THE next time your teens are in their rooms, they may be watching an online fanatic who tells them women are second-class citizens – and the authorities are putting stuff in the tap water to turn them trans.
Far fetched? Not according to Louis Theroux, whose latest documentary looks at the growing subculture of internet misogynists and their poisonous beliefs.
As well as a small army of men objectifying women, fast cars and wealth, there is a hardcore of online bigots such as Andrew Tate and HS TikkyTokky, who look down on women and think the world is being run by cabals of demons and Jews.
In the programme, Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere, which is available from today on Netflix, he shows how such views have become normalised viewing among the young.
He said on the Dish podcast: “We’ve got two worlds — a normal world that we mostly inhabit, where we’re listening to the radio or whatever, or watching the TV, and then younger people, who are creatures of the internet and internet culture, for whom HSTikkyTokky or Andrew Tate are there.
“As weird as it is to say, that’s their Blue Peter, because these are 13, 14, 15-year-old kids who are watching, and these are their celebrities.
“For the older generation, they’re like, ‘Who are these troglodytic figures?’ Like these sort of strange, backward-looking, retrograde avatars of a kind of medieval mindset.
“Of like, ‘Women shouldn’t vote. Women are stupid’ is something they say. But actually, for young teenage boys across western Europe, across America, those are their pop stars, in a way.”
Louis, 55, who is a father of three, began his investigation by meeting British blogger HSTikkyTokky — in real life, privately-educated 24-year-old Harrison Sullivan.
He helped to promote the OnlyFans adult content video site through his online presence, and owns an agency which manages models on it.
But he has also said he would disown his daughter if she ever appeared on OnlyFans.
Sullivan said: “Do I agree with it? No. Would I profit of it? Yeah. I’m a businessman, I’m not doing it for fun.
“It’s not what my daughter would be involved with. If she did something like that, it’s disgusting.
“It would be the same if my son came out as gay. Not my son.”
Sullivan is seen in the documentary setting online traps for older men who want to meet younger women, then when they turn up in person, confronting them on camera and accusing them of being predators.
But in one incident captured by Louis’s TV crew, Sullivan’s team are seen beating up a man, even though he does not appear to have done anything wrong.
Sullivan also promotes broker firms and investment opportunities designed to make a similar fortune to the one he claims to have. He takes a cut of any money invested — even if punters lose cash at the end.
He told Louis: “I’m not going to stop at small-scale. By the time I’m your age I want to have hundreds of millions . . . maybe even billions.”
After challenging him on his views on society in multiple interviews, online commentators started to poke fun at the prospect of how the Theroux documentary might portray him.
But instead of rowing back, Sullivan doubled down, posting some wild blogs, saying: “If you wanna call me a pimp, a scammer, racist, homophobic d**khead, I am all of those, Theroux. “And what are you going to do about it, p***yhole? Nothing! I do not give a f***!”
Despite Sullivan’s views on gender, the documentary also shows him getting ticked off by his mum and ordered to clean up the floor, just before Louis arrives at their villa to carry out an interview.
She then warns him: “Don’t embarrass me, don’t be rude and don’t show me up — that’s not the way I brought you up, all right? Because that’s a reflection on me.”
Louis also visits Miami, where businessman and success coach Justin Waller is an idol to his one million Instagram followers.
Like Sullivan, he believes that men should be masculine, muscular providers. He sells subscriptions to an online university called The Real World, which teaches people how to make money, set up with Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan.
He also reveals he is in a one-sided, monogamous relationship with his partner, adding: “Women don’t want to sleep with other men when they love a man.
“The mother of my children, the woman I’m with, doesn’t talk to other men.”
Waller, who has two daughters, dismisses feminism, claiming women don’t know what they want, and feeds the idea that men have to assert themselves in society because women are born with the upper hand.
As he is walking around Miami he meets a couple of fans and they start to discuss the difference between men and women. Waller says: “I think women are born with value because of their beauty.
“A woman can be stunningly beautiful at 20 and get invited to ride in a car or get on a boat or be flying to Miami, because it’s pure beauty.”
Gesturing towards a young male fan, he says: “Nobody is going to invite him on a trip to Miami, no one’s going to fly him out.
“He has to create value in the world. He has to be valuable to other men, otherwise nobody cares.”
The young man then says to Waller: “Thank you so much — you’re one of my biggest role models, man.”
Waller and others like him push the concept of the Red Pill, a reference to the drug taken in the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, which makes the characters see the real world they inhabit, rather than the artificial one that is presented to them.
They believe they are enlightening people, revealing the truth behind what they call “the bulls**t the modern western man has to put up with”.
They believe that the mainstream media discriminates against men with their views on gender relations.
One of the most extreme proponents is Myron Gaines, who through his Fresh & Fit podcast in the US pushes his assertion that women should not be able to vote or join the police and that women are born with value because they have “a vagina and t**s”.
He also boasts about the one-way monogamous relationship with his girlfriend, Angie, and hosts women on his show who he tries to humiliate by asking them simple questions such as naming three countries.
Gaines also gets paid 20 dollars a time to read out insults to the women, including calling them slags live on air.
He shows a video from a neuroscientist who claims: “Studies show that women absorb the DNA of every man they’ve been with via sperm . . . ever wonder why some kids resemble an ex rather than their father? This is usually why.
“The more men a woman has been with, the more the risk of negative mutations in her future children.”
But no member of the manosphere seems as extreme as Sneako, whose real name is Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy. He is one of the most conspiratorial of all the online preachers.
In one of his most infamous rants, about the “secret powers” who control society, he claimed: “They are trying to make you gay. They are trying to get rid of masculinity. They are trying to keep us inside again.
“They are trying to keep you vaccinated. They don’t want you to have kids. They are putting stuff that makes you trans in the tap water.”
He believes that Satanism is taking over the world and we can spot signs everywhere. He claims Satanists are in a cabal and want to establish a “one-world government”.
Standing outside a newsagent’s in the documentary, he gestures to the cover of a magazine where a model has covered one eye and says: “You see this one-eye Satanism?
“This is satanic symbolism when you cover up one eye — the Anti-christ will turn up with one eye.
“Why is it every celebrity does this pose exactly, covering one eye? They’re pledging alliegance to Satan.
“You know Sam Smith? He’s a British guy. He used to look like you, Louis, and then suddenly he became extremely fat. He became transgender and now he’s not just spreading LGBT, he is straight-up worshipping the Devil.
“The way he performs, he puts on the devil horns with 30 devils on stage and symbolising having gay sex on stage.
“Are they trying to spread a message to the populace?”
As for the manosphere’s appeal, Louis said: “I think there’s a lot of lonely men out there, and there’s now a whole industry dedicated to them.
“I think a lot of boys and men are lost, and when they see easy answers, when they see a muscly guy who seems to be very rich, telling them it’s not their fault and here’s who is to blame, then that’s massively appealing, perhaps most especially when you’re only 15, 16, 17 years old.
“I think it can’t be underestimated how young a lot of this audience is.
“It’s being marketed at kids, and sometimes for them it’s hard not to take it at face value.”
- Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere is on Netflix now.
