It turns out that Charlie Kirk was the glue holding MAGA together.
Almost five months after the assassination of the 31-year-old activist, warfare has erupted on the right, with establishment conservatives from Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and the writers at National Review fretting about conspiracy theory-minded antisemites in their ranks.
Kirk’s importance was never a secret to those who study the right. Turning Point USA, which he co-founded in 2012, is arguably the most important right-wing student organization since Young Americans for Freedom in the 1960s. After his death, many political commentators compared Kirk to William F. Buckley Jr., who organized YAF in 1960 and became, of course, a lynchpin of the postwar right. Buckley is credited with pushing disreputable elements, especially antisemites, out of the conservative coalition. (Whether or not this is true remains hotly contested.) Kirk performed a similar exorcism: He froze out rivals like Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old basement streamer whose antisemitism was too explicit for MAGA. Still, like Buckley, Kirk indulged racist currents in the movement. His last words were a swipe at Black criminality, a capstone to a career where he claimed that the Democratic Party “love[s] it when America becomes less white,” that the “great replacement strategy … is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different,” and that in American cities “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people.”
Kirk’s foray into more explicit racism in his last months may have been a strategy to sap momentum from Fuentes and his “Groypers,” as Fuentes’s band of fascist followers has dubbed itself. Fuentes is, in many ways, Kirk’s dark shadow. Kirk built TPUSA into a behemoth through traditional conservative politics: He got wealthy donors to write big checks. Fuentes, by contrast, gradually built an online audience, relying on small donors and subscribers, and now has millions of viewers. Unlike Kirk, Fuentes is antagonistic to mainstream conservatism. His Groyper army came to prominence by disrupting conservative events (including Kirk’s public appearances). Despite dining with the president at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, Fuentes is not a Trump fan. He regularly denounces the 47th president as a failure and beholden to Israel. And, of course, Fuentes—who attended both the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the January 6, 2021, insurrection—has called for political violence. Little wonder that following Kirk’s assassination, there was widespread speculation on social media that a Groyper was responsible.
Fuentes broke the cordon sanitaire in November, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. After being cashiered from Fox News, Carlson has retained his influence on the right, and the shared popularity of Fuentes and Carlson reveals genuine enthusiasm for unapologetic racism and antisemitism among many ordinary Republicans. After a trip to Washington, D.C., the Orthodox Christian writer Rod Dreher, who now lives in Hungary under Viktor Orbán’s postliberal regime, estimated that 30 to 40 percent of young GOP staffers in Washington are followers of Fuentes. According to a Manhattan Institute poll of current Republicans under 50, “a notable minority report that they themselves openly express racist (31 percent) or antisemitic (25 percent) views.” The precise figure is beside the point: Groypers can be found in practically every conservative institution. Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation chief whose 2021 installation signaled MAGA’s takeover of the GOP establishment, faced a donor revolt after defending Carlson’s decision to platform Fuentes. Although Roberts walked back his initial statements, he has not recanted them. Were he to do so, he would face a staff revolt at Heritage from Fuentes sympathizers. Roberts has already faced one staff insurrection this winter, as a dozen staffers in Heritage’s legal and economic departments resigned over his support for Carlson. Tellingly, most of the departees are in their 50s and 60s.
JD Vance, whom Fuentes frequently attacks, has remained silent amid the controversy. Perhaps this is because, as the writer John Ganz has pointed out, the vice president is functionally “Groyper adjacent” in his politics. Or it could be because Vance’s future depends on this rapidly growing faction on the right. Although the veep condemned Fuentes for insulting his Indian-American wife, at a December Turning Point USA appearance, he also condemned introducing “purity tests” on the right.
Kirk’s role was not to invent MAGA’s ideas but to manage its contradictions and to serve as a broker between donors and street politics, between institutional conservatism and its increasingly radical base. His death exposed how fragile that arrangement always was. And while the battle for the right has devoured much of the news cycle, there is a point that has eluded most of the pundits. For one, the past decade has seen the development of a distinctive MAGA universe—a set of institutions and networks—that are worth fighting over. These range from MAGAfied legacy institutions like the Heritage Foundation, to the grassroots network of TPUSA, to the accelerator-inflected networking groups like American Moment. This is a new development. In 2015, MAGA was the slogan of a Trump campaign that was initially dismissed as a joke. It lacked Republican institutional backing. That emphatically is no longer the case. For another, the MAGA Right, a distinctive political movement, has an increasingly ambiguous relationship with Trump. (Consider the Marjorie Taylor Greene breakup, Candace Owens using her chart-topping podcast to lambast the president’s foreign entanglements, or Nick Fuentes attacking the president as not sufficiently America First.) The popular movement is not entirely in thrall to Trump’s political whims—many of the animating ideas on the MAGA Right predate the rise of Trump—but it is reliant on Trump’s cult of personality for its own political success. So, what comes after Trump?... |