Thread by @RobertDownen_

I'm not in any way speculating. But I'm actually shocked how few people know that Charlie Kirk has for years been among the most reviled people on the planet by white supremacists, many of whom were radicalized by sustained campaigns painting him as an anti-white fraud.

Again: I'm not speculating about the shooter. I just have been stunned how quickly people have jumped with certainty to partisan conclusions. Because in extremism spaces, the Charlie Kirk Hater to Nazi pipeline is canon. It's how we got a generation of antisemitic extremists.

Nick Fuentes literally built his movement attacking Kirk from the right. They turned him into a caricature of all that they detested: Faux-populism, Zionism + anti-white policy, astroturfed by billionaires and establishment elites who would sell out their race for political power

And Kirk hatred was also crucial to their growth: At TPUSA events theyd grill him on Israel, immigration etc, never going mask-off but subtly injecting their invective into more mainstream GOP conversations. And this would inevitably peel off a few sympathizers in attendance.

The "Groyper War," as they call it, is literally how Nick Fuentes became Nick Fuentes. It's how a generation of angry young men took their first step into the fascist rabbithole. For many, it was as simple as starting to question why Charlie Kirk wouldn't say XYZ about ABC.

Again: I'm not speculating on the shooter. We'll know soon enough. I just think this is crucial history; if it doesnt help us understand the events of today, it certainly will help us understand things 2 and 5 and 10 years from now.

One clarification: In my first tweet, I meant to say HAD not HAS been reviled for years. Over the last few years, Kirk steadily moved further and further right, and was openly talking about Great Replacement Theory, Christian nationalism and other once-fringier things.

People have been shocked to learn that Nick Fuentes types think Charlie Kirk is a squishy moderate. So they probably don’t know that there is a whole far-far-right cohort that thinks the exact same thing of Nick Fuentes.

Honestly, Fuentes-style antisemitism is honestly not even THAT extreme compared to those further down the pipeline. Keep going further right and you eventually get to accelerationists, whose primary goal is stoking chaos until society collapse allows the Race War.

And the accelerationists absolutely LOVE what’s happened this week, as the immediate jump to partisanship deepens our divide, raises the temperature and further normalizes the possibility of sectarian violence.

And I really cannot emphasize this enough: The Fuentes/Kirk war that pushed some of these folks toward extremism was ~7 years ago. Seven years in the fascist pipeline is an INCREDIBLY long time.

And each time something like this happens - when we jump to conclusions that justify retribution — we are giving a massive gift to people who want nothing more than to inflict unspeakable violence that will touch every single one of us, democrat or republican.

Devin is correct here, and I coulda been more clear that I meant Fuentes actual, on the ground tactics — ie, that he’s not forming assassination cells or attacking power grids, even if his rhetoric is a conduit to groups that are.

https://twitter.com/dburghart/status/1966597265360830574