OK, not totally everybody, but pretty much, almost everybody.
Quick premise, for anyone who hasn’t been following the group chat: a 20 year old looksmaxxing streamer named Clavicular is currently in Israel, supposedly because he met an Israeli “model” and her mom, fell for the vibes, and hopped a private jet to go kiss the Kotel. Except the “model” isn’t a model by any standard Sofia Mechetner would recognize, and isn’t much of an influencer either once you look at the follower count. And the guy doing the kissing spent this past January enthusiastically singing along to a Kanye song called “Heil Hitler,” and is currently facing a civil lawsuit alleging he sexually assaulted a 16 year old. So yeah. We have questions. A lot of them.
Let’s start with the two idiots at the center of this, because you need the timeline to get why the last few days have been so unhinged.
Clavicular, real name Braden Peters, 20, is the reigning face of “looksmaxxing,” which if you’ve somehow dodged this content is the online subculture where guys obsess over maximizing their looks by literally any means necessary. He’s documented himself breaking his own cheekbones. He’s planning jaw surgery. He’s photoshopped himself with longer legs. He takes meth to suppress his appetite, which, sure, great plan, very sustainable. He was expelled from college for injecting testosterone and hiding steroids in his dorm, got cut off from his family, waited tables, and then somehow turned into a guy pulling six figures a month off Kick livestreams where he roasts strangers’ faces for content. He’s also described himself as autistic in at least one interview. Take that how you will, I’m just reporting what the guy said about himself. And this part matters more than any of that: he’s currently facing a lawsuit filed by a woman named Aleksandra Mendoza, who alleges that when she was 16 he served her alcohol and had non-consensual sex with her while she was incapacitated, and that months later he injected her face on a livestream with a substance the suit says was laced with methamphetamine, allegedly while aware she was still a minor. His lawyers deny all of it. No criminal charges have been filed. But it’s an active case, and it should not get lost under the Nazi salute stuff, because in a lot of ways it’s worse.
His record matters here too, since it’s exactly the standard Israel sometimes uses to keep people out. He was charged in Florida for shooting a dead alligator on a livestream, resolved with probation and community service. He was arrested in Arizona on suspicion of drug possession and using a fake ID, later dropped by prosecutors. And back in May, Israel actually denied entry to a different streamer, Tyler Oliveira, over his anti-Orthodox content, and deported him straight off the tarmac at Ben Gurion. So the actual question isn’t just why Clavicular came. It’s why he got past passport control at all.
Sneako, 27, real name Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy, is currently one of the biggest working vectors of Antisemitism and Holocaust denial on the internet, according to ADL, with a real audience in the millions, not a bit part troll account. Bernie bro in 2016, manosphere grifter after that, converted to Islam in 2023. Weeks ago he stood in the street celebrating a World Cup win and declared New York “the Islamic Republic of New Yorkistan,” name dropping Mamdani, to tens of millions of views. This is a guy who says the quiet part loud, on purpose, because it gets clicks.
Back in January, Clavicular and Sneako piled into Vendôme in Miami Beach alongside three other regulars in this circle, and you need to actually clock who these guys are, because “controversial influencer” is doing a lot of lifting for some genuinely dark résumés. Nick Fuentes is a white nationalist livestreamer who’s built his entire career on open Antisemitism. Andrew and Tristan Tate are “manosphere” influencers whose legal troubles are extremely not over, with active rape and human trafficking cases still moving through courts in both Romania and the UK as of this year, which they deny. Myron Gaines, co-host of the Fresh & Fit podcast, has praised Hitler on air as a “revolutionary leader” and led group Nazi salutes on his own show. That’s the guest list. The DJ played Kanye’s song “Heil Hitler” while the whole room threw up salutes and screamed the lyrics. Clavicular’s defense at the time, on record: “I am not sorry.” He said he’d do it again.
Sometime after that, he did a full 180. He apparently linked up with Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto to ask forgiveness, and this guy needs his own paragraph because he’s unbelievable. How did the meeting happen? No one really knows, nobody’s reported it, so I won’t pretend to. What we do know is that Pinto is a convicted felon who did prison time for trying to bribe a senior Israeli police officer to bury an investigation into a charity that had itself been accused of stealing food donated for Holocaust survivors and reselling it. He got out, kept every one of his followers, and was made Chief Rabbi of Morocco in 2019 anyway, like nothing happened. This is the industry standard absolution vendor. He also blessed Kanye right after the actual “Heil Hitler” song came out, so what exactly is this man’s process for deciding who gets forgiven?
Clavicular also reportedly stood up for two Jewish guys turned away from a club for being Jewish, said he’s partnered with Jewish business associates, and then, this past Wednesday, announced he was flying private to Israel to kiss the Kotel, all sparked, per Jewish tabloids, by meeting an Israeli model and her mother. Nobody named her. Not even mainstream Israeli press. Ynet reported flatly that his date was with “a local model whose name was not published.” Here’s where I’m going to start doing something ck does in the Rahm Emanuel piece, saying “may or may not” a lot, because a chunk of what follows is internet rumor mill stuff, not confirmed fact, and I’d rather be honest about that than dress it up as reporting. Allegedly, per TikTok chatter, the woman is Zohara Duffey, and it does look like her, going back to footage from his June trip to Paris, including shots at the Eiffel Tower. Her Instagram uses Hebrew and a Star of David, which fits the “Israeli” detail, though her bio also lists Miami and New York, so she may or may not actually live in Israel full time. There’s a wrinkle too: as you’ll see below, once he landed he went on an actual date with a different Israeli woman whose mother came along, and the two of them called her father for permission. That’s suspiciously close to the original rumor, close enough that it may or may not have always been about someone else. I can’t resolve this, and I’ll retract any of it happily if it’s wrong. What I can say with confidence: whoever the original “model” was, she’s not a working professional model in any real sense. No agency, no campaigns. She is no Sofia Mechetner, signed by Chanel at 14. One Israeli outlet, Walla, ran a headline warning “the daughters of Israel” about him directly, which tells you the tone Israeli press took from day one.
Sneako’s reaction to his old party buddy going full teshuva core: “This is a mistake.” Coming from the guy currently doing victory laps about Islamic conquest, that’s a wild thing to be right about for entirely the wrong reasons. Adin Ross and Myron Gaines both publicly questioned whether Clavicular had been “captured” by shadowy figures in Israel, because apparently “he doesn’t hate Jews anymore” is the single most suspicious thing a person can do in that circle.
Here’s the part that kills the whole redemption narrative dead: in his own words to Israeli press, Clavicular said the trip wasn’t political at all. Israel just seemed “very nice,” it was one of his “random ideas” with viral potential, everyone was already talking about it so it had to be good content, and nobody had ever livestreamed from Israel before, so why not. That’s about as clean an admission of pure content farming as you’re ever going to get. This was never teshuva. It was a business decision with a Kotel shaped thumbnail.
He landed Wednesday night, and by Thursday things had already spiraled. Chabad’s Rabbi Yossi Farro, 22, does not actually hold a rabbinic title despite everyone calling him “Rabbi,” and has built his entire following filming himself wrapping tefillin on celebrities from Jake Paul to Bill Ackman, he met Clavicular in Tel Aviv and gifted him a custom necklace mashing up a Star of David with the OpenAI logo, joking in a video he posted that it was basically “ChatGPT mogging David.” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach called it Chabad “whitewashing” someone who trivialized six million murders. His son Mendy piled on too, arguing on Instagram that Farro shouldn’t extend hospitality until Clavicular offers a fuller public apology.
Quick footnote, because fairness matters here: Boteach basically invented the modern version of what Farro is doing, using proximity to fame as a Jewish outreach tool, decades before Farro was born. He’s also the author of Kosher Sex, a genuine mainstream bestseller that draws sneering commentary from a predictable crowd who love bringing it up like a gotcha, most of whom would never bother learning that Judaism has always been a notably sex positive tradition. Take the “whitewashing” line as one showman drawing a line against another, not some pope of purity descending from Sinai. For what it’s worth, ck can personally vouch that Boteach was genuinely great in person at one of the later Jewlicious Festivals on the Queen Mary. Not a drive by marquee guest. Actually in the mix with participants the whole weekend.
That same Thursday, Clavicular ran an eleven hour livestream tour of Tel Aviv, hitting a restaurant in Neve Tzedek, a luxury store in Kikar HaMedina for free designer clothes, the boardwalk, a wedding where singer Osher Cohen performed, and a rowdy loop through Rothschild Boulevard. Part of his entourage that night was Shira Braun, an Israeli soldier who serves in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and manages the IDF’s official international TikTok account. On camera, he repeatedly tried to kiss her, told her he wanted her to “come home and make love” with him, and offered to fly her back to the US on his private jet. He lifted her into the air in tight short shorts for a clip that was flatly demeaning, did acro-yoga with her, and at one point the two of them called her father together to ask his permission for her to go out with him that evening, after her actual mother had already joined them earlier in the day. Outlets across Israel described the footage as something that could reasonably be read as harassment. At one point Braun showed him she had posting access to the IDF’s TikTok, and he immediately pushed to get his own content uploaded through it, which she said, half joking, could get her sent to prison. The footage went up Friday evening. Within a day, Braun said she’d received hundreds of threats, including messages telling her it was a shame she hadn’t been “raped and killed at Nova,” an invocation of the October 7th massacre vile enough that it deserves to be named as such. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit put out a statement saying her conduct “does not align with what is expected of IDF soldiers” and that she faces discipline, while a former Knesset member and a freed hostage both piled on publicly calling her a disgrace. A second influencer who’d also been on the livestream, Shira Klein, came forward separately saying she hadn’t known who Clavicular was going in, that she now understands he’s Antisemitic, and that she noticed a different young woman at the same livestream who seemed distressed and was texting her own brother about feeling pressured, so Klein sat beside her for the rest of the night. Somewhere in the middle of this redemption tour, an actual official of Israel’s own military social media apparatus got cornered on a livestream watched by tens of thousands, then buried in rape threats for it, while the guy responsible for putting her there faces no consequences at all. Who signed off on any of this?
Around the same time, an Israeli entrepreneur and IDF veteran named Chana Boteach, who happens to be Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s daughter, confronted him directly at a kosher restaurant and told him to his face to leave the country. So now it’s not just Boteach and his son Mendy weighing in on Farro, it’s his daughter physically showing up to tell Clavicular off in person. This family is genuinely everywhere in this story. Orthodox influencer Golda Daphna posted her own videos going after him too, including audio of him being shown a photo of an Israeli woman and asking whether she wanted to have sex, then telling his crew to let girls know he was looking to hook up in a bathroom. Daphna’s verdict on any creator still willing to work with him: their career is over. He’s reportedly taken to calling the Israeli women around him “Stacys,” looksmaxxing slang for a hot girl with nothing else going on upstairs, which is a genuinely insane thing to be calling women in a country you’re supposedly here to fall in love with.
By Saturday night, the story graduated from influencer gossip into political news: Channel 13 reported that Clavicular was filmed at a Tel Aviv beach club with Topaz Luk, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and there’s now real speculation Netanyahu himself might appear on Clavicular’s stream. Luk’s comment, on record: he ran into Clavicular “by coincidence,” and Clavicular “apologized for his Antisemitic remark.” Separately, Clavicular got thrown out of a different beach club that same night for shining a camera light in patrons’ faces and refusing to stop when security asked. So he’s 0 for 1 on Israeli nightlife, minimum.
By Sunday, the clearest articulation of why any of this matters came from inside the Jewish world itself. A Jerusalem Post opinion piece invokes the phrase “MeTooUnlessYoureAJew” and argues that Israeli creators who welcomed him have mistaken influence for integrity, going as far as to call him, in print, a known sexual predator. That’s not a tabloid. That’s the Jerusalem Post’s opinion page, making our exact point.
Two more rumors, and I’m flagging both as exactly that. A fan account claims Clavicular said he met with Netanyahu himself for “gym advice,” quoting something about hypertrophy and insisting it was “nothing political.” No actual outlet has reported this, Hebrew or English, so treat it as a joke or an invention until something better surfaces. And there’s chatter today that he’s cutting the trip short and flying out because the press coverage got to him. I could not confirm that anywhere either. May or may not be true. File it under rumor until it isn’t.
So here’s where we land. Nobody in this story is clean. A felon rabbi running a forgiveness business. A 22 year old unordained tefillin influencer treating outreach as a content strategy. A Prime Minister’s adviser calling a coincidence what sure looks like a courtship. A proud Antisemite calling out someone else’s judgment. An actual IDF soldier who got cornered on a hot mic and then buried in rape threats for it. A 20 year old whose “redemption” is, by his own admission, just a good idea for engagement, while he’s also facing an active lawsuit alleging he sexually assaulted a minor. And a woman whose entire crime may have been going on a date with the wrong guy. Nobody comes out of this looking good. Including some of the Jews. Especially some of the Jews, honestly.
― Tom Robbins
