Episode Details

In this Based Camp deep dive, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore one of the most fascinating figures in online culture: Shoe0nHead (June Lapine).

Why has a self-described social democrat, Bernie supporter, and pro-union leftist maintained massive popularity and respect in right-wing and anti-woke spaces for over a decade—while most other left-leaning creators from the early skeptic/atheist era lost their audiences?

We break down:

- Her unique journey from Gamergate-era anti-SJW commentary to Catholic trad wife and mother

- Why she never needed to “convert” her audience or pivot dramatically

- The vitalistic, entertaining style that keeps her relevant across the political spectrum

- The broader split in the old atheist community: truth-seekers vs. resentment-driven dunkers

- Why the modern right can embrace ideological diversity (and why the left struggles with it)

- Shoe0nHead as proof that the new right is a big-tent movement built on reality and forward momentum rather than purity spirals

If you’ve ever wondered why right-leaning creators constantly react to and platform Shoe0nHead (even when she criticizes Trump mildly), this episode explains it.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be pulling a thread that we got to in another video and in this other video we were talking about the. Community of early online skeptics slash atheist, which was like the core of sort of YouTube culture in the earliest days of YouTube.

And how the individuals in this community that went right, they first became anti-feminist and anti woke, then went into Gamergate and then became the seedbed that the new right movement grew out of.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And then another group of them drifted in another direction. They drifted left and the group that drifted left like they, they were in the early atheist anti theist movement.

And then the movement went either at the anti-feminist or anti woke stage. Yeah. They lost their audiences. Notably, we didn’t talk about it in that video, but there is actually one that drifted left [00:01:00] even after that stage. He was there for anti-feminist, he was there for anti woke, and he only drifted left at the trans stuff.

This is dev slash short Fighter Taku, who has co off his views are way lower than ours now. If you look at like weekly counts

Simone Collins: has he overall drifted left?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, he has refused to really call out the trans community as a serious problem. And something that needs to be in some way, you know, the, like it legislatively something like that, a addressed.

Speaker 3: Inspector, do you know if the killer was a man or a woman? Well, if ca I know that. What else is there? The kitten,

Malcolm Collins: And I, I think that that’s part of, he’s also become more proc censorship, like censoring people in his forums and stuff like that. Really?

Simone Collins: Wow. That surprises me. It seems so unlike who I thought he was when I first started watching his videos.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think that’s why he lost a lot of his followership, right?

Speaker 8: What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for [00:02:00] gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?

Malcolm Collins: Like it does, it does seem very anti what I thought he was right. But we noted one notable unique case in all of this, which was shoe on head. And Shoe on Head was very unique for a number of reasons. The, the biggest being is that she didn’t drift left over time or begin to adopt leftist talking points.

She was thoroughly le