Groypers, Christian Nationalists, and the Online Extremism Few Americans Understand

Charlie Kirk’s assassination is being framed in increasingly clearer terms. Local officials say the suspect, Tyler Robinson, held “leftist ideology” and had dated a trans woman. Given Kirk’s obsession with demonizing trans people, that storyline offers a clean motive. It’s simple, linear, legible, and easy to understand.

But that neatness may obscure something more unsettling. What if the act was less about ideology in the way we’re used to? What if it was also about performance?

Cybele Canterel, who writes the excellent Substack Abstract Machines, has been tracing the darker corners of online extremism with unusual clarity. Her recent TikTok post on Christian Nationalism and the “black-pilled” far right is essential viewing for anyone trying to make sense of how we got here. She puts it this way: “What looks like politics is often subculture. What looks like a manifesto is sometimes a dare wrapped in a joke. Wrapped in a void.”

That line lands because it describes a shift in how extremism works. In traditional political violence, ideas come first: ideology → grievance → plan → act. But in black-pill spaces, the sequence is inverted: audience → performance → act.

The act itself becomes a kind of content. A gesture for an online crowd who will recognize the meme references, who will get the joke, who will understand the dare. The point is less about achieving a political end than about proving membership in a nihilist community.

This is why Canterel makes such a useful distinction between two “families” of the right. Christian Nationalists are builders. They want state power, laws, courts, and schools. Their endgame is a moral order enforced by institutions. Black-pilled Groypers are burners. They assume collapse is inevitable, and the only creative act left is destruction.

“The black pill is the conviction that decline is irreversible,” she writes. “If nothing can be redeemed, then the only creative act is negation.”

That nihilism doesn’t live in policy papers or position statements. It lives in memes, riddles, and irony-drenched aesthetics—cartoon frogs, glitch art, doom slogans, and joke-upon-joke layers that confuse outsiders while galvanizing insiders. “Irony is a Kevlar vest,” Canterel notes. If you take it seriously, it was just a joke. If you don’t get the reference, you’re not in the club.”

She explains how memes serve three purposes simultaneously: recruitment, desensitization, and plausible deniability. And over time, what starts as a smirk hardens into a worldview: nothing matters, everything’s a joke, destruction is the only punchline.

Which brings us back to Robinson, who, given the markings etched in bullet casings, seemed fluent in extreme online behavior. Yes, the evidence we have so far seems to indicate he shot and killed Kirk because of his right-wing political beliefs. More information will come out that will either buttress or muddy that conclusion.

But if we stop there, we risk missing the larger current that gave Robinson a stage and an audience. In this world, as Canterel describes above, violence is not just an outcome of belief — it is a performance for status, a post meant to go viral in the only feed that matters.

Canterel warns against underestimating this dynamic: “Don’t confuse the absence of a blueprint with harmlessness. A politics of negation can still inspire catastrophic acts because the metric isn’t does it build, but does it break?”

That’s the smarter way to read what just happened. We’re trained to parse motives in ideological terms — who hated whom, which ideas were in play, which policy goals might be advanced. But in a meme-driven nihilist culture, the motive can be much simpler and more terrifying: break something, prove yourself, and let the audience do the rest.

Of course this doesn’t excuse such a heinous act, and it doesn’t absolve the killer. But it does demand that society — in particular law enforcement and the political media — update their models. We’re not just confronting ideology. We’re confronting incentives. The pull of audience, attention, and recognition can be more powerful than belief.

“Christian nationalism is a plan to rule,” Canterel concludes. “Black-pilled accelerationism is a plan to ruin.” And in the space between those two, politics begins to look less like a fight over laws than a fight over reality itself—where violence is both the message and the medium.

Watch above via TikTok.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.