The Groyper Wars

Hi,

“Is that a New Zealand accent I hear mate?” said the man in his mid-50s, excitement in his voice. I stopped and talked, because that’s what you do when you bump into another New Zealander. His Kiwi accent blurred with an American one - he’d been here much longer than me - and I asked him how he was finding it here in the US.

He said he couldn’t complain, especially with his “beautiful wife” at home. I told him I thought this week was pretty awful, and he said, “Oh with Charlie Kirk?” and something shifted in his eyes and then he said, “He had some profound ideas”, before telling me the media was misrepresenting what Kirk had to say.

I told him that Kirk was a vile racist who was a horrific human being, and ended the conversation. I couldn’t be fucked. As I walked away it struck me how racism, sexism, and transphobia is perfectly fine with so many people around me and of course that’s how we got here.

Later that day, I passed three flags at half-mast out of respect for Kirk: The American flag, the Californian Flag, and the most American flag of them all: McDonalds.

Don’t worry -Webworm is not turning into a Charlie Kirk newsletter. But I think this whole thing is important because it says so much about where the US - and the world, online and off - is at. I’ve read and re-read the comments you left last week and I think you probably agree.

“I saw the video about two minutes after it happened and it felt like the floor dropped out from under me. One of those 'historic moments'. Then came the fear. The fear of how the right are going to retaliate, the fear for all my friends and family that live in the US, especially the people of colour and queer ones.

I keep seeing people talking about how there wasn't this 'oh fuck, this is going to be bad' reaction when those democrat politicians were assassinated, and seemingly annoyed that the reaction of fear is bigger with Kirk's death, but it boggles my mind that they can't see what the difference is - it feels like the right wing have been waiting for an excuse. This feels like that excuse. The fuse lit on a powder keg.

Thinking of all of you over there right now, and desperately hoping you're all able to stay safe.”

Everywhere, fingers are being pointed at the why of it all, and largely they’re being pointed in the wrong direction, the motives and political affiliations largely a mystery to the mass media.

In all of this, my mind turned back to a really early Webworm piece from 2020. It was an interview with the makers of my favourite doc that year, Feels Good Man. 

Feels Good Man was about the dark depths of internet culture; the extreme trolls that grew out of an online forum. It was utterly terrifying then, but I think it helps explain what’s going on now more than ever.

To the point where I think it helps explain Charlie Kirk, and his killer.

And so I wanted to get Feels Good Man filmmaker Giorgio Angelini back again for Webworm. Because I needed him to explain what a Groyper is.

David.

Subterranean Groyper Blues

by Giorgio Angelini 

It shouldn’t be difficult to both denounce the abhorrent violence that resulted in the death of Charlie Kirk while also being clear-eyed about what he represented and what the nature of his murder reveals about our society. None of this requires mystical interpretations of the thoughts of a deceased man. One only has to listen to the things he did and said. Understanding why this happened should be obvious, too. And yet, here we are. Influential people in both the media and government who should know better feel some servile compulsion to both sanitize Kirk’s supposed contribution to society, while failing to interrogate the underlying cause of his death.  

That is: shit sucks. The material conditions of most Americans are very bad. But for a growing number of disillusioned, young, white men - they see a world that was once built entirely for their own benefit, which is now slightly more complex. Suddenly they find themselves having to compete for success against women, immigrants, non-heteros, and people of color. And rather than pulling themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps and competing in the marketplace of ideas like big boys, they’ve turned to an intoxicating brand of online nihilism in order to cope. 

Their goals are simple. Sew chaos. Burn it to the ground by any means necessary. And out of the smoldering wreckage, a fantastical white ethnostate can thrive. Some call this “accelerationism.” Others call it, “doing it for the lolz.” All of it represents a cynical rot eroding the fragile foundations of our democracy. A general cynicism that extends not just across the darkest corners of the internet, but through a political and media apparatus too preoccupied with their own thirst for power to recognize any of it. 

I made a film in 2020 called Feels Good Man which chronicled the struggles of artist Matt Furie after alt-right trolls co-opted his work, Pepe the Frog, for sinister uses. The film is both a narrative about artistic agency in the digital age and a sobering explainer on how the right wing radicalization pipeline operates online, and the weird role Pepe plays in all of it.

Sadly, the film’s subject matter has only become more relevant since its release. From the moment I learned of Kirk’s death, I had near certainty that Pepe was involved. Or rather, his bastardized, bloated mutation, “Groyper.” A mascot for this supposed movement, he’s meant to represent the wallowing and inescapable bleakness felt by a group of predominantly white, disaffected young men. 

I’m embarrassed to know anything about it, but all the same, the seriousness of this story is rivaled only by its dizzying stupidity. And that’s kind of the point. This style of memeified radicalization is intended to make you feel insane, to question your own reality.

Everything’s a joke. Until it’s not. Flood the internet with a never-ending cascade of increasingly depraved garbage until it becomes normalised. 

Though we don’t know the motives of Kirk’s killer for certain yet, based on what we do know — the absurdist memes left on shell casings, the limited view into the killer’s online life — Kirk’s murderer was almost certainly a Groyper. The community itself believes it to be the case, anyway.  

What’s for certain is that if you’re looking to find a coherent political ideology from this killer, good luck. As someone who has spent far too much time on 4chan boards, having interviewed numerous people deeply invested in this culture, there is no real belief system. At least not one that neatly falls into a media-ready left wing vs right wing framing.

The only consistent value is the cruelty itself: does the troll cause a tremendous amount of social anguish and negative attention? Does it have the potential to accelerate the cause of a white ethnostate? And, perhaps most importantly, is it ‘funny’ to the in-group. 

How Kirk and Groypers Were Birthed Of The Same Cesspool

As bleak as it may sound, it’s critical to understand that this is the very same delusional social currency in which Charlie Kirk built his audience. He was competing for the same lost souls as his killer.

He mined from the same cesspool of online shit that Groypers stewed in. He just sanitized the memes for polite society and built a popular movement from it. While this may sound like an extreme comparison to make of someone who has just been brutally murdered, observable reality would seem to suggest that the ultimate ambitions of Kirk and his killer were nearly identical. They both wanted the creation of a white ethnostate. The only notable difference was the acceptable level of trolling by which to achieve it. 

For Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, it was an entirely defensible troll to collect a massive database of supposed Marxist professors at colleges across the country, hype up his audience with memes and propaganda, and sic them on these unsuspecting academics. Those victims - including a colleague of mine, Nathan Connolly - have been on the receiving end of death threats from innumerable Kirk acolytes for the better part of a decade now.

Kirk was also a key figure in the instigation of the January 6th riots, the most violent assault on US democracy since the Civil War. In the weeks leading up to the assault, Kirk gleefully proliferated the conspiracy that Trump won the 2020 election with total disregard for the truth.

Turning Point USA not only bussed crowds of predominantly young, white men to the capital, but they paid for speakers at the Stop the Steal rally, hyping up the crowd before the riots began. All of it a delightful troll. Defensible, so long as it resulted in maximal chaos and the potential furtherance of that white ethnostate.

The Groyper Wars

Despite both being trolling operations with shared general ambitions, Groypers and Turning Point USA were often in direct conflict with one another. While most Groypers choose to live their lives in online anonymity, their self-appointed leader, Nick Fuentes, is no stranger to the public. Having met with Donald Trump on several occasions, Fuentes and Kirk were enemies in a battle over influence. Fuentes loathed Kirk’s sanitized, “dapper” professional racist schtick. But more directly, he felt Kirk was too moderate (if you can imagine that). 

Beginning in 2019, Fuentes embarked on his own troll campaign against Kirk - sending his disciples to infiltrate Turning Point events across the country. He forced Kirk to debate provocative questions like, “Can you prove that our white European ideals will be maintained if the country is no longer made up of white European descendants?” Or “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” (extended to a gay, Black Iraq War veteran who was co-hosting an event with Kirk).

This would mark a sustained troll campaign against Kirk referred to as “The Groyper Wars.” The ambition of this project was both to embarrass Kirk, but also to pressure him into moving further and further to the right. And just as it operates on online forums - where kids every day enter the proverbial chat as innocent darlings and come out the other end Nazis (or Groypers) - that’s precisely what happened. To Fuentes’ delight, Kirk’s positions would soon become nearly indistinguishable from his own. Like a parasite, Fuentes successfully took over the host. 

Whether this was a staged WWE style rivalry built for spectacle or an authentic hatred between racists, we will never know. Charlie Kirk is dead and Nick Fuentes has never uttered an authentic word in his life. But it sort of doesn’t matter, really. The medium was the message. And that medium was trolling. And in the troll, Fuentes created an anonymous, uncontrollable legion of die-hard Kirk haters, radicalizing themselves on a never ending cascade of internet slop.

Accelerationism

Given this unfortunate reality, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to conclude that Kirk’s own assassination was a troll, too: The final salvo of the Groyper Wars and a means by which to cause sufficient chaos as to accelerate a fully fledged race war. If you think that sounds too cynical on my part, I invite you to watch Stephen Miller’s response to Kirk’s killing on Friday.

Whether he’s in on the troll or his emotions have been authentically whipped into action by the killing of his supposed friend, the end result is all the same. Accelerationism. 

While “respectable” society has rushed to lionize Charlie Kirk’s life in the days following this grotesque act, the Trump administration has chosen to honor his rotten legacy by ordering flags be flown at half-mast. The reason is because the entirety of the Trump administration are a group of trolls themselves. From Stephen Miller to JD Vance, to the DOGE boys and many Republican congressional staffers - they are all steeped in the language and mechanics of trolling. 

The lowering of the flags on federal grounds is nothing more than that: a troll. It’s intended to offend and terrify the shared political enemies of both Kirk and the administration. To convince those perceived political enemies that they are not welcome here. And I’m sure, privately, Trump and his cronies find the psychic anguish funny too. A perfect troll. 

Knowing all this, the moment I found most depressing last week was the press conference held by Utah Governor Spencer Cox to announce the arrest of Kirk’s murder. I imagine that should this nation eventually fall to the forces of white nationalism, the Governor’s words at this press conference will serve as the perfect quote for the history book on America’s demise. 

A man supposedly committed to ending our fractured society through empathy and understanding, Governor Cox was noticeably tortured over the unfortunate discovery that Kirk’s killer was, in fact, a white guy. And not just any white guy, but a white guy from Utah from a conservative, Christian, law enforcement family. 

“For 33 hours, I was … I was praying that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us. That somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country … Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for. Just because I thought it would make it easier on us if we could just say ‘Hey, we don’t do that here.’”

So sad that Governor Cox could not pin this awful event on an immigrant or a brown person or a liberal. But here’s the thing… we actually do do that here in the US. We’re actually uniquely good at doing that here versus the rest of the world. A full 50% of all the guns in the world are owned by 3% of Americans. And 75% of all domestic terrorism is carried out by white men espousing far right ideology often using guns from arsenals they’ve collected. So as one of Kirk’s contemporaries once said, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” 

Total Destruction 

This is a society plagued by cynicism. It’s a society that has been deprived of moral clarity in service of wealth and power and influence above all else. And in the toxic fog, otherwise “polite” people like Gov. Cox struggle to find the courage to admit the obvious truth before them. Because to do so would be to admit to themselves that they’ve personally benefited from the chaos, from the suffering, and from the lies. 

So here’s the truth, should Gov. Cox come across this post. 

This country has been co-opted by white supremacists trolls who have inflicted a mental disease across the country. Like any disease, it doesn’t distinguish between avowed racists or polite society. The sickness manifests one way or another. And Charlie Kirk was a critical part of this contagion event. He played with incendiary rhetoric, making more enemies than friends. But all of it was defensible because it got him attention. And the attention brought him power. Until that power was suddenly extinguished by someone whose ideology and vision for the country is likely indistinguishable from Kirk’s own.

If you’re trying to make sense of any of this, stop. None of it does. And herein lies the problem. Chaos is not a force for building positive change. It only begets more chaos. More carnage. More suffering. There is a famous line from an Abraham Lincoln speech that often gets used these days:

“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

It might surprise people to know that Lincoln did not give this speech in the months or years leading up to the Civil War; but rather in 1838, a full 23 years before the first shots were fired on Ft. Sumter. He was only 28, but he understood something fundamental about the trajectory of the country. 

Lincoln gave this speech to a group in Springfield, Missouri in response to the burning to death of a Black man in St. Louis by a white mob who escaped all accountability for their crime. It’s a powerful quote because it efficiently captures an emotional sentiment that feels so familiar right now. But it’s still ambiguous. Less referenced are the sentences that follow, which, to me, offer more striking moral clarity for this moment and a lesson I hope all of us heed (including Governor Cox):

“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny.”

Whether the killer does, in fact, turn out to be a Groyper or an Antifa radical, it kind of doesn’t matter. 

Because the effect is all the same. Chaos begets more chaos. Republicans will infer whatever they want from this moment - which they did before a single piece of evidence was ever recovered - with the same general mission. Total destruction. 

So the question I have for those who claim to be in support of a free society: Do we allow ourselves to live as prisoners to this collective delusion? Or will we stop insulting our own intelligence and recognize the truth? 

-Giorgio Angelini

David here again. See you in the comments. 

If you liked what Giorgio had to say, check out the short video essay he made for Webworm back in January. And watch some of his documentaries: The Antisocial Network, Feels Good Man, and Owned: A Tale of Two Americas.

It’s surreal sometimes how things on Webworm feel like they keep coming back around. Pepe was a thing in 2020, and here we are in 2025 with Groypers.

And as Giorgio was talking about the burning of a Black man in St Louis, Missouri, I remembered my time in Missouri last year covering the execution of a black man in St Louis. Lynchings and executions – same thing.

I'm not sure how - but at some point I hope we do collectively stop insulting our own intelligence and recognize the truth. We've got to snap out of this shit somehow.

David.