James Charles: The Astrology of Class Cruelty PART ONE

Social media predator James Charles is a grotesque example of the unrestrained contempt the 'haves' express towards the 'have-nots.'

May 13, 2026

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TRUMP v2.0 IS AN EXTENDED display of unregulated grift, unedited vulgarity, and unchecked cruelty. Yesterday, Trump declared, “Not even a little bit,” when a reporter asked if Americans’ financial situations affected his negotiations with Iran.

No.

And then he pitched his new ballroom scheme.

Later that day he called one female reporter “dumb” and, moments later, another female journalist “stupid”—as if working through a list.

This kind of crude disrespect is highly cherished by his MAGA-ite base. Trump’s unedited, context-free way of ‘telling it like it is’ confirms that his devotees have little capacity to parse complex situations. The insult comics’ bark guarantees that no heavy lifting or research is required.

Whew—a relief!

I’ve written often about the psychology of MAGA’s sado-masochistic underpinnings. The cruelty it demonstrates to those less fortunate—to people in need of food or medical care or political asylum. More freakish, though, is the zeal that the cruelty inspires. A fitting response for an illiterate culture whose parents were raised on The Jerry Springer Show. As George Carlin once said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

Of course, for every ‘S’ there must be an ‘M.’ And this is the more fascinating dimension of the MAGA-ite fetish. It’s why Trump can confess that he doesn’t consider the economic plight of Americans. It’s not uncommon in cults for the leader’s bad behavior to be endured as proof of loyalty. The harder the MAGA-ite is fucked, the more they double down and take it.

What I’ve noticed more this year (than in Trump’s previous term) is how Trump’s presence imparts permission for new degrees of puerile behavior. Both in and out of the political arena. This hybrid form of lowbrowness is laced with nasty levels of cruelty—a viciousness that comes straight from the id.

And it’s everywhere. At sporting events, on airplanes, at the market, in restaurants, and in outrageous displays of road rage. Lately this fury is stepping over previously illegal boundaries—pushing into blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic eruptions. Usually this kind of behavior is kept out of the halls of government, but now, with a UFC cage match scheduled for next month at the White House, we’ve reached a new nadir of incredulity.

We’re abiding in a sociocultural dead end. A condition that the poet Robert Bly detailed in his 1996 book The Sibling Society. In his book, Bly argued that America has regressed into a culture of perpetual adolescence—a society without adults, or more precisely, without a willingness to become adults. The vertical relationship between generations (elders passing down wisdom, initiating the young into maturity) has collapsed. And it’s been replaced by a horizontal culture of peers all arrested at the same developmental stage.

As is normal for my discursive thought processes, all of the above flicked into neon for me the other day while watching a video of social media influencer James Charles.

You don’t know who Charles is? Well, you’re lucky (and probably over 30 years old). He’s a YouTube fashion influencer with a rags-to-riches story (he’s currently worth about 12 million dollars according to Wikipedia.) His audience is heavily Gen Z, with the bulk of his followers being aged 18 to 24. He’s also been described as a ‘walking Amber Alert’ due to his online entanglements with minors.

The other day Charles posted a video on TikTok where he viciously derided a woman who had, allegedly, lost her job at Spirit Airlines. Apparently the woman had posted a request to Charles in his DMs. Her request was to spread the word about a GoFundMe she’d created to help her during her sudden predicament.

Ordinarily I’d skip shit like this on TikTok, but the degree of hatred and feral viciousness that Charles displayed in the video caught my attention. Elements of his outburst suggest a pathological level of mental illness.

While watching Charles, I realized I was witnessing a Hunger Games-level of cruelty from the millionaire-billionaire class—a group of individuals who, despite appearances, are mentally compromised due to their extreme levels of wealth. Someone like Elon Musk comes immediately to mind—a good example of what happens when puerility and privilege intermix. Or Mark Zuckerberg, who—with the fantasies of an arrested-development teen—continues to build underground forts all over the world to assuage his acute paranoia.

Tomorrow I want to look at Charles’s birth chart and study the transits for the time of his videoed eruption (which he has since deleted and apologized for—a common tactic of online fame whores who panic when their follower count decreases). His ‘moment’ represents the distorted dimensions of the sign Gemini (Trump, anyone?)—fallout from the just-new Uranus into Gemini transit.

I’ll post that video close read for my paid subscribers tomorrow.

Love,

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