Lily Conway’s article is illuminating and startling in its exploration of the dark side of the web. For an older American, like myself, it covers information that I was completely unaware of, and now completely unsure of whatever the fix may be. Having grown up in the Vietnam era, it was my experience that patriotic Americans were just beginning to question their government.
Thank you, Lily, for dragging me into this new reality. We’ll depend on people like you to expose evil and enlighten us.
Thank you Lily for this very informative info on the direction and tactics of the new Alt-Right. Really makes the parent of any 15-29yr old American white male who mainlines a screen all day think about exactly what their kid is doing online...especially if that parent notices the kid is engraving rounds of ammunition. Alt-Right?
Nobody could possibly know that the alt-and-rabid right wouldn't jump on Kirk's killing (assassination, though used, doesn't fit) as another drum to beat in order to stir the base and spew propaganda. In typical overreaction, the theories for it flew well before any knowledge was known, including at the outset who the shooter was. Another knee-jerk reaction was to order the U.S. flag to half staff, a position reseved for heads of state and dignitaries. Charlie Kirk was neither. This article was, however, enlightening; some of us hadn't heard of Charlie Kirk, Turning Point, or Groyper. To learn about all of this is sobering at the very least.
This White Christian Nationalist crap has got to be swept into the dust bin of history. God had no intention of having just white males rule the roost. When one looks over Trumps cabinet and his department appointments , hired on the merit system one should wonder. Jobs are been lost, the economy is heading into the crapper, various illnesses will be increasing, world standing is diminished, women's health care is diminished, A leader who is un-woke , unaware of what he is doing and leading the nation into a pit of hell. Doing nothing for the populace, just his close friends and family. I would think DEI and woke are not too bad. You were better off back in the day when your economy was the envy of the world. No world envy today.
It's confusing when bullets are inscribed, not with the actual ideology of the perpetrator, but the irony laden, "kinda joking, kinda not" language of trolling. As a person who grew up in the analog age when sarcasm was the most complicated it got, I wonder what is the point of being so obtuse that your original intention is only obvious to about 10 people across the globe. As it is, we have right-wingers and left-wingers both using the phrases to point out why they think the other side was the one behind this heinous action. Is the confusion the point? Or laughing at everybody else's inability to catch on to these (again) extremely obtuse phrases. I suspect that the latter is the case--in which case, there is no "ideology," there are only really immature people who are dragging society down a very dark hole. It reminds me of that article from (I think) the Atlantic about 6 years ago that cited research that found that most young Western men who were radicalized into ISIS and Al Qaeda were doing it not because of the religious ideology but because they were confused about the world and wanted a strong framework of any kind, preferably violent.
Young boys who are confused about the world, want a strong framework and have easy access to online propaganda, guns/ammo and a moral compass badly in need of calibration may develop a strong Authority Bias:
"This is a cognitive bias where people attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure, leading them to be more influenced by and likely to obey that person".
"The bias was famously demonstrated by the Milgram experiment, where participants obeyed an authority figure's instructions to administer electric shocks, even when it conflicted with their moral belief".
America is a hell hole now, where government agents in masks go around beating victims to break their bones and move them along with metal rods to hold them in stinking prisons without adequate toilet facilities. This is the direct result of White Nationalism and the gospel of hate which teaches that immigrants are vermin poisoning the blood of America as Trump described them in his campaign for a second term as president. This is what it means to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN - A GREATLY CRUEL AND DISGUSTING PLACE JUST LIKE WHAT AMERICANS USED TO THINK OF AS THIRD WORLD DISASTER CASES. See the NYT article in the link, from which this little bit is an extract:
"Footage taken by bystanders of Mr. Barranco’s arrest went viral. The videos show several agents standing above him while others hold him down. One agent, kneeling at his side, strikes Mr. Barranco repeatedly in the head, neck and left shoulder as he groans. The agents force him into an S.U.V. with the aid of a metal rod."
If the United States had advanced the current tactics practiced upon immigrants when Trump's ancestors landed upon our shores, they might have been treated similarly. He has forgotten that his own family was immigrant.
The whole world consists of people moving and mixing ever since the first true human beings evolved around 300, 000 years ago. All the 8 billion people on earth belong to the same species. Even our humanoid ancestors who used tools and fire of the species homo erectus moved across the old world from Africa to Europe to Asia. America's "immigration crisis" has been engineered by the Republican Party as a way to power. Counting all the undocumented immigrants in America over several decades, they are a total of less than 5% of the population with proportionately less criminals than the native- born. MAGA is a reactionary movement funded by billionaires and led by a demented criminal to escape jail and consolidate the power of a tiny oligarchy behind him. Its essence is hatred and performative cruelty to entertain the ignorant and easily duped followers of America's senile Fuehrer.
Well said, and couldn't agree more. The immigration "issue" has been around for numerous administrations and congress sessions. When the GOP was in full power in the past, they had no workable solutions, assuming that they addressed it at all. Only now has it become an "emergency" by a 'demented criminal' as a justification to push us ever closer to a police state and treat people in an inhumane manner, denying them due process. As you point out, the perponderance of criminality does not stem from the immigrants.
I agree completely. The story of opposition to immigration in the US is in waves. There was popular violent rage (leading at times to murders) whipped up by politicians against the Irish in the 19th century as criminals who brought disease, against Jews, Poles, and Italians as dirty and also criminals in the end of the 19th century, pogroms against Chinese (drug addicts and brothel owners in the stories) and Indians in the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. Trump's father Fred marched as a young man in the KKK against Italian (Catholic) immigrants. By 1924, the U.S. had introduced race based national quotas and closed the door effectively to most of the world. The Supreme Court ruled that people of Asian origin could not be U.S. citizens or own property (which provoked fury in Japan and contributed to hyper-nationalism). U.S. popular feeling against Jewish immigrants was so strong that FDR didn't make any move to relax quotas even for refugees from Nazi persecution, who were turned away and returned to Europe to meet their deaths. By 1965, along with the other Civil RIghts legislation, the LBJ administration and Congress opened up immigration more widely by removing nationality quotas, instead giving priority to re-uniting families.
In the 1930s under Hoover and 1950s under Eisenhower, there were mass deportations of Mexican immigrants, and even of US citizens of Mexican origin. Even so, the basic needs of US agriculture brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to America in the harvest season. They simply moved back and forth across a flexible border. That changed with the 1985 Immigration Reform, which banned such seasonal immigration. The result was that many who would have returned now stayed back. That's the origin of the rise of undocumented immigrants - mostly of Hispanic, and indeed of Mexican, origin. Republicans obeyed Trump's instructions in the Biden presidency to block a bipartisan immigration reform bill, so he could use illegal immigration as a major theme in his 2024 campaign. Biden and his team were politically at best naive, even foolish, to open the border in 2021 to 2023. It wasn't enough to close it again at the beginning of 2024 - that played straight into Trump's hands, even if it was a natural humane reaction to the pictures of children in cages and separated from their parents in the first Trump term. There was, and is, a deep current of insecurity, distrust of the educated elite and experts, and xenophobia in America, ready for demagogues to exploit. That's made much worse by social media and control of major media (e.g. Fox, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and soon Larry Ellison's giant merged group) by unscrupulous billionaires allied to Trump.
Most immigrants are hard-working and just want to work at something, even without the wages or benefits of Americans - who will no longer take those jobs in hospitality or landscaping or construction or healthcare for the aged- and pay taxes. American employers exploit this cheap source of labor running into millions of workers. Like other waves of immigrants, these also came to escape poverty and lives without hope in their countries, looking for better lives for themselves and their children. Probably Europe and America can't absorb these large changes in their societies without major turbulence. Trump makes it all worse and brings rage to boiling point - chaos as opportunity for rogues.
You present a good historical perspective/analysis to the immigration situation that this country has faced over the years. Overall, we have not handled it too well, an obviously, still are not.
This whole thing sounds like the opening volleys of World War I. An assassination take place from within the team and then eventually leads to a massive conflict.
Regarding the lionization of Kirk, we'd all be better off if we heeded Kirk's admonition: “we must also be real. We must be honest." See "Charlie Kirk Got Exactly What He Said America Deserves"
I am so sick of hearing about this fucking man that I never heard of before he was murdered. He was not assassinated. He is white trash. He was murdered just like white trash is killed - they are fucking murdered like all low lying pieces of shit are shot down. Any piece of trash can buy a cheap assed suit and put it on but you are still trash. Sadly, your fucking ass is dead. DEAD. Go away. There are so many people who are so much more important than your sorry ass. What a moron. What a waste of my time.
As a Christian in a deep red state, where I sometimes feel like I’m in the wilderness, this article was like a first aid kit! I loved the casual tone, but still was learning from the information packed in here. I had no idea what a “Groyper” was, and I liked Lily Conway’s addition of “The average person’s relationship with the internet is healthy enough not to know. Mine, unfortunately, is not.” — it felt like I was talking to a young person in my kitchen.
The content is informational and was so enlightening. I hadn’t realized how deeply the internet is shaping young minds today — it’s very different from when my kids were little — and I am going to spend the weekend studying the links Lily Conway included.
I’m so pleased that now when someone in church tells me “I saw this post on Facebook” I can pull out my first aid kit and say to them “Well I saw this article from a solid and credentialed researcher and THIS is what’s happening out there in the real world, not just in the online world.”
It's not even really about "illegal" immigrants, but much more about defining America as a country for a single ("White") ethnicity and of a supposed common Judaeo-Christian background who defend "Western" civilization from hordes of savage and violent invaders. Historically, it's interesting to note that neither the Irish nor the Jews (Stephen Miller's ancestors) were considered "White", nor the Italians, when they came to America in large numbers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Trump's grandfather a German-speaking immigrant, was literally a criminal as he broke the law by running a brothel in the United States.. As for a Judaeo-Christian tradition, that is a modern American myth. In any case, the MAGA movement is at best semi-literate and totally ignorant of the scholarly research into early and second-temple Judaism and the development of Christianity. When some of Trump's Evangelical followers can even consider him to be chosen by God and Catholic priests asked devotees on Sundays to vote for him, they seem to have lost touch with not only reality and the evidence of Trump's life and behavior, but with the essential noble teachings of their faith - to be kind and to act in ways they would want others to act towards them. Trump is far more like a capricious, sexually perverted, and tyrannical Roman emperor than a Christian or practicing Jew of any kind.
"Western" civilization isn't simply a straight line from classical Greece through Republican and Imperial Rome to the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and the Industrial, Energy, and Information revolutions. A modern survey such as Josephine Quinn's "How the World Made the West" is worth reading, to understand how vast and influential were other cultures in making the world of today. The world has always been inter-connected, even if parts (the Americas, Australasia, the Pacific Islands) were not in close relationships for long periods with other cultures. People adapted everywhere, because that is the human genius, to their environments, more or less successfully for longish stretches of time, until their worlds were shattered by modern technology. That happened in the West (Europe) and in the rest of the world. All parts of the world are still adjusting. Technology - in transport, in communications, in information, in inter-linkages of production, and dependence on resources and labor in other countries - affects so-called developed societies as well as those who have not raised their standard of living to the same levels.
The insecurities of the MAGA movement come with many Americans' inability to cope with a changing world in which their relative status seems to be lower, when their country seems to have far more people of color (because race-based nationality quotas were dropped from 1965) and they all insist on equal treatment. Some of these people of other ethnic and religious backgrounds have even become very wealthy and successful as professionals and are more present in politics. So Trump followers are desperately afraid that they don't (and won't) matter anymore. The real problem is that economic policies from around 1980 have consistently increased inequality, and by now, despite the efforts of some recent administrations (Obama, Biden) to widen access to healthcare or support the least privileged in other ways, America is now ruled by an oligarchy. That oligarchy of financial predators and IT and other business barons would prefer a strongman like Trump to make sure their taxes stay low and the majority of Americans remain as only data points in their generation of profits - whatever their ethnic or religious background. Race and xenophobia are simply useful, because like the flag (MAGA) they are the last refuge of the scoundrel in politics.
Lily Conway’s article is illuminating and startling in its exploration of the dark side of the web. For an older American, like myself, it covers information that I was completely unaware of, and now completely unsure of whatever the fix may be. Having grown up in the Vietnam era, it was my experience that patriotic Americans were just beginning to question their government.
Thank you, Lily, for dragging me into this new reality. We’ll depend on people like you to expose evil and enlighten us.
Grateful for these insights, as chilling as they may be.
Thank you Lily for this very informative info on the direction and tactics of the new Alt-Right. Really makes the parent of any 15-29yr old American white male who mainlines a screen all day think about exactly what their kid is doing online...especially if that parent notices the kid is engraving rounds of ammunition. Alt-Right?
Nobody could possibly know that the alt-and-rabid right wouldn't jump on Kirk's killing (assassination, though used, doesn't fit) as another drum to beat in order to stir the base and spew propaganda. In typical overreaction, the theories for it flew well before any knowledge was known, including at the outset who the shooter was. Another knee-jerk reaction was to order the U.S. flag to half staff, a position reseved for heads of state and dignitaries. Charlie Kirk was neither. This article was, however, enlightening; some of us hadn't heard of Charlie Kirk, Turning Point, or Groyper. To learn about all of this is sobering at the very least.
This White Christian Nationalist crap has got to be swept into the dust bin of history. God had no intention of having just white males rule the roost. When one looks over Trumps cabinet and his department appointments , hired on the merit system one should wonder. Jobs are been lost, the economy is heading into the crapper, various illnesses will be increasing, world standing is diminished, women's health care is diminished, A leader who is un-woke , unaware of what he is doing and leading the nation into a pit of hell. Doing nothing for the populace, just his close friends and family. I would think DEI and woke are not too bad. You were better off back in the day when your economy was the envy of the world. No world envy today.
It's confusing when bullets are inscribed, not with the actual ideology of the perpetrator, but the irony laden, "kinda joking, kinda not" language of trolling. As a person who grew up in the analog age when sarcasm was the most complicated it got, I wonder what is the point of being so obtuse that your original intention is only obvious to about 10 people across the globe. As it is, we have right-wingers and left-wingers both using the phrases to point out why they think the other side was the one behind this heinous action. Is the confusion the point? Or laughing at everybody else's inability to catch on to these (again) extremely obtuse phrases. I suspect that the latter is the case--in which case, there is no "ideology," there are only really immature people who are dragging society down a very dark hole. It reminds me of that article from (I think) the Atlantic about 6 years ago that cited research that found that most young Western men who were radicalized into ISIS and Al Qaeda were doing it not because of the religious ideology but because they were confused about the world and wanted a strong framework of any kind, preferably violent.
Young boys who are confused about the world, want a strong framework and have easy access to online propaganda, guns/ammo and a moral compass badly in need of calibration may develop a strong Authority Bias:
"This is a cognitive bias where people attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure, leading them to be more influenced by and likely to obey that person".
"The bias was famously demonstrated by the Milgram experiment, where participants obeyed an authority figure's instructions to administer electric shocks, even when it conflicted with their moral belief".
Alt-Right?
America is a hell hole now, where government agents in masks go around beating victims to break their bones and move them along with metal rods to hold them in stinking prisons without adequate toilet facilities. This is the direct result of White Nationalism and the gospel of hate which teaches that immigrants are vermin poisoning the blood of America as Trump described them in his campaign for a second term as president. This is what it means to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN - A GREATLY CRUEL AND DISGUSTING PLACE JUST LIKE WHAT AMERICANS USED TO THINK OF AS THIRD WORLD DISASTER CASES. See the NYT article in the link, from which this little bit is an extract:
"Footage taken by bystanders of Mr. Barranco’s arrest went viral. The videos show several agents standing above him while others hold him down. One agent, kneeling at his side, strikes Mr. Barranco repeatedly in the head, neck and left shoulder as he groans. The agents force him into an S.U.V. with the aid of a metal rod."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/us/narciso-barranco-ice-deport-marines-trump.html
If the United States had advanced the current tactics practiced upon immigrants when Trump's ancestors landed upon our shores, they might have been treated similarly. He has forgotten that his own family was immigrant.
The whole world consists of people moving and mixing ever since the first true human beings evolved around 300, 000 years ago. All the 8 billion people on earth belong to the same species. Even our humanoid ancestors who used tools and fire of the species homo erectus moved across the old world from Africa to Europe to Asia. America's "immigration crisis" has been engineered by the Republican Party as a way to power. Counting all the undocumented immigrants in America over several decades, they are a total of less than 5% of the population with proportionately less criminals than the native- born. MAGA is a reactionary movement funded by billionaires and led by a demented criminal to escape jail and consolidate the power of a tiny oligarchy behind him. Its essence is hatred and performative cruelty to entertain the ignorant and easily duped followers of America's senile Fuehrer.
Well said, and couldn't agree more. The immigration "issue" has been around for numerous administrations and congress sessions. When the GOP was in full power in the past, they had no workable solutions, assuming that they addressed it at all. Only now has it become an "emergency" by a 'demented criminal' as a justification to push us ever closer to a police state and treat people in an inhumane manner, denying them due process. As you point out, the perponderance of criminality does not stem from the immigrants.
I agree completely. The story of opposition to immigration in the US is in waves. There was popular violent rage (leading at times to murders) whipped up by politicians against the Irish in the 19th century as criminals who brought disease, against Jews, Poles, and Italians as dirty and also criminals in the end of the 19th century, pogroms against Chinese (drug addicts and brothel owners in the stories) and Indians in the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. Trump's father Fred marched as a young man in the KKK against Italian (Catholic) immigrants. By 1924, the U.S. had introduced race based national quotas and closed the door effectively to most of the world. The Supreme Court ruled that people of Asian origin could not be U.S. citizens or own property (which provoked fury in Japan and contributed to hyper-nationalism). U.S. popular feeling against Jewish immigrants was so strong that FDR didn't make any move to relax quotas even for refugees from Nazi persecution, who were turned away and returned to Europe to meet their deaths. By 1965, along with the other Civil RIghts legislation, the LBJ administration and Congress opened up immigration more widely by removing nationality quotas, instead giving priority to re-uniting families.
In the 1930s under Hoover and 1950s under Eisenhower, there were mass deportations of Mexican immigrants, and even of US citizens of Mexican origin. Even so, the basic needs of US agriculture brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to America in the harvest season. They simply moved back and forth across a flexible border. That changed with the 1985 Immigration Reform, which banned such seasonal immigration. The result was that many who would have returned now stayed back. That's the origin of the rise of undocumented immigrants - mostly of Hispanic, and indeed of Mexican, origin. Republicans obeyed Trump's instructions in the Biden presidency to block a bipartisan immigration reform bill, so he could use illegal immigration as a major theme in his 2024 campaign. Biden and his team were politically at best naive, even foolish, to open the border in 2021 to 2023. It wasn't enough to close it again at the beginning of 2024 - that played straight into Trump's hands, even if it was a natural humane reaction to the pictures of children in cages and separated from their parents in the first Trump term. There was, and is, a deep current of insecurity, distrust of the educated elite and experts, and xenophobia in America, ready for demagogues to exploit. That's made much worse by social media and control of major media (e.g. Fox, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and soon Larry Ellison's giant merged group) by unscrupulous billionaires allied to Trump.
Most immigrants are hard-working and just want to work at something, even without the wages or benefits of Americans - who will no longer take those jobs in hospitality or landscaping or construction or healthcare for the aged- and pay taxes. American employers exploit this cheap source of labor running into millions of workers. Like other waves of immigrants, these also came to escape poverty and lives without hope in their countries, looking for better lives for themselves and their children. Probably Europe and America can't absorb these large changes in their societies without major turbulence. Trump makes it all worse and brings rage to boiling point - chaos as opportunity for rogues.
You present a good historical perspective/analysis to the immigration situation that this country has faced over the years. Overall, we have not handled it too well, an obviously, still are not.
So scary, mostly because the language is unknown to most.
This whole thing sounds like the opening volleys of World War I. An assassination take place from within the team and then eventually leads to a massive conflict.
very informative
Outstanding article! Thank you.
Regarding the lionization of Kirk, we'd all be better off if we heeded Kirk's admonition: “we must also be real. We must be honest." See "Charlie Kirk Got Exactly What He Said America Deserves"
https://open.substack.com/pub/blackcollarcrime/p/charlie-kirk-got-exactly-what-kirk?r=30ufvh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Wow! I had no idea about much of this. Very bizarre, surely evil in its hatred.
I am so sick of hearing about this fucking man that I never heard of before he was murdered. He was not assassinated. He is white trash. He was murdered just like white trash is killed - they are fucking murdered like all low lying pieces of shit are shot down. Any piece of trash can buy a cheap assed suit and put it on but you are still trash. Sadly, your fucking ass is dead. DEAD. Go away. There are so many people who are so much more important than your sorry ass. What a moron. What a waste of my time.
As a Christian in a deep red state, where I sometimes feel like I’m in the wilderness, this article was like a first aid kit! I loved the casual tone, but still was learning from the information packed in here. I had no idea what a “Groyper” was, and I liked Lily Conway’s addition of “The average person’s relationship with the internet is healthy enough not to know. Mine, unfortunately, is not.” — it felt like I was talking to a young person in my kitchen.
The content is informational and was so enlightening. I hadn’t realized how deeply the internet is shaping young minds today — it’s very different from when my kids were little — and I am going to spend the weekend studying the links Lily Conway included.
I’m so pleased that now when someone in church tells me “I saw this post on Facebook” I can pull out my first aid kit and say to them “Well I saw this article from a solid and credentialed researcher and THIS is what’s happening out there in the real world, not just in the online world.”
It's not even really about "illegal" immigrants, but much more about defining America as a country for a single ("White") ethnicity and of a supposed common Judaeo-Christian background who defend "Western" civilization from hordes of savage and violent invaders. Historically, it's interesting to note that neither the Irish nor the Jews (Stephen Miller's ancestors) were considered "White", nor the Italians, when they came to America in large numbers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Trump's grandfather a German-speaking immigrant, was literally a criminal as he broke the law by running a brothel in the United States.. As for a Judaeo-Christian tradition, that is a modern American myth. In any case, the MAGA movement is at best semi-literate and totally ignorant of the scholarly research into early and second-temple Judaism and the development of Christianity. When some of Trump's Evangelical followers can even consider him to be chosen by God and Catholic priests asked devotees on Sundays to vote for him, they seem to have lost touch with not only reality and the evidence of Trump's life and behavior, but with the essential noble teachings of their faith - to be kind and to act in ways they would want others to act towards them. Trump is far more like a capricious, sexually perverted, and tyrannical Roman emperor than a Christian or practicing Jew of any kind.
"Western" civilization isn't simply a straight line from classical Greece through Republican and Imperial Rome to the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and the Industrial, Energy, and Information revolutions. A modern survey such as Josephine Quinn's "How the World Made the West" is worth reading, to understand how vast and influential were other cultures in making the world of today. The world has always been inter-connected, even if parts (the Americas, Australasia, the Pacific Islands) were not in close relationships for long periods with other cultures. People adapted everywhere, because that is the human genius, to their environments, more or less successfully for longish stretches of time, until their worlds were shattered by modern technology. That happened in the West (Europe) and in the rest of the world. All parts of the world are still adjusting. Technology - in transport, in communications, in information, in inter-linkages of production, and dependence on resources and labor in other countries - affects so-called developed societies as well as those who have not raised their standard of living to the same levels.
The insecurities of the MAGA movement come with many Americans' inability to cope with a changing world in which their relative status seems to be lower, when their country seems to have far more people of color (because race-based nationality quotas were dropped from 1965) and they all insist on equal treatment. Some of these people of other ethnic and religious backgrounds have even become very wealthy and successful as professionals and are more present in politics. So Trump followers are desperately afraid that they don't (and won't) matter anymore. The real problem is that economic policies from around 1980 have consistently increased inequality, and by now, despite the efforts of some recent administrations (Obama, Biden) to widen access to healthcare or support the least privileged in other ways, America is now ruled by an oligarchy. That oligarchy of financial predators and IT and other business barons would prefer a strongman like Trump to make sure their taxes stay low and the majority of Americans remain as only data points in their generation of profits - whatever their ethnic or religious background. Race and xenophobia are simply useful, because like the flag (MAGA) they are the last refuge of the scoundrel in politics.
Thank you for this article and perspective. Corporate media has been spinning this like a poorly written soap.