FYI: There are turf wars going on within the alt-right universe where Charlie Kirk lived.
Hordes of young men center their lives around being online, belonging to one alt-right group or other, keeping up w/the memes and getting clout by trolling.
Kirk was a hateful troll helping feed young men into the far-right echo chamber via Turning Point USA.
The Groyper Army, under Nick Fuentes, are an even more hate filled alt-right online group of agitators. They and their leader Fuentes had a war going against Charlie Kirk for being too soft.
In 2019, Fuentes & his trolls began their Groyper War of systematically showing up to harass Charlie Kirk when he appeared speaking at public events. Groypers are terminally online, think their endless memes are clever and spread their poison transnationally.
For the record, Laura Loomer was a Groyper.
Groypers:
For much of the past half decade, a young, tech-savvy group that emerged from the American white nationalist movement called the “Groypers” or “Groyper Army” has worked to infiltrate and/or undermine right-wing movements they feel aren’t extreme enough. The Groypers made their bones on platforms filled with hate content, like 4chan, and are led by white nationalist and Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes and his organization America First. They believe that the mainstream conservative movement is just as responsible as the left for destroying white America, and that Groypers are the true future of the conservative movement.
Groypers organize over the web to harass and “troll” people and to normalize white supremacist ideas among the broader American right-wing (see GPAHE’s reporting on the Groypers’ use of gaming here). Groypers are more extreme than the MAGA movement they seek to infiltrate and dominate, given their hardcore antisemitism and white nationalist views. The symbol that they use is a derivation of the Pepe the Frog meme called the “Groyper” that became popular among white nationalists starting around 2015.
globalextremism.org/...
Groyper War
In the fall of 2019, Kirk launched a college speaking tour with Turning Point USA titled "Culture War", featuring himself and guests such as Rand Paul, Donald Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Lara Trump, and Dan Crenshaw.[3] In retaliation for the firing of St. Clair and the Politicon incident, Fuentes began organizing a social media campaign asking his followers to go to Kirk's events and ask provocative and controversial leading questions about his stances on immigration, Israel, and LGBT rights to expose Kirk as a "fake conservative". At a Culture War event hosted by Ohio State University on October 29, 11 out of 14 questions were asked by Groypers.[29] Their questions included "Can you prove that our white European ideals will be maintained if the country is no longer made up of white European descendants?" They asked Kirk's co-host Rob Smith, a gay, black Iraq War veteran, "How does anal sex help us win the culture war?"[32] Fuentes's social media campaign against Kirk became known as the "Groyper Wars".[8][24] Kirk, Smith, and others at Turning Point USA, including Benny Johnson, began calling the questioners white supremacists and antisemites.[25][33]
Another Turning Point USA event the Groypers targeted was a promotional event for Donald Trump Jr.'s book Triggered, featuring Trump, Kirk, and Guilfoyle at the University of California, Los Angeles in November 2019. Anticipating further questions from Fuentes's followers, it was announced that the event's Q&A portion would be canceled, which led to heckling and boos from the mostly pro-Trump audience.[34] The disruptions forced the event, originally scheduled to last two hours, to end after 30 minutes.[35][36][11][37]
In August 2024, Fuentes began a "digital war" against Trump's presidential campaign, which he dubbed "Groyper War 2", referencing his followers' activities in 2019.[40] In response to Trump's poor polling, Fuentes began calling on his followers to "bring the energy with memes, edits, replies, and trolls" aimed at pressuring Trump's campaign to adopt further-right positions on race and immigration, as well as urging Trump to fire his campaign advisors Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.[41] In addition to directing his followers to make their demands trend on X (formerly Twitter) and Truth Social, Fuentes threatened to "escalate pressure in the real world", urging followers to withhold their votes and protest Trump rallies in battleground states.[40]
Shortly after initiating this effort, Fuentes took credit for Trump's rehiring of Corey Lewandowski as a senior campaign advisor. An anonymous source cited by The Washington Post claimed that Fuentes was making it "far more difficult for Trump" to make changes to his campaign "if it looks like he's responding to the groypers".[40]
A senior researcher for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue speculated that Fuentes's "crude" attempts at platform manipulation could be a blueprint for more sophisticated actors, such as hostile states, to engage in foreign election interference due to the lack of enforcement actions taken by Twitter and Truth Social in response to Fuentes's brief influence campaign.[42][43]
