“What The Fuck is a Groyper?” and Other Cursed Knowledge (Part 1)

Just kidding, you won’t change my mind.

It has not even been two weeks since Charlie Kirk, founder of conservative non-profit Turning Point USA, was shot on a campus in Utah, at the first event on a speaking tour of 10 universities. The earlier version of the “American Comeback Tour” website’s scrolling banner proudly declares “Thousands Try To Prove Charlie Kirk Wrong at US San Diego” — an interesting and misleading title for an event that drew an estimated 1,100 people total, according to the article the banner links to (and 300 people according to ABC 7 News, but who’s counting?) Now, it’s been renamed the Turning Point Tour, with an assortment of right-wing grifters scrambling over each other to get their moment in the spotlight, including Kirk’s widow.

I don’t really want or need to go into detail about who Charlie Kirk himself is, because many people are covering that in depth. If you weren’t sure, here are a few starting places:

• How a right-wing provocateur is using race to reach Gen Z
• A Conservative Nonprofit That Seeks to Transform College Campuses Faces Allegations of Racial Bias and Illegal Campaign Activity
• Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning
• Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

However, with his death, I have been hearing a lot of confusion about how we got to this point. I get it, unless you were personally impacted, many of the sentences to describe the process sound absolutely unhinged — “well, you see, a gaming journalist broke up with her boyfriend, and in a tantrum, he started a harassment campaign that joined forces with/infected the Tea Party to create the Alt-Right, QAnon, and Boogaloos”. It sounds, quite frankly, insane. As someone who was adjacent and sometimes personally in the crosshairs of Gamergate, I thought I might offer a retrospective of writing and videos that can help people understand the trajectory from there to here. Unfortunately, this is an area of cursed knowledge I have had to stay on top of, after dealing with my own run-ins with crazed, overly online bigots who fancy themselves neo-Nazis.

Rather than review all of this in my own words at length, something which is frankly exhausting and not a little traumatizing for me, I wanted to offer a brief paragraph summarizing some of the main points and people, and then some links for further reading/watching/listening. As often as I could, I chose articles and videos across the spectrum, from as it was happening to looking back in hindsight. This is not intended to be exhaustive, but it should give you a bit of a handle on what’s going on, if you were blessedly unaware. Please keep in mind that much of what I will be relaying here is a unique kind of poisonous rhetoric lacking in much critical thinking or logic, and you may find yourself saying, “Wait. What?” a lot. That’s normal. You may also find yourself feeling dizzy, as many of these people have come together, bickered, publicly disavowed each other, and come together again, so it’s hard to really establish a timeline. It’s normal if trying to read this gives you a headache and you need to lie down.

Without further ado, here is “What the Fuck is a Groyper?” and Other Cursed Knowledge, Part 1. Getting all of this together has taken longer than I initially expected, so I’ve split it into two parts — from Gamergate leading up to Charlottesville, and everything after.

Gamergate

Zoe Quinn is a video game designer, programmer, and writer who put out an interactive fiction game about their mental health struggles called Depression Quest. An ex-boyfriend of theirs, angry at the positive reviews, posted a long blog post detailing his relationship with them and insinuating that the only reason Depression Quest had received positive reviews was because of journalists getting “sexual favors” from Quinn. This led to an intense harassment campaign coordinated on anonymous forums like 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit, and included doxxing, rape threats, bomb threats, SWATting, and death threats.

Links:

• Zoe Quinn: GamerGate must be condemned
• The sexist crusade to destroy game developer Zoe Quinn
• Anita Sarkeesian interview: ‘The word “troll” feels too childish. This is abuse’
• What Gamergate should have taught us about the ‘alt-right’
• Zoe Quinn’s Crash Override
• Zoe Quinn on Surviving Gamergate and the Rise of the Alt-Right
• What we still haven’t learned from Gamergate

Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, and Milo Yiannopoulos

Steve Bannon is a founding member of the far-right rag Breitbart News, and he became the executive chairman after the death of Andrew Breitbart. Under his stewardship, the site became even more overtly nationalistic and friendly to the alt-right. Breitbart fanned the flames of Gamergate with glee, and “pretty boy provocateur” Milo Yiannopoulos became one of the leaders of the bullying campaign, often using Breitbart to do so. Breitbart also had email chains leaked by Buzzfeed News, exposing Breitbart as soliciting pitches from various alt-right and neo-Nazi figureheads. After Milo was filmed at a bar with Richard Spencer and other alt-right leaders as they made Nazi salutes, Steve Bannon half-heartedly condemned him, as did his billionaire supporter Bob Mercer. Of course, that was only the beginning of the Breitbart-influenced alt-right rise, with Steve Bannon and Steve Miller becoming instrumental in Trump’s presidency.

• KKK, American Nazi Party praise Trump’s hiring of Bannon
• Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream
• Breitbart Emails Trace Neo-Nazi Moves Of Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos: Report
• On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right
• Stephen Miller fed white nationalist ideas to Breitbart, ex-editor says, and they’ve since ‘become policy’

The Alt-Right Playbook

This is a series of videos that does an amazing job explaining how the alt-right legitimizes itself. It came out in 2017, and it’s still helpful for understanding their techniques and strategies. There have been some additional updates on things like the Reverse Gish Gallop and “Why Don’t You Respond to Criticism?”. It’s really helpful for understanding the absolute lack of good faith argument being had, and why “debate me!!#@!” is not actually about debate.

• The Alt-Right Playbook Playlist
• How the far right borrowed its online moves from gamers (written by someone else, but a good rundown of the main points)

Ben Shapiro

Another clean-cut young man who was instrumental at Breitbart is Ben Shapiro, who was the editor at large there until he resigned in 2016. Despite working at Breitbart, he worked to distance himself from Steve Bannon and the alt-right more widely (probably in part because he is Jewish, and many of the alt-right’s favorite spokespeople are blatant antisemites.) He initially was quite critical of Trump running for president, but ended up toeing the line in 2020. Shapiro has also been very critical of the alt-right, though his stance on Jan 6th, trans rights, white nationalism, and reproductive health access has often lumped him in with the rest of them. Shapiro, like Kirk, is also well-known for demanding people debate him for content farming.

• Explaining Ben Shapiro’s Messy, Ethnic-Slur-Laden Breakup With Breitbart
• Ben Shapiro, a Provocative ‘Gladiator,’ Battles to Win Young Conservatives
• How Ben Shapiro Conquered the MAGA-verse
• Bill Maher Brutally Fact Checks MAGA Star

Charlottesville

In August 2017 there was a big white supremacist rally, “Unite the Right”, in Charlottesville, Virginia, presumably to protest Confederate statues being taken down. The photos from the event showed clean cut white men with MAGA hats, khakis, and white polos, their faces red with rage, tiki torches in their hands. The crowd included Klansmen (like former Grand High Poohbah David Duke), neo-Nazis (like Identity Evropa, Atomwaffen and The Daily Stormer), the Proud Boys (specifically the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights), far right militias (like the 3 Percenters), and more.

The first night, they chanted Nazi slogans like “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil” before attacking counter protesters who had linked arms around a statue of Thomas Jefferson. The second day, their numbers had grown to 500–600, and they proceeded to terrorize a Black church, a synagogue, surrounding and attacking individual protesters, and, ultimately, one drove a car into the crowd, killing one person (Heather Heyer) and injuring many more. Trump famously stated, “You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent”. The media went hard on this “antifa are as bad as the fascists” rhetoric, which continues to this day. After the rally, antifascist activists took to social media, identifying and outing many of the white supremacists when police response was lacking. This is also where we begin to see heavier use of “irony” and memes at these events as a way to dogwhistle various violent sentiments.

While this was a horrifying moment and a declared state of emergency, it’s worth noting that these assholes were outnumbered 1 : 4 by counterprotesters, particularly people in black bloc and antifascists. The white supremacists tried to do a second one the next year, and only 20 people showed up.

• Here’s what a neo-Nazi rally looks like in 2017 America
• Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville
• How We Identified White Supremacists After Charlottesville
• Twitter users are revealing the identities of Charlottesville white supremacist protestors
• Trump’s mixed messaging sparks concerns of ‘emboldened’ white supremacists

Part 2 will cover Pepe the Frog, the rise of the groypers, Boogaloo Boys, January 6th, and more of the rancid sludge rotting in the heart of America.

This kind of research is intense and a little traumatic, so if it informed you, please consider signing up as a paid member on Ghost or Patreon!