Ned Fulmer is attempting career CPR. But this isn’t just about one man’s rebrand. It’s about who gets to fail publicly, profit off their mistakes and then stage a glossy comeback.

Flash back to 2023. Fulmer was one of four members of the well-known internet group the Try Guys, with a collective view count reaching into the billions. One of Fulmer’s signature bits was repeatedly commenting on how much he loved and respected his wife, Ariel.

So, naturally, he cheated on his wife — with a producer at the company, no less. The scandal blew up, forcing him out of the Try Guys into relative obscurity — until Sept. 17.

In the familiar trend of overconfident men with more opinions than sense, Fulmer has created a shiny new podcast in the hopes of returning from his exile. His first guest? The wife he cheated on. 

It’s a juicy, delicious internet drama in every way. But here’s the part that made me want to write an article: I think this rebrand is going to work.

Not because Fulmer is a good person by any stretch of the imagination, but because the internet’s collective memory is notoriously short — especially when it comes to men with PR teams.

That first episode has already racked up over 1 million views in a matter of days. His channel boasts 64,000 subscribers with only three episodes thus far. Fulmer is already well on his way to a fresh, new, sustainable career. And he isn’t alone.

Figures like Logan Paul have seen massive success, even after highly controversial incidents like his filming of Japan’s Aokigahara forest, infamous for being a popular destination for suicide. Today, he’s a multimillionaire boxer, facing no lasting repercussions. 

Influencers Shane Dawson and James Charles both faced backlash for sexualizing minors, with Dawson also criticized for filming in blackface. Dawson’s videos still rake in over 4 million views on uploads as recent as last year, despite allegations surfacing in 2020. Charles still averages around a million views per video.

These men still get to have platforms. They still get to be influencers. They still live lavish lifestyles, and we still consume their content like nothing happened. Their careers may have plateaued, but they’re far from over.

If anything, they’ve shifted to monetizing the aesthetic of being cancelled. Dawson spoke about his experience facing the internet’s wrath on a podcast just five months ago. Scandal is merely more content and apology, an opportunity for profit.

Contrast that with cancelled women. 

Colleen Ballinger was accused of sexual conversations with her underage fans in 2024 and now pulls in under 50,000 views per video. React channel star SSSniperwolf had her videos temporarily demonetized after she intentionally doxxed a critic. Now, she averages 500,000 views despite having 35 million subscribers. 

So, who gets the opportunity to rebrand? Who does the internet allow to sweep their wrongdoings under the rug? The pattern is clear: It’s men — almost always white men — who get that chance.

Don’t get me wrong, there is something to be said from making mistakes and learning from them. But the aforementioned men are all repeat offenders. Charles was recently accused of defending a domestic abuser. Dawson has been cancelled multiple times, and Paul has cycled through scandals like pit stops.

Over and over again, these men minimize, excuse and dismiss their bad behavior. They spin it into a “learning opportunity” or a “lapse in judgement.” It’s the old adage “boys will be boys,” adapted for the internet.

For them, scandal is like losing a life in a video game: wait for a few months, then respawn with a “new project.” That unevenness reflects our deeper cultural biases about who we see as “complex” or “redeemable.”

This is exactly what makes this behavior so problematic, and exactly why I’m worried about Ned Fulmer. If we keep rewarding only certain people with comebacks, we reinforce real-world hierarchies of race, gender and power.

A dissection of this double standard appears in the 2024 dissertation “The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global,” written by Stanford professor Adrian Daub. On this work, Angelica Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, noted that “the moral panic of cancel culture is, at its core, a reactionary machine that defends the political agendas and status of those who fear losing what is often unearned social dominance.”

These redemption arcs aren’t accidents — they’re symptoms of a system that rewards the powerful for “surviving” scandal. 

Platforms love a comeback because it keeps users watching. But it’s time we stopped mistaking a rebrand for accountability. Instead of giving these men our clicks, we should be asking for systemic changes: clearer platform policies, consistent rule enforcement and real consequences that can’t be erased with a new podcast.