Readers, some of you know that I’ve been working on a novel and it has taken over most of the time I have carved out for the Deli. I’ve also been dealing with some stubborn migraine issues related to blue light which has been challenging, and thus I have not been giving my newsletter the attention it deserves.
On a positive note, I have spent the last couple of months in Chelsea Hodson’s excellent Finish What You Start program, and I can’t recommend this workshop enough. If you have any questions about my experience, please shoot me a reply and I’d be happy to discuss it - I’ve taken a bunch of different writing workshops over the years and this was my favorite one so far.
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On to our post for today . . .
It is no secret that after 2+ years of pandemic living, unchecked inflation, COL increases without wage growth, the passing of transphobic and anti-gay bills, the erosion of abortion rights in the south, and literal war, everyone is, for good reason, on their last damn nerve. Tensions are high. And when tensions are high, I like to see what valves people pull to release their own pressure. Some people take to Instagram and vent face-to-camera. Some people quadruple text their private group chats. The smartest people fully delete every app and just get offline.
What do I do? I choose of my own volition to follow the most deranged people I can find on social media and spend hours of my own free time deep diving their pathology. I am a glutton for punishment! I’m not one of the smart ones, okay? Let’s get that out of the way.
Because I willingly choose to engage in these flavors of morbid curiosity on social media, I have remained committed to never liking or commenting, and I usually don’t even follow directly. But my lack of interaction doesn’t mean I’m not going to write about what I see sometimes. So as the subject of today’s post might say, if you don’t like it . . . this is MY page!! GET OFF MY CHANNEL!!
I’m going to discuss one of several ‘anti-influencers’ I’ve been paying attention to who share a similar socio-political outlook. All of them use the same three-pronged gimmick to gain notoriety: girlbossing, prioritizing wealth above all else, and ‘saying what they really think’.
I’ll cover one of these women today, and I might cover the next one in a couple of weeks, because the content is so annoying that I can’t subject my readers to both of them at once. Today’s subject lives to trigger, so if that’s not something that is going to make you laugh, skip this installment.
Now that I’ve got my disclaimers out of the way, I present:
Case study #1: Alexandra Peirce, aka HRHcollection
It’s hard to sum up 11 years of YouTube videos in a few paragraphs, but I’m going to do my best to try. If anything, this woman is a testament to the fact that virality doesn’t happen overnight.
Alex grew up in Orange County, CA to wealthy parents but describes herself as ‘coming from nothing’ (probably because she wasn’t as rich as the popular girls at her high school). She was bullied, she was fat (she loves to remind people of this), and she was depressed as a result of both. Because this was true for her, she assumes anyone who is fat is also depressed and desperate not to be anymore. I mention this because fatphobia and extreme dieting is crucial to the brand she has developed, and central to her point of view. In her older videos, she suggests that her mom is one of main bullies about her weight, so the self-loathing got lodged in there deep. I’m not entirely without empathy. At some point during this teenage era, she appeared on an episode of Judge Judy as a soft-spoken plaintiff with a burned out clutch on her Audi TT, winning $1800 from the defendant (a ‘mean girl’ who looks like she might’ve been the inspiration for Alex’s modern persona).
Her social media presence can be described as ‘triggering on purpose’, so it is no mystery as to why she focuses on appearances so much - it makes people irate. Her favorite retort for anyone who disagrees with her is to call them ugly. Confusing, as she loves Elon Musk.
Before she was doing the jewelry thing, her vlogs were a lot more “lifestyle” based (ex: driving to Starbucks, complaining that her drink was made like shit, doing a clothing haul and hating everything she bought, sharing makeup tricks, talking about hair, etc). I can see the entertainment value she provides when she is rambling about things that don’t matter. Eventually, she started making jewelry after spending some time in China and learning the industry. Her longtime associate for the business, Judy, is still with her and is occasionally mentioned in her videos. Since the very beginning of her online business, her vlogs were a thinly veiled advertisement for the jewelry she was making.
But over the course of the pandemic lockdown in Los Angeles, Alex realized that when she got political (venting about the uselessness of masks, the horrors of the vaccine, the sheeple she is surrounded by and the collapse of the economy), her views increased wildly. Naturally, she stuck with it and has been pushing the envelope ever since, sharing her opinions on everything from ugly manicures to abortion law. It’s become a bit harder to parse her actual opinions from what she says to get rage clicks, which is amusing given that her authenticity is what her fans claim they can’t get enough of. If the old influencer model was to be as chill, aspirational and as objectively kind as possible, the new one is . . . the opposite. People love it because they think it’s a joke. While there is certainly a lot of humor here, it’s uhh, not a joke.
Crucial to the HRH brand is hating the homeless with a vengeance. She moved out of downtown LA during the pandemic. She couldn’t take it anymore (‘it’ being: people struggling in her line of sight), so she got out and bought a house in Newport with the money she’d made from her jewelry business. The state of LA and California in general is exceedingly frustrating to her, she spends a lot of time on the topic of ‘law and order’ and ‘making things illegal again’. Her favorite Instagram accounts to repost are @garbagepeopleoflosangeles and ironically, @trustgodbro. Do you see where I’m going with this?
For me, this dichotomy is the most idea-rich layer of Alex’s online personality: her relationship to Jesus juxtaposed with the rest of what happens on her page. Alex grew up Greek Orthodox and much of her jewelry features religious iconography. She frequently posts “inspiring”, earnest God-fearing text statuses to her stories. Needless to say, it is jarring to see this type of content next to what inevitably follows. For example: a repost from @trustgodbro next to a video of a homeless encampment filmed from her car as she drives by, cackling.
In a particularly memorable-to-me vlog from May 2020, Alex describes her horror at the state of a DTLA Starbucks she used to frequent, shrieking at the camera that homeless people are always there asking for Venti cups and filling them with free half and half, and that there is never any half and half left for her, a paying customer. She is disgusted by the presence of the needle dispensary stations placed in the public restrooms, but admits she doesn’t have the courage to ask to talk to a manager about it while she is in the store. Instead, she comes home and rages about it on her YouTube diary. Similarly, she gets very activated by anyone physically near her car while she’s filming. This reveals some level of fear at being labeled a Karen by an IRL audience, even as she’s relatively fearless on the internet in front of hundreds of thousands of virtual audience members. Anecdotes from long time followers suggest that if / when she is approached in person, she flees to her car in fear. It’s a duality, for sure. Later in the video entitled ‘MY MOM & STARBUCKS ARE RUINING MY LIFE’, she reveals that she called Starbucks corporate when she got home to talk to someone about her experience in-store, and that their response was “well, we’re all human,” which left her speechless.
I am pretty confident that Jesus’ whole deal was loving the poor and tending to the most neglected members of society, but at the end of the day America’s real religion is wealth. And Alexandra Peirce is above all, an American girl!
It is rumored on anonymous message-board style websites like Guru Gossip that she met her now-fiancée in a Qanon Facebook group, and while that would certainly track, I cannot verify it. However, she did upload a video about how she and her fiancée met, in which she admitted to using a fake avatar of a man in the Facebook group where they were exchanging messages, which led to her later having to tell him that she was actually a girl. In the video, she doesn’t say what the group was based around, but given her fiancées’s Twitter account, I’d guess it had to do with alt-right politics. Her fiancée hasn’t tweeted since January 4th, 2022, though Alex regularly shares her opinion that the 2020 election was tampered with.
Needless to say, Alex is bought into the usual pro-lifer catch-22: claiming to care about people when they’re a faceless idea, but wishing they’d disappear once they are physically present and in need of life-saving resources. Talk about a clown world. At least Alex loves her dog, Ming.
And bugs. More so than people.
With these charming qualities behind us, let’s move on to Alex’s business. She sells drop-shipped Aliexpress jewelry for 8x the retail price. None of it is real gold, or even gold-filled. Because she owns a pair of pliers and can add a charm to a pre-fabricated chain here and there, she claims she ‘handmakes’ all of her pieces. I worked at Etsy for a number of years, so I’m pretty familiar with this definition of handmade. (There’s currently an active seller strike going on there, by the way.)
Today, though she’s marketing way more on her personality than her products, she still spends a good chunk of every video showing off her ‘stacks’ of bracelets and earrings, which are all from her own line, as well as naming any active discounts. Interestingly enough, she doesn’t use her most popular channel (TikTok) to sell her jewelry, which suggests she’s angling for a full Christian Walker / Tomi Lahren-style rebrand. A main point of differentiation on her older YouTube videos - and I think this was what attracted her audience before she started talking about political flash points - was that she didn’t do fake reviews or take money from brands to promote their products. This earned her a fair amount of respect on a platform designed primarily around doing both.
This year, her vlogs (referred to as “class” and uploaded to YouTube weekly) finally picked up steam on TikTok, where some of her more theatrical sound bites have become popular to stitch on top of others’ original content. Her reach on Tiktok is massive. My suspicion that she has a greater investment in this persona than she does in her jewelry line itself was semi-confirmed when she started selling ‘class uniforms’ on her website: T-shirts that feature her screen-printed likeness and one-of-a-kind quotes like “shut up”. As of last week, the Daily Mail even covered her ranting about how the clothes at Zara are so bad she wants to bomb the place.
New-to-HRH viewers often want to know if the personality she does for her vlogs is who she is, or if her uploads are comedy or performance art. The short answer is: she’s real, and while these are her real opinions, she has certainly amped up the rage for views. Every once in a while she sort of ‘breaks character’ and laughs at herself mid-rant. The amount of time HRH spends addressing people like me (who are watching her vlogs for the ‘wrong’ reasons) is somewhat unique to her channel. Nearly all of her uploads include a reference to ‘the ugly rodents scurrying in the back of class’. She does not ignore the haters, in fact she knows she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without them, as much of her schtick consists of yelling at this unseen audience. The grift is working, garnering her recent spots on moneyed podcasts like Gigi Gorgeous’ Queerified.
She also blocks and deletes like it’s her job. Her current account (likely to be near deletion by the time this piece is published, due to community flags) has fallen from a height of 114k followers to 74.8k at the time of publication, though she claims her views are increasing.
Maybe it’s the reverence for her haters that creates this phenomenon: a significant subset of her audience crossing over from aghast disbelief to genuine admiration. Her followers go from popcorn-eating bystanders to customers with very real dollars to give her, and they do it fast. A quick survey of her most ardent followers on TikTok reveal mostly teenagers. The irony-poisoned youths of IG tell her haters not to take her too seriously, that it’s all a joke, but is it really just a joke if they’re handing her their parents’ cash? She’s certainly right that her marketing is making her richer, and I’ve always been fascinated by the purchasing power of irony.