What Was Clavicular?
· The Atlantic
At the age of 14, Braden Peters began injecting himself with mail-order testosterone to make himself into something he wasn’t. By his account, the experiment ended when his parents, Kenneth and Lauren, discovered his supply and trashed it. Young Braden was apparently undaunted. He set up a post-office box and began ordering new chemicals—he’s since claimed to have taken crystal meth to stay lean—anything that would catalyze his transformation. He began tapping his face with a hammer in pursuit of perfect cheekbones. The goal was entirely superficial: to reshape his physical form so that other men would feel inferior in his presence, and so that women would want to have sex with him.
Visit saltysenoritaaz.com for more information.
This, at least, is the origin story he’s told and retold over hundreds of hours of livestreams and interviews. In the pre-internet age, Peters might have passed through the world without notice, or at least without fame. But in 2026, at age 20, he is a popular influencer who calls himself Clavicular, after the span of his collarbones. He is among the most recognizable adherents of the radical-self-improvement project known as looks-maxxing. Hew closely to the credo, which includes all sorts of steroids and therapies, and you might even ascend. That’s looks-maxxing terminology for becoming really, really hot.
Clav, as he’s known, has had a moment this year. Seemingly overnight, he became wildly popular among the lost boys of the internet—the kinds of people who spend their time watching Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist influencer, and Andrew Tate, the proudly misogynistic elder statesman of the manosphere, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking (he has denied the allegations). In January, Clavicular joined Tate, Fuentes, and the extremist podcaster Myron Gaines at a nightclub in Miami. Videos of the group listening to the Kanye West song “Heil Hitler” went viral; Clavicular was singing along.
[Read: I watched 12 hours of Nick Fuentes]
As his live videos have been clipped and reposted on more mainstream parts of the internet, Clavicular has continued to gain widespread attention. There’s been a temptation among observers, including the media outlets that have covered this story over the past few months, to understand Clavicular as, essentially, a curiosity. He is a strange, attention-hungry young guy—the latest addition to a streaming ecosystem that celebrates extreme provocation. His peculiar online lingo, derived from the looks-maxxing community, has seeped into the culture. Mogging, meaning “outclassing someone,” and -maxxing, an all-purpose suffix denoting maximization of any kind, are inescapable online. Conan O’Brian described himself as “host-maxxing” during this year’s Oscars, and Saturday Night Live parodied Clavicular in a “Weekend Update” sketch.
But Clavicular’s rise is pernicious. The baseline concern with an influencer who takes a hammer to his face and says hateful things is that he is in some sense encouraging other people to do the same. Last month, a couple of fans came up to him during a livestream, and one shouted “Heil Hitler.” Clavicular tried to dismiss the comments as “cringe,” but he quite obviously set the tone. I have some authority here: After I left a note outside his parents’ house requesting an interview for this story, Clavicular shared my contact information online. As a reporter who covers the internet, I am used to being harassed—but I had never experienced so many direct violent threats, and so much virulent anti-Semitic hatred, as I have since then. The looks-maxxer insult “subhuman” kept coming up, as did the word mongrel. (A spokesperson for Clavicular declined to answer my questions.)
The bigger concern with Clavicular is not that he is encouraging a generation of young men to take extreme measures to change their looks. It’s that because his antics are so ridiculous and his videos so entertaining to a certain crowd, he has allowed more coherent and dangerous ideologies to hitch a ride on his movement. The far-right manosphere has seemingly taken every opportunity it can to tie itself to Clavicular. Tate joined him on a stream last month to lift weights and offer advice about how Clav should handle his newfound fame. Jon Zherka, an adjacent influencer, recently likened him to a “younger brother.” Last week, Fuentes called him a “prophet” for exposing the cynical reality of modern dating—a core part of Clavicular’s appeal among this group.
[Listen: The manosphere breaks containment]
Clavicular is of course getting something in return. Associating with the manosphere’s best-known figures has been a shortcut to fame and money. But he is also a different kind of influencer. Although he calls women whores and says the N-word, he is generally less focused on politics than are Fuentes and Tate, who are constantly weighing theories about power and opining about the state of the world. In fact, Clavicular does not tend to talk about politics much at all, and has repeatedly claimed that his message is distinctly apolitical. He trolls for views. That, if anything, is his philosophy; the looks-maxxing is secondary. During a December interview with a conservative podcaster, Clavicular said that if the 2028 presidential election comes down to Gavin Newsom and J. D. Vance, he will vote for the California Democrat purely because Newsom mogs Vance with his looks. Last month, Clavicular told the comedian Adam Friedland that he’d never heard of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “I’m so far removed,” he said.
Even beyond the manosphere’s corner of the internet, the right-wing ecosystem as a whole has recently gotten much better at capitalizing on cultural trends. Whenever a viral moment might have a remotely right-wing cast, the machinery moves into place. After Sydney Sweeney starred in an American Eagle commercial last year that touts her “great jeans” (a pun about her denim and her genetics), some on the left accused her of endorsing eugenics. The right, in turn, coalesced around her. A few months later, when sorority-dance videos went viral, the online right immediately jumped in to say—without any evidence of the women’s actual views—that the dancers were owning the libs.
Weeks after Clavicular’s brief reign as the internet’s main character, his daily livestreams continue to collect hundreds of thousands of views. He is currently in the middle of a livestreaming marathon under the heading “Mog World Order” and will keep the cameras rolling nonstop for the next few weeks. The other day, a girl slapped him in the face at a nightclub. Fuentes, on his own stream, was indignant: “Kill, rape, and die for Clavicular—no, no, kidding, kidding, kidding, kidding!”