By: Samuel Mortel
If you’re a young man obsessed with your looks and physique, you can turn to Clavicular and the looksmaxxing community. If you are interested in mixed martial arts and want to learn how to one day become a millionaire, you can watch Andrew Tate and pay to attend his online “Hustler’s University”. And, of course, if you’re looking to get into actual politics, there’s Nick Fuentes and the Groypers (if none of these names are familiar to you, congratulations. I’m very envious).
It’s becoming increasingly hard to communicate this in a way that’s digestible for the average person and doesn’t come off as exaggerated or overly concerned, but reactionary politics has begun to infest every corner of the internet.
For the next generation of boys, there’s an endless roster of influencers and streamers waiting to prey on their insecurities and use their interests to funnel them into right-wing or even extremist ideology.
The underground rap scene has had relatively prominent influencers who’ve fully embraced the right for a while, including names like Adin Ross and N3on, both of whom have collaborated with influencers like Clavicular, McRae, and Fuentes numerous times. In 2024, Ross hosted a notable stream in which he joined President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, endorsed his second-term campaign, and gifted him a Rolex and a wrapped Tesla Cybertruck. These streamers have substantial credibility in the rap scene. When they aren’t collaborating with right-wing extremists, their streams often feature stars in underground rap and the occasional mainstream icons like Young Thug, 21 Savage, and Drake.
Musicians of various ethnicities, sexualities, and gender identities have found success within the underground rap scene. When you look at artists who’ve graduated from the underground and are fully mainstream, rappers like Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, and Playboi Carti have been notorious for experimenting with their gender expression and femininity, with Thug famously wearing a dress on the album cover of his 2016 album “JEFFERY” and Uzi Vert coming out as gender-nonconforming in 2021.
There are countless queer producers and rappers within the subgenre who’ve been accepted and launched into micro-celebrity. Still, even though the underground rap scene can usually be more accepting than mainstream rap, artists who are queer or fall outside the confines of traditional gender expression or sexuality are often met with scrutiny as they become more successful. This has increasingly become a problem due to the aforementioned pervasive conservative politics that have come to grab hold of anything with a fanbase mostly consisting of young men, including underground rap. One of the most glaring examples of this friction within the culture occurred this past week.
Young Dabo is a Twitch livestreamer who has amassed over 500,000 subscribers on the platform over the past 4 years, first gaining notoriety for his humorous and over-the-top reactions to rap and R&B albums. Over the past 4 years, he’s grown into a well-known figure among rap streamers, often featuring underground rappers, who he’ll invite to his house to converse, interact with his chat, and occasionally make a song live on air.
According to trans-femme artist and electronic producer Jane Remover, Dabo invited them to join his stream earlier this month, a request the artist declined. Jane would go on to reference the offer on a single uploaded to their Soundcloud account on May 4, rapping “F*** I look like hopping on the Dabo stream?”
Dabo later reacted to the line on his livestream and was offended to the point of rage, responding, “You could’ve kept your mouth shut like a good b****. Instead, you want to talk to me, about me. Stupid wh**re,” along with several other misogynistic comments.
Remover received a barrage of misogynistic and transphobic hate from fans of the streamer across social media, with Twitter/X users flooding the rapper’s comments with slurs and typical insults that are often hurled at gender minorities by right-wing extremists.
On May 6, Young Dabo posted a diss track and accompanying music video on his YouTube titled “BLEED.” The track features several offensive transphobic lyrics, opening with the lines “I swear it’s f*** that n****, I swear it’s f*** his family tree. I chopped the whole s*** down like you did your —,” seemingly a vulgar way of alluding to gender-affirming surgery.
Although Remover has publicly said they’re fine using any pronouns, Dabo appears to intentionally use masculine pronouns in the song to disparage their gender identity, especially since he referred to the artist using feminine pronouns in his initial reaction to their song and used misogynistic slurs against them. The music video also shows Dabo and an associate assaulting a figure clearly meant as a stand-in for Jane Remover, wearing a red wig resembling the artist’s current hairstyle.
Following the diss track, multiple underground rappers who’ve done livestreams with Young Dabo in the past have unfollowed him on social media, including Prettifun, Slayr, and Jane’s deadAir Records labelmate Lucy Bedroque.
Young Dabo’s extremely bigoted response to Jane Remover, as well as the response of his fanbase, showcases why they were opposed to collaborating with the streamer in the first place. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of streamers like Dabo is aware of how reactionary, immature, and often hateful their fanbases can be. It’s no coincidence that the demographics of a Young Dabo subscriber also tend to overlap with those of Adin Ross or N3on subscribers, and may similarly overlap with the audience of Andrew Tate or even Nick Fuentes.
It seems that everywhere a young boy turns, they’re at risk of being indoctrinated into a hateful, far-right, bigoted community by some influencer. As someone with a teenage younger brother, it’s something I often find myself worrying about, and anyone with a young boy in their life has probably had the same concerns.