Ongezellig; or, "Unsociable"

Chat, are we cooked?

Content warning: article discusses virulent bigotry and genocidal aspirations

Last week, 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez walked into the Islamic Center of San Diego with a gun. He and a friend, 17-year-old Cain Clark, shot and killed three men named Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awad, and Mansour Kaziha.

That’s a picture of Caleb, at the top of this article. In the photo he had taken a bite out of a stroopwafel, a classic Dutch snack, and holds a plush of Mymy, a character from the internet animated series Ongezellig.

Ongezellig is not a landmark in animation. Sam Tollenaar made it alone, over four years, in evenings stolen from his day job animating for the Dutch government. The whole thing runs 24 minutes across six episodes, and in those 24 minutes Tollenaar tells the story of three adoptive sisters and their upcoming history presentation.

What about this anime-style Dutch cartoon led it to immense popularity within a niche, racist corner of the internet?

Let’s start with the show’s title. Gezellig is considered a cornerstone of Dutch culture, and is often pointed to as an example of a word that resists translation, although “convivial” is a fair approximation. It refers to good vibes, to inviting environments fostered by individual warmth, to the kind of social ease that a high-trust society runs on.

Ongezellig, on the other hand, refers to those things that are not gezellig. Think a situation that is uninviting, or a person who is standoffish. We could translate it as “unsociable,” or “uncozy.”  

This show’s lead, Maya, is one such figure. She is of Dutch-Indonesian-Surinamese-Chinese-Indian descent and grew up in Belgium. She has ADD and becomes immensely flustered whenever she has to interact with anyone. She has two friends, but they are imaginary. Maya is racked with fear that her confident, charming adoptive sister Coco, who is from South Africa, will notice her lack of friends and ask her about it.

She ponders suicide. She does not kill herself. She does very little of anything in the show besides watch tentacle porn and write the words “geschiedenis van belgie,” or “history of belgium,” at the top of a Word document.

But Maya isn’t the one who had Caleb’s heart. That would be the third and final sister, Mymy, a fervent Dutch nationalist who was adopted from Japan. She wears colored contact lenses, dyes her hair, and denies her Japanese heritage. When Coco begins to tell their teacher that she’s from Japan, Mymy cuts her off and claims to be from “Japsterdam.”

When her history presentation is criticized as being racist against Belgians, Mymy retorts that Belgians aren’t a race. She threatens to enact a “schoolocaust.” She shoots her teacher with a Nerf gun.

Tollenaar wasn’t endorsing these views. He plays Mymy’s racism for laughs; it’s satire. But to a certain kind of terminally online NEET bigot, Mymy is inspirational, while Maya is relatable.

Caleb left a manifesto. In a section titled “Zellig rant” he writes that the show was “practically made for us, Mymy is a based racist nationalist who commits schoolcausts(this accounts for the Nazis and Chuds who love the show), Maya who is a depressed neurodivergent loner who likes to [watch porn] (this accounts for the incels and gooners who love the show).”

Caleb’s TikTok account is all about Mymy. His profile picture is Mymy eating a stroopwafel. His bio describes him as “a trve ‘zellig fan in a world of normiefvgs.” Four out of his six posts highlight Mymy in some way.

As a Dutch nationalist from Japan, Mymy is a comic figure. But there are plenty of non-white white supremacists in the real world. Caleb was Mexican-American. So is streamer Nick Fuentes, the most influential public figure pushing people toward Caleb’s worldview.

Clips of Fuentes’ streams get many millions of views. He had dinner with Trump in 2022. His hatred runs deep. There’s one clip in particular that makes the rounds sometimes, in which he’s more explicit than usual about his beliefs. It’s worth watching it, but I’ll reproduce what he said as well.

YoungGroypClips@YoungGroypClips

"It's actually really complicated." Nick goes off on MAGAtards who won't name the J-w.

7:00 PM · Apr 3, 2026 · 435 Views

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7 Reposts · 49 Likes

So they’re always coming up with, “No, it’s not the Jews. No, it’s not women. No, it’s not Blacks. It’s actually really complicated.” No, it fucking isn’t at all. Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned, for the most part, and we would live in paradise.

It’s that simple. It’s literally that simple.

He’s picked one out-group as the dominant threat, but he has problems with other groups as well. He is just like Mymy, but with Fuentes there’s no laugh track.

There’s even a fan edit of Mymy that parodies the same Fuentes clip. Where Fuentes blamed the Jews, in this version Mymy declares that Belgians are running society. The antisemitism is laundered back in through fan-made content. The joke only lands if you’ve seen Fuentes say the same thing about the Jews. This is the pipeline that puts Caleb in a mosque, armed to the teeth.

The first section of his manifesto is titled “The Universal Enemy” and it begins by observing that everyone has some group that they blame “for all the wrong in the world.” He outlines the usual suspects. There’s the Illuminati, the left, the right, the immigrants, the “fags and trannies.” But Caleb believes it’s simpler than that. All of these groups, he says, can be traced back to just one source. He writes:

IT’S THE JEWS

IT’S THE JEWS

IT’S THE JEWS

IT’S THE JEWS

… There is no moderate option to this problem, they’ll always rise back to power or do the same again wherever you exile them to, for any sane man seeing all this the only logical solution would be to just kill them all.

Where does this darkness come from? Contemporary anomie has many sources, and it falls hardest on those who feel Ongezellig.

An 18-year-old American citizen of sound mind and body has more material abundance, information, and freedom than almost any human who has ever lived. But he doesn’t feel like it. The reference class against which he measures himself is no longer the people on his block but a curated global elite, and the algorithms that deliver that reference class to him also deliver, in adjacent tabs, forums chock full of people complaining about exactly his problem, whatever it happens to be. Grievance is the most reliable engine of engagement, so grievance is what gets surfaced. Whatever ails you, someone has already built a worldview around your grievance, and a community stands ready to sharpen it.

Caleb had many grievances, but he had a special hatred for women. Another section of his manifesto was titled “Foids and the Incel Experience.” He writes about how being short is a “torturous humiliation ritual,” and how women will “never see [short men] as human, plain and simple.”

Those who don’t make the cut from not being quite attractive enough are cursed to an existence of perpetual torture just because a couple centimeters in their face weren’t a certain way, they got the wrong chromosomes, or they got unlucky with their genetics which were passed onto them by their parents. Genetic determinism is the most cruel, unfair, brutal reality to accept and women don’t make it any easier. As Saint Hamudi said “I was born and my life was over” and this is unfortunately the truth for many.

That’s a worldview that has nowhere to go. If you’ve concluded that your life was over at birth, you cannot build, you cannot improve, and you cannot expect things to get better. The only available moves are despair, destruction, or finding someone to blame.

Externalizing the problem gives the unlovable young man a villain—international Jewry, with its various agents and proxies—and a team and a story. And, through the internet, it gives the unlovable young man a community.

Together, they can perform as white nationalist soldiers locked in a civilizational struggle. The most popular white supremacist slogan, sometimes called “the 14 words,” runs: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

These are fundamentally lonely people. They feel a deep need for companionship, just like anyone else. Caleb’s final TikTok post shows him and Cain going fishing last month. He covered their faces with a symbol that’s a hybrid of the Nazi Totenkopf and a trollface. The top comment, with 5 likes, says “Wish I had ns [National Socialist] friends who lived close.” Caleb responded with a reaction image of Mymy, writing “We met online and realized we live close so maybe you do bro.”

These communities provide more than friendship. They provide a shared world, divorced from reality but comforting all the same. The LARP is fundamental to how these people live and act, and it doesn’t stay confined to politics. Once you’ve decided that mainstream institutions are run by the enemy, you need to have your own mythology.

Would-be researchers have to tread carefully while looking up information about Ongezellig because there’s loads of stuff out there that’s just made up. There’s a Wiki page on a “fanoncyclopedia” discussing the feature film adaptation of Ongezellig that grossed $35 million worldwide and follows Maya and her sisters as they are forced to team up again to save their high school’s failing reputation. The same Wiki claims that the show was picked up by Paramount+ and MTV after its YouTube run, that it premiered on Dutch network RTL 5 in December 2022, that Ubisoft produced a tie-in video game. None of this happened. Tollenaar’s six-episode YouTube series remains what it has always been: a one-man passion project that ran for 24 minutes total.

Similarly, the Soyjak Wiki page for Ongezellig claims that it was included on the Anti-Defamation League’s hate symbol database, with the citation of “it just is, ok?” This is not true, of course, as the citation jokingly acknowledges. The ADL has no entry for Ongezellig, Mymy, or anything else from Tollenaar’s work.

Both inventions are doing the same emotional work. The fans want the show to be a major cultural product. They want the racist community they’ve built around it to be an ideologically serious project, viewed as a threat by the ADL. They need to be more than what they are. If Ongezellig grossed $35 million worldwide, then loving Ongezellig is a normal thing to love. If the ADL flagged it as a hate symbol, then the community’s idolization of Mymy is a threat to the Zionist establishment.

Caleb’s time on racist internet forums cultivated more than a radical political perspective. He moved into a parallel reality that had been built, message by message and wiki edit by wiki edit, to receive him. Inside it, he was “a trve ‘zellig fan in a world of normiefvgs,” one of the rare people who had seen the world for what it was. Inside it, his personal failures were not personal at all: they were historic forces, the inevitable consequence of being a white man in a world run by The International Jew.

None of it was real. But it looks real from the inside.

The 20th-century fascist had a political project. The project was monstrous. It was genocide, conquest, and the destruction of democratic institutions. But it was a project nonetheless: it pointed somewhere. Fascists wanted to build the nation, purify the people, expand the territory. Caleb and his comrades have no such project. Within their mythology, the world is too far gone for construction. There is no nation worth building because every institution is captured, no people worth purifying because the rot is everywhere, no territory to expand into because the enemy holds all of it.

Caleb writes tracts against the left wing, the right wing, and the center. To him all are hopeless, as they are all part of the “ZOG,” which stands for “Zionist Occupied Government.” Caleb refers to Trump as a “bought out shabbos goy.”

What do you do when you believe that the bad guys control every single mainstream political organization that exists? What do you do when you believe the world is irretrievably lost? There is nothing left to vote for, no grand vision to build toward. Any attempt to build a national project would soon become compromised by the nefarious Jews.

So you accelerate.

Caleb writes that “a left wing revolution will never come, but a white revolution is coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” He describes himself as an accelerationist and a Third Positionist, aligned with National Socialism and Ecofascism. The Third Position is not a movement with a constructive program but instead a rejection of alternatives. Caleb writes:

I believe that accelerating towards the destruction of our current political system and towards an all-out race war for the purpose of a societal collapse is the only real way forward, I don’t believe there is a diplomatic solution to the problem we currently find ourselves in.

He doesn’t mind the idea of “nuclear accelerationism,” but he’s a little worried about the environmental consequences. He believes that death is the salve, that the white race must turn to guerrilla warfare and serve as a “sacrifice generation” in order to ensure a future for white children. When society is this rotten, a hard reset is necessary.

Caleb’s manifesto is titled “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant,” after Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019. In Caleb’s world, Tarrant is Saint Tarrant. Caleb’s accelerationist canon is built from these mass shooters. His “saints” are men who killed and died for the cause. There are no living heroes in this story, only martyrs.

All violence is good violence, even from the enemy. No, especially from the enemy. Another animalistic violent n***** or some crazy radical Islamist going out and killing some innocent and unsuspecting White will do more for our cause than we ourselves could do.

It’s bleak stuff.

There is, however, another response to anomie. There is another community that stops just short of the totalizing nihilism that leads Caleb and his ilk to accelerationism. They, too, think that the world is fundamentally unfair. They believe that women are shallow and vacant, that being short is a curse, and that you have to be a top 1% man to get real attention.

Meet the “maxxers.” Braden Peters, who streams under the name Clavicular, is the most prominent member of the looksmaxxing community. Looksmaxxing developed out of incel forums, and shares a heritage with the community that incubated Caleb. Both groups idolize Hamudi, a Syrian-German man who posted videos online from 2017 to 2020 about the harsh reality of sexual selection. The line Caleb quotes in his manifesto, "I was born and my life was over,” is from Hamudi.

Looksmaxxers are less interested in the Jews. But they share the broader diagnosis: that the deck is stacked against most people, that we are divided into godlike Chads and unlovable Chuds, flawless Stacys and homely Beckys. In both frameworks women are reserved for the Chads alone, as genetic determinism is unforgiving and the dating market is brutal for any man not in the top tier.

Where they differ is what they do about it. The diagnosis—the “heightpill,” the “genepill,” the unforgiving physics of the dating market—is an invitation to give up. The final pill, the “blackpill,” is essentially a permission slip. Once you’ve taken the blackpill, you’ve conceded that the world is so unfair that effort is irrational, so you might as well stop trying. Looksmaxxers accept the premises and refuse the permission slip. They walk up to the edge of the nihilistic cliff and refuse to jump. They believe they can improve their sexual market value, that they can “ascend” through a regimen of mewing, bonesmashing, gym work, drugs, skincare, hair restoration, and leg-lengthening surgery. They put everything they have into this project. The salvation they pursue is narrow and cruel to their own bodies. Clavicular is infertile because he's been using steroids from such a young age.

This search for personal salvation is not one that you’ll find in Caleb’s manifesto. He accepts that his generation of white nationalists must sacrifice themselves, that there can be no victory within the short term. His goals are civilizational where Clavicular’s are personal. Both are plagued by anomie. Both are ongezellig—both, in fact, described themselves as autistic. But where Caleb and Nick Fuentes turn their discontent outward at the world and blame the Jews, Clavicular turns it inwards and works to eliminate that discontent. He is monastic in his pursuit of ascension.

This is not a moral distinction. Clavicular is not less dangerous than Caleb because he is a better person. He is less dangerous because he is too busy ascending. The terrible thing about accelerationism is that, as a fundamentally destructive ideology, it offers nothing to construct. The only demands it ever makes on its adherents are lethal ones, that you sacrifice yourself and the entire world if that’s what it takes for a new world to emerge. The looksmaxxer perspective is too concerned with construction of a better personal future to leave time for atrocity.

Looksmaxxers are not the good guys. They subscribe to a misogynistic worldview and abuse their bodies with drugs, hammers, and eating disorders.

But there is something in their response to be taken seriously. Looksmaxxers see a great darkness in the world, they see a cosmic unfairness, and they persevere through it. They have a constructive project, and it requires their effort.

Communities organized around what their members are building produce different outcomes from communities organized around what their members hate, even when the two communities share beliefs, vocabulary, and members. The form of the organizing principle matters more than the content of the ideology. The maxxer forums and the accelerationist forums share much of their stated worldview. What they do not share is the question they ask their members every day.

One asks: what are you doing to improve yourself? The other asks: who is your enemy?

Caleb took the blackpill and ended up in the wrong community. His internet community did not ask him what he was working on. It asked him to name the Jew. The answer organized his anger into a target. There was nothing in this worldview to gradually build toward, and so there was nothing for him to do day to day except prepare for the one final act the worldview demanded.

For Caleb, glory could come only in death. He concludes his manifesto:

And to the Saints of tomorrow reading this today, know that when you succeed you'll be celebrated with reverence and your sacrifice will not be in vain. Hail the Saints and hail our glorious and bloody legacy of White Terror.