Shoe0nHead: Queen of Hell World
June Lapine, better known as Shoe0nHead or even “Shoe,” is one of the most peculiar YouTubers and Twitter personalities out there. With a career dating back to coverage of Gamergate, Shoe has typically distinguished herself with contrarian takes that have a way of bridging divides between the left and the right, while also alienating people on the left and the right. It is for these reasons (and others to come) that I choose to write about her today.
In essence, she has consistently walked a fine line with whatever topic she approaches, never selling out to single side of an issue. She half-jokingly refers to herself as a “bimbo populist,” embracing the politics of current leaders like Bernie Sanders and older ones like Theodore Roosevelt. With a Catholic upbringing, her style of humor reflects her personal Trinity:
Boorish Patriot (The Father)
Horny Gamer (The Son)
Anxious Millennial (The Holy Ghost )
Her most ambitious series is Hell World, consisting of six episodes so far, all of which summarize news events of the prior three-to-six months and provide her assessment of them. With more attention to detail than her usual videos, these give entertaining insights into Shoe’s beliefs and values and (by extension) those of her large base of fans and followers. Here’s an imperfect summary of the episodes.
Episode 1: Normal Country
Kicking off in 2020, Shoe discusses the issue of police brutality in America. She starts with the death of George Floyd and the fallout that occurred. From there she gives copious examples of excessive force by police, as well as inexcusable behavior by rioters/protesters, which media tried to paint as being primarily caused by one side but featured a wide array of groups from left to right.
She goes on to note that much of this is rationalized depending on what side (left or right) someone is. She notes how brutality by police is accepted by the left when done against the right and showed examples of such by right-wingers who were protesting the COVID lockdowns. Right-wingers then defend police when the violence is directed at left-wingers protesting racism. She described this clamoring for excuses as compulsive contrarianism.
Meanwhile, even though everyone genuinely seems to want police reform, none of that happened, while irrelevant and weird things did. She talks about the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that briefly appeared in Seattle, which created racially segregated spaces in its time, while also observing that some companies changed logos/branding that were deemed to be racist. Nobody tried to achieve material improvement in American policing.
She closes by recounting her own encounter with police, in which she ran a stop sign, did not see the police for a long time and kept driving (effectively evading arrest), but otherwise had a pleasant and lenient officer at the window, hardly a brute.
Episode 2: The American Abyss
In this episode, also from 2020, Shoe gives a more general critique of how we are failing to address some issues raised in the first episode. This includes police brutality but goes on to cover things like government spying, mass evictions, and abuse of illegal immigrants by ICE.
The key theme that strings together much of this is her critique of how easily people are pulled into gimmicky messaging on social media. She talks about a how a strawberry sun dress was critiqued as fascist, how folks were hesitant to criticize Trump’s Supreme Court nomination (Amy Coney Barrett) because she is a woman, and Oreo’s Pride cookies. People speak up or decline to speak up for reasons that are shallow, not substantive. All of this happens while we have an aging, seemingly unconcerned cadre of leadership in Washington.
Episode 3: Fever Dream
Released in early 2021, Shoe discusses the failure of Trump’s presidency to “drain the swamp” and notes his failure to transfer power peacefully during the events of January 6th. From there, however, she noticed how strange things got when this finally resulted in him being suspended from most platforms, such a Twitter. This leads to her discussing the ways in which America is handing over real political authority to businesses and corporations. She discusses the way the mainstream media tried to paint the traders from the GameStop Short Squeeze as neo-Nazis, incels, or Russian agents. She goes over Amazon’s explicit efforts to influence the education of kindergartners in order to familiarize them with the brand and to make sure they are raising the next generation of employees. She discusses how an energy company, during the major ice storm that winter that devastated Texas’s power grid, restricted the supply of natural gas to raises prices, while hundreds of people were dying.
At the end, she gets fed up and decides to perform a Satanic ritual that will resurrect Theodore Roosevelt.
Episode 4: Late Stage Cringe
This episode focuses more on developments in American capitalism than on strictly political things. She observes how Big Tech has grown into another form of government and the massive strides taken by corporations to control more of society. She discusses BlackRock’s accumulation of traditional homes to be converted into rental units, people selling their blood as an income sources, the push to get people off of traditional meat and into eating bugs, and even synthetic wombs for bearing children.
Episode 5: Dystopian Utopia
Here, Shoe doesn’t have as clear of a main theme but does note on a lot of things falling apart: sex crimes by top officials in government, the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of the Metaverse as fake escape from this Hell Word.
Episode 6: Clown Country
Finally, Shoe hits on our fascination with defying life and death, remarking again on scientific attempts to prevent death for the rich, using AI or harvested tattoos to pretend that loved ones are not gone, or even having virtual children in the Metaverse instread of real ones. She covers the War on Ukraine and America’s obsession with Volodymyr Zelenksyy as an indication that we have no heroes of our own. She touches on Elon’s acquisition of Twitter and the selective hypocrisy of those lamenting a billionaire having too much control of social media, when it is billionaires who have been runninng social media anyway.
These episodes hit more topics than I mentioned, but the overall takeaway is clear. Shoe wants a sensible economic model that rewards laborers for hard work and innovation. She dislikes a system where most of those rewards go to billionaires, who then leverage their wealth to undermine the democratic process. She further dislikes how the culture wars distract people from this magic trick.
For the IDW Community, values like free speech are part of that democratic process and are part of what is lost. To that end, we have formed so that we can work proactively toward solutions. In Hell World and her other content, Shoe represents what is perhaps the best that an industry of outrage content can offer. She highlights real issues, and instead of provoking an audience into hating half the country, she commiserates with them.
The utility for that has a ceiling, though. Outrage content, even the best of it, isn’t solution content. Perhaps it would be unfair to put individual blame on Shoe for this. She is merely filling a role that naturally presented itself to her. The same goes for several individuals that have, at any point, been associated with the IDW. Nevertheless, one would hope that such an even-handed person with a large audience (over 500K Twitter followers and approaching 2 million YouTube subscribers) could find more productive outlets for her grief.
I hope Shoe finds such a path because watching three years’ worth of content showed that she wants more out of life—out of America—than what she is getting. To be Queen of a Hell World almost defeats the point of being a queen. Her popularity suggests she is not alone in this feeling. If everyone did something, even something small, then the big picture would actually change. Whether Shoe is sitting on such an opportunity is for her to figure out.
For folks reading this, you have an opportunity to do that with our organization. We have our annual meeting approaching on Dec. 9, and we’re encouraging folks to attend and to influence our plans for 2024. Visit idw-hq.org to learn more.
You can also support our organization by becoming a paid subscriber here on Suback.