The online clip factory that’s radicalizing teen boys

The videos often seem to come from nowhere — devoid of any context like names, locations or professions — and pop onto a young man’s phone screen, guided by the invisible hand of the algorithm. The clips are undeniably provocative. Sexy young women at microphones, with captions promising the viewer is about to see them “TRIGGERED” or “CRYING” with “ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY” for their allegedly awful actions. Every basement dwelling-misogynist’s worst views of women are, the headlines suggest, about to be proved true: Women are too stupid for politics. Feminism has turned women into a bunch of sluts. Women shamelessly lie to manipulate men. “Girl power” has deluded women into believing they’re much hotter than they are. Women have ridiculously high standards for both men’s looks and wealth.

The message to young male viewers is unmistakable: Modern dating is a fool’s errand, because “woke” politics has turned all the women into gold-digging harlots. Better to stay home and keep scrolling, making yourself ever more furious that women’s liberation robbed you of your rights as a man.

After the 2024 election, much media attention was paid to “bro” podcasters like Joe Rogan and young right-wing influencers like the late Charlie Kirk in an effort to explain how and why many young men have moved to the right politically. But there was far less focus on the even rowdier world of “dating” shows aimed at young men, most of which turn out to be less about dating than about delivering a steady stream of over-the-top misogynist content. Masculinity influencer Andrew Tate got some press attention after his arrest on rape charges in Romania, but he’s just one in a large field of content creators who, under the guise of offering dating and life advice to young men, push “this hegemonic, masculine ideal, where men are dominant and women are subordinate,” as researcher J.J. West of Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab puts it. 

Technically, Brian Atlas’ show is called “Dating Talk,” but most people call it “Whatever,” the name of the long-standing YouTube channel that hosts it. Atlas spent many years publishing half-baked “prank” videos on his channel, which often had right-wing undertones, before he discovered what appears to be his real money-maker: a veritable factory of anti-feminist rage bait, churned out at an unrelenting pace for rapid dissemination on every social media channel imaginable. For roughly three years, “Whatever” has stuck to a formula that has generated nearly 5 million subscribers: bring in young, conventionally attractive women who are willing to sit through a video shoot that can last six to eight hours (and sometimes longer) in hopes of capturing moments of weirdness, conflict or outrageous behavior. Clip those moments and publish them on multiple social media channels, provoking a mix of lust, curiosity and rage that keeps male fingers scrolling. On YouTube alone, the channel has netted 27 million views in the past 30 days. It’s hard to get exact numbers on the revenue that has produced, but with numbers like that, Atlas has likely made millions off this machine-gun approach.

Atlas is so successful, in fact, that appearing on the Whatever channel has become a rite of passage for any right-wing influencer who wants to expand their audience. High profile MAGA figures like Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Dave Rubin and Michael Knowles have all made the pilgrimage to the Santa Barbara, California, office park where Whatever is shot. They sit across a table from scantily clad OnlyFans models and college students, “debating” such hot topics as whether women should have the right to vote and whether marital rape is acceptable.

Kirk made his infamous Whatever appearance in January 2024. As journalist Madeline Peltz has documented, after that, he “staged more and more debates on college campuses,” focused on generating “bite-sized clips” that showcased how Kirk “would patronize and shame” students, largely young women. It seems likely that twist in Kirk’s career was inspired by his experience with the Whatever channel, where misogynist dunk clips generate so much publicity and profit.  

Why do women even do this?

Women are the key to Atlas’ success. Every episode, which can sometime run eight hours or longer, features an array of female guests, sometimes as young as 18. Most appear in tank tops or low-cut dresses that prominently display cleavage. The message to young male viewers, West said, amounts to “I know how to get these women in my vicinity” and “I am right about what I’m saying, because look at how well I’ve done for myself.” The resulting clips are spread throughout social media with titles like “Brian Atlas WARNING to young women thinking about doing S work” and “EVIL woman says men DESERVE ridicule?!” and typically focus on an individual woman trying to defend herself in a supposed “debate” with Atlas or one of his rotating cast of right-wing guests. 

Shooting these episodes, several previous participants told Salon, is a grueling task. The women, who usually use only their first names or online pseudonyms, are expected to sit at the studio table for up to nine hours, with no breaks. They surrender their phones when they arrive in the studio early in the afternoon and don’t get them back until they leave, often after midnight. As day turns to night and the “debate” continues, these women can grow visibly exhausted. Occasionally one will actually fall asleep on camera, only to be yelled at by Atlas. Their reward for this is to be portrayed as stupid, greedy or promiscuous in video clips seen by hundreds of thousands of people. So why would any woman subject herself to this?

“I want to confront these people,” a progressive streamer who uses the online name Erin Straighterade told Salon. She has appeared on Whatever several times, debating guests like Kirk and Dave Rubin, the latter of whom got angry when she noted that he’d apparently rather confront teenage girls than progressive talk show host Sam Seder. Most women on the show, Erin told Salon, are erotic models looking to promote their OnlyFans pages, or random women that Atlas initially contacted through dating apps. Many may assume that “Dating Talk” will be a lighthearted or mildly risqué show about sex and relationships, only to be ambushed by Atlas’ barrage of political questions.

“The price of that exposure,” Erin said, “is just taking verbal abuse for seven hours.” Atlas and his right-wing guests specifically “want to debate college students that are unprepared,” so she has volunteered because “somebody needs to be in the room to oppose it.”

“They don’t want to debate people like me. I have a college degree,” Erin said. “I know their digital footprint.”

Atlas did not respond to Salon’s multiple requests for an interview, using an email address he often uses to exchange messages with young women willing to appear on his show.

Feminist content creator Farha Khalidi has also appeared on Whatever multiple times. “I just like it,” she told Salon. There aren’t enough “c**ty people” on these kinds of shows, as she put it. She’s friends with Erin, and expressed a similar desire to battle the far right on its own turf. She appreciates that “red-pill guys say it with their full chest,” she said, and prefers that to the euphemisms more traditional conservatives use to conceal their true attitudes. 

Other guests, however, come away from the Whatever experience feeling dirty. Salon reached out to more than a dozen women who had appeared on Atlas’ show, and only a few were willing to discuss the experience on the record. “He’s an a**hole,” one simply replied, meaning Atlas.

“It was just for laughs, really,” said Eugina Gelbelman, a filmmaker who now lives in Scotland. “I have this weird fascination with incel podcasts.”

The Whatever experience, she said, was a “stress test” that lasted from mid-afternoon until after 1 a.m. “It’s a very weird, kind of aggressive environment to go into.” Gelbelman said she felt good telling Atlas to his face that “Dating Talk” was “weird hate propaganda towards women,” but also said she’d never put herself through that again.

Comedian Josie Marcellino appeared once on Whatever and declined an interview, directing Salon to the “High Society” podcast, where she recounted a nine-hour shoot with no break and any food of any kind, except a tray of ring pops. “I’m not sucking a ring pop for a f**king live stream,” she told the podcast hosts. 

“No one can self-police for eight hours with the camera in front of them,” said Amanda Almond, a psychology professor at New York City College of Technology. People in that situation, she said, go into what psychologists call survival mode, asking themselves, “How can I come out with the least loss?”, whether that loss is to “your reputation or just your own stress and sanity.” 

This on-camera “stress test” seems to reliably fulfill Atlas’ content goal of manufactured drama. As Almond explained, when a person is “so depleted,” it becomes more likely they will do something “foolish.”

“Man or bear” — and real-world radicalization

Whatever gets millions of views on clips of “Dating Talk.” In the process, West argued, Atlas is radicalizing young men with the topsy-turvy message that “women are in charge of society,” while men have “an inherent disadvantage” and must fight to win back their “dominant position.” As both Erin and Khalidi pointed out, Atlas uses the same formula for every show: He rattles off a list of questions that don’t change much from episode to episode, largely drawn from the fixations that have dominated anti-feminist social media discourse for the last two decades.

On nearly every episode, Atlas badgers female guests to talk about their “body count,” meaning the number of men they’ve slept with. Those who give numbers deemed shockingly high are turned into clips. Male viewers respond with comments like “absolutely gross who would want to marry that” or claim a woman’s genitals have been “blown to PIECES.”

This repeated pattern of hurling “verbal abuse at a woman” is “like a pornographic experience for them,” Erin said.

Another favorite question Atlas asks is the “man or bear” thought experiment. This started in 2024, when a TikTok creator asked random women on the street, “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” Most women chose the bear, infuriating many online men, who often unspool elaborate fantasies of how a bear might kill a woman. Many women point out that attacks by bears on humans are extremely rare (there are typically less than 40 a year in the U.S., and very few are fatal) but rape most definitely is not. This statistical reality doesn’t prevent angry male viewers or Atlas’ guests from accusing the women of hating men. The man-or-bear meme “is definitely playing to this idea that men are disadvantaged in society,” West said, and that women “don’t give men a chance.”

But as Marcellino noted on the “High Society” podcast, the men enraged by this discourse aren’t defending their side of the argument too well. After her appearance on Whatever, she said, one man messaged her, noting that he knew her home address. “He’s like, ‘Who’s more scary now, b**ch, the man or the bear?’” she said. “Still the man.”

Atlas will often demand that his female guests remove their makeup on-air, which is apparently meant to prove that their beauty is based in deceit. Many of his routines seem aimed at showing that women’s self-esteem is too high. Guests are asked if they think they’ll still be attractive when they’re older. When they say yes, Atlas shows them photos of their faces with AI aging filters that add wrinkles. Women are asked to “rate” themselves on the infamous 1-to-10 scale, and mocked mercilessly if they give themselves a high number. If a woman insists she can both have a career and a successful marriage, Atlas and his male guests deride her: According to their worldview, that’s impossible.

Atlas has done a good job of keeping his personal details off the internet, but his career trajectory and looks suggest that he’s in his late 30s or early 40s. He is not married. On a recent episode, a 19-year-old guest observed that it seemed odd for a man his age to be so fixated on the “intricate details” of college women’s lives.

The central premise of Atlas’ show message was aptly captured by the far-right magazine Evie, although the description is meant to be complimentary: The “Gen Z woman” is “an entitled, selfish person who believes that women are oppressed and men are spoiled, and that she should be able to live her life in any way she wants without any consequences.”

While author Gina Florio clearly endorses this depiction, actual statistics say otherwise. Gen Z women participate in the workforce at higher rates than their male counterparts, and often accept jobs they’re overqualified for rather than not working. They have lower rates of unplanned pregnancy and higher levels of education, on average, than women of older generations. Broadly speaking, these are responsible, industrious, independent women — and it seems clear that those qualities make some men irrationally angry, perhaps because those women don’t need men for financial security. But in propaganda terms, hating women for being awesome is a pretty tough sell. So Whatever offers a fictional alternate universe in which women are lazy, irresponsible, entitled and sexually promiscuous.

West pointed out that these clips are pushed at users via online algorithms, whether or not they follow the Whatever feed. “You could be scrolling and you could just see a 6-, 10- or 30-second clip, hit ‘like’ or comment on it,” she said. Then you’re served more such clips, quite likely more extreme or provocative. “It starts with these smaller ideas,” she said: Women are untrustworthy and have sex with too many men. But as users “fall down this spiral,” they may see explicitly political clips that depict women as unworthy of equality or independence. On “Dating Talk,” this can get pretty dark, as with Atlas’ frequent suggestions that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. 

The problem of  “pick-me girls”

Often, the most popular short clips from Whatever demonize female guests who argue against the host’s sexist views, or who say things that sound ignorant. If you watch full episodes, however, you’ll often see female guests remain silent on controversial political topics, or even agree with Atlas and his conservative guests. It’s not uncommon for female guests to attack those who make feminist arguments, or join in the mockery of other women who express confidence about their own career and dating prospects.

In a typical example, a woman named Mandy who was promoting her OnlyFans page appeared on the same episode as Marcellino. Nearly two hours into the show, she announced that she prefers “primal” men who espouse far-right ideas about sex and gender. She said she didn’t want “the power or, like, [to] get to make the decisions” in a relationship, and lamented that it was hard to meet “real” men who will dominate her.

It was all an act, Marcellino said on her podcast appearance. “As soon as we cut, the act dropped. She just went back to normal.” Mandy was a “marketing genius,” Marcellino joked, who stood to make “20 grand” on Only Fans with her misogynist sexpot routine.

Erin agreed that many of the female guests “are not there to oppose” the Whatever discourse. “They’re there to just take advantage of it,” and “there’s no advantage to being perceived as a smart woman who does OnlyFans.” It’s far more lucrative to present yourself as a “bimbo” and adopt the reactionary views of the audience, or pretend to. She notes that the internet slang term for a woman who acts this way is a “pick-me girl,” meaning a woman who is perceived as putting down other women to garner male approval. 

Almond valiantly watched some Whatever content before her Salon interview, and said she was struck by “women that would jump in and double down on the shaming” of other women who were the objects of Atlas’ derision or disapproval. She agreed that some “pick-me girls” are just being cynical, but also offered an alternative explanation.

“There’s this whole stress response that we call ‘tend or befriend,'” she explained. It’s different from the more familiar “fight or flight” response, and more common among women than men. In the “tend or befriend” model, a person responds to threat by seeking shelter or support from those they see as having power in a given situation. 

“When women perceive threats, we tend to affiliate with a larger group as a means of survival,” she explained. (In psychological terms, “survival” can refer to reputation or mental health, not just physical safety.) Women will often align themselves with the dominant person in a room as a form of self-protection, she explained. 

The circumstances of “Dating Talk” make this tend-or-befriend reaction even more likely, Almond said, because women are being asked questions they didn’t expect and aren’t prepared to answer. Atlas sits at a laptop during the shoot and often looks up evidence for his claims (although it’s sometimes spurious). But female guests don’t have their phones or any other resources that might help them formulate informed responses or fact-check Atlas’s dubious statistics. In situations where “you can’t have an independent response,” Almond said, a person is more likely to accede to the room’s prevailing opinion.  

In this stressful environment, Almond said, guests are more likely to focus on getting out of there “as quickly as possible” or “making sure I come out OK,” rather than more high-minded concerns like factual accuracy or articulating progressive values. All these factors make it more likely they will “align with the person who has the power in this dynamic.”

Both Erin and Marcellino expressed some sympathy for the “pick-me girls,” and agreed that their behavior is understandable given a morally bankrupt situation. It’s still short-sighted, Erin argued: “There’s no amount of ‘pick me’ that’s going to save you or insulate you from the core ideology of these people. They detest women. They don’t respect women. They don’t want anything to do with you.”

A machine for “creating so many more incels”

It’s may seem obvious that the spread of misogynist views through “red pill” shows like “Dating Talk” can be dangerous for women. But experts who spoke with Salon also argued that this content is harmful to men and boys, especially teenage boys who don’t have fully formed political or social views and may be consuming these clips out of pure curiosity.

The Whatever channel, like most red-pill content, is something of a bait-and-switch operation. Hosts like Atlas draw young male viewers with promises that he can teach them how to attract women, West explained. But once the audience is engaged, it hears an entirely different story: Feminism has put dating and successful sexual relationships beyond the reach of all but a tiny group of men — one to which they do not belong.

“Most of the impact I see is it makes people feel worse,” Harris O’Malley, a dating coach and advice columnist who goes by “Dr. Nerdlove,” told Salon. Between his advice column and his direct work with clients, O’Malley frequently encounters men who have consumed red-pill content, believing it will help them improve at dating. Instead, “it’s mostly serving to confirm all of their worst fears.”

He finds that men who have absorbed these ideas “feel helpless,” like they are “not ever going to be ‘man enough'” to succeed at dating. “Nobody has a lower impression of men” than manosphere creators like Atlas, he argued, because they present most men as “losers or simps.” 

Memes like “man or bear” teach viewers that women are hateful, but there’s another set of manosphere concepts, heavily promoted on the Whatever channel, that lead male viewers to believe they face impossible odds in pursuing a happy relationship. A common question on “Dating Talk” involves asking women what “the minimum yearly income” of a potential future husband would be. Female guests often take this as a moment to fantasize about marrying a millionaire, but those moments are clipped out of context and circulated as proof that women will never settle for a guy with a middle-class job.

Similarly, Atlas frequently asks whether men should pay for a first date. This is framed as confronting hypocrisy, an opportunity to scold women who claim to want equality but also want to see a man reach for his wallet when the check comes. (The feminist rebuttal might be that when women get equal pay, splitting the check will seem reasonable.) This also signals to male viewers that they can’t afford to date an attractive woman, who will expect to be taken out to fancy places without sharing any of the cost. Atlas also likes to ask women whether they prefer tall men. Any woman who expresses an interest in men who are 6’2″ or taller is getting clipped and shared on all platforms, reinforcing the impression that men of average height don’t stand a chance.

Taken together, these cherry-picked moments are used to support what red-pill promoters call the “80/20 rule,” a belief that 80% of women will only date the “top” 20% of men. To be clear, this is an invented statistic with no basis in reality, which ignores the observable fact that humans find each other attractive for all sorts of different reasons. But this concept has become ubiquitous in the manosphere, and “Dating Talk” is no exception. On a recent episode, Atlas laid it out explicitly: “You’ll have women who are dealing with a certain caliber of guy” and those women will “be chasing those dudes who will never give you commitment.” But “the guys who are actually prepared to give you commitment,” he told his female guests, “you’re not going to give them commitment.”

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On its surface, Atlas seems to be delivering a revenge fantasy: All those uptight women who rejected you will get dumped by the time they’re 30, guys! But as O’Malley noted, the underlying message to men is almost tragic: You’ll be “lonely forever,” and if you ever do get a girlfriend, “you can never be secure,” because she’ll always have “one foot out the door looking for the upgrade.”

Even when O’Malley points out the fallacious arithmetic at work here — “You want us to believe that 20% of the male population has this massive harem?” — he says it’s difficult to deprogram men who’ve been fully red-pilled, because these fantasies speak to deep male insecurities. 

Marcellino was blunt in her “High Society” appearance, saying that content like Atlas’ show is “creating so many more incels now.”

O’Malley agreed, saying he sees how it prevents men “from developing their emotional intelligence, their ability to reach out to other people, to make friends and connect.”

Describing the Whatever audience, Khalidi said, “These people don’t have friends.” 

That loneliness drives young men into deeper layers of radicalization, West said. They “are looking for a community,” and the far-right is ready to offer them one. Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes, for instance, explicitly markets his hateful rhetoric to incels, presenting his puritanical form of white nationalism as a necessary corrective to the supposedly decadent lifestyles his audience feels excluded from. More broadly, pseudoscientific claims like the “80/20 rule” can lure young men toward the view that women’s freedom must not be tolerated.

In the worldview presented by Atlas, it’s a mistake to give women too much freedom, because they’re simply too dumb to make the “right” choices. Almond noted that the alternative Atlas offers is a world where “women are objectified” as literal commodities to be purchased and consumed, not as full-fledged human beings with complicated needs and desires. O’Malley says that men seduced into this worldview may come to feel that “they aren’t wanted, so they need to be needed,” which can lead all the way to believing that women should be stripped of the right to be educated, to work outside of the home or even to vote, so that they are forced to depend on men. 

West recommends that parents and educators with preteen and teenage boys in their care need to learn “the language that’s being used” — terms like “incel,” “red pill” or “sexual market value” — so they can intervene if they hear slang picked up from the manosphere. O’Malley said he tells his clients to get offline and “actually go out into the world,” where they can see with their own eyes that plenty of men have wives and girlfriends, despite not meeting the checklist of “six feet tall, six-figure income, six-pack abs.”

Online misogyny as a mass-produced commodity

One crucial way to help inoculate boys against this content, West said, is to ask them questions about the creators’ underlying agendas: “How is this tactic being used to push engagement or push a product?” Whatever and similar forms of misogynistic content often depict women as greedy manipulators after men’s money. To disrupt that message, West suggests unmasking the obvious fact that the content creators themselves are con artists selling a sham product.

“Red pill” is an ideology, but it’s also, first and foremost, an incredibly lucrative business. While the people who spoke with Salon had no doubt that the Whatever channel and similar outlets like “Fresh & Fit” are run by men who sincerely loathe women, they’re also making lots of money churning out this sexist rage-bait. Atlas’ show can feel like a factory production line, with the host asking the same litany of questions every episode, leading to similar clips guaranteed to elicit predictable reactions from male viewers. Indeed, Atlas often has the affect and body language of a bored manager, going through a familiar checklist in cookie-cutter fashion.

“He came in and he wasn’t looking anyone in the eyes,” said one-time guest Gelbelman. “It doesn’t seem like he really enjoys what he does.”

“There’s moments in it where you look at him,” Marcellino told “High Society,” and “he’s like almost annoyed with this process.”

“It’s just the same arguments over and over,” agreed Erin from Straighterade. Khalidi said she tried to watch two episodes to prepare for her first appearance, but gave up after she realized that Atlas essentially uses the same script for every show.

While no financial records are publicly available for Whatever and Atlas did not respond to Salon’s requests for an interview, he’s clearly making a mint from this repetitious shtick. His content has drawn millions of views, both for full-length episodes and the seemingly infinite number of short clips constructed to exploit the algorithms on TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms. He even makes money during the lengthy shoots, as his live audience can pay to have comments read aloud, using the “super chat” function provided by YouTube. Men sometimes pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the alleged thrill of hearing their insults spoken directly to female guests.

While Atlas is selling outrageous content as “clickbait central,” as West said, Atlas is also clearly aware that YouTube and other platforms will demonetize an episode if the bots catch certain semi-banned trigger words. That leads to absurd code words and euphemisms, such as saying “grape” instead of “rape.”

Breeding viewers who are too bitter and paranoid to get offline and engage with people, especially women, in the real world, is “good business,” O’Malley said. “There’s a dark incentive for a lot of these guys to focus more on your insecurities and hype those up than to give an actual solution.”

“If you solve the problem for these guys,” he added, “they’re not going to keep coming back to you.”

Men are genuinely hurting — but patriarchy is not the answer

Engaging with “Dating Talk” on the Whatever channel, or similar red-pill content wherever it shows up, can be exhausting for outsiders of this world. Erin of Straighterade noted that the Whatever worldview has glaring internal contradictions that the hosts and superfans never seem to notice. For instance, Atlas and his compatriots peddle the idea that gender roles are “biologically determined,” but then also complain that human behavior has changed for the worse because of shifting social norms.

There wouldn’t be much reason to worry “about the direction of men,” she observes, “if it were really as predetermined by how much testosterone you have and how much estrogen I have.” All of us “would be at the mercy of the laws of nature.” Instead, she noted, these guys are forever “complaining about how masculinity is declining, but it’s not in decline.”

“What’s in decline is patriarchy, and people’s demand for it,” she added.

It’s striking to hear a woman as young as Erin use the term “patriarchy,” which sounds almost old-fashioned today. But in fact, that’s exactly what’s being sold to young men by Whatever and other red-pill content farms. There can be no doubt that many young men are struggling in 21st-century America. As O’Malley told Salon, the “male loneliness epidemic” is real, and “there are a lot of systems in place that really do make it harder for guys.” Younger men are underemployed, falling behind women in educational terms, and struggling with genuine mental and physical health issues.

But patriarchy — or male supremacy or “toxic masculinity,” if you prefer — is not the solution. As experts told Salon, sexist ideas about gender and power are likely to make men’s problems worse, not better. They alienate young men, not just from women but also from each other, nurturing a worldview that sees all relationships as determined by hierarchy and domination. Manhood, as portrayed on Whatever and similar outlets, is an inescapably miserable experience, where young men bounce back and forth between anger and anxiety, forever failing to live up to a damaging and ridiculous ideal of masculinity.

In this sense, Whatever is a miniature version of the ugly world the red-pillers want to create. On the “Dating Talk” set, men have all the power and women struggle to preserve their dignity in what many of them perceive as an overtly hostile environment. But no one seems happy. The only moods on display are dread, humiliation, anger, frustration and sadness. Love or affection between human beings is treated as a preposterous fantasy, and the only pleasure available to men comes from abusing and humiliating women. For women, joy is impossible and irrelevant, since they are regarded as objects for men’s use, not fully autonomous human beings.

This dark attitudes perpetuated on Whatever and its red-pill ilk can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, exacerbating the male loneliness crisis.  This, in turn, can drive despairing male viewers ever further into the manosphere. Go too deep into that realm, O’Malley said, and it becomes a “roach trap” from which “you never feel like there’s an exit strategy.”