No Avoiding It: Post-Kirk, We Have to Learn About the Groyper Wars

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 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.”