Republicans discover what some of us already knew — the real danger is to their right

A few hours before this Friday's presser, in which law enforcement authorities announced they had taken into custody Charlie Kirk’s killer, Meghan McCain, daughter of the late John McCain, weighed in on “the fundamental difference between the right and the left in this country.”

“It’s that the left glorifies death, particularly of adversaries, and the right does not,” she wrote on Twitter. “And it’s not something I think I really have fully faced until Charlie’s assassination. And it’s petrifying.”

I know, I know. But before you say anything more, lemme get back to this morning’s press conference. Turns out the bad guy is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. He’s white, comfortably middle class and apparently from a respectable conservative Utah family. His mom and dad are registered Republicans. (Their son is unaffiliated.) Tyler was steeped in gun culture (not surprising given that he killed Kirk with one shot at more than 175 yards). And he was, as they say, Extremely Online.

This is clear in the messages he wrote on four shell casings. They were: 1) “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?”; 2) “If you read this, you are gay lmao”; 3) “Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao”; 4) “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow, three down arrow symbols.”

The message on the first shell casing, which was fired, alludes to “an internet meme tied to animated videos and furry culture,” according to USA Today. “OwO references an emoticon, and ‘what’s this?’ denotes cuteness or curiosity. It’s frequently referenced by video game streamers.” The message on the second casing contains an online taunt. But those on the third and fourth are the most important.

“Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao” are lyrics to “the anthem of the antifascist Italian resistance during World War II,” according to USA Today. “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow, three down arrow symbols” refers “to a cooperative shooter video game called Helldivers 2,” the paper said. “The input is the code for an airstrike. It has morphed into a meme and is used to imply a devastating reaction to something that should be destroyed.”

But The Verge revealed something about that video game that is getting little or no attention. First, that it featured “Bella Ciao,” the anti-fascist Italian resistance song, and second, that it was a satire. The Verge reported that “the world of Helldivers — which evokes Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers and the subsequent movie — concerns fascism thematically” and “developer Arrowhead has characterized it as a satire where players fight for a fascist state.”

Again, with feeling – players fight for the fascist state.

During the presser, Utah Governor Spencer Cox was asked about the significance of the inscriptions on the shell castings, as they might suggest a motive. Cox said he couldn’t speak to all of them, but did say that “Hey fascist! Catch!” seems to speak for itself, adding that the implication is that Robinson’s intention was for Kirk to catch his bullet.

Cox took “Hey fascist! Catch!” out of its video-gaming context, first because he probably was not aware of it, but second, because that fits the narrative that he and others on the right want to tell – that political violence is coming solely from “the left” and that, as Meghan McCain said, anyone who has been critical of Charlie Kirk “glorifies death,” thus justifying the president’s abuses of power to stop them.

But if you put “Hey fascist! Catch!” (and the other inscriptions) in their proper context of Extremely Online culture, a different picture emerges, one where the right is so focused on alleged enemies they’re missing what’s happening among their own, and it’s here that I must beg your pardon if I’m introducing you for the first time to groypers.

In a nutshell, groypers are hardcore, unrepentant racists. They hate everyone, openly and without reservation. (They are also weird about sex and women. They overlap with “incels.”) They are decentralized and defuse, but Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist podcaster, speaks for them. Fuentes didn’t like Charlie Kirk. For instance, he thought Kirk was too soft on Israel, which is to say, he wasn’t antisemitic enough. Fuentes used to be on Team Trump but parted ways for reasons I have forgotten. Anyway, he thought Kirk was a sycophant. Kirk backed off from demanding Trump release “the Epstein files.” Meanwhile, Fuentes raged against him, calling for his party to be “hanged in the midterms.”

There are many important (and repugnant) aspects of groypers, but for our purposes here, the main one to remember is they communicate online using an array of obscure images that most people would see as meaningless, if they were not also Extremely Online. One of them is called Pepe the Frog. Basically, if you see it, it means whoever is using it is a white-power nihilist (or, at the very least, a terrible human being.) And guess what? Tyler Robinson knew how to speak groyper.

In 2018, when Robinson was 15, his mother posted a Halloween picture on Facebook in which her son is wearing a black track suit with white stripes. He’s striking a pose similar to one taken by Pepe the Frog in a well-known rendering. Robinson’s mom, Amber Jones Robinson, wrote that Tyler was dressed up like “some guy from a meme,” suggesting she had no idea what he was. (She probably didn’t know “Bella Ciao” is on the “Groyper War” playlist on Spotify either.) In this, I think Jones Robinson has something in common with the entire GOP, which is the near-total lack of awareness of just how close they are to danger.

That seems to have changed. Suddenly (as in, yesterday and today), high-profile rightwing chaos-agents are expressing an awareness of the possibility that if Charlie Kirk can get popped, so could they.

Richard Hanania, the authoritarian apologist, has discovered the virtues of gun control. “‘The Left’ did not kill Charlie Kirk,” Hanania said. “Talking like this is an attempt to silence critics of the Trump administration. No movement is responsible for crazy people. The only way you get something close to complete safety is strict gun control.”

Christopher Rufo, the “antiwoke” provocateur, was more deceitful. He said FBI Director Kash Patel (who said during today’s presser that he’d see Kirk “in Valhalla”) didn’t have “the operational expertise to investigate, infiltrate and disrupt the violent movements — of whatever ideology — that threaten the peace in the United States” (italics mine).

Rufo continued, saying the country has two choices: “enter a spiral of violence, which would be a catastrophe” or “federal law enforcement makes a credible plan to restore the civil order, initiates a campaign to disrupt domestic terror networks in all fifty states, and sets them in motion with the goal of preventing further bloodshed, all of which can and must be done in a principled, legal, nonpartisan manner.”

Rufo didn’t say “the left” didn’t kill Kirk but he didn’t say it did either. Like Hanania, law and order, rather than lawlessness and disorder, are suddenly very important to him after an apparent groyper killed Charlie Kirk. Together, they represent a notable departure from rightwing dogma, and not only from the position, articulated by Kirk, that “some gun deaths every single year” are a “rational” price to pay for having “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” It’s also a notable departure from Trump’s current trajectory.

The Republicans, especially at the state level, are not prepared to do anything about the actual means of achieving political violence, which is to say, about guns. (Utah Governor Spencer Cox had nothing to say about the fact that it’s easy to buy and legal to openly carry long guns on Utah’s college campuses. Trump, meanwhile, seems to believe political violence doesn’t count if it’s against Democrats). The party will instead follow the president’s lead in criminalizing political speech.

Hanania and Rufo seem to be the canaries in the coal mine. While Trump and the Republicans are busy telling their story – “that the left glorifies death, particularly of adversaries, and the right does not,” according to Meghan McCain – they are not seeing the actual right-on-right white-on-white danger to their lives. And while the attempted assassination of Trump should have been their first sign of trouble, it wasn’t. It took Charlie Kirk getting popped to see that.