Groypers, Charlie Kirk and a new Turning Point

If you didn’t know who Charlie Kirk was until this week, you probably don’t know who Nick Feuntes is. You should.

Having instantly and desperately labelled the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk as a far-left fanatic, or a trans activist, MAGA America is coming to terms with the fact that he is a white Christian from an ultra-Conservative Republican family with links to the Groyper movement.

The Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, even said, disappointedly: “I was praying that it was an immigrant.”

‘It’ was not. To get an insight into Tyler Robinson’s motives is to get inside the dark world of America’s far-far right, a world of memes and internecine warfare. It’s an exploration that defies the myth of the completely unified far-right, but also points that things could get still-darker.

Tyler Robinson is a Groyper, the far-right internet movement led by Nick Fuentes which believes people like Charlie Kirk to be too liberal. Robinson dressed up as Pepe – the comic book character appropriated by the far-right – for Halloween. The stuff scratched into the bullets all refer to rightwing video games and groyper imagery, this is not “trans or leftist ideology”.  In America’s post-fact society, it probably doesn’t matter, but it looks highly likely that MAGA’s enemy is to their right. 

Groypers are a movement that promotes white nationalist ideals, including opposition to immigration, advocacy for a “Christian America,” and virulent criticism of multiculturalism, globalism, and Jewish influence in politics and media.

Fuentes so-called “Groyper Army”, which had been waging the “Groyper Wars” against mainstream Republicans, including specifically Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA represents the dregs of the ‘always online’ world of radicalised young men. But it would be foolish to underestimate its influence and potential. 

Who is Nick Fuentes?

Fuentes is a white supremacist whose views mix extreme misogyny, homophobia, incelism, and anti-semitism. Multiple sources describe him as a neo-Nazi [Neo-Nazi Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes laments Kanye’s antisemitism apology]. He may be best known for his support for Trump and his infamous tweet on the night of Trump’s election: “Your body, My Choice.” As Moira Donegan explained [‘Your body, my choice’: what misogynistic Trump supporters feel about sexual power]:

“The Trump campaign positioned itself as a champion of a hierarchical gender order, aiming to restore men to a place of wrongfully deprived supremacy over women. Many of his voters cast their lot in with Trump hoping that he would do just that.”

Now, after Trump’s victory, some of his supporters have adopted a slogan which neatly joins the movement’s twin projects of forced sex and forced pregnancy: “Your body, my choice.”

“Your body, my choice,” was coined by the far-right, pro-Nazi internet troll and Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes on the night of the election. “Your body, my choice,” Fuentes tweeted. “Forever.” It’s a taunting inversion of the pro-choice slogan “my body, my choice”, meant to assert women’s autonomy: instead, “your body, my choice” presents women’s full citizenship and freedom as laughable, asserting, in gleeful terms, the male supremacy that will now carry for the force of policy and law under a new Trump administration.”

Fuentes attended the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, (one of the “very fine people”) and was also an attendee and speaker at events preceding the January 6 United States Capitol attack. His dinner meeting with Donald Trump and Kanye West was widely condemned. Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League which campaigns against bigotry and antisemitism, condemned Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and expressed shock at the development. “Nick Fuentes is among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the country,” Greenblatt told the New York Times. “He’s a vicious bigot and known Holocaust denier who has been condemned by leading figures from both political parties here.”

Fuentes’ world is one that was previously hidden from view, in the dank recesses of the internet. But even though it has now spilled into the mainstream, it remains incomprehensible to most outside its codes and signifiers.

One characteristic of this world is the online ability to ‘swarm’ against anyone considered its opponents. As the authors of Post-Internet Far Right have noted:

“This capacity of the swarm – to be weaponised against its leaders, particularly its less explicitly radical ones – has been clearest in the case of ‘Groyping’, a tactic that sprang up around white nationalist content creator Nick Fuentes and his attempt to influence the mainstream conservative movement. ‘Groypers’ made interventions at the rallies of Turning Point USA, an astroturfed conservative movement, where besuited white nationalists asked leading questions on Zionism, tolerance of homosexuality, and other issues of importance for the far right.”

“The aim is to expose the contradictions within conservatism and humiliate the speaker by tying him in knots. The intention for Groypers is to open the (mostly) one-way trap door from conservatism to fascism. The tactic is similar to one used by The League of Empire Loyalists, a group established in the 1950s in defence of the British Empire, who practiced the same kind of interventions at right-wing or otherwise establishment events.”

A Post-Trump Dystopia

The revelations about the reality of Kirk’s killer – rather than the imagined and projected paranoid one ” – “I was praying that it was an immigrant” – means there’s less talk of a ‘civil war’ today. But if the horrific events show a glimpse into MAGA and America’s neo-Nazi subculture, it’s also a sobering insight into what might come next. Imagining a political regime worse than that of Donald Trump may seem ridiculous, even obscene, but that’s the world we’re in. One scenario pictures Trump’s reign giving way to a JD Vance succession.

Richard Hanania has charted how the Overton Window of America’s far-right continues to travel right, without a threshold. He calls this the ‘Based Arc of Conservatism’, by which he means “The Based Ritual involves flaunting your connoisseurship of racism, sexism, and reactionary ideas in various forms” to establish that you are part of the same subculture.

He argues that this trajectory moves ever further rightward, and “it is unrealistic to think that the taboo on antisemitism will be the one to hold.” Following this logic Hanania contends that the only thing that can stop a post-Trump JD Vance succession is a Bannon-Groyper Alliance.

He writes: “I don’t expect most Republican presidential candidates to openly talk about the “Jewish question” in 2028, but they will be increasingly friendly to those that do, and dogwhistle to them when they can on issues like Epstein and Israel. Supporters of the Jewish state in Washington have done a good job of holding onto positions of influence at the upper reaches of the GOP even as the ground under them has shifted. But every trend is against them. A movement that makes racism, anti-foreigner paranoia, and conspiracy theories central to its worldview will always exist uncomfortably alongside any form of philosemitism, if it isn’t simply overrun with Jew hate.”

Hanania argues, depressingly convincingly,  that: “The energy of the party, polling data, and current trends all suggest that Vance can only be attacked by a candidate or movement that is further along on the populist end of the spectrum.”

“All of this is what makes the reports that Bannon is likely to run so notable Bannon has always done a good job of skating where the puck is going, and shown keen insight into what makes the Republican base tick.”

He concludes [Can a Bannon-Groyper Alliance Derail Vance?]: “One can imagine Bannon playing footsie with the Groypers. Fuentes will attack Vance for having an Indian wife, while Bannon will say he didn’t enact a complete immigration moratorium and is too friendly with transhumanists like Elon and Peter Thiel.”

It’s a grim prospect, I know. But it shows that while Trump’s ageing, chaotic regime decays and disassembles, the movement beneath it is festering and morphing into something even worse.