The Blackpill
“Where does this darkness come from? Contemporary anomie has many sources, and it is felt most deeply by those who feel ‘ongezellig.’”
THE NEW CRITIC
Jacob Zucker is a 23-year-old living in Boston. He writes at I Need to Start a Garden and studied Economics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago.
In May, 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez walked into the Islamic Center of San Diego with a gun. He and a friend, 17-year-old Cain Clark, shot and killed three men named Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awad, and Mansour Kaziha. Soon after, they killed themselves.
Caleb and Cain wrote a 75-page manifesto titled The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant. The title honors Brenton Tarrant, the Australian whose own 74-page manifesto, The Great Replacement, preceded the murder of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019.
There’s a photo of Caleb that’s been floating around the internet, in which he has taken a bite out of a stroopwafel and is holding a plush of Mymy, a character from the online animated series Ongezellig.
Ongezellig is not a landmark in animation. Dutch animator Sam Tollenaar made it alone, over four years, during evenings stolen from his day job at the public broadcaster BNNVARA. The whole thing runs 24 minutes across six episodes. In those 24 minutes, Tollenaar tells the story of three adoptive sisters and their upcoming presentation for history class.
What about this anime-style Dutch cartoon led to its immense popularity within a niche, racist corner of the internet?
Let’s start with the show’s title. “Gezelligheid” is a Dutch word said to resist translation, although “conviviality” comes closest. It names the warmth of an inviting space, the social ease that a high-trust society runs on. The adjective form is “gezellig.”
“Ongezellig,” on the other hand, refers to those things that are not “gezellig” — think a situation that is uninviting, or a person who is standoffish. We could translate it as “unsociable,” or “uncozy.”
Ongezellig’s lead, Maya, is one such “unsociable” figure. She is of Dutch-Indonesian-Surinamese-Chinese-Indian descent and grew up in Belgium. She has ADD and becomes immensely flustered whenever she has to interact with anyone. She has two friends, but they are imaginary. Maya is racked with fear that her confident, charming adoptive sister Coco, who is from South Africa, will notice her lack of friends and ask her about it.
She ponders suicide. She does not kill herself. She does very little of anything in the show besides watch tentacle porn and write the words “geschiedenis van belgie,” or “history of Belgium,” at the top of a Word document.
Caleb’s heart, though, belonged to Mymy, a fervent Dutch nationalist adopted from Japan. She wears colored contact lenses, dyes her hair red, and denies her Japanese heritage. When Coco begins to tell their teacher that Mymy is from Japan, Mymy cuts her off and claims to be from “Japsterdam.”
When an initial history presentation is criticized as being racist against Belgians, Mymy retorts that Belgians aren’t a race. She threatens to enact a “schoolocaust.” She shoots her teacher with a Nerf gun.
Tollenaar plays Mymy’s racism and instability for laughs. But to a certain kind of terminally online NEET bigot, Mymy is inspirational, Maya is relatable, and Coco is just another normie.
Caleb saw the characters that way and wrote as much in The New Crusade. In a section titled “Zellig rant,” Caleb wrote that the show was “practically made for us, Mymy is a based racist nationalist who commits schoolcausts [sic] (this accounts for the Nazis and Chuds who love the show), Maya who is a depressed neurodivergent loner who likes to you know what [watch porn] (this accounts for the incels and gooners who love the show).”
Caleb’s TikTok account is all about Mymy. His profile picture is Mymy eating a stroopwafel. His bio describes him as “a trve [sic] ‘zellig fan in a world of normiefvgs.” Four out of his six posts highlight Mymy in some way.
There are plenty of non-white white supremacists in the real world. Caleb was Mexican-American. So is streamer Nick Fuentes.
Clips of Fuentes’s streams get many millions of views. His hatred runs deep. There’s one clip in particular that his fans circulate sometimes, in which he is more explicit than usual about his beliefs. YoungGroypClips@YoungGroypClips on X captions the clip: “Nick goes off on MAGAtards who won’t name the J-w.”
“So they’re always coming up with, ‘No, it’s not the Jews. No, it’s not women. No, it’s not Blacks. It’s actually really complicated.’
No, it fucking isn’t at all. Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned, for the most part, and we would live in paradise.
It’s that simple. It’s literally that simple.”
Fuentes is just like Mymy, but with him, there’s no laugh track.
A fan edit of Mymy parodies the same Fuentes clip. Where Fuentes blamed the Jews, in this version, Mymy declares Belgians are running society. The antisemitism is laundered back in through fan-made content, as the joke only lands if you’ve seen Fuentes say the same thing about the Jews. This pipeline carries Caleb into a mosque, armed to the teeth.
The first section of Caleb’s manifesto is titled “The Universal Enemy,” and it begins by observing that everyone has some group that they blame “for all the wrong in the world.” He outlines the usual suspects. There’s the Illuminati, the left, the right, the immigrants, the “fags and trannies.” But Caleb believed it was simpler than that. All of these groups, according to Caleb, could be traced back to just one source. He wrote:
“IT’S THE JEWS
IT’S THE JEWS
IT’S THE JEWS
IT’S THE JEWS…
There is no moderate option to this problem, they’ll always rise back to power or do the same again wherever you exile them to, for any sane man seeing all this the only logical solution would be to just kill them all.”
Reading the manifesto leaves one surprised that Caleb ultimately shot up a mosque rather than a synagogue. His only writing on Muslims comes within a section titled “The Bioweapons of the Kikes,” in which he explains he doesn’t hate Muslims as individuals. His gripe is with Sharia and with the Muslim immigrants he claimed Jewish interests imported into what should be a white American nation.
Where does this darkness come from? Contemporary anomie has many sources, and it is felt most deeply by those who feel “ongezellig.”
An 18-year-old American citizen of sound mind and body has more material abundance, information, and freedom than almost any human who has ever lived. But he doesn’t feel like it. The reference class against which he measures himself is no longer the people on his block but a curated global elite, and the algorithms that deliver that reference class to him also deliver forums chock-full of people complaining about his exact problem. Grievance is the most reliable engine of engagement, so the algorithms surface grievance.
Whatever that grievance looks like, there will be a community there ready to cultivate it further. Shared grievance festers into hate.
This particular community fixated on a conviction that your genes decide whether anyone will ever love you, and that the genetically unlucky have already lost. In a section of his manifesto titled “Foids and the Incel Experience,” Caleb called his short stature a “torturous humiliation ritual.” He explains:
“Those who don’t make the cut from not being quite attractive enough are cursed to an existence of perpetual torture just because a couple centimeters in their face weren’t a certain way, they got the wrong chromosomes, or they got unlucky with their genetics which were passed onto them by their parents. Genetic determinism is the most cruel, unfair, brutal reality to accept and women don’t make it any easier. As Saint Hamudi said ‘I was born and my life was over’ and this is unfortunately the truth for many.”
This is a worldview that has nowhere to go. A man who has concluded that his life was over at birth cannot build a political movement, he cannot improve himself, and he cannot expect things to get better. The only available moves are despair, destruction, or finding someone to blame. Externalizing the problem gives the unlovable young man a villain: international Jewry, with its various agents and proxies, conspiring to ruin the lives of white men everywhere. And, on the internet, the unlovable young man gains a community that shares a vocabulary and a belief system.
On anonymous message boards, men such as these can perform as white nationalist soldiers locked in a civilizational struggle. These “soldiers” feel a deep need for companionship, just like anyone else.
Caleb’s final TikTok shows him and Cain going fishing in April. He digitally covered their faces with a symbol that’s a hybrid of the Nazi Totenkopf and a Trollface. The top comment, with five likes, reads: “Wish I had ns [National Socialist] friends who lived close.” Caleb responded with a reaction image of Mymy, writing, “We met online and realized we live close so maybe you do bro.”
Radical online forums provide more than friendship; they provide a shared world, one that is divorced from reality but comforting all the same. The LARP is fundamental to how these people live and act, and it isn’t confined to their politics. Once you’ve decided that mainstream institutions are run by the enemy, you need to invent your own mythology.
Would-be researchers like myself have to tread carefully while looking up information about Ongezellig because there’s loads of stuff out there that’s just made-up. There’s a page on a “fanoncyclopedia” discussing the feature film adaptation of Ongezellig that allegedly grossed $35 million worldwide and follows Maya and her sisters as they are forced to team up again to save their high school’s failing reputation. The same Wiki claims Ongezellig was developed into a television series by Paramount+ and MTV after its initial YouTube run, that it premiered on Dutch network RTL 5 in December 2022, that Ubisoft produced a tie-in video game. None of this happened. Tollenaar’s six-episode YouTube series remains what it always was: a one-man passion project that ran for 24 minutes total.
Similarly, the Soyjak Wiki page for Ongezellig claims the series made the Anti-Defamation League’s hate symbol database. The source the Wiki gives for that claim is “it just is, ok?”, a joke that concedes it isn’t true. (The ADL has no entry for Ongezellig, Mymy, or anything else from Tollenaar’s work.)
The fake blockbuster and the fake hate-symbol listing do the same emotional work for Ongezellig fans. A $35 million film would make Ongezellig a real cultural force instead of a niche, half-hour passion project. An ADL listing would make the fans’ devotion to Mymy a genuine threat to the mainstream rather than a footnote. Either way, the fandom feels like they matter.
Caleb’s activity on racist internet forums deposited him into a parallel reality built, message by message and Wiki edit by Wiki edit, to receive him. Inside it, he was that “trve [sic] ‘zellig fan in a world of normiefvgs,” one of the rare people who had seen the world for what it was. Inside it, his personal failures were not personal at all. They were historic forces: the inevitable consequence of being a white man in a world run by The International Jew.
The 20th-century fascist had a political project, albeit a monstrous one. It advocated genocide, conquest, and the destruction of democratic institutions. But it was a project nonetheless — at least it pointed somewhere: fascists in Europe wanted to rebuild the nation, purify its people, expand its territory. Caleb and his comrades have no such project.
Caleb wrote tracts against the left wing, the right wing, and the center. To him, all three were hopeless, part of the same “ZOG” (the “Zionist Occupied Government”). Caleb even referred to Trump as a “bought out shabbos goy.”
What do you do when you believe that the bad guys control every single mainstream political organization? You can’t build anything like the fascists did; every institution is already lost to the nefarious Jews. So you do the only thing left to someone with no project: you bring it all down. You accelerate.
In the manifesto Caleb wrote, “A left wing revolution will never come, but a white revolution is coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” He described himself as an accelerationist and a Third Positionist, and aligned himself with National Socialism and Ecofascism. The Third Position is not a movement that endorses a constructive program but rather one that rejects alternative movements. As Caleb wrote, “I believe that accelerating towards the destruction of our current political system and towards an all-out race war for the purpose of a societal collapse is the only real way forward, I don’t believe there is a diplomatic solution to the problem we currently find ourselves in.”
He didn’t mind the idea of “nuclear accelerationism,” but he was a little worried about the environmental consequences of a nuclear holocaust. He believed that death was the salve, that the current members of white race needed to turn to guerrilla warfare and serve as a “sacrifice generation” in order to ensure a future for white children.
Remember Brenton Tarrant, the Australian man who inspired the manifesto’s title? In Caleb’s world, Tarrant is Saint Tarrant. Mass shooters like him make up the accelerationist canon. To become one of Caleb’s saints, one must kill and die for the cause. Caleb knew no living heroes, only martyrs.
Violence was grist for his mill. In a section titled “Goals and Objectives of the Crusade,” he wrote:
“All violence is good violence, even from the enemy. No, especially from the enemy. Another animalistic violent n***** or some crazy radical Islamist going out and killing some innocent and unsuspecting White will do more for our cause than we ourselves could do.”
It’s bleak stuff.
But there’s another response to the same anomie, one that stops just short of the totalizing nihilism that led Caleb and Cain to accelerationism. These so-called “looksmaxxers” optimize their appearance precisely because they agree with Caleb that the world is deeply unfair. They, too, think that women are shallow and vacant, that being short is a curse, and that only a top-1% man gets any real attention.
Looksmaxxing developed out of incel forums in the late 2010s, and it shares a heritage with the community that incubated boys like Caleb. Both groups idolize Hamudi, a Syrian-German man who posted videos to YouTube from 2017 to 2020 about the harsh reality of sexual selection. It’s Hamudi who first said, “I was born and my life was over,” a line Caleb quoted in his manifesto.
Caleb’s totalizing nihilism is known as the “blackpill.” Once you’ve taken the blackpill, you’ve conceded that self-improvement is irrational.
Looksmaxxers accept Hamudi’s diagnosis of inequity and laud him for seeing the world clearly, but they refuse to concede that they are condemned to a loveless life — they refuse to take the blackpill. They believe they can improve their sexual market value, that they can “ascend,” through a regimen of mewing, meth, bonesmashing, lifting, and leg-lengthening surgeries. They pour everything into the project of remaking themselves, even as it wrecks the bodies they’re trying to perfect. Clavicular, the most prominent looksmaxxer, is infertile because he’s been using steroids since age 14.
You won’t find any such drive toward self-improvement in Caleb’s manifesto, for he did not believe his generation of white supremacists would live to see the revolution they seek.
His goals were civilizational, whereas Clavicular’s are personal. Both are “ongezellig.” Both, in fact, have self-described as autistic. But where Caleb and Nick Fuentes turn their discontent into rage against the Jews, Clavicular seeks to eliminate that discontent by perfecting his appearance. He is monastic in his pursuit of ascension.
The terrible thing about accelerationism is that it offers nothing to build on. Convincing its disciples that the world is already lost, it leaves only one thing for them to do: destroy — destroy themselves and destroy the world, so that something new can emerge from the wreckage.
By contrast, the looksmaxxer’s telos is the construction of the self. Looksmaxxing asks you to ascend. Accelerationism asks you to burn the world down.
Caleb took the blackpill.
He concluded his manifesto with a call for further carnage:
“And to the Saints of tomorrow reading this today, know that when you succeed you’ll be celebrated with reverence and your sacrifice will not be in vain. Hail the Saints and hail our glorious and bloody legacy of White Terror.”
Caleb didn’t find “gezelligheid” in the real world, so he went looking online. In racist forums, he found a community, a shared language, and a canon of murderers they all venerated as saints. He wanted in — but he knew his Latino heritage meant he didn’t fit their white ideal. He wrote that they would “probably just see [him] as a larping spic.”
Still, he paid the price of admission. For Caleb, glory could only come in death. After killing Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awad, and Mansour Kaziha, Caleb and Cain got back in the car. Caleb grabbed Cain’s rifle, pressing the muzzle to his own forehead. Cain shot twice before turning the gun on himself.
THE YOUNG AMERICANS
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