If I had my way, the United States would have been focused on dealing with THE existential threat to our species, climate change, and we’d have done that a long time ago. This is impossible, not at a political level, but epistemically. We all see the same shapes on our screens, hear the same sounds, but we come to dramatically different conclusions about the meaning of it all.
And thusly, these are the conditions within the American right at this moment.
Combatants:
Charlie Kirk, the calculating, movement building institutional force. The White House’s pipeline to younger voters.
Nick Fuentes, also a movement builder, but his entire play was chasing after Kirk since 2019 with his Groyper Army, demanding more extreme positions on everything.
The two mens’s respective networks are now locked in a death grip and it’s not at all clear what will happen. Kirk’s partisans have the institutions, the money, and the preconditions needed to turn the FBI loose on the Groypers. Fuentes has spent six years as front man for a non-kinetic insurgency with Kirk as the focus, and he is a unifying voice for radicalized young people, god help us all.
Accelerationism:
If you are here seeking to confirm your politicization bias - that is to say you’re seeking to sort things into left/right, blue/red, good/evil, you might as well just scroll away before you hurt your brain.
The Kirk supporters are likely to hold Christian themed accelerationist views - it’s the End of Days. The Fuentes supporters do not have a unifying world view, but given that they are young and male, their multifaceted accelerationist views are just as dangerous.
If this is completely new to you, start with Accelerationism’s Factions. Today Policy & Prejudice is eight and a half months old, and American society just delivered a bouncing baby kinetic insurgency. I heckin’ HATE being right.
Republican Factions:
If you want to know what’s next, figure out where Kirk and Fuentes connect to this diagram of the top level of the GOP, which was seen in Six Republican Factions, just ten days ago.
I think the top row are all Kirk, bottom left is the only Fuentes connection point, leaving the mysteries of MAHA and the Tech Right. The Broligarchs will continue their coy me-first corporate accelerationism, leaning towards the admin, but hedging their bets against the rise of a left to right populist economy movement over the next few election cycles. I think MAHA is going to follow whomever pushes the Epstein files issue. That would have been the Groypers, even before Turning Point picked Ben Shapiro as Kirk’s successor (they did NOT pick Shapiro), as lowbrow anti-Semitism is a unifying theme for them. I don’t see the two groups getting particularly cozy, the female dominated MAHA can quietly appreciate a pack of aggressive boys, doing so from a safe distance.
Conclusion:
Trump is dying. The Epstein list release created the first publicly visible schisms in the right wing coalition. Studying the fallout of Kirk’s assassination will give a much better sense of what will come when Trump expires. The general outlines are already visible. We’ll see old disputes flare up, and we’ll learn of “secret protocols” - covert alliances that already exist will become visible.
What I said in Our Oncoming Civil War has never been more pertinent.
Once the tit for tat faucet is opened even a crack … well … look at what’s left of Syria, fourteen years into their experiment with communal violence.
Here we sit, holding our breath and waiting to see what happens to Fuentes. Assuming he can avoid joining Kirk in the ranks of the martyrs in our second civil war, he’s going to get silenced by the system. His speech is vile, but not in violation of the case law lines drawn by Brandenburg v. Ohio. Be careful out there, don’t trip over any free speech absolutists who are having seizures in public places.
My policy preference would have been a peaceful maintenance of Pax Americana, with us leading a decarbonization effort. Instead we’re liable to violently carbonize our own cities while the rest of the world shrugs and sets about making other arrangements. Even if the spasm of violence is fairly short, the post-WWII world order is gone for good. We’ve proven ourselves untrustworthy to lead and that damage can never be undone.
So much for silly notions of peace …
Another way to look at it is malignant narcissists all turn on each other in the end.
We care what you think!