by Liz K

We live in a country that produces children like Bryan Mercadente. That is the real scandal. Not the content of his essays—vile though they are—but the fact that a sixteen-year-old boy can write, without irony or remorse, that his fat classmates deserve cancer. That a child can look at another child, see a stain on a chair, and fantasise about his suicide. That a teenager can stand in the mirror admiring his jawline and conclude that anyone not shaped like him is a “dysgenic” embarrassment, a stinking obstacle in the corridors of his school, an enemy of beauty and therefore of civilisation.

The danger here is not just the cruelty. It is the coherence. Bryan Mercadente has constructed a complete ideology from his own reflection. He believes that physical beauty is proof of moral superiority. That being fat is not just unhealthy, but evil. That ugliness is a form of political submission to the lies of the ruling class, and that the unfit are not merely unsightly but complicit in tyranny. He speaks, again and again, of “the fat,” “the spotty,” “the smelly,” as if they were a contaminated species in need of purge. In his world, beauty is resistance. Fatness is betrayal. And public health is war.

He does not merely dislike fat people. He despises them. He loathes their bodies, their breath, the marks they leave on chairs. He sees them as vermin in the corridors of his school—“two-legged livestock,” “dysgenic refuse,” a “wretched” class of walking decay. He writes about them not with the disgust of a teenager confronting puberty, but with the loathing of a young man who has found, in hatred, a sense of purpose.

In three separate essays, Bryan lays out this philosophy with unnerving calm:

• In the first, he mocks a fat classmate for the stain he leaves on a plastic chair. He makes no attempt at empathy. Instead, he imagines inventive forms of suicide to recommend, and delights in the idea of humiliating the boy further: “I shall find ways to seat him exclusively on chairs of pale cloth and judge him by the stains he leaves behind.”
• In the second, he offers a personal gospel of beauty: “Everyone should think himself under an obligation of beauty.” Those who fail to groom or dress as he does are dismissed as “deliberately ugly”—a phrase he treats as moral indictment. They are not just physically deficient. They are subhuman. “There is an undeniable correlation,” he claims, “between ugliness of form and ugliness of substance.”
• In the third, he expresses tepid support for semaglutide injections—because, in his own words, “a little thyroid cancer might be the first productive thing their bodies have done in years.” The suffering caused by these drugs, he says, is “a better misuse of the taxpayers’ money than most I’ve seen.”

This is not social commentary. This is dehumanisation.

And the style makes it worse. Bryan is smart—dangerously so. He can quote Seneca, analyse Roman latrines, parse medical leaflets, and end with a rhetorical flourish that would make a Spectator columnist green with envy. His prose is elegant. His ideas are filth. What makes his writing unbearable is not that he’s stupid, but that he’s talented. He doesn’t stumble into hate. He walks there, smiling, with a classical education and a very clean shirt.

You can see the influences: Nietzsche without the nuance, Evola without the spiritual anguish, a smattering of Bronze Age Mindset filtered through schoolboy disdain. But where those writers, however detestable, had the sense to cloak their hatred in metaphysics or myth, Bryan is brutally literal. He hates fat people because they are ugly and they smell. That’s it. That’s the whole argument. Everything else—Greek, grooming tips, public health policy—is window dressing.

And let us not be distracted by the pose of “meritocracy.” Bryan does not believe in lifting others up. He believes in pushing them down. He mocks the idea that beauty might be subjective, or culturally influenced, or economically constrained. If you’re ugly, it’s your fault. If you’re fat, it’s because you’re weak. If you suffer, you deserve to. His fantasy is not that everyone might be beautiful. His fantasy is that the beautiful might rule.

This is teenage fascism. Not jackboots and banners, but a razor and a protein shake. A fascism of the mirror. A belief that only the well-formed have value, and that the rest should be medicated, humiliated, or erased.

And it is profoundly British. Because what Bryan expresses—however cruelly—is only a concentrated version of what millions think quietly: that the poor are poor because they are lazy, that the fat are fat because they are gluttonous, that the weak are weak because they deserve to be. Bryan has just said it out loud. He has weaponised schoolboy contempt into a political vision.

And he is political. His defence on semaglutide is not medical, but ideological. He rightly notes that it is a wealth transfer from the taxpayer to Big Pharma, but approves it because he wants the poor to suffer. He doesn’t oppose the injections out of compassion for their side effects. He supports them because of their side effects. Death is a bonus.

This is not dissent. This is sadism.

So what are we to do with a boy like Bryan?

He must be answered, not censored. He must be told, firmly, that his ideas are not courageous, but cowardly. That real strength is not mocking the weak, but standing with them. That the smell in the corridor is not a sign of moral collapse, but of social abandonment. That the child he mocks for sweating in a chair may be hungry, traumatised, unloved, or ill. That beauty is not goodness.

Bryan Mercadente is sixteen. He may yet change. But if he does not—if this mirror-worship hardens into ideology—then he will be the future of the Right. He will be the future of cruelty, dressed up in rhetoric and muscle tone. And he will have been made, inch by inch, by a country that taught him to hate weakness and called it self-respect.

He is a beautiful boy. But his soul is rotting.

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Bryan Mercadente’s Anti-Sucralose Crusade: A Friendly Rebuke

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