Brain rot? #expand; Political correctness? #shrink

It was a momentous occasion for Michigan State University’s corner of the “burnerverse.”

The network of anonymous Spartan athletics fan accounts on X had seen the news earlier that day in late January: A lawsuit against former football coach Mel Tucker by Brenda Tracy, the anti-rape advocate MSU found him to have sexually harassed, had been dismissed by a county judge.

In the grand scheme of federal and state lawsuits still dissecting the saga, it was a relatively minor development. But to the burners, it represented a resounding exoneration for one of their cult heroes — and an opportunity to crudely attack a gang rape survivor.

“Get f------ bent @brendatracy24 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂” read one post from the popular burner Brody Sheetz, which has been viewed 23,000 times.

Another anonymous fan suggested the once-beloved, then swiftly disgraced coach should return to East Lansing for the rivalry basketball game against the University of Michigan that was scheduled for later that week.

“GET MEL TUCKER TO THE BRESLIN FRIDAY,” the post read, referencing the campus’ basketball arena. It ended with a hashtag, which a burner operator told me was soon trending: #TuckerToTheBres.

Burner accounts are, essentially, fake online personas that conceal their creators' true identities. The benefit to users is relatively simple: one can say virtually whatever they want free of real-life repercussions — not to mention the potential for the dopamine rush that comes with authoring a viral post.

Of course, the subjects of the accounts’ ridicule, and, indeed, most of society at this point, spot an obvious flaw in that arrangement: fake accounts are understood as cowards, possessing the luxury of anonymity when inflicting real pain on real people who can’t conveniently hide behind a screen. In an internet-driven American culture that can seem more polarized by the day, it’s hard not to see online anonymity and the nihilism it enables as a particular symptom — or, perhaps cause — of the division. We've become convinced of this to the point of coining a derisive label for the provocateurs: “internet troll.”

A casual observer could thus be excused for writing off the MSU burnerverse, not least given its brash, irreverent, taunting reaction to the dismissal of Tracy’s suit.

Even still, indulging such an impulse risks missing out on all that this hyper-niche internet subculture can reveal. 

For one, the story of the network of anonymous online Spartans, most of them students and alums, underscores the critical role that internet fandom has come to play in the college sports ecosystem. Years ago, one prominent burner told me, the university’s athletics department even experimented with harnessing the burnerverse’s power for its own benefit.

For another, the burnerverse displays some of the extent of Gen-Z’s desensitization to societal ills: U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran present a chance to troll the University of Michigan basketball coach, for example, and there’s delight to be found in deliberately posting “fake news” that gullible people will inevitably take seriously.

Scrolling the accounts even provides a window into the thorny socio-political sentiments that are seemingly animating some Spartans’ disdain for their cross-state rival in the modern era. They reflect the prevalence in our culture of both anti-elitism and bigotry, as well as those attitudes’ capacity to intertwine.

When the burners’ boisterousness veers into insults against MSU players, the father of one of the Spartan basketball team’s stars offers some form of paternal oversight, he told me. That sometimes entails defending an underperforming player who the burners suspect of getting undeserved minutes because his father is on the coaching staff. They’ve also recently dubbed him a “terrorist.”

There’s also certainly something of anthropological value in the burnerverse for all the thinkpiece authors who’ve concerned themselves with the supposed crisis of today’s young men. The anonymous accounts often serve as brazen digital journals, accented not with doodles in a book’s margins, but rather reaction memes, GIFs, AI-generated slop and nonsensical hashtags. In this way, the burnerverse is a trove of real-time, first-hand accounts of what modern campus life is like for a demographic that society seems particularly vexed by: there are tales of dating struggles, being suspected of cheating on assignments, “doing bag" and much more.

Perhaps above all, writing off the burnerverse would overlook its capacity to address a dilemma that humans have faced since time immemorial: making friends. Paradoxically, the practice of masking one’s identity in the burnerverse doesn’t just provide an online community — it often leads to real-life companionship, complete with “burner meetups” in the bars of East Lansing (though not all are welcomed in quite the same way.)

To better understand the at-times funny, at-times alarming, and always bizarre world that is the burnerverse, I granted anonymity to those behind the accounts. Some used it to talk earnestly about how having a burner has enhanced their life, or reflectively about some of the burnerverse’s flaws. Others stayed unserious, trolling and baiting me with wild tales and crass bits. Many refused to talk at all, or demanded terms I simply could not accept, in one case, saying they would only agree to an interview if it could be conducted in Akers Hall, naked, while “doing bag.”

‘Wink, wink, nod, nod’

Several people I spoke to trace the origins of the burnerverse, as we know it, to 2020. Then, two forces came together: The COVID-19 pandemic left people with more time to doomscroll, and the hiring of Tucker, a larger-than-life, unprecedentedly well-compensated new football coach, had fans abuzz with hopes for an exciting new chapter in the program’s storied history. “There were a lot more burners around then,” said Ryan McCumber, a lifelong MSU fan whose X account is not a burner, who told me he’s seen his timeline become dominated by anonymous Spartan fan accounts since joining what was then-called Twitter in 2011.

Perhaps further aiding the growth of the burnerverse at the time was a sort of symbiosis between the MSU athletics department and its network of online fans.

The person who runs the MSU Chief of Propaganda account — which, at 34.8K followers, is the burnerverse’s most famous — told me that during the Tucker era, the university would quietly tap him for help courting prospective players. After high-profile recruits’ visits to East Lansing, athletics personnel would send him “some additional photos of their visit.”

“It was like, ‘Wink, wink, nod, nod, if you want to post these pictures, feel free to do so,’” he told me. The thinking went that talented players who were on the fence about coming to MSU might be swayed if the school’s online fanbase seemed hyped enough about their potential arrival, he said. (Executive Senior Associate Athletic Director Matt Larson told me in a statement that the practice “is not currently, nor has it been previously, part of athletic department strategies.”)

Even the backstory to the Chief of Propaganda’s profile picture illustrates the harmony between MSU athletics and its online supporters at this time. The man behind the account, an MSU alum, told me of a virtual Q&A session with Tucker shortly after he was hired where attendees could submit questions. The Chief of Propaganda’s, which was selected first, was a classic: If you could see any concert, who would it be? “2Pac,” answered Tucker. That prompted the Chief of Propaganda to recall the photo of the legendary rapper wearing a Detroit Red Wings jersey. He then went to a Twitter group chat with other MSU fans to ask if anyone could photoshop an MSU jersey onto the image — and the rest was history. 

The relative collegiality between MSU athletics and the online fan community seemingly stayed throughout Tucker’s tenure. Shortly before his ultimately disastrous 2023 season began, the athletics department held an event at the Wharton Center for the unveiling of the football team’s new, all-black, “shadow” uniforms. The alum behind the Chief of Propaganda account told me that several people who ran burner accounts were invited to it. (Asked if burners were indeed invited, Larson told me in a statement, “Given that uniforms often drive conversation and engagement on social media, former staff invited some popular MSU Athletics fan accounts to the event, similar to how brands engage with social media influencers.”)

At the showcase, the man behind the Chief of Propaganda account got a sense of the extent of the athletics department's concertedness in establishing relationships with the online fan community. He told me a staffer approached him and asked, “What are some female MSU accounts that we should include?” He could only come up with a short list, he added, and none of them were burners. 

A little over a month later, the Tucker era came to a grinding halt when news broke that the coach was under Title IX investigation for sexually harassing Tracy. The man behind the Chief of Propaganda account told me he hasn’t heard from athletics personnel since then. In the years since, he’s watched what he called a “new era” of the burnerverse spring up. Though it’s hard to define, he said today’s burners seem generally less laser-focused exclusively and more concentrated on getting engagement on their posts. 

Still, the high-minded ethos of his account has remained intact. He told me of a years-old tweet from a sports reporter that’s always stuck with him, and in a way, served as a sort of governing principle: it said something to the effect of, “If Michigan State fans could just, like, channel their energy into something positive, they could get a lot of things done.”

Indeed, the Chief of Propaganda somewhat routinely makes calls to action to the university’s administrators. In February, he had a pitch for what MSU could do with the land that the IM West gymnasium currently sits on once it’s demolished next year. It would be “unique,” the account posted, to “enhance” the land near Spartan Stadium by adding a building “similar to the (Detroit Athletic Club) where donors, players families and the athletic department can stay at and gather on game days.” The alum behind the Chief of Propaganda account told me he’s also previously made posts encouraging MSU to “brick” Spartan Stadium — a fundraising initiative whereby fans would buy engraved bricks to be installed into its infrastructure. 

Posting from his popular account is “the best way for me to kind of get ideas out there where somebody at the school could potentially see it,” he told me. “Like, I don’t have (Athletic Director) J Batt’s number.” He added that viral posts on X, compared to, say, public comments at a Board of Trustees meeting, have a unique potential to digitally proliferate through the various Spartan athletics blogs and message boards online. “And from there, you have donors on those boards, or somebody who is connected to somebody who can go on and see,” he said. Sure, he could sign up for public comment at a board meeting, but “without wanting to sound cocky or anything,” there wouldn’t be “33,000 people following me there.” (Among his followers are several university trustees and spokespeople.)

With his prominent platform, the alum who runs the Chief of Propaganda account told me, he also feels a responsibility to rein in the more unruly contingents of the burnerverse. He recalled his dismay after seeing burners referring last year to an MSU basketball game against Ole Miss as “#TheLynching.” Sometimes he’ll make a post himself condemning offensive posts as “completely irresponsible,” but the “best way” for him to root out the nastiness is to reach out directly to the relevant accounts via direct messages. “I’ll be like, ‘Hey, I think this is very inappropriate and something that won’t reflect well on MSU as a whole.’” 

He furthers his appeal to the accounts: “‘Because listen, a lot of people’s perspective on the university is based off of what they see online, and we are a reflection of the university whether we want that to be true or not, and we see how quickly stories can blow up.’”

Just as his account’s name suggests, though, the mandate that the Chief of Propaganda feels with his online anonymity is a unique one. “I think the persona he puts out is someone who is, like, the platonic ideal of the MSU fan,” the operator of the long-standing SpartanDog97 burner told me.

‘#expand’

The network of anonymous MSU fan accounts is, in some respects, more like a burner-galaxy, forming one part of a broader, more generalized burnerverse. 

Though the internet’s immensity — with its tangled web of subcultures, each one more niche than the last — makes it difficult to conclusively characterize any single section, the burnerverse can broadly be understood as a sprawling network of college students using pseudonymous accounts. They chronicle the modern-day campus experience and cheer on their school’s teams while using a hyper-specific and unmistakably-online vernacular and set of references. (One of the burnerverse's more recent fixations has been the 20-year-old influencer Clavicular, who was the spiritual leader of the growing “looksmaxxing” movement before getting “frame-mogged” by an “ASU frat leader.”)

A recent Wall Street Journal article about prediction market platforms' targeted marketing efforts on college campuses described the burnerverse as “populated by fraternity members who use pseudonymous accounts to post crude content.” (In MSU's burnerverse, references to greek life do abound, though one account operator told me fraternity-run burners are in the minority.)

The MSU student behind the Brody Sheetz burner told me of the “big three” terms that, if used by an account, likely signal its membership in the burnerverse.

There’s “#shrink,” which generally is used to express that something is bad; “#expand,” which generally is used to express the opposite; and “#lank,” which seems more like a sort of all-purpose punctuation mark. That term, the MSU student behind the Brody Sheetz account told me, was coined by the University of Alabama football team, and initially stood for “let a naysayer know,” but “I think when people are saying it, they’re saying ‘Let a — ‘other word’ know.” It was also the hashtag that one burner used to end his declination of my interview request over direct messages: “Ain’t nobody talking to you #lank,” the account told me.

Another inherent element of the burnerverse? Testosterone. 

The reason for that, the MSU student who runs the Brody Sheetz account said, is largely because X is a great place to stay up to date on sports news, which naturally draws a lot of men. “And then, a lot of the whole burnerverse is drinking, and you know, regular, just, guy stuff, I guess,” he added. 

What seemed to be a woman-run account’s entrance into a recent X Space of MSU burners — essentially, a voice-only chat room — illustrated the boys club characterization. As so frequently happened during the session, a burner was telling me about “doing bag” (slang for consuming cocaine) when an account named Mrs. Terry Saban suddenly piped up with a higher-pitched voice than might be expected in such a meetup: “Did someone say bag?” 

The seeming sound of a woman left the talkative chatroom uncharacteristically silent. After five awkward seconds, I asked, “Who is this?” 

Thejewishmamba, the burner that invited me to the Space and posted frequently about MSU before graduating last year, responded for the account. “That’s our friend, Terry,” he said. “She’s one of my lil’ hoes.”

Members of the burnerverse can also be identified by the personas they create through their profile pictures and bios. 

A particularly ubiquitous template is parodying MSU players or figures. Take “Coen Carr’s Sperm,” or “Greg Billiams-Boerner.” (That one’s a deeper cut; a reference to the Spartan benefactor partly responsible for the record-breaking $401 million commitment MSU recently received.) The MSU student who operates the Brody Sheetz account said another common burner persona is that of “some old Republican dude.” Such accounts “have the profile picture of a trucker, MAGA in the bio, all that.” Personally, he selected for himself a different burner archetype — the fake sports journalist. 

In Sheetz’ bio he calls himself an “Analyst and Writer” for the On3 Sports media outlet. His profile picture is a stock image he found on Google of an unidentified man’s professional headshot. His pinned post, viewed 451,000 times, is two photos of the man from the profile picture with the caption: "Handsome. Successful. Blessed.”

Prior to making his own account as a freshman in the spring semester of 2024, he’d seen lots of SEC burners on his timeline and became a particular fan of anonymous accounts associated with the Big East conference (“It’s so funny over there.”) But his biggest inspiration came from a fake reporter account in the MSU corner of the burnerverse: Brenton Kelley. The account has “CBS” in its handle and a profile picture of a smoldering, glasses-wearing man in a collared shirt.

It was one specific Brenton Kelley post from December 2022 that catalyzed the creation of Brody Sheetz. Labeled “#BREAKING,” Brenton Kelley employed a journalist’s terse, official tone to announce that Drake Maye, then one of college football’s premier quarterbacks, would “put his name in the transfer portal in ‘the coming days.’” Kelley continued, “Maye will be one of the most coveted players in the portal.” The post was entirely fabricated, but it blew up, nonetheless. Seeing that post, and that people were taking it seriously, motivated the student who runs the Brody Sheetz burner to create his account, he told me. 

“When I first started the account, I think it was just, like, posting fake news, honestly, just like fake crap, trying to be funny.”

What made that funny? I asked. 

“I’d say just like —” he paused. “It’s really just that people believe it, and it’s really the people that get angry about it, like, start freaking out.” 

While he can see, “if you look at it in a more serious lens, that it’s actually really bad that people will just believe anything they see,” there’s something undeniably “amusing” about it. In his account’s case, that’s especially so, he told me, because it wouldn’t take much digging at all to realize it’s satirical: “I mean, I have, like, a Black profile picture and I’ll post my white hands."

Over time, he told me, he’s moved away from acting as this sort of online Joker, capitalizing on some people’s lack of media literacy to sow chaos before reveling in it. 

In fact, he said he now feels a degree of accountability with some of the things he posts. While he doesn’t care what judgments members of other college sports fanbases might make of his account (least of all UM’s or Indiana’s), it does matter to him what other members of the MSU fanbase think. He used to occasionally make posts “trolling,” or “crapping on,” MSU and its teams, but he’s since decided to “cut that out” because he doesn’t “want anyone from our fanbase hating my account.” He added, “because, you know, I have parents of players that follow me.” (More on that later!)

I asked how he squared that eye toward positivity with some of the edgier MSU-related posts on his account — namely, one from the same December day that President Kevin Guskiewicz had sent out a campuswide email condemning the Nazi symbols that had been graffitied on the campus’ Jewish center that week, as well as an antisemitic terror attack in Sydney, Australia. “Hey @KevinGuskiewicz, you ever send me an email like that again, (former Athletic Director) Alan Haller is going to have his foot six feet up your ass. Understand?” Brody Sheetz wrote. 

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “I could see how that doesn’t really go with what I said. Um, I think that’s one of them where you’re just kind of messing around.” He added the context that he’s “always been, like, making jokes about Alan Haller being wrongfully fired just because I know his son,” and because he’s “always been, like, messing around with Kevin, just, you know, dumping on him for anything — stupid crap like icing the sidewalks and whatnot.”

Earlier in our conversation, the MSU student behind the Brody Sheetz account told me that when he explains his account to people, he puts it like, “how a girl has their private story, I have my burner.” 

He added, “I just post whatever.”

‘Doing whippets’

The burnerverse’s anonymity offers a convenient place for all manner of unguardedness.

Over spring break, burners sometimes treated their accounts like obscene travel diaries. “At the airport at 6am and I’ve already consumed a Diet Coke and rubbed one out! #lank #expand,” wrote one called Jordan ‘Scott’ Applesoos late last month. Another, Donnie ‘Blackjack’ Frazier, announced his arrival to his destination with a photo from a dock and a message: “​​Donnie’s touched down in the Jew Capital of the world Boca Raton Florida.”

Of course, the MSU burnerverse can also serve as an online Spartan shrine, where fans can indulge their more fanatic impulses. Last month, a photo of a shower curtain emblazoned with an image of MSU basketball player Kur Teng circulated widely. Or there was the photo from an account called DIVINE ‘get healthy soon’ Ugochukwo of its namesake, a currently injured player on the basketball team, sitting on the bench at a game with the caption: “BONER ALERT 🚨#divine.”

Academics don’t often come up, but when they do, it tends to be under dire circumstances. Earlier this month, the account Jeremy ‘Bender’ Fears declared one day that he should’ve skipped class, before asking, “anyone boozin?” Hours later, the account followed that post up with a GIF of an anguished man crying with his hands folded and the caption: “fading 2nd class.” That’s seemingly burner lingo for skipping, though when I sought clarity from the account, my message was screenshotted and then posted on X where it promptly went viral. Burners teased me for not being in the know about the slang term and accused me of being, among other things, the “least obvious fed,” and working on behalf of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

At the end of last fall semester, Brenton Kelley posted, “Professor just asked if we can set up a call to talk about my final project submission.” Accompanying the message was a screengrab from “Goodfellas,” just after Tommy DeVito is ushered into a lounge where he’s shot in the back of the head. A burner called Mike Jennings replied with a screenshot of a similar email he’d gotten the year before: “Never a good feeling.” Kelley later posted that his professor let him off the hook. 

Earlier in the fall semester, two burners stumbled upon the realization that they were classmates before entering cahoots. After Hank ‘Lank’ Richards posted a clip of a recorded lecture, theorizing that the cup his professor was drinking from in it “can’t be coffee,” another burner, Pete Dunham J.D., recognized the video and put together that they were in the same course.

Dunham then wrote, “Haven’t watched a single lecture…how can we cheat,” to which Richards responded, “Idk bro I hate how they’re in person.”

Dunham concurred: “So gay. Might just be able to whip out a phone tho.”

Another frequent topic? The trials and tribulations of campus bachelorism. “Farted in the middle of class and the chick next to me asks her friend if it smells #Over” wrote a burner called Quazi. Another, named LJ ‘3rd & Goal’ Scott confessed to a universally-feared blunder — “accidentally liked my ex situationships insta post from 3 years ago #pleasecomeback” — but followed it up with a hopeful development: “she just snapped me #ballgame.” Sometimes burners post screenshots of prospective partners on dating apps. An account called Arther Dingleson MBA was evidently put off by one who expressed on their Hinge profile that they’d like to “have a 3some😀” this year: “Somebody’s future wife btw.” Sometimes burners seek one another’s counsel. The burner named Mark Damelio recently posted a GIF of a woman he was sitting across from in what appeared to be a north campus lounge with the message: “Studying with hg trying to have her put me on. Not working, anyone got any tips?” (The likely translation for “hg” is “homegirl,” though I’m admittedly murky on exactly what “have her put me on” connotes here.) Brenton Kelley suggested, “tell her you’ll kys if she doesn’t.” (I know what that one means: “kill yourself.”) Mark Damelio took the advice to heart: “I’ll rip it.”

Women are often the subject of burners’ jokes (jokes?). The burner named Mike Jennings posted in January “Fat girls covering their drinks at the bar is just wishful thinking.” Early the next month, he posted something of an intrusive thought in reference to a photo of pop singer Chappell Roan on a red carpet, wearing a dress with fabric tied around her nipple rings: “Imagine someone steps on her dress and rips her nipples out on live TV." An burner with a profile picture of former UM football coach Sherrone Moore's mugshot replied with a GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” proudly clapping his hands; another, named “TOMHOMANGOAT,” a praising reference to President Donald Trump’s border czar, simply said “good tweet.” On one of the first warm days of the spring semester, a different MSU burner with a Sherrone Moore mugshot profile picture wrote, “The way the hoes spawn around campus when it gets above 60 degrees has to be studied.” 

Burners also sometimes use their accounts to scrawl their personal reflections. In December, Brenton Kelley posted a picture of his blanket-covered legs on the sofa with a video of the comedian Shane Gillis playing on the television. The account wrote, “Christmas break. Still no traction on the job search. Buddies just texted if we’re doing 35 cent wings tonight. Watching Uncle Shane. Thinking a stay at home son is in the cards.” A burner named Bruce Biggums posted in February, “You ever wake up to videos of you doing whippets at a random house and ripping a bong when you quit 6 months ago. Yeah that’s how this morning is going.”

In spite of the shamelessness, some burners seem to test the limits of their anonymity, writing on X when and where they have particular classes or where they’re drinking on any given night. Thejewishmamba, the account that invited me to the X Space, is among such risk-takers. When I asked the person behind the account about why he occasionally plays on the edge of anonymity, he told me, “It’s thrilling, it’s anxiety inducing. I like blacking out, waking up in a random girl’s bed with a selfie of me on Twitter with boys messaging me ‘delete that.’”

He added, “I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it.”

‘Larry Ellison Israel checks’

Predictably, the burners also use their accounts to hate on the University of Michigan — and virtually no blow seems to be too low. 

Shortly after the U.S. and Israel unleashed a barrage of missile strikes on Iran last month, Brody Sheetz posted a screenshot of a post from an account that pretended to be University of Michigan basketball coach Dusty May, which read, “Good thing Iran is run by a bunch of p------. If they were really about that action, they’d send a missile strike to Ann Arbor RIGHT NOW!” Sheetz captioned the screenshot, “What the f--- ?? Is this real???”

Where does the burners' hatred come from?

Some offer material gripes. The person who runs the Spartandog97 burner account, for his part, told me that he hates “the colors,” and that Ann Arbor is laid out as if the city planner was “drunk.”

He and others, though, also allege a broader conspiracy. Complaints include that the supposed “Blue Wall” Detroit media runs cover for UM while criticizing MSU at every turn; NCAA officials are sold out to the university’s powerful athletics department, shielding even brazen rule-breakers from accountability; the county prosecutor is soft on university-affiliated offenders because he is an alum; wealthy donors give NIL money to persuade the best athletes to transfer onto UM’s teams; or, as one burner more simply put it on the recent X Space, “There’s too many Jews at that school.”

“100 percent,” another added. 

The closer one looks, the more it appears that antisemitism is creatively and intrinsically enmeshed with at least some of the burnerverse’s contempt for UM, which has one of the largest Jewish populations among all U.S. public universities. 

When a call from a referee during last football season’s rivalry game between MSU and UM went the Wolverines’ way, an account wrote, “Most israel coded team of all time for like 50 reasons. God will remember”; another replied that “Larry Ellison Israel checks” would go “right into the officials pockets for this one,” referencing the Jewish tech billionaire who gave a multimillion-dollar contribution to UM’s NIL collective in order to lure a star quarterback recruit to the team.

Some in the burnerverse, though, said they reject the characterization. In fact, they believe their commentary falls on the unproblematic side of a fine line that has been hotly debated across higher education.

The person who runs the Spartandog97 burner — an MSU alum who has posted about UM’s perceived ties to Israel and told me that its board is composed of “bloodthirsty Zionist pigs” — said that, to him, the burnerverse largely isn’t peddling antisemitism, but rather voicing a reasoned resistance to the policies of the State of Israel. Though some people have burners “because they just want to call people slurs,” he suggested much of the burnerverse’s discussion of Israel stems from “being against children being bombed, being slaughtered, indiscriminately.” That position, he continued, is tied to a broader “populist” and “underdog” mentality that he sees as inherent to MSU’s identity. 

“I’m not antisemitic in any way, but I am against, you know, genocide, and Israel’s committing a genocide,” he told me. “So, it’s hard to not take swings at Israel when they’re doing things that I’m not psyched about.”

The alum — who told me he attended protests against MSU’s handling of the Larry Nassar crisis while a student years ago — later said there’s a “George Carlin aspect to some of the things” he posts that “call out” the supposed connections between UM and Israel. 

An example of that, he said, is the post he reshared after Moore, the former UM football coach, was arrested for breaking into the home of a female member of his staff that he was in a relationship with. The post says “sherrone became ‘friends’ with Larry Ellison and immediately fell for the mossad honeypot scheme,” referencing the Israeli intelligence agency and the practice of using attractive female spies to gain intel on targets by seducing them. It’s accompanied by a GIF of an NBA player standing on the sideline during a game, exasperatedly gesturing for one of his teammates to come over to him, while lecturing him on something he’d done wrong. 

In other cases, trying to understand the thinking behind burners’ posts proved more fruitless. 

Thejewishmamba frequently identifies himself as Jewish on his account, and posts often about Israel. When I asked him whether he views the burnerverse as having an antisemitism problem, his response was about as troll-ish as everything else he told me. “I mean, off the book, a Jew’s gonna be a Jew, a Black’s gonna be a Black, a Hispanic’s gonna be a Hispanic,” he told me. “There’s bad apples in every batch. I mean, people want to crack penny jokes, you can crack it, I’m not one of those, like, it’s whatever. I’ll call it a spade if a spade. If I see a Jew, I’m gonna say it’s a f------ Jew. But I’m a loud and proud Jew.”

I repeated my initial question. 

“No, I will condemn the burnerverse is not antisemitic,” he declared. 

Confused by what that meant, I repeated what he said back to him. 

“It’s not antisemitic, I don’t know,” he said, raising his voice.

Minutes after we got off our call, the frivolity of seeking to understand the burnerverse’s fixation on Israel and the Jewish population was proven to me further still.

I got a direct message from Thejewishmamba, inviting me to an X Space with a host of other burners. After the mention of “too many Jews” at UM, I asked if others had different thoughts on the matter, or counterpoints to the assertion. One suggested that the burnerverse has carte blanche: “Burners cannot be antisemitic. Anything we say, it can’t be antisemitic.”

The response is emblematic of a broader ethos that at least some parts of the burnerverse have seemingly come to internalize: nothing is serious.

Minutes after joining the Space, I told the burners to reach out to me if they would be up for an interview, but that I was going to log off the call because I wasn’t getting what seemed like honest answers to my questions. One burner had a telling response: “Yeah, I feel like that’s just the burnerverse, though. We just, like, mess around — it’s like, some college kids that just want to mess around, you know.” 

Another piped up, right on cue: “Doing bag, f------ around.”

In an interview, the MSU junior behind the Brody Sheetz burner would later articulate something similar. Anything of a political nature on his account isn’t actually underpinned by real political views, he told me. In fact, he’s previously discussed with a friend of his, who also has a burner, how adding a political element to posts tends to boost engagement, and gets people more riled up than they would have been otherwise. That applies to his frequent posts relating to Israel, he added: “A lot of the posts about Israel and all that, from my side, like I said, it’s messing around, kinda like that brain rot side of it.”

Even if the burners’ more edgy content comes from an unserious place, some suggested there’s still consequences to it.

During the Space, the burner called Mike Jennings asked that I don’t name his account if I “talk about this Space in your article.” That request was because “my home address at school has been commented on my post before, people know where I live.”

Thejewishmamba seemed at first to suggest that he could relate: “People used to show up to my apartment all day and all night, knocking on my door, asking for me,” he said. 

Who were these people? I asked.

“50% Michigan fans, 49% antisemites,” he said, before abruptly going mute.

And the last one percent?

“People who wanted bag,” he replied.

‘Lifelong friends’

In February 2025, the Mike Jennings burner tagged the father of MSU basketball star Jaxon Kohler in a post. It was a picture from a sparse MSU lecture hall, where, in the foreground, is what appears to be the poster’s lap, and in the background, is the back of a tall man in a Black winter coat. 

“@tradingaddicts your son in class after a great win. This is what this university is all about.”

Thejewishmamba replied, “MIKE IM IN THIS CLASS”; another anonymous account added to the chain, “12:40 ADV 442? expand.” Yet another wrote, “So we’re all just in 12:40 ADV 442?”

There’s something of a paradox in the burnerverse: students creating anonymous online accounts that are careful to conceal their true identity has led to plenty of real-life, face-to-face friendships. The student who runs the Brody Sheetz account told me it normally goes like this: you get added to a group chat with other burners, people discuss MSU sports, and then someone proposes a “Riv night,” he said, referencing the downtown East Lansing bar.

Occasionally, the burners post about those outings. They call them “burner meet ups.” An account will make a post that tags other burners and includes a picture of their creators holding beers at a bar — though something like an emoji, or their accounts’ profile picture is photoshopped in to obscure their likeness.

With friendship comes favors, too. McCumber, the lifelong MSU fan whose account is not a burner, told me that he typically goes across town to pick up his friend before MSU games so they can watch together on television. The Breslin Center, where MSU basketball plays, is en route. So, ahead of MSU’s most recent home game against UM, McCumber sent a direct message on X to Brody Sheetz, asking if he could drop off pizzas to him and his friends as they braved the cold while waiting in line for the game.

McCumber told me he appreciates the MSU burners because they bring needed “balance” to the fan community, as their anonymity empowers them to express uncomfortable truths about underachieving players that others wouldn’t have the gall to. While he’s “seen guys say some pretty racist stuff that’s pretty bad,” he noted how that’s present in “any fanbase, not just MSU’s.” And, as someone who, as a means to “take anger out,” said himself “a lot of unhinged stuff when (he) was that age on Twitter,” he gives grace to burners who cross the line: “When you’re younger, I kind of get it. You don’t care as much and your brain’s not fully developed.”

McCumber’s regard for the burners was reciprocated by them after the pizza drop-off. The person who runs the Brody Sheetz account told me that he and the fellow burners he was in line with appreciated the sustenance: “It was cold as heck, and he brought over like three pies, and everyone around me got some hot pizza.” He added, “That was awesome … It’s like, just, connecting with other people in the fanbase.”

During the X Space, burners broadly agreed that the burnerverse has been useful for finding community. “I’ve met my lifelong friends through this s---, man,” one told me. 

They also suggested that some hangouts aren’t quite as wholesome as the pizza episode. “Yeah, we just did bag at Harps, you know how it be,” one said, using the colloquialism for Harper's Bar in East Lansing. “So fun,” another chimed in. “Downstairs, obviously,” yet another added.

As friends do, the burners also have their share of inside jokes. They often manifest on X in the form of a hashtag.

There’s “#TheKeg,” which burners told me refers to a recent tailgating attempt that was thwarted by MSU Police (“unfairly,” one caveated.) Or, there’s “#ThePath,” which refers to the alley between downtown East Lansing’s iconic “hamster cage” parking garage and the 400 block of Grand River Avenue — a frequently travelled foot trail for students out on the town.

When I said I was familiar with the path (The entrance to the State News’ newsroom is located along it), one burner blurted out that I must have a burner myself.

“Confirmed,” he said.

‘Undefeated’

In late November, Crystal Flint had a point to make. 

She’s the mother of Tre Holloman, a once-beloved MSU basketball player whose exit for another school shortly after the team was eliminated during March Madness last year upset many fans. “So College coaches can walk RIGHT INTO A NEW COACHING position some bowl eligible… NO outrage, claims of disloyalty, or distraction, no accusation of tampering,” Flint wrote in a post on X. “However when players leave at the END of their season, they are held to a different standard. ✔️got it 👌🏽.”

A burner called Bill Rumskin shot back with a dig at her son’s poor shooting in a pivotal contest.

“Coaches don’t go 0/10 in a final four clinching game Crystal,” said the account, which has a photo of an unidentified elderly man’s mirror selfie as its profile picture. (As funny as lying can sometimes be for the burners, ESPN’s box score from the late March defeat to Auburn that ended MSU’s tournament run shows Rumskin’s stats were on point.) 

Flint may have not realized the person in the Bill Rumskin account's profile picture was almost surely not the same person who wrote the post. “You are to damn old to still be thinking about that,” Flint wrote. “Get a life, however much time you have left 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽.”

Another account pointed out her seemingly flopped comeback: “Girl that is a burner account, stop embarrassing yourself trying to be all sassy and s---.”

The exchange is a particularly absurd illustration of a pastime for some burners — arguing with the parents of players. 

Jeff Kohler, the father of MSU forward Jaxon Kohler, told me he recently got into it with a burner over Denham Wojcik, an often-unproductive bench player who some fans maintain gets undue playing time because his father is an assistant coach. 

“Finally, I just had enough,” Kohler told me. “And so I just kind of drew a line. It turned into a conversation about, ‘We should support anybody that wears the jersey, and just because you think it’s going on for this sort of way — it’s, it’s not.’”

He continued, arguing, “We need somebody that can back up our point guard and he’s our guy”; He’s the “only” one that “would agree to playing a limited role and playing behind someone else.” Kohler added of the spat with the burner, “it got kind of ugly, and it’s still ugly to this day.”

Luckily for him, while Kohler thinks anonymous MSU accounts sometimes take things too far, he sees himself as acting as a sort of safeguard against their impulses to insult players. 

“I think it just keeps people aware that, maybe not players are out there, but people are out there that know players, and players might be listening,” Kohler told me. “And I just think, you wouldn’t say that stuff to somebody’s face, so if floating out around there makes them say it differently, I think that’s a good thing.”

Put another way, while he’s the literal father of Jaxon Kohler, he’s a figurative father to the burnerverse.

Still, though burners largely seem to embrace Jeff Kohler — tagging him in praising posts and, as he told me, asking to snap photos with him at games — his online presence hasn’t completely quelled their ridiculing of Wojcik.

After MSU posted the starting lineup for a Big Ten contest against Illinois in February, a burner called “Mateen’s Cleavage,” a reference to Spartan basketball legend Mateen Cleaves, invoked what’s become a recurring moniker for the player in the burnerverse: “If Denham ‘terrorist’ Wojcik gets in the game we loose.” Late one night the month before — after a narrow loss to Nebraska in which Wojcik recorded zero points, one rebound and one foul over five minutes of playing time — the Donnie ‘Blackjack’ Frazier burner posted a particularly distasteful spin on the alias. He shared a doctored image of the player in a turban and a photo of his glass of Maker’s Mark whiskey on the rocks with the caption: “This what Denham ‘south tower’ Wojcik causes.”

When I asked about Wojcik on the X Space with the burners, one shot back, “next question.” After I persisted, another said, “If you’ve been on Twitter, you know how we feel about Denham Wojcik.” Yet another followed up to put a fine point on it: “Listen, we don’t support that type of nepotism at our university.”

The discord between Kohler and the burnerverse over Wojcik left me pondering — could the mutual respect they’ve built up unravel if the team starts to struggle, or meets a disappointing fate in the March Madness tournament? Kohler doesn’t think that’s likely.

“Because of what the program is, who the coach is, what they’ve been able to accomplish, I think that our community is different, because there’s a lot more respect for the underlying product,” he told me. “I look at some of the other fans from the different schools that we play, and they go harass me online, and it’s way different.”

In those places, he continued, “It’s a little dirtier, it’s a little more vile, but also it’s because they don’t really have a product that they can really stand behind and be proud of over time.”

In any case, Kohler was emphatic in our conversation about his appreciation for the burnerverse (and has since tagged me in a post to let me know that “MSU Burner Twitter” is “Undefeated.”)

He told me he once held the same stigma that much of society has toward burner accounts; his assumption was that the burnerverse was mostly composed of people using anonymity to say, “everything that’s on your chest unfiltered.” While sure, at some schools, burners can be used to “say some pretty harsh things,” the “closer (he’s) gotten to these guys,” Kohler has come to largely view the burnerverse as “almost a competition amongst these students to create the coolest or funniest content out there.” He later added, “Some of it is just hilarious and it’s just a good laugh to follow.” And he particularly values the burnerverse for the “community” it provides, where MSU fans can bask in their shared passion for the Spartans, and their shared hatred for other teams: “I think it’s awesome,” Kohler told me.

In a certain respect, Kohler is uniquely positioned to sympathize with and understand the more provocative corners of the internet, having spent a good deal of time in such places himself. Kohler, who owns a hedge fund, told me he first carved out his niche in the financial community through his blog, which featured “edgy,” “toed-the-line” content and was used as a tool to promote his firm. He would “occasionally take a shot at a financial personality, like somebody on TV,” and in one especially contentious post, enumerated “stock trader stereotypes,” which “just absolutely made fun of every” type and “every emotion that they go through.” He added, “Every single person that read that knew they fit into one category.”

All the while, he was active on what was then-called Twitter, which he saw as the best place for real-time information on the stock market. On the app, he often found himself sparring with people he’d peeved with his takes — and he figured out how to do so effectively. “I would just absolutely eviscerate trolls,” he told me.

‘Get a beer’

“Born an MSU fan,” Haviland is a loyal Spartan.

She grew up watching MSU sports with her dad, who went to the university himself. She turned down an offer to attend UM because of her love for the MSU basketball team, and because she likes “our campus so much more than how UM is, like, in the city.”

Today, she’s in her senior year of undergrad at MSU. In early November, Haviland posted from her personal account on X that she thought Kur Teng, the MSU basketball player, was overrated, she told me. 

It wasn’t well received by some burners.

Haviland, who asked to be identified only by her middle name, said that one of them found her Instagram account, screenshotted a photo from it, and included it in a reply to her Kur Teng take that said: “I don’t listen to ugly b------.”

“And I was like, ‘Okay, cool,’” she told me.

The harassment led to a realization: “That was when I basically was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to make a new account.’”

So far, having a burner has been great, she said. (Haviland asked that her burner account not be named for fear that others would harass it if they knew a woman runs it.) She dislikes what she described as the “red-pilled,” "misogynistic,” “extremely antisemitic” streak to the MSU burnerverse. However, she’s “learned a lot about the sport in general because people have opinions that I wouldn’t normally hear” and because “people are just so funny.”

“I could just sit there for hours,” she added. “It’s hilarious.”

Haviland even decided to join in on a recent burner meetup. The other burner operators were, at first, incredulous when they realized a woman was among their ranks, she told me. Then, they were coquettish.

“They were all really nice, but I feel like — they honestly all try to flirt with me,” she said with a laugh. “It’s kind of weird, but I just ignore it. I’m like, ‘whatever, it’s fine.’”

Was the burner meetup a fun experience overall? I asked.

Well, it would have been more so “if I was a guy,” Haviland replied. “Then, like, I could be all buddy-buddy and get a beer with them.” Instead, “as soon as they catch the drift that I’m not interested in, like, flirting with them, they’re like, ‘Okay, we’re going to go. It’s nice to meet you.’”

Though it “could be a total stretch,” Haviland said she has a theory for the sharp juxtaposition between the burners’ online behavior toward women and how they’ve acted toward her in real life.

“A lot of girls won’t put up with a guy who talks that way,” she told me. In their everyday life, the guys who run burners are “holding it in, because they want to get hot girls or whatever.” But online they let it out, where “nobody knows who they are”; where “everyone’s saying the same thing.”

“They’re surrounded by people in the burnerverse that all think the same,” she said.