I’m going to discuss what is easily one of the worst videos I’ve ever seen on the internet, uploaded by the 40-year-old actor Frankie Muniz, who gained fame as the lead character in the Fox sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle,” which aired from 2000 to 2006.  After making a few terrible films, he mostly gave up acting and began moonlighting as a race car driver —  a career where he’s best known for fighting very hard for 26th place in the NASCAR Truck Series while the actual contenders are busy lapping him.  Muniz has not completely dropped out of Hollywood, though. He just starred in the “Malcolm in the Middle” reboot miniseries on Hulu, which very few people watched or cared about. But they did make sure to include all of the obligatory woke updates, such as introducing a “non-binary” sibling for Malcolm and revealing that his black friend is now in a gay interracial relationship and has an adopted son. They checked all of the boxes, except, in a surprising twist, they didn’t have Bryan Cranston’s character come out as trans. I guess they’re saving that for the reboot of the reboot in 2029. In short, Frankie Muniz has had a mediocre career since reaching its zenith at the age of 14. He hasn’t received much attention of late, and for good reason: He’s not relevant anymore, and no one cares about anything he’s doing. There’s certainly no shame in that. It’s probably been a major lifestyle upgrade, in too many ways to list. This is a period in his life when he’s supposed to focus on raising his family and counting the many blessings he’s enjoyed, including all of the residual checks that are still pouring in.  By age 40, most child actors end up homeless outside of a Denny’s, pants around their ankles, begging every passing stranger for a few dollars so they can get a bus ticket to Milwaukee, which, as we know, is homeless drug addict code for buying crack.  Muniz was somehow able to avoid that fate. He managed to dodge the curse of childhood fame and start a family that, to all outward appearances, seemed healthy and happy. And that’s an achievement in its own right. Indeed, in terms of accomplishments, a child actor not becoming a crackhead is like a normal person placing in the top 100 in the Boston Marathon. It’s not the kind of thing that will win you the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but it’s quite impressive in its own right. Unfortunately, Frankie has just undone all of that goodwill in one fell swoop with one of the most agonizingly cringy posts ever to curse the feeds of unsuspecting social media users. On Wednesday, across all his social media profiles, Muniz announced that he and his wife were getting a divorce.  He framed the divorce as something he’s happy about, which he obviously isn’t, and as a mutual decision, which it obviously wasn’t. But before we get into Muniz’s statement — a statement that reflects a larger cultural trend, which is the only thing that makes it worth talking about — here’s the video that he uploaded along with his announcement. The caption reads, “WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T STAY BEST FRIENDS WITH YOUR BABY MAMA?” The fact that he’s a 40-year-old white man using the term “baby mama” should make this video less surprising, though no less excruciating to witness.  Watch: Frankie Muniz deleted this video that he posted of him celebrating breaking up his family by divorcing his wife.pic.twitter.com/99c6PidegV — Ian Miles Cheong (@ianmiles) July 1, 2026 Source: @ianmiles/X.com The footage shows Frankie and his wife dancing together in the living room, celebrating their divorce. There’s a lengthy caption where he excitedly talks about the divorce — like he’s announcing a marriage, rather than the dissolution of one.  The video itself is a tragedy, especially given the context. Admittedly, there is no context where a 40-year-old man should be posting videos of himself dancing. It is undignified and unfair to those of us who had the misfortune to be born with eyes. Frankie, like most 40-year-old men — and I say this as one myself — moves with all of the grace and rhythm of a three-legged deer, hobbling away after getting shot in the ass. That’s why dancing is meant for younger people.  If you feel the need to dance as a middle-aged man, for some ungodly reason, go somewhere behind a locked door, lower the blinds, draw the shades, make sure all other humans and domestic animals have evacuated the premises, and then dance in private, so that the rest of us are not forced to witness the ghastly sight.  But in this context — a cucked, henpecked weakling convulsing off-beat to a bad pop song, pretending to be happy that his wife is leaving him, displaying the sincere enthusiasm and wearing the genuine smile of a North Korean citizen giving a standing ovation to Dear Leader because the other option was burial in a mass grave — in this context, it is unbearable to behold.   When I first watched this — probably because I was so overwhelmed with disgust that I turned it off in 3.2 seconds — I didn’t even notice that their 5-year-old child joins in on the dancing. Frankie invites his son over and plays air guitar with his body, all to celebrate the fact that his son won’t be growing up in a stable two-parent household.  They apparently sat the child down, explained very somberly that mommy and daddy still love each other but don’t want to be around each other or live in the same house or on the same planet anymore, and then as the child was tearfully trying to process the worst trauma of his life, they excitedly declared: “Hey, we have an idea — let’s have a dance party!” Dancing with your wife and child to celebrate the fact that your child will no longer have mommy and daddy in the home is one of the most depraved things a Hollywood actor has ever done, which is obviously a very very high bar to clear.  In a twist no one saw coming, Frankie Muniz has surged ahead of Charlie Sheen and Kevin Spacey in the race to be the greatest living Hollywood degenerate. If he can’t win a NASCAR race, at least he can win this one.  How are we supposed to interpret what happened specifically in Frankie’s case? I can’t say one way or the other because I don’t know any of these people. Just looking at that video, though, it’s pretty apparent that his wife came up with the idea. No man would subject himself to something like this voluntarily.  Also, from a statistical perspective, these sorts of things are normally the wife’s idea. I don’t just mean posting dancing videos on the internet, although that too. Depending on what studies you look at, women are responsible for filing something like 70 to 80% of divorces. This has been one of the most enduring consequences of the feminist movement. Women have been bombarded with relentless propaganda about how they’re fully independent and “don’t need no man.” They’re taught that they can murder their children if they’re inconvenient, so obviously, breaking up a family is no big deal. And as a result, divorce has become something of a social contagion. The social contagion aspect of divorce is nothing new. What is new, or at least increasingly mainstream, is the relentless effort to present divorce as something empowering and fulfilling, a thing to be celebrated.  Not to get too hung up on this one example of the guy from Malcolm in the Middle, now the star of Malcolm in the Cuck Chair, but the example is illuminating. Especially when you read the caption: Life update! Following a period of separation that we kept private, Paige and I have decided to move forward with ending our marriage. After 10 beautiful years together, we’ve grown in ways that made us realize our relationship feels most natural and strong as a deep friendship and as co-parents. We share an incredible son who remains the center of our world, and we’re both happier, stronger parents because of the love and growth we’ve shared.  This feels like an email you’d get from HR when they deactivate your keycard. “We’ve decided to move forward with ending our marriage.” There isn’t an actual human being on the planet who’s ever uttered that sentence. I’m confident in saying that.  You’ll only get a line like that from Brenda from HR or ChatGPT. If there’s one thing AI chatbots are good at, it’s putting together grammatically correct sentences that manage to be coherent and yet have no meaning at the exact same time.  Also, notice the attempt — typical of these Hollywood divorce announcements — to pretend that divorce is the result of “personal growth” when really it is the result, usually, of two selfish people who never figured out how to stop being selfish. The problem is precisely a lack of growth. Or, if it was growth, it was growth of the wrong thing. Saying divorce is the result of growth is like saying terminal cancer is the result of growth. It’s technically and medically true, but the problem is that the wrong thing was growing. As for being a “co-parent” — that’s the arrangement you already had. That’s called being married. Divorced couples aren’t co-parents. They are competing parents. If you were cooperating parents, parents on the same team, you’d still be married. It is certainly a practical impossibility for any child to remain “the center of their world,” as Frankie claims, in this scenario — which is one of the reasons why it’s so revolting that these people insist on including their child in all of their messaging about their divorce.  And at any rate, the child actually should not be the center of your world anyway. The center of your world should be your faith, and your marriage should be the next closest thing to the center. The child orbits around that, like a planet around the Sun. The child is not himself the Sun with you and your wife as planets orbiting him. Not to torture the cosmic analogy, but the thing in the solar system with the most mass is the thing that everything else orbits around. Your child should not — in a metaphorical or literal sense — have the most mass.  Your marriage is the center, the thing with the gravitational pull that your child revolves around. Putting the child at the center of your world is very likely — in fact, almost certain — to result in exactly what has happened here. It would be like trying to reorganize our solar system with Pluto in the middle of it. Apocalyptic chaos and destruction are the only possible results.  Of course, in this case, within a few minutes, Muniz (or his PR people) apparently realized the footage wasn’t playing well, so the video was deleted from all of his social media profiles. But in its place, we get this message, along with a family photo featuring his son.