The Age of Ian Miles Cheong
“Populism and nationalism are spreading worldwide as the masses awaken to the lies of the lying legacy media and its promotion of globalism,” wrote one popular social media personality in 2024, “The reality is that globalism really, really sucks.”
The author of these words is a Malaysian man, who seems to be living in Dubai, who comments obsessively on American politics.
I am morbidly obsessed with Ian Miles Cheong. He is, for me, one of the most fascinating characters on social media. This is despite the fact that he does not seem to have much character. (Perhaps this is no coincidence.)
Cheong first came to prominence in 2012 when the Daily Dot alleged that he had become a “redditor for hire”. Cheong denied this but was banned from Reddit nonetheless.
Cheong was a self-described “turbofeminist” who abruptly switched sides in the 2010s. Cheong was known for saying and doing anything to get ahead. He wrote a column for Milo Yiannopoulous’ website called “Incel Corner”.
By the late 2010s, Cheong was working with the YouTuber Andy Warski on the fringes of the far right debate-centric “Internet Bloodsports” community. The pair launched a gaming commentary channel but quickly fell out. In revenge, according to Right Wing Watch, Cheong “logged in to [Warski’s]’ YouTube account and replaced video thumbnails on [Warski’s]’ main YouTube channel with pornographic images”. He then reported him to the police.
Cheong was also an energetic user of Twitter, which has since been renamed X. He appeared to post all day and night — focussing on domestic American politics with an obsessiveness that was extremely strange for a Malaysian living in Malaysia. He was a passionate fan of Donald Trump who became a passionate fan of Ron DeSantis and then pivoted back again. When America sneezes, the world catches a cold, so it makes sense for anyone to have an interest in American politics, but when you’re a non-American fan of Ron DeSantis you might want to get a sense of perspective.
Cheong is also a massive fan of Elon Musk. He is the social media equivalent of a pilot fish — obsessively praising and defending Musk. Musk, who has a chronic addiction to sycophancy, has reciprocated with supportive replies. Now that people can be paid for posting tweets, Cheong’s obsessive engagement baiting — as I write, he has posted six tweets in an hour — can make him a fortune.
There is something perversely impressive about this. The man who was getting into obscure YouTube feuds now has more than a million followers, interacts with the world’s richest man and lives what appears to be a comfortable life in one of the world’s most opulent cities. What makes it less impressive, except from the most cynical perspective, is that Cheong has been so completely opportunistic.
It’s the shamelessness that is truly fascinating. Cheong has made an art form out of amoral engagement baiting. Take this tweet about the female athlete Katie Ledecky, who had just won a swimming race. Is Cheong calling her trans? Is he calling her ugly? Is he trying to say that you have a problem if you think is her calling her trans or ugly? Does he know what he looks like? The answer is probably yes, yes, yes and yes — he is trying to provoke all kinds of reactions, positive and negative. It’s all engagement.
More prosaically, Cheong has been accused of “shilling”. (“MAGA Influencers Caught Red-Handed Shilling for Big Soda” was the Daily Beast’s headline in 2025 after Cheong, among others, had bizarrely intervened to oppose a ban on food stamps being spent on fizzy drinks.) It barely matters when his output is so fundamentally insincere. “Andrew Tate is peak goyslop,” he wrote in a Twitter article in January:
While Tate presents himself as an "antidote" to a weak society, many critics—particularly within the same subcultures that coined the term—view him as just another form of "mental slop." And they’re not wrong.
The irony is that this is instantly recognisable as AI-generated text. It isn’t even subtle. Is that supposed to be the joke? Is it supposed to be sincere or a joke depending on how it is perceived? (Again, it’s all engagement.)
From Dubai, Cheong has been posting videos that attempt to prove that the city is peaceful despite Iranian attacks. He makes it look insanely grim, with migrant workers frantically pretending to have fun in a nauseating nightclub as Cheong sprawls fleshily across a sofa, and a lonely meal in an anonymous shopping mall as tourists pretend not to notice that Cheong is ranting into his phone.
This is the ultimate irony — that the man who hates “globalism” is posting garbage from a shopping mall in Dubai about a country he has never even lived in. This is globalism — globalism in excelsis. No, it’s not the cultured cosmopolitan paradise that its advocates imagined — it is rootless consumerism and opportunistic pretension. Yet that it is so extremely powerful that even some of its major critics — if “major” is perceived in cold numerical terms — represent a kind of reductio ad absurdum of these pathologies is bizarrely impressive.
Perhaps what makes Cheong especially compelling to me is that I am not completely different from him. I live in a country that is not my own, and write about countries that are not my own, despite being a critic of certain “globalising” trends. I’ve drifted between ideas. I make my living from creating “content” online. Of course, I would argue that my critique is more qualified, and that my thinking is more sincere, and that my “content” has genuine qualities. But if Cheong and I are from different breeds, that doesn’t mean that we are from different species.
Perhaps this proves that there is an element of naivete in the critique of “globalism”. As long as we occupy similar informational and economic environments, an element of “globalism” is as avoidable as the smell of weed in California. Yet the moral and intellectual vacancy that yawns at the centre of Mr Cheong’s public being is urgent proof of our need for a relational and philosophical core.
Otherwise, we will end up in the great Dubai shopping mall of the soul.
Between Saad and Cheong is this part of some sort of masochistic series?
Good piece. More writers should have the courage to ask: am I adjacent to Ian Miles Cheong?