Republican Governor Spencer Cox’s Utah hot take on Charlie Kirk’s assassination Wednesday is still the most candid. “I was praying that if this had to happen here, that [the killer] wouldn’t be one of us,” Cox said, meaning (presumably) that the killer wouldn’t be white, American, male, conservative, and Utahn. This, naturally, launched a thousand TikToks by those who ticketed Cox for racism.
But wasn’t Cox’s Mormon prayer a near-universal expectation? And weren’t most mainstream observers at least somewhat surprised to find that the suspect in Kirk’s murder is no stranger to MAGA?
From the start, chatterers from The Atlantic to The Guardian to Benjamin Netanyahu determined that Kirk, a white nationalist, was killed not by “one of us” but by one of them: a leftist, brown or Black, an immigrant, or—if not female, as that’s too much to ask, even from Cox’s Mormon God—at least transgender.
This rush to judgment blazed through both the media and political leadership. In The Atlantic, Peter Thiel protégé Mike Solana had, just two days before the assassination, warned of a “Luigi Left” that had decided murdering the rich was fair game. The day after the murder, Solana retweeted the reactionary social media icon Bronze Age Pervert, who wrote, “Charlie Kirk’s killer was probably an antifa transexual with anti-Zionist hysteria.”
The Wall Street Journal falsely faulted the killer for “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” The Guardian mistakenly trusted a sketchy source who said Robinson was “left on everything.” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared the murder the work of “radical Islamists and ultra-progressives.” Trump, of course, instantly blamed the “radical left.”
But then Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old electrician, was arrested. Robinson is white and from Utah, the son of a MAGA family with a passion for guns; that’s why Cox was crestfallen. On Sunday, Cox started trying to insist that Robinson still holds a “leftist ideology”—not quite “one of us,” then—but he just seemed to be spiraling.
As details emerged, the Journal took back its reporting on the shooter’s leftist leanings. The Guardian did too. Robinson’s grandmother was stunned to discover the suspect was one of her tribe. “I don’t know any single one [of my family] who’s a Democrat,” she told The Daily Mail. “I’m just so confused.” (TikTok wags jumped in: “Tyler Robinson’s meemaw got on the internet and she said, ‘My grandson [may be] a murderer, but he is not a liberal.’ Don’t get it twisted.”)
Then the other shoe dropped. The far-far-right, those to the right of Kirk, appeared to recognize Robinson as maybe, just maybe, one of them.
First there was the scattershot “evidence”—a bunch of inkblots. In spite of his MAGA heritage, Robinson, according to a police affidavit, disliked Kirk’s views. In the pro-Trump, anti-Kirk position, some recognized the stance of the so-called Groypers, the neo-Nazi followers of Nick Fuentes, another right-wing influencer.
There’s also the fact that Robinson once dressed for Halloween as a track-suited gopnik, “a badly educated, lower-class, bigoted thug” meme that some associate with Groypers. On the killer’s shell casings, according to the FBI, are mostly gamer references, but there are also lyrics to “Bella Ciao,” a political song known to gamers that appears alongside Kanye tracks and Trump pep songs on a small, possibly irrevelant Groyper-themed playlist on Spotify.
So was the alleged Kirk killer one of them—not the Luigi leftists, but the Groyper gopniks?
We don’t know. We don’t know anything. But this is why our world, for its manifold sins, has had to learn about the Groyper wars. Kirk’s murder, whatever else comes of it, has revealed to the broader normie world a schism in MAGA. That schism has implications for America’s future—and suggests that the country’s ideological divisions are increasingly nonbinary.
I’ll be brief. Fuentes and Kirk are far-right influencers of different flavors and intensities. Fuentes made his name praising Hitler. Kirk didn’t praise Hitler, but he preached replacement theory. Both men have for years vied for the adulation of a cohort that online leftists call “Hitlerjugend” and The New York Times calls “young men [who felt] that left-leaning culture had become oppressive.” The beef was formalized as the Groyper wars in 2019, when Fuentes, then 21, exhorted his followers to heckle Kirk, then 25. For years now, Groypers have publicly trolled Kirk by confronting him with antisemitic chestnuts, including “the USS Liberty incident” and the 9/11 “dancing Israelis” nonsense. They’ve tried to destabilize his Israel support and claim him for the Hitlerian right. Faced with the taunts, Kirk sometimes held his own and sometimes seemed to wobble.
The Groyper wars sort of worked. The Groypers, at least, believed they’d budged Kirk from being (in incel speak) a red-pilled conservative who aimed to transform America into something closer to a black-pilled one, who aims to burn it down. And indeed Kirk, who had started out as a fiscal-responsibility Republican in secular politics, turned into a Christian nationalist. In August, Kirk even sat down with Gen Zers critical of Israel who (though largely leftists) sounded, Fuentes later said approvingly, “like Groypers.”
In July, Fuentes declared victory: “I took your organization. I took your baby, Turning Point USA, and I fucked it. And I’ve been fucking it.” Groypers cheered. “Fuentes absolutely destroys fat gummed Israeli puppet Charlie Kirk,” one wrote on X on July 29.
But that was then. Six weeks later, Kirk is gone, and Fuentes is “gutted.” No doubt anxious about the vigilantism that can coalesce in an information vacuum, Fuentes is also hassling the Trump administration for more information about Tyler Robinson and especially his group on Discord, an online chat platform, which might clarify his politics.
But even as the rest of us try to refrain from jumping to conclusions, Fuentes knows things look suspicious. Fearing that the assassination “will set off a chain reaction,” he said, “to all of my followers, if you take up arms, I disavow you. I disown you in the strongest possible terms. And the same goes obviously for the other side.”
The other side?!
I suspect that, to Fuentes, who turned 25 last month, the “other side” is no longer liberal Democrats. It’s not antifa. Maybe it’s Kirk’s grieving followers. Maybe it’s others he’s condemned—pro-Israel politicians or Republicans covering for Jeffrey Epstein. Lately, politics in the United States seems less polarized than disintegrated.
In the Groyper branch of MAGA, the “other side” could even be Donald Trump himself. That’s right. Just two weeks ago, Fuentes posted, “Trump 2.0 has been a disappointment in literally every way but nobody wants to admit it.”
For those hoping the story of Charlie Kirk’s assassination will ever yield us-and-them contours, a cautionary tale exists in Ryan Routh, the man currently on trial for trying to assassinate Trump last September. Routh made his pro se opening statements September 12 in Fort Pierce, Florida. While the media ignored Routh and scrambled to divine motives in the Kirk assassination, Routh himself gave us a taste of the ideological clarity we might one day hear from Tyler Robinson. Before Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump appointee who so-called presided over the president’s so-called documents case, gaveled Routh down for incoherence, the defendant invoked Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin, and the “need to be kind to one another.” Ah—the Hitler-Putin-kindness ideology. That explains everything.
