2026 XXL Freshman Class Faces the Internet: Chris Patrick, La Reezy, Belly Gang Kushington and More Respond to Mean Comments

The 2026 XXL Freshman Class has landed and, as ritual dictates, the real test comes after the photo shoot. This year’s roster—Chris Patrick, La Reezy, Belly Gang Kushington, YKNiece, Skrilla, Trim, Hurricane Wisdom, Babyfxce E, Trap Dickey, Slayr, Sosocamo and the 10th spot winner Miles Minnick—stepped into the arena of public opinion to face one of the Freshman process’s most humbling traditions: Mean Comments.

“The 2026 XXL Freshman Class has landed.”

“Now, they to take on the most humbling experience of the entire Freshman process: Mean Comments.”

“The internet is a cruel place, but these Freshman know how to fire back.”

Year after year, XXL puts these new faces in front of the camera and then forces them to look at how the internet has decided to remember—or erase—them. This installment finds the class, minus Trim, taking the sting of comment sections and answering in real time. The results are a reminder that social media is at once a promotional engine and a public confessional where grievances, jokes and cruelty collide.

Some responses land as quick wit, others as indifference. Belly Gang Kushington, for example, doesn’t waste time turning fat-shaming into fodder for a comeback, fielding jokes about his weight with sharp retorts. Trap Dickey shrugs off a barb aimed at his crooked eye like he’s used to the noise. Slayr, pushed into being reduced to a crude label—called the “voice of the fat f**ks” in one comment—shoots back and even calls for the suspension of an X account that compared him to Diddy. These moments read less like fragility and more like boundary setting.

Elsewhere, Sosocamo takes aim at the perennial accusation: industry plant. He rebuffs the claim but admits that a blunt “nobody cares” still stings—a rare glimpse at how public dismissal can land even on artists who are playfully combative. YKNiece, confronted by a commenter, comes close to taking the insult physically, his response teetering between performative bravado and real irritation.

There’s an economy to these exchanges. Some Freshmen turn insults into punchlines; others treat them like paper cutouts to be shrugged aside. Chris Patrick and La Reezy move through the segment with the practiced ease of artists who know controversy is part of the promotional cycle, while Skrilla, Hurricane Wisdom and Babyfxce E each bring their own texture to the clip—defiant, amused, or quietly unbothered.

Trim’s absence is notable. The rest of the class volunteered for the ritual, facing a cross-section of comments pulled from social platforms and streaming threads. The feature, after all, is built on exposing how quickly fandom and vitriol can coexist in the same comment box.

Miles Minnick, credited here as the 10th spot winner, gets his share of jabs too. In aggregate, the segment plays less like a cancellation tribunal and more like a communal pressure test: who can lean into the noise and who will be flattened by it?

The clip doesn’t pretend to resolve anything. It does, however, document the ways newer artists learn to navigate attention in the attention economy—how clapbacks, silence and sarcasm become part of the public playsheet. In that regard, this Freshman class does what Freshmen have always done: make a first impression, then scatter the internet’s reactions across the record player.

Watch these exchanges and you’ll see a pattern: most are thick-skinned, some are provocative, and a few look like they might keep score. Whether that translates into longevity is a different conversation, but for now the 2026 class has passed one of the rite-of-passage tests handed to newcomers by the culture itself.