"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."
"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."
"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."
Local officials say suspect Tyler Robinson held leftist beliefs and had dated a trans woman, which aligns with a simple motive given Charlie Kirk's history of demonizing trans people. The apparent ideological motive is plausible but may obscure a performative logic shaping modern extremism. Online black-pilled spaces prioritize audience and performance over coherent policy goals, turning violent acts into content and proof of in-group status. Christian Nationalists seek institutional power, while black-pilled Groypers embrace inevitable collapse and celebrate destruction as creative negation. That nihilism manifests as gestures and memes rather than policy platforms.
Read at www.mediaite.com
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