Someone checked in on Santino Rice and what they found was horrifying

Celebrities who have fallen out of favor don’t have it easy. While we do live in an age when you can get famous for one role and then pivot completely to influencing, it can still be hard to maintain a grip on the attention economy, especially for celebrities who got big in a pre-Internet age.

Which is why it can be a fascinating exercise to check back in on the celebrities of yore and see what they’re up to now. But take heed: it can also be an extremely scary project, as one TikToker found out recently.

@chambreezey

Santino Rice becoming an extremist right wing conspiracy theorist was a fun surprise! #dragrace #rupaulsdragrace

♬ original sound – chambreezey

“I checked in on [Santino Rice] the other day,” user @chambreezey said in a post from yesterday, “and I found his Twitter. Boy, did I find his Twitter.”

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What he found was evidence of just how far down the conspiracy theory alt-right rabbit hole Rice has gone down since leaving the spotlight. While Rice spent the 2000s judging on early Drag Race and Project Runway seasons, he now seems to spend the majority of his time tweeting in support of Donald Trump and against vaccines. Which is…not the most predictable pivot in the world, but certainly not the least.

“This is a gay man who was on one of the gayest mainstream shows…available to the general public,” @chambreezey says, noting that Rice seems to be taking the Milo Yiannopoulos path of going from super gay to super conservative, “but some of this gets into really dark territory.”

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One Rice tweet talks about how inflation and rising food costs could help stop the “obesity epidemic” which…huh? Is it the French Revolution?

He’s also retweeted Roseanne Barr, who’s been making gross, racist, uninformed statements on Twitter since the start of the Trump presidency.

All of which might lead you to wonder—what happened? Well, we don’t know. If we had to venture a guess, we’d say that people who get addicted to the spotlight and then suddenly lose access to it tend to grab at any attention-getting tactics they can find, so that’s probably what happened here. Thankfully as a past Drag Race judge, his tenure was short and he was one of the least-liked judges in the show’s run. And according to one Redditor, Rice only got on the show to begin with because Ru thought he was hot? Honestly, tracks.

Suffice it to say we’ll never be going down this deep, dark rabbit hole again!

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