My Thoughts on Destiny (aka political live-streamer Steven Bonnell)

And why I am no longer a fan

Steven Bonnell, known on the Internet as Destiny, is a live-streamer who focuses on politics from a left of center perspective, while avoiding radicalism, populism, and extreme anti-establishment attitudes. His main niche involves learning as much as possible about a subject and then publicly debating people on it who disagree with him.

Destiny has a very long online history, going back more than 10 years. He was a live streaming pioneer who joined Twitch when it was still called Justin.tv, years before it was bought by Amazon. Originally he focused on gaming content, at one point he was one of the world's best players of the classic Real Time Strategy game StarCraft II (I've never played it, but have enjoyed many similar games such as Dawn of War).

While he has held many different political positions over the years (starting as Rush Limbaugh listener and Ron Paul fan due to his conservative Nebraska origins), in 2016, Trump’s election helped him come to a left wing political awakening that led him to become one of the most prominent defenders of the Democratic party and liberal politics in live streaming and online in general. In fact, despite the claims of other political streamers, he arguably established the entire niche of the political live streamer. Many other big political live streamers at the moment, including Vaush and Hasan Piker, were originally linked to his community and at one point called him their friend, before they had dramatic fallings out.

He was and is a fearless debator who tries as much as possible to ground arguments in factuality and avoids the kind of conspiratorial thinking that has become so pervasive in online discourse. While he is fairly left wing in many of his political positions, he has always disliked socialism and been a defender of capitalism and liberalism (liberalism in the academic sense, not the political one), and I discovered him as I was having my own political journey away from socialism.

He first came to my attention in 2022 after I came across his community on Reddit. I then watched a few videos of some of his classic debates on YouTube. Soon enough, I was watching him live, which I greatly enjoyed, as there is a sense of participation in watching a live stream that you don't get from a recorded video.

I have called into the stream a few times and spoken with him about a few different subjects, though eventually I got fed up with the extremely dismissive attitude he expressed towards many of his callers, including myself. I mainly participate with the community (called DGG) via the Destiny subreddit, which is a vibrant place for discussing a vast array of different issues with people who are more sensible and grounded than participants in most other online discussions spaces. They also have a great sense of humor which is something I appreciate and think is hard to find these days.

Additionally, after October 7th, I found that community to be a safe space for people who don't hate Israel and have a more nuanced and informed view of the conflict in Gaza than almost every other left wing community. This was very important for me, as I watched with great dismay how so many groups (and friends and family members) I once supported descended into wittingly or unwittingly promoting vile anti semitic rhetoric so that they could avoid social ostracization for having beliefs considered wrong by the majority of the left wing community. Destiny spent many, many months doing deep research on the conflict, and even went to Israel where he interviewed people as high up as former prime ministers. He has debated both extreme left wing anti-Zionists and extreme right wing Israelis, all in support of a two state solution and the end of Palestinian violence against Israel, and against the Netanyahu government, the extreme right wing, and the West Bank settler movement.

I wouldn't have this Substack if it weren't for that community. Originally I intended these updates to be posted solely on the subreddit, and only made this Substack so I would have a repository for my updates.

Slowly but surely, however, over the past year, I have found myself liking him less and less. The bottom line is that he has always been an asshole, but prior to this, it was in ways that were ultimately justifiable on some level. And it was fun to see him be an asshole to people who say and do horrible things that make the world a worse place.

Events which have transpired in the past few months and come to a head in the last few weeks have, however, led me to feel like I need to publicly repudiate him, because I have expressed support of him to people I know in real life, and because many of my subscribers here come from the Destiny subreddit.

Destiny has always been someone who had what I considered to be a strange and probably unhealthy sex life. His relationships with women have all eventually crashed and burned. He has a child with a women he met in high school who he is an absent father to. He convinced his ex wife to open their relationship and they lived a polyamorous lifestyle, something which has never appealed to me for many different reasons, but especially because of how messy it is. I think, however, that someone's sex life is their own personal business. I don't care what anyone does behind closed doors as long as it is not coercive and doesn't break the law or people's trust. Even the deadbeat dad allegations weren't fully true, he does heavily financially support his child and does make time for them to be together, even if I do think the amount of time he spends with his kid is grossly inadequate.

All of this stuff I was able to disregard, until now. Because in November of this year, messages he sent on Discord to a 19 year old woman were leaked when that person was hacked. A whole slew of sexual videos and images he had sent her as part of a sexting conversation were released publicly, including videos of him and his ex wife, and a video that shows him sucking a dude's dick who may or may not be far right commentator Nick Fuentes. I don't care who's dick he sucks (and his dick sucking proclivities were something he has acknowledged publicly many times), but one of these videos (and to be clear, I have not watched any of them) apparently depicts him engaging in a sexual act with a long time friend of the stream and fellow live-streamer called Pixie.

Pixie has been a great contributor to the community for years. She often went into the lions den of the alt right, extremely misogynist Fresh and Fit podcast with and without Destiny to argue on behalf of women's equality and autonomy and against the toxic red pill ideology which that podcast promotes. I also have a distinct memory of her calling into the stream with her Trump supporting father and having a fascinating three way discussion about why he believes what he does. I had no idea that her and Destiny had ever had a sexual relationship, though it does seem like he inevitably has sex with almost every woman who has appeared on stream (though not Candace Owens, as far as I know).

Destiny violated her confidence in a disgusting and unforgivable way by sending a sexual video of them to a young woman he had never met and was sexting with over Discord. Regardless of anything else that happened, this one act exposes him definitively as someone who doesn't care about people who care about him, which is a cardinal sin to me. That fact that he did this so that he could get into the pants of a random 19 year old makes it worse. The fact that he did this even though he constantly lectures other people on how dangerous sexual contact with strangers can be makes it worse. The fact that the person he did this to had been nothing but a good ally to him for years makes it worse still.

Clearly, Destiny has some kind of sex addiction problem that he covers up with polyamory and claims that he simply has a very active sex life. But even being an addict does not insulate a person from facing consequences for their actions. Pixie tried to get him to agree to some kind of settlement in private, but for whatever reason, that negotiation went nowhere. Now she is bringing a civil suit against him in Florida for revenge porn. I don't know enough about Florida law to know whether or not she has a real case. But I do know that her trust was violated by Destiny in an absolutely atrocious way, and she deserves some kind of justice and compensation. I hope that she is able to achieve a resolution at some point that leaves her feeling better about what happened.

Some people can separate a person's horrendous personal decisions from the benefit they may or may not provide society. Some people think that the political work he does (which, to be clear, is incredibly laudable, especially the extremely successful swing state canvassing campaigns he and the community organized in the 2020 and 2024 elections), is too valuable to cancel him for personal transgressions. I am not one of those people. To me, a person's political credibility is maintained in large part by their moral credibility. Once that moral credibility is compromised, it is very difficult to recover, especially if the person has a history of consistently engaging in conduct that puts themself and others around them at risk unapologetically.

When all this came out, Destiny was on the cusp of achieving some kind of mainstream political relevance. He was appearing on podcasts and news broadcasts with millions of viewers. He interviewed candidates running for chair of the DNC including relatively big names like former Maryland governor and Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley. He was making a real case that he could be the “Joe Rogan of the left” that many Democrats have been hoping would emerge. And the whole time that all of these big things were happening, he was sending sexual videos of himself to a random 19 year old girl and leaking several different people’s private videos to her without their consent.

When I was much younger, I was a big fan of Anthony Weiner. Like Destiny, he was a funny, acerbic, unapologetic liberal who was willing to vigorously call out Republicans for their lies, hypocrisy, and political project of cruelty and ignorance. And apparently, also like Destiny, he was uncontrollably horny to an extent that he destroyed his entire career and burned almost every relationship he had because he couldn't stop himself from engaging sexually with random women on the Internet. Being a man with power puts a person in situations where they can use that power to get themselves as much sex as they want. Countless men over the years, centuries, and milennia have done immense damage to other people and ruined their reputations because they thought they were immune from consequences and could do whatever they wanted. But I will always do whatever I can to stand up for basic morality and decency in politics and personal relations. And that means cutting myself off from people who do horrible things so that they can gratify their sexual desires.

I won't pretend like I am some pillar of the community. Most DGGers have probably never read my updates and don't know who I am. I have no clout to wield here, and I feel weird even writing about this because to a certain extent it feels like grandstanding even though no one cares what I think. But I am considering removing myself from the /r/Destiny community, and I feel like I owe it to my subscribers to tell you why. And I owe it to the basic concepts of morality and decency to urge you to abandon people who have shown themselves to have no consistent values. Destiny is one of those people, and he doesn't deserve your support or viewership.

Watch Lonerbox instead. He's ultra based, well informed, and has never had any sex scandals or done anything untoward with anyone, as far as I know.

Take care everybody.