s in terrible taste and that it’s not very funny, but the cultural tailwinds are clearly at his back. I didn’t have to seek out his stand-up at some dingy basement comedy club in Los Angeles — he headlined the Hollywood Bowl during this year’s Netflix is a Joke comedy festival. He has his own Netflix series.

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” later revealed that he was against Gillis’ firing from the show. He blamed NBC and said Gillis had been swept up in a “mania” — the victim of the perceived excesses of political correctness of the late 2010s.

Gillis has since returned to host “Saturday Night Live” not once, but twice, in 2024 and 2025.

The “tone police” that John talks about feel more like ghosts from an era that lost its steam three years ago. Many of the “canceled” are now thriving — not least Donald Trump, who was kicked off all the major social media sites after he lost the 2020 election and his supporters launched the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Now, Trump is back in the White House where he is visited and feted by the same tech moguls that had once banned him from their platforms.

Indeed, the “tone police” seem to have been so thoroughly disarmed, the canceled so successfully uncanceled, it has ushered in a new era of crassness in which it’s tough to find a pose that seems shockingly subversive.

For the disillusioned young men who have a natural urge to act out, it might be hard to feel like a rebel if your social media feed is tamer than the feed from the leader of the free world, who earlier this year shared a racist video depicting the Obamas as apes.

The comedy club

The manosphere and the male loneliness epidemic has been too thoroughly litigated elsewhere to dwell on here. I will, however, point out that groyperism offers unhappy men a sense of superiority.

This comes not only from the substance of Fuentes’ rants about the supremacy of men as a sex and white people as a race, but also from their form. The groyper, unlike normies, is in the exalted position of believing he can tell when Fuentes is joking and when he is not. He has access to the special knowledge that sets the group apart.

But does he really? Fuentes has repeatedly said women should not be allowed to vote. I asked Rich and John if that was a joke or if he was serious.

First, they said it was a joke. “It’s like we’re not going out of our way to repeal the 19th [Amendment],” Rich said.

“He’s trying to get under people’s skins,” John added.

Okay, I said, so he is not serious about this?

No, they said, Fuentes is serious — “but he wouldn’t do anything about it.”

So what do Rich and John believe? Rich, after some hesitation, said he personally believed women should vote.

John, with a straight face, told me, “I think women should only be allowed to vote if they’re married. Because I think if they were married, they would vote with their husband.”

Was John joking? Was he trolling me? It was hard to know who was being serious, where the joke started and where it ended.

Fuentes has also praised the Nazis and described Hitler as “very f**king cool.” Was this also a joke?

Rich and John seemed less interested in considering Hitler’s actions or history than they were in their adamancy that they should be allowed to joke about Hitler.

“I’m just at the point where people don’t ever get criticized for actually doing stuff that hurts our country,” John said.

“So, like if someone makes a joke,” he added, “it shouldn’t matter that much, even if he’s wrong.”

It seemed to me that neither of them had really considered the prospect of what any of the “jokes” about sexism and antisemitism meant, what any of it was supposed to achieve. What mattered was that, as groypers, they were seen to be enjoying the jokes.

In his famous 1986 essay “On Bullshit,” the philosopher Harry Frankfurt drew a distinction between liars and bullshitters. Liars know the truth and are deliberately saying the opposite. Bullshitters are indifferent to whether what they are saying is true or false. The effect, not the truth, is the point.

Even more telling — and depressing — is the nihilism that lies beneath Rich’s contention that it’s all “just jokes” and it doesn’t matter anyway. Despite Fuentes telling them they are the master race, neither Rich nor John believe the world is theirs to shape.

Who’s kidding whom?

It would be giving my teenage self too much credit to say I fully understood the degree to which “Anchorman” was a satire of old-fashioned sexism and “Borat” was a critical exploration of antisemitism.

But it was clear that Ron Burgundy and Borat were supposed to be absurd, losers, pathetic in their own sad ways. They were not people to aspire to be or to emulate.

Lenny Bruce died of an overdose in 1966 before he could reckon with whether his approach to using the n-word had worked. But his argument, even if it was wrong, was that repetition robbed it of its power. Richard Pryor, a Bruce acolyte, eventually concluded after a visit to Africa in 1979 that repeating the n-word hadn’t diluted it at all. It had only made audiences comfortable hearing it and laughing. He vowed to never say it again.

Lester Bangs realized, he wrote, that in among the punks who played around with acting like racists or Nazis, because no would really mean it, there were people who really meant it. For people slinging racial slurs or flaunting swastikas, he wrote, “no matter how you intend them, you can’t say them without risking misinterpretation by some other bigoted asshole; your irony just might be his cup of hate.”

Today, under the guise of humor, a lot of people are getting hurt — and they’re not always the people who were intended to be the butt of the joke. Words do matter. And even the most disillusioned, above-it-all people feel different when the jokes are on them.

Rich and John learned that the hard way.

After I interviewed them in Miami back in April, John posted photos from the interview on his social media. They got the attention of groypers and eventually of Fuentes himself.

“What the actual f**k is this?” Fuentes asked on social media, reposting John’s photos. “Do not claim to represent me if you are dressed like that and are plus 25 BMI, as a matter of fact nobody represents me at all.”

He was calling his loyal supporters fat. He also mocked what they were wearing, down to their shoes and socks. His attacks signaled to other groypers to pile on.

“I can’t wait for this guy to be doxxed and have his life ruined forever,” one groyper said of John in a live online audio chat which he and Rich were part of.

“Just kill yourself,” said another.

John later posted a video on social video saying Fuentes had “made his hyperbolic statements about the fat thing and the shoes and all that. And I get it. And I wasn’t even that upset. That’s Nick. That’s just vintage Nick. He’s being funny about stuff.”

Yet John couldn’t help taking it seriously enough to try to argue against Fuentes, in the hopes of defending himself against the charge of being out of shape. “I’ve ran multiple marathons and I’m in pretty good shape,” he offered.

He also wanted to make sure the groypers understood that he hadn’t agreed that women could be allowed to vote — that it was Rich who did that, not him. The thing the two friends had told me was only “to get under people’s skins” was suddenly a real test of their loyalty to Fuentes and the movement.

John put on a brave face, but it was clear it hurt to suddenly be on the receiving end of hate from a community he was a part of.

“You can hate, but you’re just in your basement, you’re a keyboard warrior, and you’re doing nothing for the movement,” he said in the video.

After the attacks from Fuentes and their fellow groypers, Rich and John didn’t want to be interviewed by me again.

But I wondered: did they really still believe it was all “just jokes”?

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