In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore a viral Asmongold take: VTubing as a “hack” that lets women (and others) influence online discourse without traditional appearance-based barriers. They dive into how anime avatars and VTubers have transformed the online right—opening doors for older, intellectually mature women, introducing female perspectives, and boosting the post-GamerGate “nerd right” faction.

Topics include the evolution of the online right from edgy atheists to the modern conservative scene, why traditional female influencers were often young and impressionable, the rise of conservative VTubers like Kirsche, Leaflit, Rev Says Desu, and more, plus the cultural shifts around age, attractiveness, parasocial relationships, and factional dynamics within the right (deontologists vs. consequentialists, anti-nerd sentiments, etc.).

They also touch on Anna Valens drama, anime’s role in conservatism, censorship, coalition-building, and why this VTuber phenomenon strengthens the right’s adaptability and intellectual depth. A fun, wide-ranging conversation on how technology is reshaping ideology and influence.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to hear with you today.

Today we’re gonna be talking about an interesting phenomenon that came from a viral moment that Asma Gold got himself into. Oh, what? ASG Gold was I think, reacting to a tweet. And the tweet said something like, there is no point to male v tubers and Asma Gold said this is true. And then he went further, which is to say the key benefit of VT tubing for women is he said it’s like this crazy hack that they found out where you can be a hot woman without having to be a hot woman.

And then he said the thing that was controversial, but many female vt tubers have reacted to this and been like, but this isn’t controversial, it’s just true. Oh no. Which he said is, if you look at not hot female influencers. The vast majority of them are v tubers to, to the extent that almost all of them are v tubers.

Right.

Speaker 6: To be clear, I am not saying that V tubers are predominantly unattractive. I actually do not think that this is the case. I think that they’re [00:01:00] well more attractive than the average person. , like the real people are more attractive than the average person. But we lived in an era where, women who were.

Let’s say top 25%, but not top 10% of attractiveness were frozen out of being able to start to rise as intellectual influencers. , And this doesn’t just have to do with genetics. It was also really any woman who is over the age of 25 was frozen out of being able to rise as an intellectual influencer because men think younger women are attractive, generally speaking.

, And. It’s worse than all of that because even if a woman is in the top 5% of attractiveness, but she is shy or she is insecure and doesn’t want people criticizing her looks because, , that is a normal thing for conservatives to do to immediately go after a woman’s looks if they don’t like her ideas.

, She would not attempt to rise and v tubers as a concept, allowing this completely transformed that.

Simone Collins: How would you know, aren’t most [00:02:00] v tubers good at concealing their identity?

Malcolm Collins: Hmm, there’s the leaks all the time.

Simone Collins: Can you put like images on screens of like the person next to their V YouTuber persona or just gimme their names so I can do it and then give it to you?

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no, no. We’re not gonna do that.

And the reason I’m not gonna do that is because the leaks are typically unintentional and that’s mean.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. I just

Malcolm Collins: like, like

Simone Collins: by, I mean, are you saying like non Instagram filter ugly or do you mean like.

Malcolm Collins: Well, this is, this is where we’re getting to the point, the point I wanted to, to talk

Simone Collins: about and mean, do they look like me?

Because, you know, there’s like thought hot and then

Malcolm Collins: but the point I was going to make was that. This phenomenon that he is pointing out has actually completely changed the online conversation in the internet, right? It has changed the tone of it.

It has changed the factions that are ideologically winning within it. And I really want to go into how this happened. Like, like how things are changing [00:03:00] because of V tubers. And it, and it comes fundamentally down Tomic golds. Observation. So to not extract too much. If you go back and we go to the preview tubing days of the online, right?

So we’ve gotta first talk about a bit about the online, right? We have one history on how the online right. Evolved from edgy atheist, which is weird, but it did it, it originally started as the skeptic community, if you go back to like, when I was a kid, right? And some. Online YouTubers, like literally you see their career evolve through each of these phases of the online run.

Back then it was not right-leaning at all. No, no. These people got tired of dunking on Christians because really there weren’t that much of them. And the arguments, you know, they weren’t as fun, like the gotcha were It gets old, it gets, yeah. It was much more fun to dunk on feminists. Right. And then dunking on feminist turned into Dunking on wokeness which then sorted its way into the, the gamer gate and all of that, and then the [00:04:00] mainstream online.

Right, right now. Right. And, and we point out that this, this is what makes up the new Right. Ideologically this group is obviously going to crash with the legacy, right. Because this is a community that has you know, like. Most of our crusades as the movement was being radicalized into a right wing movement, were about stuff like des censoring sexy female video game characters and stuff like that, right?

Like arguing against bad faith, against too much violence online and stuff like that, which really is completely the. Opposite perspective of a lot of the Legacy riot, which was like, we need to ban rap music. It’s too violent and ban GTA and and so, oh my gosh. Yeah. And this is where part of the rights inversion came from.

But during this period, you did not have that mini female influencers within this movement with the probably biggest [00:05:00] female influencer in this movement being. A socialist. And here I’m speaking of course, of shoe on head where she is often lumped in as part of this larger ideological movement by her detractors when she is just solidly leftist, like, and, and, and really like tries to remind people like.

Look, I know I said this Trump policy was reasonable. I’m still a socialist. I’m just trying to be sane here. People like I don’t,

Simone Collins: and a Catholic socialist too. She, she made it very clear she was a practicing Catholic again recently.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. She, yeah, she did say she’s a practicing Catholic. So Catholic and socialist.

Can you get more leftist? Sorry. I know, I just hang, heard a lot. I’m joking. Joking. For people who don’t know, traditionally the Democratic party was seen as the Catholic party. Mm-hmm. Like historical,

Simone Collins: I’m, come on Kennedy, our first Catholic president.

Malcolm Collins: Well, Joe Biden

Simone Collins: Biden Catholic. Yeah, totally.

Malcolm Collins: And, and not just that, but if you look at voting lines, [00:06:00] historically, they were really tied to the percent Catholic a district was. Even today, if you look at US states and districts by percent Catholic now this isn’t to say that Catholics overwhelmingly vote Democrat anymore. I think in the last election was the first election where they voted conservative.

Overwhelmingly interesting. Well not overwhelmingly by, by a small margin, but yeah. But she continue here. I,

Simone Collins: yes.

Malcolm Collins: Don’t, don’t wanna get on too much of a but the few influencers we did have in the Wright who were women had the number one hallmark of beauty which a lot of people are like I I, this reminds me of a time I went with Simone.

She doesn’t believe me because I’m like, Simone, you’re actually extremely attractive for your age. And many of the times when you think someone is more attractive than you they are just younger. And the night where I think I really broke you on this is we were at a club and you had to have an ex on your hand if you were under drinking age.

Yeah. And I was like, look around the club and find anyone you [00:07:00] think is more attractive than you. And then check if they have an ex on their hand. Yeah. And so you’d, you’d look around and every single time they had an ex on their hand, like they weren’t just a little bit younger than you they were significantly, significantly under younger than you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. There was also that time we were sharing a table at a dinner, like at a restaurant, and there were three people sitting right next to us. And I thought that they were a group of friends and like just two less attractive ones, and then one attractive woman. Yeah, and it just turned out that it was parents and their teenage daughter, and I thought she was like 25.

But no. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: gen Z looks old today

Simone Collins: too. Yeah, she was like 16 years old and I thought she was like. God.

Malcolm Coll...