Agate Credit Only by Name Surnameineff ective legal counsel for the loss of his
license. Still, ever since, he has been stuck in the
castle, feuding about orthotropics on Facebook.In his 30s, after an aimless decade partying
around Europe and working as a traditional
dentist, Mike decided to follow in his father’s
footsteps. He trained in orthodontics in Den-
mark and soon joined John at the Purley clin-
ic. If John projects the measured demeanor
of a Victorian naturalist, then Mike comes off
as a product of the internet age, his words
pouring out in half-sentences and overlap-
ping thoughts.
Staff members often seemed fl ustered by
Mike’s frenetic energy, but his command of
the clinic has been an unequivocal boon for
orthotropics. Since 2018, under his direction,
interest in the clinic has exploded, most of it
driven by the rise in viewership for his YouTube
videos. Originally, the YouTube channel was just
a way to game search-engine results — the fi rst
videos answered basic dental questions, with
titles meant to lure new patients from Google.
But eventually Mike grew frustrated, feeling he
had failed to speak hard truths to the people
who clicked through. In 2012, he started posting
the videos he actually wanted to share — ser-
mons on what he considers the true causes of
crooked teeth.
In many of his videos, he wears blue scrubs,
lending him a clinical authority; even when the
words are carefully scripted, he keeps his tone
natural to ensure the material is accessible. He
talks about tongue posture, recounts patient
success stories, calls out the orthodontic estab-
lishment and teaches viewers to see the count-
less ways their faces have grown wrong. With
the help of a small team, he and John began
regularly putting out videos meant to show
viewers the threats to health and beauty they
see in traditional practice, warning them that
their lives could be ruined by the decision to
sit in an orthodontist’s chair.
Almost all of John’s patients came from with-
in England, but Mike’s hail from much farther
afi eld — the Netherlands, Finland, Spain, the
United States. According to Mike, one family
from Switzerland fl ew their children in on a
private jet twice a month, while a father living
off the coast of Estonia traveled by ferry, bus,
plane and train to have his daughter treated.
During my week at the clinic, hundreds of emails
fl ooded in, most of them from YouTube viewers
seeking advice on tongue posture. Demand for
John’s typo-riddled 2013 magnum opus on orth-
otropics, ‘‘The Cause and Cure of Malocclusion,’’
meanwhile, has skyrocketed; copies sat stacked
around the offi ce, waiting to be sent to practi-
tioners in Taiwan, Germany and Saudi Arabia.There would most likely be no interest in orthotropics
today were it not for an email Mike received some time
around the spring of 2012, inviting him to speak about facial
growth at an event in London called the 21 Convention,
featuring speakers from all corners of the so-called ‘‘mano-
sphere’’: pickup artists, Navy SEALs, fi tness infl uencers and
men’s rights advocates. The organizers had come across
Mike’s work and felt he had something to off er. Mike says
he arrived at the lecture without looking into it and was sur-
prised to fi nd a room full of young men, desperate for his
advice on how they could improve their looks. In his talk,
Mike compared facial growth to bodybuilding. ‘‘I said body-
builders understand the work and eff ort they need to put
into building their physiques, but we don’t do the same for
our faces,’’ he recalled. He told the young men that through
persistence and proper tongue posture, every one of them
could become more attractive. At the end, Mike says that
attendees mobbed him, and he had to be ushered out.
Mike mostly forgot about the event. But in June of 2014,
a user going by the name of the Orthodontist — Mike says
it wasn’t him — posted a video of the speech on a message
board called Sluthate, a central gathering point at the time
for incels. (That same year, Elliot Rodger, a member of Slu t-
hate’s precursor forum, killed six people in California with
the stated intention of instigating a ‘‘War on Women.’’) Many
self-identifi ed incels have a highly mechanistic understand-
ing of human relationships and believe they can improve
their station in the sexual hierarchy through a practice called
‘‘looksmaxxing’’: enhancing one’s sex appeal through weight
lifting, skin and hair treatments and even plastic surgery.
The Orthodontist’s recommendation was clear: The Mews’
orthotropic techniques could be an important addition to
the toolbox. But the theory also had a deeper allure. Like
the movements against vaccines or circumcision or GMOs,orthotropics spoke to its new-
found adherents’ reactionary
desires, affi rming their skepticism
of authority and faceless establish-
ments; promising to restore a sto-
len masculinity; and recounting a
simple but exhilarating narrative
that pitted modernity against the
best interests of the human race.
Unknown to the Mews, users on
Sluthate began talking about try-
ing orthotropics on themselves.
Eventually their discussions caught
Mike’s attention, and — grateful to
have an audience — he ventured
onto Sluthate and off ered to hold a
Q. and A. Questions came in from
users with names like BetaGayFace
and IncelExecutioner, which Mike
answered in an awkward YouTube
video. Before long, support began
arriving from ideologically prox-
imate directions. Mike especially
appreciated the words of Marcus
Follin, a Swedish bodybuilder
and ethnonationalist vlogger who
calls himself the Golden One. In
a popular video, the Golden One
explained to his 100,000 subscrib-
ers how ‘‘mewing’’ could help
return vigor and good looks to
modern men. After the British
Orthodontic Society expelled
Mike, the Golden One rallied his
followers to spread mewing videos
in order to combat Mike’s ortho-
dontic ‘‘adversaries,’’ who he said
had a ‘‘vested interest’’ in silencing
the Mews.
In 2015, inspired by his online
followers’ before-and- after pho-
tos, Mike decided to begin treat-
ing a select group of adult patients26 Photograph by Levon Biss for The New York Times
A poster inside the Purley
clinic showing a patient’s
progress. The Mews contend
that changes in our lifestyle
and environment since the 18th
century are inducing our jaws
to grow small and recessed.