The Gospel of the Liver King

Brian Johnson, better known as the Liver King, is a steroidal cartoon who tried to sell himself as a prophet of “ancestral living.” In reality, he was just another hustler juicing his body with over a hundred grand a year in growth hormones and anabolic steroids. He strutted around Instagram in animal skins, bellowing like a berserk Viking, gnawing raw liver on camera, and flogging overpriced supplements. His entire empire collapsed the moment it was revealed that his shredded physique was less the fruit of caveman purity and more the handiwork of pharmacy-grade science.

Instead of bowing out in disgrace, he doubled down. Unable to detach from the narcotic glow of internet celebrity, he documented his own unraveling in real time—YouTube became his padded cell, each video another entry in the world’s strangest public diary. He wanted to be remembered as a leader, a liberator from modern malaise, but he became a parody of himself, a sideshow Rambo gone rancid.

Raw meat became his metaphor—masculinity, toughness, a primal rejection of processed life. But it was also cosplay, a carnival act built for the algorithm, because nothing feeds clicks like a maniac tearing into a bull testicle with his teeth. And young men, starving for meaning, saw not a fraud but a messiah: the steroidal savior who would flex them into the promised land.

This was kayfabe 2.0. Vince McMahon taught wrestlers never to break character, and Liver King took that gospel straight to Instagram. Only he forgot the cardinal rule: kayfabe consumes you. Live in the gimmick long enough and the gimmick swallows the man. By the end, Liver King wasn’t selling a mask—he was the mask, devoured whole by his own performance.

His collapse is bigger than one delusional influencer. It’s a commentary on the culture itself: a society so anesthetized by spectacle that it mistakes bombast for wisdom. Idiocracy predicted a wrestler-president peddling electrolytes; we got a shirtless Texan chewing raw liver and pushing HGH cocktails disguised as authenticity. Mike Judge wasn’t satirizing the future—he was reporting it early.

And yet, there is something deeply American in the Liver King’s fall: the grift, the spectacle, the refusal to relinquish the stage even when the show is over. His tragedy is that of a man who wanted love, found instead an algorithm’s approval, and now cannot escape the cage of his own creation.