On International Women’s Day, Alexandra Pierce, a 37-year-old jewelry brand owner and YouTuber better known as HRH Collection, tweeted, “I hate women,” followed by a heart emoji.
“I don’t like fucking Women’s Day,” Pierce told BuzzFeed News that same day over FaceTime. “I think it’s stupid. I really do. I don’t give a fuck. People are like, ‘Women, women, women.’ I’m sorry. I don’t get it. I just feel like why is there not a men’s day? No offense — if I was a man, I would be offended.”
Of course, International Men’s Day is on Nov. 19, but that’s not the point. On Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, Pierce is a free speech warrior and conservative influencer who posts frequently about vaccine mandates and being anti-abortion. On TikTok, however, she is simply a soundbite generator.
Footage of Pierce in the heat of emotion uploaded by fans to TikTok frequently go viral as reusable sounds, often without a peep of right-wing sentiment. For instance, “IT’S NOT THE VIBE, STOP” has 4.4 million views, and “YOU’RE EMBARRASSING” has nearly 80,000. The #HRHCollection hashtag has more than 330 million views. For people who have only been exposed to Pierce on TikTok, she just seems like a person who gets really worked up about designer bags and French hairstyle trends because her viral audios are completely separated from the political views she discusses on other platforms. While clips of her have gone viral on TikTok, several fans are perhaps totally unaware of her “no offense, but” content.
Or maybe they just don’t care. Pierce is something similar to Trisha Paytas — a content creator who at times sounds so ridiculous, it feels like satire. As one TikTok user put it: “This woman is actually problematic but my brain is itched by the way she complains because it’s exactly how I think when I’m annoyed.” It doesn’t matter if her longer YouTube videos are insufferable and filled with bad takes — she’s different. The short snippets uploaded to TikTok are context-free and undeniably fun. People watch her for the same reason they watch literally anything: entertainment.
“I am harsh. I’m very blunt,” Pierce told BuzzFeed News. “I don’t care if I’m misunderstood.”
She has been accused of fetishizing Asian people, she’s called mask-wearing “stupid,” and she frequently uses the words “fat” and “ugly” as insults against her detractors. She also defended the use of swastikas as a way for people to “label themselves” as “racist antisemites” under the banner of free speech.
And turns out yelling at your fans is good for business. Her YouTube subscriptions spiked in January 2022, when she gained 35,000 subscribers, according to Social Blade — the same time the TikTok fan account @jessezspam started posting clips of Pierce.
“I fell in love with her because she speaks mostly what’s on my mind,” said Jesse, who runs @jessezspam and declined to give his last name. He made the account during school break and it’s gone viral from him posting her audio clips out of context. Jesse ignores any controversy surrounding Pierce because it usually comes from people who are “too sensitive these days,” he said.
All of the attention has doubled the sales for her jewelry business, where she sells trendy earrings, necklaces, and rings, Pierce said, which she confirmed via screenshots. As HRH Collection, Pierce has been an online presence for more than 12 years, first as a fashion influencer. Her most popular YouTube video is a 2010 hair tutorial in which she gently guides the viewer through the process of braiding bangs to look like a headband. Her soft voice sounds markedly different from her recent content. “She was so calm what happened,” wrote one commenter.
Although many creators who began their YouTube career with haul videos are having a hard time staying relevant in the age of high-budget mini films on YouTube, Pierce found her niche in front of the camera, yelling an unedited stream of consciousness.
Steven Buckley, a media critic and researcher of internet culture, told BuzzFeed News that Pierce’s persona is a bit like a metaphorical “car crash.”
“The slow-rolling train wreck that some of HRH Collection’s videos can be viewed as has some of the traits that early 2000s reality TV had,” he said. “Audiences like to see the mess of other people’s lives, as it makes them feel better about their own situation.”
Being a loud, obnoxious conservative influencer has always found an audience online — as well as in various right-wing publications and outlets. But the nature of TikTok’s short videos and the ways that audio gets reused and removed from any of its original context means that suddenly Pierce has found an audience that likes her purely for the few-seconds-long viral sound. Does it matter that they don’t know the rest of her beliefs?
Eboni, who has tweeted that Pierce makes her want to bang her head on a wall “repeatedly” and asked for her last name not to be published, told BuzzFeed News she understands that people are drawn to her content because of the “shock factor” that comes with her dramatic rants, but it doesn’t do it for her. She recalled seeing “awful and ignorant” tweets about the terminology used for Indigenous communities and catcalling that turned her off for good.
“Honestly it’s horrific, and the people who find her entertaining must have the same beliefs as her,” Eboni said. “She doesn’t seem to care about anyone’s opinions but her own.”
Pierce would agree. Over the course of our interview, she said she doesn’t care what people think about her 11 different times, and credited her outspoken political beliefs as one of the things that people most enjoy about her content.
Race doesn’t matter get over it racists.
Pierce said she knew we would hate her “I hate women” defense and bemoaned “little white girls” who “get triggered” by her posts and flag her. She said that’s what happened when she shared her “I hate women” tweet to Instagram, and if any more of her posts are removed, she’ll lose her Instagram account. Again. (Instagram declined to comment on her account’s status, citing the protection of her privacy.)
A constant battle against content moderation policies is, as Pierce would say, “not the vibe” on TikTok, where posts about her are ubiquitous and those who share her clips benefit from the views while removing the context of her more problematic beliefs.