Most People Know Nothing About Groypers, And That's A Problem
So let's talk about Groypers!
Over the weekend, everyone wanted to know “What is a Groyper?” — largely due to online speculation that Tyler Robinson, who allegedly shot and killed Charlie Kirk, just might be one himself.
On the one hand, given how much we’ve written about the Groypers and their leader, Nick Fuentes, it’s a little depressing to see that so many people don’t know anything about them. We’re trying so hard. On the other, I’m almost a little relieved, in a way. I have been frustrated for years to see how the Right gets away with pretending that they are the “normal” ones, while we’re always “going too far.” It makes a little more sense when you find out that a whole lot of people may not know how batshit they truly are.
We don’t know yet if Tyler Robinson was, in fact, a Groyper. I can tell you that it was my first instinct, but we’re not Republicans here, so we do facts, not instincts or “vibes.” What I will say is that whether he was or not, the very fact that people are now looking into these young men and what they believe is really going to rain on the parade of the Republicans and right-wing pundits who have been so excited to use Kirk’s death as an opportunity to fearmonger about the Left.
If they are being opportunists, we must be as well. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but this is a very serious and scary situation we’ve got here. There are people talking about how they want to round up all of the trans people and put them in camps. It is not a time to “not politicize things.”
Who Are They?
The quick explanation is that they are followers of Nick Fuentes. The long explanation is that they are young, mostly white, mostly Catholic (primarily “traditional” Latin mass Catholics and anti-Vatican II sedevacantists) men who have been brain-poisoned by the internet and have turned to this fucking twerp to tell them what they want to hear. What is it that they want to hear? That women are evil and stupid, and they don’t have to feel bad about the historical oppression of minorities, because all of those people were/are actually bad and therefore deserving of said oppression.
Why Do People Think Robinson Was A Groyper?
Well, the Groyper War on Kirk would be a big one, but also because the words engraved on Robinson’s bullets are known to be Groyper memes, or at least ones that they reference a lot.
I will say that this was my personal first instinct, although I think it’s equally possible that he was involved in the "nihilistic violent extremism" online communities that have inspired so many tragedies lately, including the recent shooting in Minneapolis.
Why Are They Called Groypers?
Memes of an overweight Pepe the Frog are called Groypers, and have been associated with the extremely online far right for a decade now.
In 2019, after Turning Point USA disavowed contributor Ashley St. Clair for palling around with Fuentes and other white nationalists, Fuentes’s superfans started following Charlie Kirk around at his various college speaking engagements, aggressively questioning him about why he was not as far right as they were, why he hated illegal migration but was okay with legal migration, why he was okay with gay conservatives like Dave Rubin, etc., and then posting these confrontations online. This was called “The Groyper War” and Fuentes’s followers started being called and calling themselves Groypers.
What Is It That They Believe?
I always believe it’s best to let people speak for themselves, so here is Nick Fuentes explaining what he believes:
They're always coming up with, “No, it's not the Jews. No, it's not women. No, it's not Blacks. It's actually really complicated.” No, it fucking isn't at all. Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise, it's that simple. It's literally that simple. […]
We need white men in charge of everything again. That's it. Like, it's that simple. You sort of start to get based and you kind of realize what's up, and you have this inkling in your head, you're like, man, we need white men in charge of everything. And then people kinda get convinced like, “No, it's like, it's about ideology. We need like right-wing patriots that love the free market,” or like, “No, we need like trad Christians.” It's like, no dude, we need white men running everything. OK? White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies. They just need to run everything. That's a pretty good heuristic.
This is what they mean, by the way, when they say they or someone else is “based.”
Fuentes and his followers, importantly, are celibate. Fuentes has said that having sex with women is “gay,” and he reportedly had a falling out with his pal, former America First treasurer Jaden McNeil, after McNeil moved out of Fuentes’s basement and got a girlfriend, which was not allowed.
The thing you’re going to hear in a lot of these explainers is that they are steeped in irony. Not irony like a 2000s hipster with a handlebar mustache, irony like “Saying the extremely racist, sexist, anti-semitic, homophobic, transphobic, cruel things that they actually do believe, but in a way that sounds like they could just be trolling and trying to get a rise out of people, which allows for some plausible deniability.” Young men will start listening to Fuentes and others, often thinking that they are just being hyperbolic for the purposes of triggering the libs, and end up getting radicalized and believing all of those things in all sincerity.
Let’s Get A Little Deeper, Shall We?
While we don’t know for a fact that Robinson was a follower of Fuentes, it’s pretty clear that this movement is ruining lives, both inside and outside the group.
We talk about the “male loneliness epidemic,” and a lot of that is due to the fact that these views make men repulsive to others, especially to women, which then reinforces their belief that women and those outside of their group are evil.
One of the biggest things that made me suspect that Robinson was, if not a Groyper, certainly not a “radical leftist,” is the mere fact that we are not seeing anything at all from anyone who really knew him or had heard him talking about specific issues or anything like that. The most we’ve gotten is a quick video from a former classmate who says he didn’t know him well but just knew he was “a Reddit kid.” One of the things that does draw people leftward is simply interacting with different kinds of people on a regular basis. That’s the real “leftist indoctrination” that goes on in colleges and in major metropolitan areas. It’s a whole lot easier to make weird judgments about women or Black people or Jewish people if you are largely isolated and the only people you ever really engage with are other angry white young men on the internet.
Frankly, if he had been a big ol’ leftist, you’d have 50 people coming forward being like “Oh yeah, we knew everything this kid believed.”
Even If Robinson Wasn’t A Groyper, It’s Good That We’re Talking About Them!
Republicans, from the president on down, have been desperate to use Kirk’s murder as a way to destroy the Left, to connect us to violence, to blame the fact that we criticized him for saying horrible things for the fact that he was murdered. This was proving to be very easy for them, since, as I mentioned before, people only talk about what’s wrong with the Left lately.
When I write about these things, I hear back from a lot of people who say “I’m sorry Robyn, but I just can’t read about this. I don’t want to know who Nick Fuentes is or what he believes! I don’t want to know that there are people like this in the world!”
I get that — sort of. I’ve always been the kind of person who needs to know what terrible people believe and why, but I understand that everyone isn’t. That being said, to paraphrase my favorite Princess Diana sweater, that is a luxury we cannot afford right now. The propaganda against us has been so strong that there was almost no mainstream pushback at all last week when Republicans were calling for our heads before all of the facts were in. That needs to change.
The more (grown, adult, less ignorant) people start looking into online factions like the Groypers, the harder of a time the Right will actually have painting us as extremists or even as overreacting. They will have a harder time painting themselves as victims, of making it seem like the worst and scariest thing in the world is how many genders there might be.
Weirdly enough, this is the first time I’ve had any hope at all in the last year that the tides might change sooner than later, so let’s not waste it.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Maybe I'm the weirdo, but I can go months without obsessing about other people's genitalia or rest room habits. Maybe even years.
THE LEFT MAY NOT HAVE KILLED KIRK, BUT THEY NEED TO ACCEPT MANY BELIEVE THEY DID.
And that is why support for Trump's "kill them all" policy is expected to be high.
By Ptony Chitin-Thumbmbaster, NYT