The murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk was expected to unify the base, but instead, writes Salon's Amanda Marcotte, has triggered infighting and torn it apart.
Although media figures and President Donald Trump declared Kirk a "martyr" just minutes after his assassination, and Vice President JD Vance said at his memorial, "this is not a funeral but a revival," "a little more than two months later, the predicted wave of new recruits to the MAGA cause has not manifested," Marcotte says.
As Trump's approval ratings decline, people were fired for criticizing Kirk, and "after the public outcry that followed ABC’s attempted termination of late show host Jimmy Kimmel for a mild joke related to the shooting, the campaign to use Kirk’s death as an excuse to silence dissent largely fizzled out," Marcotte explains.
Early on after his death, "there were signs," Marcotte notes, that it "was not leading to the authoritarian takeover his fans had envisioned," but even less predictable was what came next, she says.
"Far from unifying the MAGA movement, Kirk’s death opened the door to increasingly ugly infighting, as various right-wing influencers vie to fill the power vacuum left by the TPUSA leader," she exlains, pointing to the vicious fighting between right wing influeners Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro over leading MAGA neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes, among other things.
They have been "flinging accusations of dark conspiracies and anti-semitism, some of which even appear to be true," Marcotte notes.
"The immediate cause of the strife is a growing divide over U.S. support for Israel, but there’s little doubt that the feuds are fueled by unchecked ambition: To exploit Kirk’s death to get more followers — and more power — in the toxic MAGA media ecosystem," she writes.
Kirk, she says, was a frequent "hate target" of "Hitler-praising far right influencer" Fuentes, and "now that Kirk’s gone, Fuentes’ star is rising."
"While Kirk was never the mega-celebrity the right now pretends he was, it does seem he was powerful enough within MAGA to keep a lid on the burgeoning desire that exists in some circles to embrace overt anti-semitism and even Nazi sympathies," Marcotte adds.
In Kirk's absence, Marcotte notes, "The Fuentes vision is being taken up in bits and pieces by the Trump administration."
"Last week, ProPublica exposed how a White House lawyer with a self-described “Nazi streak” had been working to protect accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate from a federal investigation," she writes.
"On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that, under the leadership of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Coast Guard will stop classifying swastikas and nooses as hate symbols," and later backtracked on it.
Shapiro, meanwhile, is competing with Owens, "his former Daily Wire employee, whose open flirtation with anti-semitism eventually forced him to fire her last year," Marcotte explains. But "the key to Owens’ success seems to be the very anti-semitism that got her fired from the Daily Wire."
The infighting is splitting the conspiracy theorists, Marcotte explains, and as such, the MAGA movement itself.
"Fuentes appears to believe that all this infighting will destroy MAGA, creating an opportunity for his ascendance as the right’s new — and unapologetically fascist — leader," she writes.
And it's not just conspiracy theorists who are fighting, she notes.
"The fighting has started to spill out into all corners," Marcotte says, including an "especially stupid feud" between radio personality Mark Levin and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, "who refused to condemn Carlson for his flirtations with anti-semitism."
But now that Kirk is gone and "Trump's health isn't looking good, "internal strife is tearing up the MAGA movement," she writes.
"Fuentes was premature in tweeting 'MAGA is dead' earlier this month. That obituary has been written many times, and it’s always been premature. But it’s not wrong that the movement is starting to look a little sickly," she says.
