Simon Van Zylenwood

A lot of them are athletes or they know athletes or in general embody more conservative values where they were already coming in extremely skeptical of something like trans rights.

But on the athlete issue in particular, they would not, most of them, call themselves feminists.

But they basically think, oh, this is now a Republican-slash-conservative issue.

Like, oh, who's going to stand up for my female-only swimming team?

We don't want to compete against people like that.

That comes up all the time.

And Leslie, who's TPSA president at Ole Miss, she was already kind of going to meetings last fall, last spring, 2024, when Riley Gaines, the swimmer, came and spoke.

That's when she threw herself into TPSA and then became the president.

Based on everything I saw, they are headed where their feed is headed.

And it cannot be overemphasized how dominant Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are in their feeds.

It is not like these kids are born out of the womb, bigoted, anti-Semitic, conspiracy theorists.

But in a culture that rewards conspiracism and the appetite on the American right, the young American right for conspiracy is just bottomless.

All of a sudden, absent clips of Charlie Kirk on his podcast every day or on the campus, you know, his greatest enemy, Nick Fuentes, is there instead.

And Fuentes, to some of these kids, has a dark charisma that they can't stay away from in some cases.

And although the energy of the so-called Groyper Wright is very male, it comes for some of the women in my piece, too.

And they're in their radicalization, in their grief, in their search for someone else, almost like touching wet pain or almost like spiraling further down into whatever dark place they're in.

They find themselves watching Fuentes and they find themselves watching the person that their leader, their old leader would never, he wouldn't even say his name.

He wouldn't platform.

He's the one person Charlie Kirk wouldn't debate.

That's how extreme Charlie Kirk found him.