Brooke Teegarden is one of a growing number of women using the specific texture of MAGA masculinity against itself.

Note: This article originally appeared on HuffPost Voices.

Tom doesn’t like this newly revealed truth, but he can’t say so publicly. People will say he’s a Democrat, he explains. Teegarden tells Tom that she is scared too and they should both just pick a few people and tell them privately. He says OK. He says, “I really like you.” She says, “THANK YOU.”

Tom will probably never know who he’s really talking to.

Teegarden is one of a growing number of women using the specific texture of MAGA masculinity against itself by exploiting their political humiliation kinks online and then donating earnings into leftist causes.

Teegarden, who posts as @theletsnotdate, is one of a growing number of women using the specific texture of MAGA masculinity against itself by exploiting their political humiliation kinks online and funneling the money into leftist causes. The men she targets are generally older, white, Christian and conservative, and they carry two things into every conversation: a desperation to be desired and a set of beliefs propped up entirely by fake news. Teegarden uses both.

Sometimes Teegarden’s goal is to expose conservative men to the truths that Fox News won’t tell them. Sometimes it’s persuasion. Sometimes, as with James, another MAGA man she spent months “grooming,” it’s a photo of her in a bra exchanged for a public anti-ICE post followed by a second operation that got him publicly questioning Trump and defending his own posts to his confused right-wing Facebook friends. This is all documented in screenshots that can be found on Teegarden’s Instagram account.

Teegarden might call that a win, though not the kind people expect. “Winning does not always mean changing a man’s mind,” she says. “In these conversations, winning is any moment where I do not feel afraid.” Here in post-democratic Trumplandia, many of us are not trying to change the hearts and minds of our oppressors anymore. We are simply trying to not die. 

Financial domination — findomming, in the parlance — is a kink in which a dominant extracts money from a submissive, often with accompanying degradation. Twig, who I’ve been following for years, describes her approach as “operating within an existing system while being very aware of its implications.” She is not trying to change MAGA’s worldview. “Honestly, MAGA minds can’t be changed,” she says. “I’m interacting with it as it already exists.”

What Twig has noticed, working within that system, is that some MAGA men have a humiliation kink that extends well beyond the bedroom. “Whether in their public life, calling Trump their ‘Daddy,’ or in their private life asking me for humiliation videos,” she says, “there is a common need to be made to feel inferior or small.” Twig’s work is a treasure trove of Freudian delights. 

One might find themselves asking whether it’s ethical to manipulate people, even in a quest to make them more informed or compassionate. Teegarden doesn’t flinch at this question. “I don’t feel bad if manipulation, rather than pure persuasion, creates a better outcome,” she says. 

Trump’s own manufactured reality, after all, is also manipulation. The difference is that Teegarden isn’t inciting hate. She’s trying to get a 60-year-old man in the suburbs to see, for even a single moment, that what is happening to his neighbor is wrong and maybe he should do something about it. Teegarden’s work, then, is part therapy, part public service, part revenge fantasy. 

Does it work? Sometimes. Twig may not be redistributing wealth at a congressional scale, but she is doing it — one humiliated client and one mutual aid Venmo at a time. Two of the men Teegarden has run operations on are now in a private group chat with people who no longer support Trump. They are questioning, but they are also still making bigoted remarks. “Unfortunately, they haven’t become safe or kind people, yet,” she says. 

That “yet” is doing a lot of work, but so are we.