Simon Van Zylenwood

And a lot of these Gropers would, exhorted by Nick Fuentes, would go and do this to Charlie Kirk.

And I think what happened over the years is it moved Charlie Kirk to the right because he was constantly protecting his right flank.

In Trump's first term, Charlie Kirk was talking about, quote, stapling green cards to every college diploma.

He was talking about increasing immigration to help stem urban population loss.

Before his death, he was talking about banning all, quote, third world immigration.

I mean, he'd gone completely far right on immigration.

And I think part of the reason is this pressure.

And so what happens after his death is the same dynamic just keeps repeating, but with new imitators and new antagonists.

There's two ways to look at it.

One is that it's extremely troubling that two main figures in my piece that are just dominating the feeds of these students are Candace Owens, who's a conspiracy theorist and has, you know, rocketed up the Spotify podcast charts by spreading really out there theories about his death.

And Nick Fuentes, who's an outright anti-Semite.

This is the biggest part of his brand.

It is extremely troubling how mainstream that has become on the right.

But as an electoral consequence, it's actually arguably more troubling to MAGA's chances.

If you are doing pure...

Identitarian, hate-driven politics in the Fuentes vein, you probably instantly just doomed the emerging multiracial coalition that brought Trump to office in November 2024.

So there are already these, quote, anti-Gruyper politicians on the right who are trying to sound the alarm.

I think there's two things to separate.

I think TPSA's appeal to young women is actually a little—it's not quite about Erica Kirk, although Erica Kirk now being the figurehead is going to accelerate the female-dominated nature of TPSA.

This was a really interesting thing, is that a lot of these young Republican groups, especially the ones that are sort of interested in Nick Fuentes, are extremely male, to the point where I was hanging out with these kids and they were basically kind of complaining, like, why can't we get any girls to come to our meetings?