‘Manosphere’ streamer Sneako says his offensive views are ‘facetious’ and a joke — but parents of teen boys should beware

You might not know who Sneako is. But most any middle school or high schooler does. 

The 27-year-old streamer has made a name for himself as a political commentator, live-streaming as many as eight hours a day on Kick to spread extreme views that are teen boy catnip. 

The secret to his success? A willingness to say — to 1 million-plus subscribers on YouTube and 100,000 on Kick — what others aren’t, no matter how vile.

He presents this as if the rest of the world is prevented from speaking the truth by corporate overlords, rather than the ideas being unpopular or even hateful.

“Somebody who has a company that they work for can’t say ‘Hitler had aura’ because they’ll get fired,” the New York City native, real name Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy, told The Post.

Throughout his 15-year YouTube career, his “truths” have grown increasingly inflammatory: professing that women shouldn’t be able to vote, that the swastika is aesthetically pleasing, that Yahya Sinwar was a hero, that Jews are secretly running society. I could go on, but that’s also exactly what he wants.

In Netflix’s “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere” documentary, released last month, Sneako is seen getting mobbed by young fans on the streets of New York City. Wherever he goes, they circle, asking for selfies and fist bumps.

He is loud, he is unabashed, he is a tween boy’s idea of a prophet. Parents should beware.

While he insists he’s been unfairly accused of antisemitism, Sneako advocates for getting “Israeli influence out of American politics” and mocks the death toll of the Holocaust — sarcastically saying in our interview, “it’s 6 million. You can’t say anything less, or anything more. It’s exactly 6 million.”

But confront him about his most odious statements, and suddenly they’re satire.

Asked about a 2024 tweet in which he said of Hitler, “this [n-word] had aura,” he now rationalizes: “That’s facetious. This is a dead guy. The Nazi party’s over.”

Both the “joke” and the denial of its impact are edgelording: saying the most provocative thing possible in order to generate attention.

Being a provocateur, he claimed, gets his “kernel of truth” to more people: “That gets seen … and then you get on the show and you explain it. And then people can’t really defeat your argument … It’s all part of a bigger conversation.”

If you don’t get the humor, you’re simply out of touch according to Sneako. “I’m an edgelord based off of mainstream media [sensibilities] … ” he said. But he believes Gen Z “understand, like, ‘yeah, there’s some truth in what you’re saying.'”

As an elder member of Gen Z, I know not to take him too literally. Provocation drives social media clout; nuance kills engagement. 

But the problem isn’t people my age watching Sneako, it’s his very young and impressionable fans — who lack political context and don’t understand which provocations are for show.

Case in point: a 2023 viral video, clipped from his livestream and circulated on X and TikTok, in which two tween boys swarm Sneako and scream things like “all gays should die” and “f—k the women” to impress the streamer. 

Even Sneako looks overwhelmed by their manic behavior. “We love the women,” he says in the video. “What have I done?” 

He conceded in our interview that his very young fans often miss his humor and claimed the mainstream media — read: me — does, too. “I think anybody that analyzes politics properly, anybody worth speaking to would be like, ‘All right, that’s just like a stupid joke, and it doesn’t matter,’” he said.

But don’t underestimate his two-facedness.

In our talk, he condemned Hitler as a “racist” who did “evil things,” and insisted the aura remark was a joke. Hours later he was live on his Kick stream, with 25,000 viewers watching as he doubled down on the notion that the murderous dictator had aura: “Because [n-word], he did!”

Sneako took to Kick after being banned from YouTube, which recently reinstate him as part of its “second chance” program. While Sneako says the social media company apologized for banning him in the first place, a spokesperson denied any apology.

Some people will no doubt criticize me and The Post for “platforming” his views. But he reaches millions of young people on a daily basis. Ignoring him won’t make it go away.

Public condemnation is tricky because it gives Sneako the attention he wants — it’s taking the bait. Manosphere influencers are so seductive because they carry an air of gnosticism: The more they are frozen out and reflexively flattened into one-dimensional caricatures, the more credibility they can claim to have “forbidden” knowledge that offends the powers that be.

It’s why Sneako falsely claimed on his livestream that a video producer who was in the room as we talked was actually my “handler.” The implication is that his ideas are so dangerous they must be carefully monitored so as not to explode the normy consciousness.

Parents need to understand this context.

He speaks directly to modern male “plight,” telling me, “80% of women want to sleep with 20% of men. Every girl now sees the opportunities in front of her … The guy she wants to be with got to be six feet tall.”

Sexual frustration is often cited for pushing young men into the arms of the manosphere, and Sneako blames “all the feminism” for that. But he believes frustration runs deeper. “What used to be the norm is now a pipe dream for our generation,” he said, alluding to marriage and homeownership.

“Boomers had it. They took advantage of it. And look at the country they left us. It’s a disaster. They’re going to keep voting in more and more warmongers, hoard all the wealth, and then just say, ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.’”

This has rendered a lot of men “black pilled,” according to Sneako: “Who are they going to get married to? Who are they going to have a real relationship with? Where are they going to get a job?”

Other, less provocative voices, like Scott Galloway and Richard Reeves, make similar points without the Holocaust “jokes.” But it’s depressingly obvious in speaking with Sneako that his secret sauce is an unapologetic violation of norms for the sake of it.

Young men love it for its catharsis. They were taught to say their pronouns when introducing themselves, and told to capitalize the word Black but not white. They have been conditioned to apologize to anyone who is offended, no matter how ridiculous their claim, and taught that their masculinity was toxic.

But edgelording is counterproductive. It’s offensive and can be corrosive when implanted in kids ill equipped to recognize the line between satire and commentary.

The manosphere is a dangerous place for young men developing a sense of self. While it’s tapping into genuine male angst, left unchecked, it’s a source of it, too.