The Kills Are Coming From Within The Cult

I didn’t want Charlie Kirk dead, I wanted him following the traditional demagogue’s career arc of Father Coughlin, George Putnam, Wally George, Morton Downey Jr, and Rush Limbaugh:  Rapid rise to fame then increasing irrelevance leading to humiliation and scandal, capped by utter postmortem obscurity to all but the best read history buffs. 
As noted elsewhere, in my heart of hearts I am a genuinely sadistic bastard. 
But an assassin’s bullet has sped up the process, sidestepping many stages, so now all that’s left is whether anyone will remember -- much less care to -- who he was after January 1, 2026. 
For all the hoopla and pious performance mourning over him now, Charlie will be lucky to be an answer on a Trivial Pursuit — Politics game after all is said and done.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re in for a rough ride, folks, but Charlie matters no more than Horst Wessel did.  An icon to be exploited post-mortem, a non-entity beyond that.
What’s of particular note today is the apparent background and mindset of his alleged killer. 
If news reports are reliable, he’s part of a loosely affiliated group that call themselves Groypers.  Arch fascist Nick Fuentes is their chief cheerleader (the group is so amorphous one can hardly say it has a brain, just a alimentary canal with one orifice serving both functions). They are linked by edgelord attitudes, deliberately subverting pop culture to both turn it against itself while offering them plausible deniability. 
It should come as no surprise they are predominantly (1) angry (2) young (3) white (4) culturally Christian (6) males. 
“Culturally Christian” includes Groypers coming from families who professed the faith but they themselves have since abandoned religion.  I know MAGA right now wants to make him a trans-ally, but that’s ringing about as true as…well, anything that falls out of the drooping left side of Trump’s mouth.

If he was bright enough to try to deflect attention away from himself by planting Groyper memes as evidence, he was bright enough to have gotten away with the crime a lot longer.  He’s not stupid but he’s no Michael Corleone.
The Venn diagram of Groypers and incels is damn near a circle.  As we’ll see, there are numerous reasons for that, but a major one is that both moralistic Christianity and “alpha male” influencers encourage attitudes and behavior that pretty much make Groypers / incels honorary Darwin Awardees. 

Nick Fuentes has long touted that having sexual relations of any kind -- even with a female -- is “gay.”

“That’s why celibacy is the straight thing because who are the celibates?” Fuentes says. “Monks, priests, soldiers, ok? Great scientists, philosophers, geniuses.”

This will come as one helluva surprise to anyone who knows anything about the Catholic Church (not to single them out; protestants are just as bad) or spent one hour in a military barracks.

Great scientists, philosophers, and geniuses are not known for celibacy; no, no, quite the opposite.  Despite being confined to a life-support wheelchair and needing a computer to communicate, Stephen Hawking still banging away at swinger parties.

The purpose of Groyper / alpha male / religious patriarchy misinformation is to create more angry, conflicted men who will rally around extremists hoping to direct them into stochastic acts, being they annoying pranks aimed at disrupting civilized discourse and full on acts of terror.

The worthless incel who killed six people in Isla Vista in 2014 and injured fourteen was rage-fueled by his frustration at finding a girlfriend -- this despite coming from a family of privilege and having money and a fancy car, three things that 95% of the rest of the males in his age cohort would love to have because they could successfully use them to attract favorable attention to themselves (being a nice guy on top of all that is the key, the Isla Vista guy turned out to be an ineducable creep).
The irony is that Groypers are both perpetrators and victims of their own easily exploitable mindset, effortlessly sucked into a simultaneous sense of over-preening entitlement coupled with wholly imaginary persecution.  Following the advice and teachings of this sub-culture’s influencers, they willing embrace behaviors that anyone with a shred of common sense would recognize as counterproductive to establishing relationships of any kind.

Females who buy into the Groyper / alpha male / religious patriarchy are not the resilient sort of personalities needed to build a solid foundation for a relationship and this only leads to more anger / frustration / sense of betrayal which keeps the cycle going for both sexes (and God have pity on any children unlucky enough to be born into such a relationship). 

Ironically, when you read Kirk’s Wikipedia page, you see he wasn’t all that different from the man accused of shooting him (yeah, I said man; if I was considered a grown ass adult at age 18 who could be drafted and held accountable for all my actions, he can, too).

[Charlie Kirk] described a period of political awakening in middle school, during which he read books by economist Milton Friedman and became more attracted to Republican Party principles.

In 2010, during his junior year at Wheeling High School, Kirk volunteered for the successful U.S. Senate campaign of Illinois Republican Mark Kirk (no relation). Also during his junior year, he began listening to The Rush Limbaugh Show, a prominent conservative talk radio broadcast. In his senior year, he initiated a boycott of cookies at the school's cafeteria to reverse a price increase. He also wrote an essay for Breitbart News alleging liberal bias in high-school textbooks; it led to his first media appearance on Fox Business at age 17. He applied to the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, but was rejected in 2012. He was accepted to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, but chose to enroll at Harper College near Chicago. He dropped out after one semester. In 2015, Kirk took online classes at King's College in New York City. [from Wikipedia]

Sounds awfully similar to his accused killer.  Rootless, unable to focus, looking everywhere for quick and easy answers.  He lucked out by getting involved with rightwing media instead of gaming platforms.

The same day Kirk was killed, a 16 year old who was also part of the amorphous sub-culture that includes Groypers and incels shot up his high school, injuring two students before taking his own life.

Other crimes around the country involving teens and young adults, but particularly young white males, also show exposure to if not full on connection with this sub-culture.

You don’t hear about such crimes unless you go looking for them because usually they involve stupid, petty motives:  Killing a parent for not giving them everything they want, or annihilating a girlfriend’s family because they question the relationship (apparently with damn good reasons).

The question I think needs answers -- which I concede we are unlikely to get with a bootlicking incompetent like Kash Patel heading the FBI -- is how much exposure to this sub-culture did Thomas Matthews Crooks have before he took a shot at Trump?

I know many people suspect his attempt was a setup by Trump or someone near him.  While I agree that possibility can’t be taken off the table, I don’t think it likely, nor do I think it impossible that Crooks may have been shooting around Trump but not at him in hopes of bolstering his campaign with an assassination attempt, hoping to end up like John Hinckley, a few comfortable years in an insane asylum then released when his target dies of old age.

One thing for certain is this:  With MAGA appointees, the odds of the facts coming out any time soon diminish dramatically.

I hope we don’t have a wave of political assassinations on the scope and scale of the 1960s.  Even excluding the murders of rank and file civil rights workers, the number of prominent politicians and civic leaders who got shot was staggering.

Even today we see a huge number of violent but so far relatively non-lethal (by incompetence, not design) attacks on public figures by right wing extremists.

© Buzz Dixon