It is January in Wisconsin, and Brooke Teegarden, a writer and content creator in Green Bay, sits at her laptop, wearing a blond filter and conservative cosplay attire. Teegarden is about to teach a 60-year-old MAGA man that the people abducting children in Minnesota are not, in fact, ISIS.
Teegarden replies to Tom's direct message with a photo of a 5-year-old boy in a blue bunny hat, pretending to be clueless. "ISIS KIDNAPPED THIS 5-YEAR-OLD CHILD," she suggests, in all caps, mimicking Trump. Tom responds immediately. He wants to help. He wants to know where the child is. He wants to send in the National Guard.
The boy is Liam Conejo Ramos, but Tom does not know that. Fox News does not cover the unjust detainment of children by ICE. Teegarden carefully guides Tom through reality with precision. She describes the detention center in Dilley, Texas, where some prisoners have reported malnourishment, sexual assault, and instances of children contracting severe illnesses without receiving medication. Tom pays close attention, horrified, morally activated, agreeing at every turn that this is vile, despicable, and un-American. Then comes the big reveal, ironically by Tom himself: The organization doing this is not ISIS. It is ICE.
"Hey do you mean ICE not ISIS?" he types hours later. "Did some googling." Tom does not like this newly revealed truth, but he cannot say so publicly. People will call him a Democrat, he explains. Teegarden tells Tom that she is scared too and suggests they each pick a few people to tell privately. He agrees. He says, "I really like you." She replies, "THANK YOU."
Tom will probably never know who he is really talking to.
"I target the type of man who harmed me," Teegarden says. In other words, she seeks out middle-aged conservative men who publicly perpetuate the idea that it is acceptable to treat women and girls like property. "When I talk to them, I am not doing it from some detached political distance. I am doing it because I do not want them to harm other girls."
Teegarden is one of a growing number of women using the specific texture of MAGA masculinity against itself by exploiting their political humiliation kinks online and donating earnings to leftist causes. She posts as @theletsnotdate on Instagram. The men she targets are generally older, white, Christian, and conservative, carrying two things into every conversation: a desperation to be desired and a set of beliefs propped up entirely by fake news. Teegarden uses both.
Teegarden's tactics vary. She maintains multiple profiles. One is a filtered, blond version of herself that she describes as a "satirical right-wing persona" used to enter conversations she would not otherwise be invited into. She starts with sympathy, asks questions, and sends selfies when she begins to lose them with facts. Sometimes her goal is to expose conservative men to truths that Fox News will not tell them. Other times, it is persuasion. In one case, with a MAGA man named James, she spent months "grooming" him, culminating in a photo of her in a bra exchanged for a public anti-ICE post, followed by a second operation that led him to publicly question Trump and defend his posts to confused right-wing Facebook friends. This is all documented in screenshots on Teegarden's Instagram account.
James's friends were not pleased. "What happened to you dude," one wrote. "Grew a conscience," another replied.
Teegarden might call that a win, though not the kind people expect. "Winning does not always mean changing a man's mind," she says. "In these conversations, winning is any moment where I do not feel afraid." In post-democratic Trumplandia, many are not trying to change the hearts and minds of oppressors anymore. They are simply trying to survive.
In Jacksonville, Florida, an activist who uses the professional alias Twig to ensure her safety runs a different operation. She does not need to catfish anyone. She is herself: a woman who noticed that conservative men on Instagram do not just want to argue with her. They want her to take their money and humiliate them while doing it. So she does. Then, she funnels the proceeds into Planned Parenthood donations, ACLU membership, and flights to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress.
Financial domination, or findomming, is a kink in which a dominant extracts money from a submissive, often with accompanying degradation. Twig describes her approach as "operating within an existing system while being very aware of its implications." She is not trying to change MAGA's worldview. "Honestly, MAGA minds can't be changed," she says. "I'm interacting with it as it already exists."
Twig has noticed that some MAGA men have a humiliation kink that extends beyond the bedroom. "Whether in their public life, calling Trump their 'Daddy,' or in their private life asking me for humiliation videos," she says, "there is a common need to be made to feel inferior or small." Her work is a treasure trove of Freudian delights. This work, which some may dismiss as scamming, is actually the opposite. Although it may seem cathartic to scream at MAGA men, it requires enormous emotional work to engage with men that nobody wants to talk to. "It requires emotional intelligence, discipline, and a strong sense of self," Twig says. "It's work. It just doesn't look like traditional labor."
One might question the ethics of manipulating people, even in a quest to make them more informed or compassionate. Teegarden does not flinch. "I don't feel bad if manipulation, rather than pure persuasion, creates a better outcome," she says. Trump's own manufactured reality is also manipulation. The difference is that Teegarden is not inciting hate. She is trying to get a 60-year-old man in the suburbs to see, even for a moment, that what is happening to his neighbor is wrong and that he should do something about it. Her work is part therapy, part public service, part revenge fantasy. Twig feels similarly about the necessity of employing edgy strategies but adds that she works within explicitly consensual boundaries. "The entire thing only works if consent is real, ongoing, and explicit, even when the 'connection' is about intentional imbalance," she says. "That distinction is important."
Does it work? Sometimes. Twig may not be redistributing wealth at congressional scale, but she is doing it one humiliated client and one mutual aid Venmo at a time. Two of the men Teegarden has run operations on are now in a private group chat with people who no longer support Trump. They are questioning, but they are also still making bigoted remarks. "Unfortunately, they haven't become safe or kind people, yet," she says. That "yet" carries a lot of weight, but so do the women doing this work.
