Ultra MAGA Is Eating MAGA Inside the "Groyper" pipeline turning the far right against itself—and why the same machine keeps producing violent extremists now going after their own. Dean Blundell Sep 13 September 13, 2025 You drive this Substack. So, for September, get 50% OFF for unlimited access. Monthly, Annual, and Founding plans. 🔒 Lock in the half-price rate forever. Ends September 30, 2025 (11:59 pm ET). The sound you heard wasn’t just a gunshot. It was feedback. By the time the tent poles trembled on a campus lawn in Orem, Utah, the internet had already cast its suspects, crafted a motive, and crowned a villain. Charlie Kirk, the conservative campus impresario who turned outrage into an extracurricular, was dead. The shooter fled. Then the real weapon came out: the narrative machine. BREAKING: Charlie Kirk's Alleged Killer in Custody: 22 Year Old Registered Republican From A Trump Loving Family Dean Blundell · Sep 12 September 12, 2025 Read full story Within hours, the usual channels rolled out a carousel of scapegoats: “trans.” Then “leftist.” Then “gay.” When that didn’t land, the pivot arrived: blame a “leftist university” for radicalizing a kid in one semester—at Utah Valley University, a campus tucked inside one of the reddest counties in America. Meanwhile, the actual suspect, Tyler Robinson, emerged from the fog of rumor as a young man whose life was less campus indoctrination and more 21st‑century immersion: online jokes, gaming chatter, Discord pings, half‑ironic memes—some of them vile, many of them nonsensical unless you speak fluent internet. What the shell casings really said—and why it matters In the days that followed, a handful of bullet casings became Rorschach tests. Reports showed they were etched with a jumble of references: a video game shout-out (Helldivers 2), a furry in-joke, a trolling “OwO”, even “Bella Ciao,” the old anti-fascist song that’s now also a Netflix-era meme. Vanity Fair’s deep dive into those inscriptions is the rare explainer that actually helps: this wasn’t a clean ideological manifesto. It looked like a collage of internet subcultures, the kind of bricolage young men use to signal in‑group status, troll out‑groups, and broadcast irony as a shield. The point isn’t that memes made him do it. It’s that the far right’s recruitment arenas—from livestreams to Telegram to “edgy” Q&A ambushes—train recruits to talk in riddles. The ambiguity is a feature: it evades moderation, frustrates journalists, and lets movement leaders distance themselves after the harm is done. Define the threat: What is a Groyper? Groypers are the radicalized youth wing orbiting Nick Fuentes and “America First”—a white‑nationalist, Christian‑nationalist subculture that perfected heckling the Right from the right. Their big debut came in 2019, when they waged the “Groyper War” against Turning Point USA (Kirk’s operation), crashing campus events to push harder lines on immigration, race, and religion. The tactic wasn’t to convert liberals; it was to purify conservatism, bully “Conservative Inc.,” and pull the Overton window so far rightward that yesterday’s taboo becomes today’s talking point. They present as “just kids asking questions.” What sits behind it is a pipeline: irony and Q&A theater on campus, niche celebrities online, then escalating demands for loyalty tests. Some get bored and move on. Too many stick around long enough for the mask to curdle into ideology. The Butler warning we chose to ignore A year before Orem, a 20‑year‑old named Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed high at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, fired down at a former president, and turned a county fairground into a crime scene. Almost instantly, political feeds tried to pin him to whichever team fit the day’s script. The verified picture was weirder and uglier: a registered Republican whose online trail also included a tiny ActBlue donation when he was 17. If you were looking for clean lines, you didn’t find them. You found contradictions, obsession, and a young man soaking in the same toxic soup of notoriety, grievance, and spectacle. What links Butler to Orem isn’t partisanship. It’s the attention economy of extremism—the feedback loop where fringe influencers court chaos, mainstream figures launder that energy for ratings, and unstable young men decide to write themselves into the story. 5) The kids are studying—just not what you think This year’s Evergreen High School shooting in Colorado adds the most chilling footnote: a 16‑year‑old fascinated by Columbine, marinating in neo‑Nazi content, and connected with extremist networks where mass murderers are cataloged like baseball cards. It wasn’t a “political debate” at school that did this. It was the extracurriculars: algorithmic rabbit holes, gore forums dressed up as “edgy,” and a generation learning that attention is the currency and violence is a fast path to a name. Ultra MAGA vs. MAGA: when the fringe turns the gun around For years, the Right tried to domesticate the tiger it was riding. Charlie Kirk monetized the campus fight; Fuentes and his Groypers tried to make Kirk the villain for not going far enough. Donald Trump dined with Fuentes in 2022, then dodged a clean, sustained condemnation—classic wink‑and‑nod politics. The message to the fringe wasn’t “no.” It was “not here, not now.” But movements don’t pause at the waterline; they spill. And when a movement rewards transgression, transgressors eventually test the hand that feeds. That’s the cannibalism we’re watching: Ultra MAGA eating MAGA, with old patrons scrambling to blame the Left, or a phantom campus, or anyone but the pipeline they helped build. The spin cycle: how “narrative laundering” works Instant scapegoat. Before facts settle, plant a label—“trans,” “leftist,” “gay.” Flood the zone. Amplify clips and “receipts,” many AI‑summarized or out of context. Pivot points. When disproven, shift to culture war (“leftist universities”)—even in deep‑red communities. Moral immunity. Frame the Right as the real victim—“They’re hunting us”—even when the attacker comes from your own ideological kitchen. Memory‑holing. Quietly edit or delete the early claims. Move on. Repeat. This playbook erases accountability and leaves the public with a foggy sense that truth is unknowable, which is the perfect climate for radicalization. 8) The scoreboard nobody wants to read If you zoom out even a few years, the pattern is brutally clear. Buffalo (10 Black shoppers murdered). El Paso (23 Latinos targeted over “invasion” rhetoric). Tree of Life, Pittsburgh (11 Jewish worshippers). Charleston AME (9 Black parishioners). Jacksonville Dollar General (3 Black victims, swastika‑marked rifle). Different cities, same ideology: white supremacist violence with a meme‑era sheen. Federal threat assessments have said it plainly for years: racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism—especially white supremacist—remains the most persistent and lethal domestic threat. We pretend it’s a debate. It’s a data point. 9) Why leaders keep flinching It should be easy to draw a hard line: No platforming white nationalism. No dinner with its avatars. No winks, no nods, no “stand back and stand by.” Instead, too many politicians still treat the fringe like a volatile donor—dangerous to anger, useful when needed. They want the vibes without the violence, the turnout without the terror. But you don’t schedule the lightning when you’ve built the storm. 10) What accountability looks like Say the quiet part loudly. Name Groypers and white‑supremacist networks as the threat vectors they are. Fix the funnel. Enforce platform rules in gaming and chat ecosystems where recruiters hunt bored young men. Resource prevention. Fund evidence‑based deradicalization and community‑level interventions—schools, churches, youth clubs. Stop laundering. Media and politicians must retire the instant‑blame carousel. If you were wrong, say so. Draw bright lines. If your brand depends on “just asking questions” from known extremists, you’re not mainstream—you’re a vector. The uncomfortable truth for MAGA - They’re being hunted by their own This isn’t one campus, one forum, or one gun. It’s a machine: build an audience on grievance, marinate them in irony, dare them to prove they’re serious—and act surprised when some of them do. That machine worked so well it finally turned inward. Ultra MAGA is eating MAGA because violence was always on the menu. The question now isn’t who to blame today. It’s whether anyone with a platform on the Right is willing to turn the machine off. Thanks for reading! This post is public, so feel free to share it. Get 50% OFF for unlimited access. Monthly, Annual, and Founding plans. 🔒 Lock in the half-price rate forever. Ends September 30, 2025 (11:59 pm ET).