Groyper war, dark elves, bugmen: how the GOP ticket is reviving far-right beef

Antisemitic streamer, Holocaust denier, Charlottesville rally attendee, and January 6th instigator Nick Fuentes disavowed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last week, claiming the America First movement had been “hijacked” by “consultants, lobbyists, & donors.” 

The news that Fuentes had declared a “groyper war” on his preferred presidential candidate has sparked some claims that Trump is losing support among a core part of his constituency: white supremacists. But Fuentes has long been at odds with another subset of the far-right — one that has ascended within the mainstream Republican Party in recent years, culminating in Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate.

In a video posted on Rumble, Fuentes said Trump had made “an endless string of unforced errors” in his campaign, beginning with Trump’s suggestion that former candidate Nikki Haley could have a place in his administration. Fuentes also took issue with Trump’s appearance on the All-In podcast, in which he said all foreign students who graduate from US colleges should get a green card along with their diploma. Among Fuentes’ other complaints was the fact that Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump term.

Unmentioned in Fuentes’ video is his longstanding beef with far-right thinkers who have gained prominence within conservative circles, including Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” philosopher who is close with Vance and megadonor Peter Thiel. Fuentes, a vocal antisemite, has accused Yarvin of believing that “non-Jews are incapable of governing themselves and therefore must always be ruled by Jews.” He has also claimed that Yarvin and Costin Alamariu — the once-pseudonymous writer better known as Bronze Age Pervert — are “at the forefront of a rising Thiel-funded faction of the Right.” 

This subset of the far-right has been quietly gaining ground for years. In 2019, Politico Magazine reported that several young staffers of the Trump White House had become taken with Bronze Age Mindset, Alamariu’s self-published, anti-egalitarian manifesto about how superior men suffer under the tyranny of the “Leviathan” (the government, elite cultural institutions, and so forth) and the hordes of “bugmen” (inferior beings who do the Leviathan’s bidding). Vance, incidentally, follows Bronze Age Pervert on X.

Michael Anton, a Trump-era national security official, has described Bronze Age Pervert as speaking “directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day.” In his review of Bronze Age Mindset, Anton notes that Yarvin gave him the book as a gift.

Writer John Ganz has referred to the radicalization of young conservative staffers as a sort of “groyperfication,” and while there are certainly some influential Fuentes sympathizers within the Republican Party, Fuentes’ groypers are actually at war with BAP acolytes and Yarvin’s so-called Dark Elves. 

The Thiel-funded faction of the right, as Fuentes put it, is now in power. Vance owes much of his political career to Thiel. Elon Musk was among those who convinced Trump to select Vance as his running mate, and Vance’s addition to the ticket has brought in hundreds of millions in donations from other members of the Silicon Valley elite. 

Fuentes’ groyper war is really a war of optics. Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 is largely superficial; many of its policy proposals were written by former Trump staffers and current allies. Vance has not only echoed some of the proposals laid out in Project 2025 but also wrote the foreword for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light. But polling suggests that Project 2025 is becoming increasingly unpopular among voters — it’s only logical that Trump has tried to tell voters he has nothing to do with it. 

Trump has, in fact, also attempted to distance himself from Fuentes. Trump had dinner with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and “seemed very taken” with the young white supremacist, Axios reported at the time. (Fuentes had been invited by Kanye West shortly after the rapper legally changed his name to Ye.) But after Republican leaders criticized Trump for dining with Fuentes, Trump claimed he had no idea who Fuentes was.

Vance, too, has recently been questioned about Trump’s ties to Fuentes. Vance was asked about Fuentes’ dinner with Trump during an interview with ABC News on Sunday. “The one — the one thing I like about Donald Trump, Jon, is that he actually will talk to anybody,” Vance told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. “But just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views. And look, I mean Donald Trump spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells her she’s beautiful and jokes around with her a little bit.”

Fuentes, on the other hand, had said “terrible stuff” about Vance’s wife, Usha. After Trump announced Vance as his running mate, Fuentes said Vance’s interracial relationship was proof that he “doesn’t value his racial identity,” heritage, or religion. “I mean, he’s a white supremacist,” Vance said. But unlike the other white supremacists in Trump’s orbit, Fuentes doesn’t couch his beliefs in cryptic diatribes about bugmen and elves.