Groyper War 2 Turns Hot

On September eighth 2025, Jezebel published a tongue in cheek look at the bustling online curse market served by America’s entrepreneurial witches, titled “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk.”

To be absolutely clear, the Jezebel writer only intended for Kirk “to wake up every morning with an inexplicable zit” or for “his thumb to grow too big to tweet.” That sort of thing. Unfortunately the Etsy witches went a little too hard, as we would all find out on September tenth when Charlie Kirk was shot through the neck and killed while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Jezebel has since pulled the article, writing that “we want to make clear that we prioritize an end to violence over anyone wanting to read about Etsy witches.” Namaste 🙏.

At the time of the shooting Kirk was engaged in the activity his organization, Turning Point USA, was best known for: trolling college students with misleading statistics and reactionary talking points. Audience member Hunter Kozack, “a TikTok content maker who is a father of two himself” according to ABC News, asked Kirk: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America, over the last ten years?” Kirk picked up the microphone and said “Counting or not counting gang violence?” The questioner said “Great—” and then with exquisite dramatic timing, the flat crack of a rifle rang out and a bullet passed through Kirk’s neck.¹ If nothing else we can say he died doing what he loved, which was being racist in front of an audience.

The ensuing crowd panic was captured on the spot by Mormon influencer Elder Tiktok, who posted a video reporting that: “It’s ya boy Elder Tiktok, there was just a gunfire in Utah, this is not a drill…” Flashing two fingers in selfie mode in front of the fleeing crowd he continued, “Jesus will save you but I’m not even lyin’, make sure you subscribe to Elder Tiktok on Instagram.” And with that, the twenty-first century has its own “Oh the humanity!”

Elder Tiktok later took down the video, posting a sober “yo my bad though fr.” Many commenters in the latter video pointed to images that appear to show Elder Tiktok also stealing piles of blood-soaked Charlie Kirk merch after the shooting.

In the immediate aftermath of the murder, everyone had something stupid to say. California’s allegedly Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who had hosted Charlie Kirk on the first episode of his podcast in March, issued a statement saying that “[t]he best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” And ostensibly left wing New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who has lately shared funders with Charlie Kirk, wrote a piece expressing much the same idea titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein wrote:

Klein notably didn’t include a single quote from Charlie Kirk (or anyone at all) to support this alleged “taste for disagreement.” Perhaps he was thinking of the time Kirk said “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.” Hill Heat’s Brad Johnson did the heroic work of collecting a lot of other things Charlie Kirk actually said in two newsletter posts, but I’m having trouble finding the part where he spoke about his taste for disagreement. One thing Kirk did unambiguously endorse was random gun violence, saying: “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.” The comments on Klein’s piece were locked after 975 mostly very negative posts, and rumor has it that the moderators were only approving 10% of comments submitted.

Other writers provided the response that Klein’s title demanded. “Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way,” wrote Jason Koebler in 404, providing some more detail on what Kirk has actually said and done, including “claim[ing] that his Turning Point USA sent ‘80+ buses full of patriots’ to the January 6 insurrection” and operating a “Professor Watchlist” to focus the harassment of his cadre of followers on individual college professors who were reported for espousing allegedly leftist ideas by their TPUSA-aligned students. Koebler wrote:

“No, Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way” also wrote Mother Jones’s David Corn, in another example of how straightforward, how easy it is to disavow and condemn his murder without lionizing or whitewashing Kirk’s actual beliefs, which were already plenty white to begin with. Rachel Dolezal also chimed in, but if you want to know what she had to say you’re going to have to find out yourself, as I simply cannot with this.

Despite Kirk’s lack of any sort of military or public service, flags across the country were ordered to half-mast, including by the Democratic governor of Oregon, the Republican President of the United States, and the non-partisan Guantanamo Bay McDonald’s. In sharp contrast to the antiviolent groveling of liberals, President Trump said “‘we have to beat the hell’ out of ‘radical left lunatics’,” reflecting a growing feeling of excitement on the right that here, at last, the MAGA movement may have found its Horst Wessel.

Unfortunately for them it looks like that is not to be. This morning Americans, including the members of Imagine Dragons, woke up to the news that a Tyler Robinson has been taken into custody and has allegedly confessed to the shooting. Luckily for the Nevada pop group it wasn’t the Tyler Robinson they named their pediatric cancer foundation after, who did pass away in 2013. This Tyler Robinson is a 22 year old Utah resident who according to a neighbor was “smart, quiet, never caused any problems” and grew up in an entirely unremarkable gun-toting, Republican voting Utah family. There’s no evidence Robinson was a radical leftist, but plenty of evidence that he was, like so many other American shooters, extremely online. Utah Governor Spencer Cox announced the arrest and described evidence collected in the case, including inscriptions engaved on bullet casings found with the alleged murder weapon.

And here let’s all take a deep, calming breath before we confront the fact that the .30-06 cartridge that killed Charlie Kirk was engraved with the words: “Notices bulge OwO whats this?” because with that knowledge, it appears that we now live in a world where Groyper War 2 has turned hot. And I am so grateful that I was able to vamp long enough with this post to turn you over to Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas from Garbage Day, who are far more qualified than I am to explain what any of that means.

Just go read the whole Garbage Day post, there’s no point in me trying to explain all the same stuff here. If you’d like to know a lot more about who the Groypers are and where they came from, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights has a very comprehensive report on them. Whether Robinson was an active Groyper or not, this shooting was not only prefigured by the Etsy witches, but just a few days earlier by The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel, who wrote on September fourth that “The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another.”

Broderick and Bumas make much the same point, concluding that:

So in summary: it appears that this was a shooting where the victim, an influencer, was answering a question from another influencer when he was shot by a third influencer, after which a fourth influencer documented the ensuing chaos and a host of other influencers registered their takes, before the director of the FBI (an influencer) and the deputy director of the FBI (another influencer) announced the alleged shooter’s apprehension with a quote from Mad Max.

Today’s Song: Imagine Dragons, “It's Time”

Because you all love Imagine Dragons so much. RIP Good Tyler Robinson.

1  The video linked here includes the question and answer, and the sound of the shot and crowd reaction, but freezes video before the bullet’s impact. Nothing gruesome is shown but there is the sound of the gunshot and a good amount of audience panicking noise.