THE ALIAS KNOWN AS
JPMORGANSSTACHE

For roughly one year, Mattske operated under the Reddit alias JPMorgansStache — a character deliberately designed to be both absurd and authoritative. The avatar: a suited, diamond-holding, sunglasses-wearing Reddit mascot in a black hoodie. The bio: "Everything I say is 💰🤑" — a kind of winking disclaimer that the financial-sounding name was a front for something far more politically engaged.

The persona was a vehicle. While the username nodded to JP Morgan the banking giant and its legendary mustachioed patriarch, the account was never about finance. It was about using Reddit's vast political communities as a real-time public square — one where a single anonymous voice, applied with enough precision and volume, could actually move the conversation.

The account earned 30 Gold awards — a Reddit distinction given by other users who found content valuable enough to spend real money on — and unlocked 37 achievements. It was active in more than 8 subreddits spanning the full ideological spectrum: r/politics, r/democrats, r/Conservative, r/PoliticalHumor, r/WeirdGOP, r/news, r/PoliticalDiscussion, and others. The karma-to-age ratio was exceptional for an account of its size, suggesting high engagement density rather than passive browsing.

Rather than operating in a single echo chamber, JPMorgansStache deliberately spread across communities with radically different default positions — from r/politics (the left-leaning mainstream) to r/Conservative, from r/democrats to r/WeirdGOP. This cross-ideological presence was not accidental; it reflects a strategic theory that opinion-shaping requires presence in rooms where your views aren't already the consensus.

One of the most unusual aspects of JPMorgansStache's operation was the use of Reddit's own user profile as a micro-blog. As the account itself noted in a post from August 2025: "It is obvious to me now that even avid Redditors are unaware that your profile contains with it, your own sub basically, a wall of sorts, where you can post things. This is what was once referred to as a micro-blog."

Over the course of roughly five months, the account published 129 original essays, critiques, and dispatches directly to its profile — a remarkable cadence of political writing that ranged from geopolitical analysis of the Iran conflict to sharp media criticism to theoretical framings of American fascism. These posts were not linkposts to news articles; they were original text, arguing a position.

Click any post below to read it in full.

Before getting into what the writing did, it's worth pausing on what the name was. JP Morgan — the actual man, John Pierpont Morgan — had one of the most famously, almost aggressively, magnificent mustaches in the history of American finance. A thick, iron-gray, no-apologies walrus of a thing. A mustache that seemed to be making its own financial decisions. Naming a Reddit account after that stache — and then using it to tear apart the political and financial establishment — is genuinely funny, and the joke runs deeper the more you think about it. The avatar (suited, hooded, diamond-handed, sunglassed) completed the bit: a figure of anonymous financial menace, cosplaying as a Reddit alien, holding two gems it didn't earn in a system it didn't design.

But what actually distinguished the writing underneath that character? A few things that are genuinely uncommon — not just on Reddit, but in political and financial commentary broadly.

Why the Anonymity Was the Point

The mask wasn't just a practical choice — it was structurally load-bearing. When you know who is speaking, you immediately begin filtering the argument through everything you know or assume about them: their affiliations, their history, their incentives, who they're trying to impress or avoid alienating. A named commentator saying "Bernie Sanders is fake opposition" gets processed as: what is this person's angle, what team are they playing for, is this a left-punch or a right-punch? The same words from an anonymous account with a finance-bro joke name get processed more purely as: is this true or not?

There's a reason the most piercing political satire in history — from the Federalist Papers to early punk fanzines to certain corners of the internet — has often been anonymous or pseudonymous. The absence of a named author forces the argument to stand alone. It can't be dismissed by association. It can't be praised by association either. It just sits there demanding to be engaged with on its own terms.

There's also something specific to Reddit's culture where accounts that comment prolifically and consistently across ideological lines develop an unusual kind of credibility. Because a nameless account has no brand to protect and no audience to placate, readers sense — correctly — that there's less incentive to lie. The 30 Gold awards from strangers across the political spectrum are evidence that the writing was landing that way: as something that felt more honest precisely because there was nobody behind it trying to be loved.

The one genuine cost of anonymity is accumulation. Sixty-two thousand words, 500,000+ impressions, and almost nobody could connect it to a single mind with a consistent worldview developing in real time. Each comment existed somewhat in isolation for the reader. That's the trade-off Mattske made — and it was a conscious one. Purity of message. Invisibility of author. The stache, enormous and ridiculous, covering the face perfectly.