It’s January in Wisconsin, and Brooke Teegarden, a writer and content creator in Green Bay, is at her laptop, wearing a blond filter and conservative cosplay attire. Teegarden is about to teach a 60-year-old MAGA man that the people abducting children in Minnesota are not, in fact, ISIS.Teegarden replies to Tom’s DM with a photo of a 5-year-old boy in a blue bunny hat, pretending to be clueless. “ISIS KIDNAPPED THIS 5-YEAR-OLD CHILD,” she suggests, in all caps, a la Trump. Tom responds immediately. He wants to help. He wants to know where the child is. He wants to send in the National Guard.The boy is Liam Conejo Ramos, but Tom doesn’t know that. They don’t really cover the unjust detainment of children by ICE on Fox. Teegarden baby-steps Tom through reality with careful precision. She describes the detention center in Dilley, Texas, where some prisoners have reported malnourishment and sexual assault as well as instances of children contracting severe illnesses and not receiving medication. Tom pays close attention, horrified, morally activated, agreeing at every turn that this is vile, this is despicable, as well as un-American. Then the big reveal, ironically by Tom himself: The organization doing this is not ISIS. It’s ICE.“Hey do you mean ICE not ISIS?” he types, hours later. “Did some googling.” 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.“I target the type of man who harmed me,” Teegarden tells me. In other words, Teegarden tries to find middle-aged conservative men who publicly perpetuate the idea that it’s OK to treat women and girls like property. “When I talk to them, I am not doing it from some detached political distance. I am doing it because I do not want them to harm other girls.”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.Courtesy of Brooke TeegardenTeegarden, 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.Teegarden’s tactics vary. She maintains multiple profiles. My favorite is a filtered, blond version of herself that she describes as a “satirical right-wing persona” that she uses to enter conversations she wouldn’t otherwise be invited into. She starts with sympathy, asks questions and sends selfies when she starts to lose them with facts. 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.James’s friends were not pleased. “What happened to you dude,” one wrote. “Grew a conscience,” another replied.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. In Jacksonville, Florida, Twig, an activist who asked to be referred to by her professional alias to better ensure her safety, has a different operation running. She doesn’t need to catfish anyone. She is herself: a woman who noticed that conservative men on Instagram don’t just want to argue with her. They want her to take their money and humiliate them while she does it. So she does. And then, she tells me, she funnels the proceeds into Planned Parenthood donations, ACLU membership, and flights to D.C. to lobby Congress.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. This work, Twig says, which some may dismiss as scamming, is actually kind of the opposite. Although it may seem cathartic to scream at MAGA men, it requires an enormous amount of emotional work to be the person who engages with the men none of us want to talk to. “It requires emotional intelligence, discipline, and a strong sense of self,” Twig says. “It’s work. It just doesn’t look like traditional labor.”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. Twig feels similarly about the necessity of employing edgy strategies, but adds that she works within explicitly consensual boundaries. “The entire thing only works if consent is real, ongoing, and explicit, even when the ‘connection’ is about intentional imbalance,” she says. “That distinction is important.”Does it work? Sometimes. Twig may not be redistributing wealth at 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.