Reaction
An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
Reaction
Episode 6 - Destiny
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It's on you to decide. As Mike said, his breakthrough came in March of 2017 when he debated YouTuber John Tron, who made explicitly racist claims about immigration and criminal blood entering the American gene pool. Destiny performed relatively well, appearing rational and informed, while John Tron really, really floundered. The internet celebrated him as a champion of progressive values. What they didn't realize was that they just witnessed the birth of a grift. Destiny had discovered he could debate right wingers, appear to defeat them, and thus earn eternal credibility with the left while actually serving as a gateway that normalizes reactionary thought by treating it as merely debatable. But we're not here to talk about his ideology. Mike already covered that. We're here for the scandals. And boy, oh boy, Jesus fucking Christ, the number of hours I had to spend on Reddit for this.
SPEAKER_00Oh no. You deserve that punishment.
SPEAKER_03Let's start with uh the revenge porn lawsuit. In February 2025, fellow streamer Pixie filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Destiny shared a sexual video of her without consent. According to court documents, he recorded their 2020 encounter, shared it with a fan in 2022, and by 2024, it had racked up at least 78,000 views online. When Pixie confronted him in a November 2024 Discord message, Destiny admitted it, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, there's literally no excuse. Yet days later, guess what? He publicly claimed the leak happened without my knowledge, consent, or authorization. A lie contradicted by his own confession that you just heard. Here's where it gets darker. The lawsuit alleges that approximately fifteen women contented Pixie to report that destiny had shared explicit images of them without consent. Fifteen. This isn't a mistake. This is a pattern. The lawsuit further alleges he destroyed evidence by deleting text messages once legal action started to loom. Pixie received hundreds of harassing messages after the leak. Her career suffered and her political aspirations were completely damaged. Destiny's response, obfuscation about delays due to Pixie's mental health. Classic abuser playbook. Blame the victim's psychological state. Then there's the alleged alleged alleged.
SPEAKER_05As far as I'm aware, and I'm I'm happy to be corrected on this, is there was a number of weird, you know, non-denial denials from Nick Fluentes.
SPEAKER_03Him not saying anything really, you know, spit on that thing. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_00We need to stop. Stop imagining his beard tickling you and get back to. Please cut that part. And we we don't need to we don't need to subject the audience to that. I definitely got that.
SPEAKER_03That's humor. This is a podcast. It's supposed to be edgy. Oh, come on, keep it. Uh our first our first fight as co-hosts. Do we keep the image of uh of Destiny BJ in their heads or not? Oh god. Fred is like, I'm out.
SPEAKER_01Dude, I was about to remove my headset for a second, anyways. Keep going.
SPEAKER_03I like it. Uh what is true, without a doubt though, is that Destiny maintains intimate relationships, as Mike also noted, with prominent far right figures while presenting himself as their opponent. This isn't cognitive dissonance or some sort of fucking fetish. Maybe a little bit. It's deliberate cultivation of political ambiguity that allows him to amass a right-wing following who continuously calls him their secret guy, slash our guy slash, you know how it goes.
SPEAKER_05I mean Nick Fuentes has specifically said that destiny is a secret Nazi.
SPEAKER_01It must be said that Nick Fuentes says a lot of other things as well. So they yeah, both of them have a motivation to say shit that obscures what might be real. So who knows what's true.
SPEAKER_03True. I agree completely. I agree completely. Let's move on to other scandals because you're in for even more rides. Unfortunate rides, though. I I will not make fun of any of this because it is like very fucking serious. Moving on to the Melina marriage disaster, destiny married Swedish streamer Melina Gurenson in December 2021 in an open marriage. By December 2023, they were divorced, and the reasons are a masterclass in emotional abuse. According to multiple sources, Destiny constructed relationship rules explicitly designed to disadvantage Melina. Rules that functioned as traps. When she violated them, she was dishonest and manipulative. When he violated them, the rules were unjust. Gaslight, gatekeep boy, boss? I guess. During the divorce drama, five mutual friends contacted Destiny to tell him he'd been untruthful and abusive towards Melina. He responded by just doubling down and calling Melina emotionally manipulative, claiming he could detect each lie she told, comparing himself to Neo from The Matrix.
SPEAKER_01That's fucking crazy.
SPEAKER_03It's insane. Yeah. I am Neo from The Matrix. Uh I can see through the simulation.
SPEAKER_01I can I know when my the girlfriend I'm abusing or my wife that I'm abusing is lying. Like that's that's wild.
SPEAKER_05The other thing is, like, you should you should be aware that he met m her on stream when she was, I think, under the age of 20. And they married when she was 20 years old. So this was a much, much younger, and he was 30. This is a much younger woman that was a fan that was parasocial. And that pattern of behavior is something that continued. In fact, like Destiny and his community have an open joke about how he is addicted to BPD women, namely, that's borderline personality disorder women. And he pursues women that have some sort of like personality disorder or mental illness because he finds them exciting and interesting. And when these women react to being abused or exploited, he can use their mental health issues or problems as you know evidence that he's not to blame and that they're being crazy. It's a systematic and well-known pattern of behavior that he engages in.
SPEAKER_03Very true. And in general, like his constant treating of women in his chat as basically like a revolving harem is very fucking weird. Like hypersexualizing so many people in your community whose kind of like borderline father figure you're supposed to be is fucking wacky as shit, but hey, I'm not one to judge, I guess. I mean I have to this is kind of the point of this whole podcast. But Jesus fucking Christ, dude. Then there's the Bob Seven fabrication campaign. In January 2021, Destiny, very ironically, accused streamer Bob 7 of sharing women's intimate photos without consent. Bob 7 was effectively cancelled, lost his job, his friendship, his reputation. Then Bob 7 released a 40-page defense document alleging that Destiny had fabricated the accusations because he had discussed Destiny's abusive behavior with Melina and other women. When Bob Seven raised concerns, Destiny allegedly responded by manufacturing sexual assault allegations, then spreading them among Bob Seven's closest friends to destroy him preemptively. He claimed Destiny had shared sexual videos of himself and Melina with other women without Melina's consent, years before the Pixie lawsuit. When women didn't corroborate the harassment narrative against Bob Seven, Destiny attacked them as well. Then there are allegations of a long-term affair with Lauren Southern, yes, the far right activist that allegedly contributed to his marriage's collapse. YouTuber Brittany Simon claimed both Destiny and Melina privately confirmed it to her. As of 2025, Lauren Southern's memoir, I can't believe she has a fucking memoir, allegedly describes an intimate relationship with destiny. Neither of them confirmed it publicly, but the pattern is consistent. Destiny forms intimate connections across ideological lines with far right figures while maintaining his liberal brand. Then there are the Rose allegations. All of these have their own names, by the way, for our audience to understand. There's so many that they have to have their own titles. When you read about them either on Reddit or on some more niche Wikipedia pages and so on, they have their own, like you know how you have a segment in a book?
SPEAKER_01Chapters of his life?
SPEAKER_03Chapters. Sexual misconduct allegations, chapters to his biography, entire chapters, next to the debating child pornography part. But in these particular ones, uh there are claims that destiny exchanged sexually explicit messages with someone identified as 17-year-old Rose. He defended himself by saying she told him she was 19, uh, an eternal fucking classic, you know. Uh he noted later she created adult content in later parts of her life, as if that somehow retroactively validates.
SPEAKER_05I mean, like i in the United States of America, child sex abuse material is a strict liability offense, which means it doesn't matter whether or not you knew that the person was underage or not. If they are underage and you record them sexually, that is child porn. And so all this, like, oh, I didn't know she lied to me about her age is immaterial. If you are, you know, sexually uh interacting with it, recording or uh you know, distributing videos of someone who's underage, you are a criminal, and that is the way the law functions in this country in most jurisdictions.
SPEAKER_01You know, Norway's kind of awesome because you know all these like weirdo right-wing Nazis and stuff on Twitter who love like lolly and shit. In Norway, any sort of uh depiction that is meant to represent an underage person is treated as childborn. So even like the argument that some of these people, like these debate bros, make where like you know, it's not a real person, that wouldn't fly here. And I think we gotta like get on that all over the world. Destiny would love debating that with you. Yeah, he probably would. Quote unquote ethical child porn.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, bro! It's just a picture, bro! It's just a pic Destiny has argued It's drawn, bro, it's drawn. He has argued that actual child porn should be legal, and and if it was done ethically, namely, you know, to be fair to him, I'm gonna make sure that I'm as accurate to what his his argument was, is that he could be persuaded through empirical evidence that there could be ethical child porn where a firmally victimized adult, you know, who was someone who was uh victimized when they were a child, could give their consent for their you know, the filming of uh sexual abuse material of them to be distributed to pedophiles as a palliative treatment so that they wouldn't offend. And he could see that as being ethical.
SPEAKER_01He's got a very strange mind to be like exploring these avenues when the sort of therapy thing for these people exists. Like there are ways in which these like potential abusers can get help, at least in Scandinavia. I don't know about it in America, but the solution isn't to be like, yeah, just go look at more child porn. Like that's not how you do that.
SPEAKER_05I wasn't saying this in order to engage in a debate on it because that's kind of falling into the temptation of destiny, is yeah, he tries to trap you in these extreme hypotheticals where all the difficult questions where the dispute actually lies are assumed away. And we're now on the ground of talking about whether or not we think that this or that therapy is reasonable, what it's like. The real question is, is it effective? And there is no evidence that it is. So why are you assuming this away to try to get someone to agree that child porn should be available? It's a very odd position that you are presenting and you are arguing when the most important questions are not actually in alignment with what you're proposing.
SPEAKER_01You're you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The question has nothing really to do with like material reality or anything else. It's just like a question for the sake of the question, I guess.
SPEAKER_05It's like very divorced from yeah, you try to get as many people to agree that child porn maybe not be that bad. Yeah. And that is uh an interesting project.
SPEAKER_03I don't think he even gives a flying fuck, like agree to disagree. No, it's it's an incredible taboo, so it gets eyeballs. Yep. And uh when you when you posit uh such a like uh dual dilemma, or what that's a when you posit such a dilemma where uh definitely like half of your audience is gonna choose A and the other half is gonna choose B, you're always gonna have at least half of the audience that just came in on your stream agreeing with you, and maybe even a big part of them staying, leading to the grift to increase in profitability. You do topics like this not necessarily because you care, though he sounds like he kind of cares, but he cares first and foremost because this is a moneymaker. Yeah, that that's that's it. That's what we keep coming back on with this particular guy. And a lot of us bite the fucking hook. I know I bite the fucking hook all the time because I'm like, what the fuck are you saying, dude? And then and then he won, like unironically. Uh but to finish off the controversy cake, I will give you an N-word cherry on top.
SPEAKER_01That's a fucking crazy way of wording that. Uh, yeah. Sorry.
SPEAKER_03They call me the they call me the leftist poet. Yes, you heard that right. In October 2019, prominent streamer TriHex, Destiny's friend, confronted him about his private use of racial slurs. By the way, TriHex is black. Destiny's response was that he doesn't care how others feel about it. He justified continued usage by claiming race is a social construct. He's are you ready? Half Cuban, so it's fine. And if everyone used it without racist intent, it would it would lose power. Uh Tri-Hex, high trihex, heartbroken, explained that he didn't choose to be black, but is offended by that word. Destiny refused uh to stop. What in the mother of like 12-year-old understanding of slurs is that argumentation?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, also like using like woke like language to be like, yeah, race a social construct, therefore I should be able to say the N-word. Like, yeah, it is a social construct, but it has real material like effects in the real world.
SPEAKER_03And uh this is not all of them, but uh I gave up, I have to say. Uh if uh Patreon numbers go down now, it's on me, guys. I could not read another one. I was sick to my stomach. Stephen Destiny Bonell II, a man who went from cleaning carpets to building an online empire, leaving a trail of revenge porn, fabricated accusations, emotional abuse, and racial slur defenses in his wake. A man who positions himself as a champion of progressive values while systematically harming women, normalizing far right figures, and deploying abuser tactics against anyone who challenges him. His life story isn't about intellectual evolution or political courage. It's about a person who discovered that confidence, rhetorical aggression, and shameless self-contradiction could be monetized, and that audiences would mistake dominance for competence. The scandals aren't separate from his career, they're the foundation of it. Now you heard about his worldview from Mike. Learned what kind of a man he is for me, and now I pass you on to Freda, who will help you tie those two together and extrapolate it on the thousands of destinies all around the world.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Hugo. This episode isn't just about destiny. It's about a widespread tendency online of people who reasonably should be our allies, turning out to be our enemies. And when I say our, I mean people like us and our listeners. People who I hope stand up for marginalized people, who fight against right-wing forces of reaction and who aren't satisfied with the world as it is, but who want to make it a better place. I'm gonna give you a very, very brief economic history lesson. Don't worry, it's not very long. The advent of capitalism paved the way for a radical transformation of property relations, which in turn paved the way for a radical transformation of politics. Through the 1700s and the eighteen hundreds, earnest liberal revolutionaries fought and bled under banners such as liberty, equality, and solidarity. They were fighting the entrenched conservative powers of the time, the forces of reaction, which were looking to maintain the status quo. The advent of international organizations based on liberal principles like individual rights, property rights, free trade, and so on, coupled with the integration of the whole world into a single economic system throughout the late 1800s, began to pave the way for what some call the liberal world order, nominally governed by commonly held principles and international law. This is the thing that destiny has seemingly constructed his whole political identity around. Destiny considers himself a free market capitalist, but in today's society, what does that actually mean in practice? What do you actually stand for? We can probably throw the whole human rights bill of rights international law thing out the window, considering his stance on Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. But the free market thing and calling himself a capitalist is interesting. A capitalist is someone whose economic position is predicated on their ownership of private property. Profits flow to them from their investments, them buying and owning things. Destiny doesn't make his money from owning a factory or whatever. If you want an example of a content creator who is also a capitalist, then Mr. Beast is right there. Destiny does debate pervert team sports on the internet, as we've covered. Destiny describes himself as ideologically capitalist, which is a very strange thing to be for someone who is very much not actually monstrously rich. His affinity for free markets and this idea that he calls capitalism is based on his belief that these provide data-driven solutions, that the market is effective at solving problems. He's not entirely wrong. The free market is very good at addressing certain problems, but it's also very good at creating others. The history of this concept that Destiny calls the free market is a very bloody one. What I neglected to mention earlier in my brief narrative about how we in the West established our liberal democracies was the effect that we would have on the rest of the world right after that. There were always limits to the degree to which our Western governments saw people in other parts of the world as worthy of being granted the same rights that we afforded ourselves. Before the advent of this so-called free trade ideology that destiny upholds, there were already European colonies around the world, slave trading outposts, settlements, that sort of thing. Around the late 1700s and early 1800s, as middle class Europeans gained political rights, particularly more rights to organize politically and economically, the nature of colonization changed. Quoting Lorenzo Bracini from his book Colonialism A Global History. The opium wars epitomized free trade imperialism, in this instance, the free trade of narcotics. Did the Chinese state have a right to erect a levy to protect its territory, economy, and population? The answer was a resounding no. Europe and the West were now ascendant more than ever before. The rest could not compete. The arguments made by the free trade proponents of the period are very similar to those made today. Back then it was called quote civilizing, and now it's called development or investment. Quoting Vercini again. Development theory can thus be seen as a fundamental underpinning of the new global colonial wave, a Wave sustained by the notion that the former colonizers, that is, the current neocolonizers, have a right to govern and steer a recalcitrant backward social body towards a somewhat remote future where the distinction between colonizers and colonized will finally disappear. Continuing from a different section of the book, quote British Prime Minister Tony Blair emphatically talked, after September 11, about the need to reorder the world around us. He was then advocating a type of inclusive colonialism. And one final quote: A failed state allows a mix of foreign corporate, non-governmental, and institutional concerns to step in and enables extraordinary extractive possibilities. A recognizably colonial circumstance. This is what's called disaster colonialism. In completely unrelated news, Destiny is of course a noted defender of Israel's conduct in Gaza. By all accounts, a disaster zone. As of January 16, 2026, it's been announced that the aforementioned Tony Blair is on the executive board of Trump's so-called Gaza Peace Plan, a plan that involves the quote, redevelopment of Gaza under technocratic governance by local and international experts. And quote, many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas have been crafted by well-meaning international groups. And, quote, a special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries. The so-called Board of Peace is, of course, headed by Donald Trump. The plan relegates Palestinian self-governance to some distant future when Gaza is deemed developed enough, and the Palestinian Authority is deemed to be sufficiently reformed. This is colonialism. The book that I quoted was released in 2022 and basically outlined this whole step-by-step process and the dynamics behind it, what we're currently seeing, unfolding in Gaza. The book wasn't prophetic. It and the decades of research that preceded it has analyzed and understood our economic reality. These results were predictable, given the logic of our economic system. So why has Destiny built his political identity around this? As opposed to, I don't know, workers' rights or fighting economic equality? And why does he always fight those who do?
SPEAKER_05I mean, I think one of the things about Destiny in particular is he is like time and time again, when people try to introduce these ideas to him, he rejects them as like unnecessary, irrelevant, he doesn't care about history, and that you should be able to explain why you believe what you believe from first principles in this kind of like marketplace of ideas of hypotheticals. And he doesn't really appreciate when people talk about historical contingency, materialism, the nature in which like things have proceeded from previous historical conditions. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because he doesn't have a lot of that knowledge. And when destiny is then proven wrong, puts him in an awkward position, in which he has to seek allies elsewhere, which you can see a parallel to in history. In the interest of preserving the political and economic status quo so as to not lose ground to their communist adversaries, liberal democracies, like the United States, supported all sorts of dictatorships around the world. One famous example, in 1973, the United States supported a coup against Chile's democratically elected president Allende, and propped up their right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and murdered thousands of his own people. At this time, the Soviet Union presented itself as an ally to the oppressed and provided material support to decolonization struggles around the world, which of course made it an attractive ally to anti-colonial movements. When faced with the prospect of these colonized people falling to the communist sphere of influence, the knee-jerk reaction for many liberal democracies was to support murderous, racist and exploitative regimes. Implicit in this decision is two notions. One, if you're not with us, you're against us. Two, in their calculation, the racist and exploitative regime is the lesser evil. I'm deliberately using this analogy because I think it's kind of insane that a person who at least professes certain principles, we now know that he doesn't really hold to them, has decided that Nick Fuentes or Lauren Southern are guess the lesser evils when weighed up against uh Mike from you know this podcast or Hassan Piker.
SPEAKER_05I mean, that's pretty standard when you discuss America's position as a global hegemon and how America consistently supports anti-democratic institutions, whether it is military coups in Iran or Brazil or Argentina or Chile or Honduras or El Salvador or you know, the list is as long as your arm, right? Yep. Um, while at the same time professing liberal values, it becomes clear that destiny is more of a kind of regime and institution defender as opposed to somebody who's connected to ideas. Because if you're connected to the idea, even liberalism as an idea, America doesn't represent that. And it certainly doesn't care about aligning with, you know, authoritarian, autocratic, monarchical, or other forms of reactionary politic.
SPEAKER_01The thing about liberalism as an idea as well is that it emerged in a very specific historic circumstance, and it emerged to address specific, like, challenges, I suppose. And after that, things have changed. The world is not the same as uh the time when liberals stood on the barricades and fought to, you know, oust monarchs. It's a different world out there. In 1989, just a couple years before the fall of the Soviet Union, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an essay called The End of History Question Mark. Then after the fall of the Soviet Union, he expanded the essay into a full book, whereby he then removed the question mark. The new title was The End of History and the Last Man. The thesis of the book is that modern liberal democracy has won, that the time of political struggle is over, and that there are no longer any ideological competitors to liberalism. Quote: The endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This arrogant confidence that we have arrived at the perfect system that doesn't really need any major tweaks at all completely permeates the ideology of creators like Destiny. As the confident protagonists of history, they don't have to reconcile the contradictions that led liberal democracies to support regimes like apartheid South Africa. Just stay the course, we've won, we're the good guys. So this is in many ways why I think Destiny is kind of like American foreign policy, if it was a person. He's overconfident, he very often gets the facts wrong, he very often picks fights he shouldn't, and when people fight back, he very often allies himself with insane right-wingers. Personally, I don't think Destiny's ideology is based on any specific moral framework or educated understanding of history. I want to play you a clip that I think is very illustrative of him as a person.
SPEAKER_04Um, who started the war in 47? Who fired the first shots? It was Palestinians. They would never admit that.
SPEAKER_01Why ask a quote Palestinian supporter, whatever the fuck that means, this question. What's the lesson here? If Palestinians fired the first shots, does that justify the genocide? Does that justify the apartheid regime? What does this question do for our understanding of what's happening in Gaza? The answer is nothing.
SPEAKER_02Oh, leftists burn down the Reichstag, ah, time to kill 20, 30, 40 million people.
SPEAKER_05I mean, the center party in Nazi Germany voted with the Enabling Act. People identical to I uh to destiny who were addicted to procedure and and constitutional law or whatever, they psyoped themselves into supporting their own destruction.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_01This podcast is one hundred percent financed by you guys, the listeners, and we have to pay our editor. As such, you can find the rest of this episode over at patreon.com slash the reaction podcast, or just use the link in the podcast description. We are incredibly grateful to all of our supporters. If you're already a patron and you're hearing this, you are on the wrong podcast feed. Thank you all so much for listening.
