last night as i was trying to wind down for bed i had a unified theory of what the fuck just happened, and i wrote it down, and filed it under "well, i can't talk about this on main without sounding insane until and unless the perp gets caught and is provably a groyper" anyways, great news! (1/X) the bitch of it for them is charlie kirk WAS a generational talent who was going to become president someday. he was genuinely extremely fucking good at his job and he's almost certainly the reason Trump won reëlection one of the big things that happened in the background that a lot of people didn't see was the Groyper Wars - Fuentes and Kirk were beefing, Fuentes controls a bunch of insane white twinks who were intimidating everyone at conservative events it was a whole thing I can't adequately summarise, but Kirk was the one who, at least for a while, had managed to defuse it - this is why he suddenly tacked hard to the right on immigration and racism, that was calculated. by kneeling to the groypers, Kirk was - successfully - defusing the tension in the Hitlerjugend, conceding ALL the ground on racism and immigration and, like, channer shit, basically, in exchange for being able to position himself as the intellectual heir to Trumpism. that was his play here. keep up the gadfly act until he could be, like, Vance's chief of staff or something, G-d only knows, but the point is, he was the man who could unite Turning Point and the groypers by knowing what to concede to Fuentes et al. and how to do so recently, Kirk kept calling for the release of the Epstein Files, even after Trump called him and asked him to stop, and Fuentes has been FURIOUS about it, and won't-someone-rid-me-of-this-meddlesome-priest about it: stochastic terrorism wasn't a "if", at this point, it was a "when". Kirk thought, i am SURE of it, that if HE was able to get out in front of the Epstein files - he KNEW what was in them, obviously. He knew that there's SOMETHING there that's genuinely, actually, catastrophically explosive He wanted the fucking positionality of being the one within the conservative Trumpist movement to expiate its own sins by throwing the old dying man under the bus and claiming the mantle as the one who Purified The Movement the promised prince of QAnon, the Guy Who Exposed The Pedophiles, it would not be the Democrats, it would be Charlie Kirk, and he'd be able to use it to win the Groyper Wars forever and marginalise them for good. the next few seasons of the show were supposed to be about him, and everyone knew it, and then nick fuentes, that poor, stupid, loyal twink, fucking beefed it for all of them by killing him. or engaging in stochastic terrorism such that he was killed by one of his followers. the world may never know and nobody's going to be able to grab the ring - CERTAINLY not Fuentes - because you need to be able to code-switch between Christian Pastor and also Charm The Grandmas and ALSO gutter-racist antisemite Branch Hitlerian Dialect. and nobody is going to be able to do that like he could. some people have said "oh the billionaires will just decant another one" or install Tim Pool or Hanania or something like that but, I need you to believe me when I say that that is *not how this works*, and Turning Point was the work of decades, and Charlie Kirk was load-bearing for it. coda, more than a correction: bsky.app
a solid point here and half of what i feel *least* confident on (the other half is that i think Fuentes *himself* is less personally relevant than when i wrote the thread - but the Groyper War was still between Kirk and Fuentes, and that's *still* the salient fault-line to be examining.)