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At the tail end of September 1995, the Croatian Army (HV) launched an offensive across the Una River from Central Croatia into Serb-held Northwestern Bosnia. This came on the heels of several major victories for the HV in that war, but Operation Una would quickly be a failure.

Danish UN Peacekeepers were stationed in the vicinity and got to see the whole show as it played out. Stuck in their bunkers (to make sure that they weren’t accidentally hit by stray shells), they watched the action and reported what they saw. One report that I read has stuck with me ever since; a Danish soldier was using thermal imaging binoculars and watched Croatian soldiers slowly bleed out until they died from their wounds. He said that the colour of their bodies went from red, orange, and yellow, and then to green, and finally to a shade of dark blue.

Charlie Kirk is currently in between the orange and green phases, as his social media omnipresence begins to dissipate, leaving only clips of what once had been. Charlie is fading out.

I, like many others, dismissed him at first and openly mocked him. How could you not? TPUSA had a gift shop that sold the most cringe items possible: hoodies emblazoned with the words “I LOVE CAPITALISM” were splashed all over the page. Combined with his early rhetoric that reflected the most milquetoast GOP talking points, no one could be blamed for seeing him as little more than another sponsored Con Inc. grifter.

While many of us wrote him off, he continued to build his organization, extend his network, and most importantly, rapidly mature in his politics. As he was being ignored by the likes of people like myself, he moved away from Chamber of Commerce Republicanism and towards #MAGA. So successful was he in this evolution that not only did he gain the ear of people like Donald Trump and JD Vance, but he also managed to turn his organization, TPUSA, into the youth wing of #MAGA. So critical was he to this movement that he became a power broker behind the scenes at the age of 30. Who knows where he would have been at 50 if he was not gunned down by Tyler Robinson three months ago?

We will never know. What we do know now is that Kirk was able to speak to rival factions within the overall Republican Party, having earned the trust of each of these groups. This may not have been visible to us at the time, but it certainly is obvious now. Charlie had a movement, leadership qualities, trust, a growing, powerful network, and most importantly, influence. His removal from the scene has left a massive, gaping hole in #MAGA, leaving its youth wing rudderless for the time being (and for the foreseeable future).

Scott Greer has gone as far as to argue that the Kirk assassination has “wrecked the right”:

Highly Respected

The Charlie Kirk Assassination Wrecked The Right

Charlie Kirk’s death shocked the world. Millions of Americans grieved over the loss of the Turning Point USA founder. His public memorial essentially became a state funeral, with thousands in attendance, and countless others watching it live. His death gruesomely illustrated the threat of political violence, with the White House declaring Antifa a terro…

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a day ago · 103 likes · 63 comments · Scott Greer

All of that disappeared with his murder. There’s no one filling the massive void he left behind. There’s a desperation to find someone to fill Kirk’s shoes, but the only candidate they can suggest is JD Vance. Vance is vice president. He’s too busy to serve as conservatism’s manager and hold campus rallies all over the country.

The vacuum left by Kirk led to the Right’s ongoing civil war. Without an effective leader, there’s nothing holding these disparate sides together. Brutal mudslinging and purge attempts naturally follow.

Scott focuses on two different streams to criticize in the fallout from the killing:

1. the addiction to ridiculous conspiratorial thinking that is amplified by social media
2. unrealistic hopes from those who want to see concrete action against perceived political enemies

Explaining the first group as individuals seeking entertainment, Greer speaks to how politics has become a spectator sport. Compounding this negative trend is the fact that this cohort are glued to podcasts that thrive on sensationalism, since sensationalism drives clicks (meaning revenue). Entertainment has in many ways supplanted the seek for truth in the realm of politics, and the cacophony that it produces makes trying to get your own point across almost a Sisyphean task. No, Charlie Kirk was not assassinated in a plot involving the Mossad, Egyptians, and TPUSA turncoats.

On “unrealistic hopes”:

The Online Right is largely blackpilled by the murder because it did not result in mass arrests of leftists. This was never going to happen. Robinson acted alone. There was no terror group behind him, besides a few troons encouraging him on Discord. There is no network to arrest here in connection with the shooting. American law does not allow for round-ups of people just for their beliefs and tweets. But a number of right-wing influencers think it does and insist the public demand this.

Considering how the public is getting cold feet over Trump’s deportations, it’s highly unlikely the people would be happy with federal agents arresting citizens just for celebrating Kirk’s murder. But influencers pumped up their audiences with fantasies of mass arrests and hysteric claims of well-organized terror networks. It increased viewership, but it didn’t create realistic expectations. The lack of mass arrests makes believers angry and think Trump “betrayed” them. But it’s akin to getting mad at the sky not turning green or failing to get a date with Sydney Sweeney as an average joe.

Scott has a technical point here, but I believe that he is missing something very important; energy and symbolism.

A tremendous amount of energy was unleashed in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, one that could have been harnessed to radicalize tepid youth who have made their first steps towards #MAGA. A backlash was called for, one that should have happened from two camps: TPUSA members and the White House. Yes, the White House is constrained by law in what it could have possibly done (and Trump did declare ANTIFA a terrorist organization), but a symbolic arrest or two (even if charges would have been thrown out of court), would have provided enough fuel for young radicals to believe that the administration is truly in the fight and truly on their side.

At the same time, no violent backlash occurred from the foot soldiers of TPUSA and #MAGA. Instead, Charlie Kirk’s wife, Erika, defused the entire situation by publicly proclaiming that she “forgave” his killer. This was a very Christian gesture, but on the other hand, it completely took the wind out of the sails of radicalization. An entire army of young people watched with horror as their leader took a bullet in the neck, and instead baring their teeth, they were asked to let it go. The price for this missed opportunity will be political apathy and more targeted killings, as the opposing side sees that the cost for assassinations is entirely localized to those volunteers who pull the trigger, and any immediate support network that they might have. For them, this is a price worth paying. As it stands now, one man looks like he will be going to jail, while the youth wing of the American right is now in disarray. That’s an incredibly good trade-off.

At the same time, who would step up to engage in unlawful retaliatory behaviour? We saw some low-level political violence from the American right in the past, and time and time again these individuals were thrown under the bus by people who they felt should have had their backs. Why would you stick your own neck out knowing that if you do get arrested, you are not going to be immediately assisted by a team of lawyers like leftist radicals have on call.

As is my custom, I like to compare contemporary politics to historical eras, and I will first bring up Weimar Germany and how right wing radicals were often sheltered by the state from serious punishment, permitting them to radicalize even further:

Men like Jünger and Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz provided the literary voice for what some commentators in the early 1920s called the “White Terror.” Thousands of right-wing radicals involved in the campaign of political violence during the first years of the Weimar Republic sought the destruction of the first German democracy and the conquest of portions of Eastern Europe in the months and years after the First World War. Heinz was part of a wave of returning veterans and radicalized young men who responded to the total collapse of imperial Germany by organizing themselves and committing violent acts. Between 1919 and 1923, dozens of loosely organized groups embarked on a campaign of revolutionary terrorism designed to spark a civil war and unite the disparate elements of the German Right behind the goal of creating an authoritarian state.1

(Please note that I am not calling for terrorist attacks to be committed – ed.)

One notorious radical right wing group was the Organization Consul founded by Freikorps leader Captain Hermann Ehrhardt.

On the OC and its ties to the Bavarian Government of the time:

Founded in Bavaria, the OC enjoyed legal protection and even financial resources from a sympathetic government.22 Bavaria was a hot bed of right-wing extremism, and it was no secret that the government and local military units supported the efforts of the OC and dozens of other paramilitary organizations wholeheartedly. The president of Bavaria, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, openly despised the Weimar government in Berlin and identified with upstart leaders like Adolf Hitler and Hermann Ehrhardt. Munich served essentially as a secure base where radicals could plot freely against the government.23 Kahr even protected extremists who were wanted for crimes in other parts of Germany. He and the German military forces in Bavaria acted as state sponsors of terrorism because they provided groups like the OC and the NSDAP with political, financial, and military support. As is the case for many more recent terrorist organizations, state-sponsorship (or at the very least, benign neglect) facilitated the extremists’ terrorist acts.

The point of this excerpt isn’t to urge young Americans to engage in terrorist acts, but to illustrate how easy it was for young men from another time and place to be radical extremists as they had the state on their side and broad sympathy from wide segments of the populace. This is why I keep stating that the USA is in no way near a state of actual civil war, an idea that continues to creep into conversations all the time. You need two sides ready to engage in political violence for a civil war to occur, and despite one side having had a ‘nod and a wink’ level of support up until recently, the other side has never had even that.

I still do believe that it would behoove the American right to bare its fangs (which does make me seem like I am speaking out of both sides of my mouth), but that energy has already largely evaporated, leaving vultures like Candace Owens to peck away at Kirk’s corpse. The question then becomes: “How do they realistically bare their fangs?”

Where do those radicalized by Kirk’s killing go? Who would lead them? It’s clear that TPUSA is not going to radicalize, and it’s quite clear that the condition today in US politics is nowhere near Spain on the verge of its civil war:

Shortly afterward, a judge provisionally suspended both the activities of FE de las JONS and its membership throughout the country, ordering the closure of its headquarters. Primo de Rivera responded with the order for the Falange to go underground. Paradoxically, it was now, after the electoral defeat, that FE de las JONS began to grow significantly, welcoming young people from the Popular Action Youth disenchanted with the CEDA’s strategy, but also others without prior affiliation, 23 and adults and women, all eager to fight against the left and convinced that if they did not, Spain would end up suffering a communist revolution.2

CEDA was the conservative political party that governed Spain for two years during the Second Spanish Republic. Its victory was the result of a conservative reaction to the radical changes made by the previous government, many of which it had undone in its time in office. For many of its more radical supporters, CEDA was too wedded to the democratic process and was not taking the threat of radical leftism seriously enough to their liking. The disenchantment with democratic and constitutional politics (combined with CEDA’s loss in the 1936 elections) resulted in the almost total defection of the party’s youth wing (Juventudes de Acción Popular – JAP) from CEDA to the far right Falange just months before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Today’s radicalized American right wingers have nothing of the sort to defect to. They are stuck on the GOP reservation for the time being, a party that is entirely wedded to constitutionalism, just like CEDA was. This works to de-radicalize US politics and is just another example of how the USA is not at threat of a new civil war breaking out anytime soon.

In parallel to this rightist youth defection, so too did one occur with radicalized leftist youth in Spain, as the PSOE’s youth wing crossed over to the communists:

The “unification meeting” – in anticipation of a congress which was planned but never took place because of the civil war – was to take place in Madrid, Plaza de Las Ventas, on Sunday 5 April 1936, under the effective chairmanship of Largo Caballero, of whom it is known that he had expressed in private strong reservations about the unification of the Youth organisations and in any case had totally rejected a break by the PSOE with the Second International, though he was no less on the line of “organic unity”. The new organisation – which was called in a slightly improper way the Unified Socialist Youth – seems, on good evidence, to have had much greater material resources than hitherto, which cannot be explained simply by the fact that its membership quickly doubled. [77] The first issue of its weekly, Juventud, in a new and very unpolitical style, abundantly illustrated, had a print-run of 100,000 copies. The history of the Socialist Youth was ended. The history of the Unified Socialist Youth had begun. It was not only a new chapter; it was a new book.

Was the Unified Young Socialists already won to the Stalinist policy when it came into existence? All the evidence suggests that Trotsky thought so – or estimated that, at least, the men of the Communist International believed that they controlled the leadership, which implied that a certain number at least of the old leaders of the Socialist Youth had secretly joined them. The official version of the history of the Communist Party of Spain would have us believe that Carrillo and the other leaders of the JSU came and asked to enter the Communist Party en bloc at the most dramatic moment of the siege of Madrid, at the time of the departure of the Largo Caballero government for Valencia and of the formation of the Junta for Defence of Madrid: this is the date which fits in best with the explanation that the valiant fighters of the JSU joined the most courageous and far-seeing formation of fighters. In fact, we know that Santiago Carrillo, months before, was already taking part in the work of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. [78] And a speech delivered on the day before the unification meeting by the general secretary of the Socialist Youth warned his members against internal criticisms voiced by the “Trotskyists”, which, at the time of the first Moscow Trial, presented his true visiting-card and displayed his political colour.3

This last excerpt I’ll leave to you to interpret for yourselves.

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