The MAGA War Has Begun. Here’s The Situation.
I wrote about “groypers” (the extreme-right ideology Charlie Kirk’s shooter subscribes to) in my 2018 book, but didn’t use the term because it didn’t widely exist until 2019. Nick Fuentes describes them as “the right-wing flank of the Republican Party,” a cohort that wants to keep Trump in power forever. They are next-level extremists: equal parts white nationalist, homophobic, nativist, fascist, sexist and antisemitic. They might sound like “the worst people on earth,” but there’s an even darker level: If you dig deep into 4chan’s Pol group and white supremacist Discord groups, you find people who feel that Trump *isn’t antisemitic enough*. Trump, whose son-in-law Jared Kushner is Jewish, describes himself as Israel’s “protector,” which he’s proven by fully supporting the Gaza genocide. In response, 4chan’s most radical racists commonly post coded memes accusing Trump of being part of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Some believe Charlie Kirk was such an extremist, citing the fact that Kirk was denouncing Trump’s support for Israel.
So what does Kirk’s assassination mean? It means that Trump’s Republican cult is now being forced to show the world exactly how hateful they really are. In the minds of the very worst of them, xenophobia is an all-or-nothing proposition. You can’t just exhibit hatred toward women, LGBTQIAs and brown people and then turn around and give the Israelis all kinds of financial and military support. To the worse-than-Groypers (and, like regular Groypers, a lot of those 4chan people aren’t actually racists at all but bored trolls who get their jollies by radicalizing the gullible), that’s off-brand.
I saw this day coming when I first started researching 4chan culture in 2017 for the book. MAGA has always been its own biggest problem. Now that it’s in charge of every branch of government, it has decisions to make.
The good news is that MAGA is a minority group, and at this point there’s nowhere for them to go but down. Most of us citizens are (mostly) tolerant people who want “a very very very fine house, with two cats in the yard.” Unfortunately we don’t have any political representation whatsoever. All things die, though, and the members of America’s duopoly all appear to want the system to collapse as much as the rest of us. As a registered “doomer,” I’m taking great pleasure in watching all their bullshit burn.
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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, is out now. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in those books, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m spending a lot more time there now), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).
