Anti-Semitic streamer, Holocaust denier, Charlottesville rally participant and January 6 instigator Nick Fuentes distanced himself from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last week, claiming the America First movement had been “hijacked” by “advisors, lobbyists and donors.”

News that Fuentes has declared a “groyper war” on his preferred presidential candidate has sparked some claims that Trump is losing support among a core part of his electorate: white supremacists. But Fuentes has long been at loggerheads with another subset of the far right — a subset that has risen to prominence within the establishment 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 made “an endless series of unforced errors” in his campaign, starting with Trump’s suggestion that former candidate Nikki Haley could have a place in his administration. Fuentes also criticized Trump’s appearance at the All In podcast in which he said that all foreign students graduating from U.S. colleges should receive 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 game plan for a second Trump term.

Unmentioned in Fuentes’ video is his long-running feud with far-right thinkers who have gained prominence in conservative circles, including Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” philosopher close to Vance and major donor Peter Thiel. Fuentes, a vocal anti-Semite, has accused Yarvin of believing “non-Jews are incapable of governing themselves and must therefore always be governed by Jews.” He has also claimed that Yarvin and Costin Alamariu – the once-pseudonymous writer better known as the Bronze Age Pervert – are “at the head of a growing faction of the right funded by Thiel.”

This subgroup of the extreme right has been quietly gaining ground for years. In 2019 Politico Magazine reported that several young White House staff members under Trump were Bronze Age mentalityAlamarius’s self-published, anti-egalitarian manifesto about how superior humans suffer under the tyranny of the “Leviathan” (the government, elite cultural institutions, etc.) and the hordes of “Bugmen” (inferior beings who obey the Leviathan’s orders).. By the way, Vance follows Bronze Age Pervert on X.

Michael Anton, a Trump-era national security official, has described Bronze Age Pervert as a “direct expression of youthful discontent (especially among white males) with the equality that is being propagated and imposed in our time.” In his review of Bronze Age mentality, Anton notices that Yarvin gave him the book.

Author John Ganz has called the radicalization of young conservative workers a form of “groyperfication,” and while there are certainly some influential Fuentes sympathizers within the Republican Party, Fuentes’ groypers are actually at war with BAP supporters 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 one of those who convinced Trump to select Vance as his running mate, and Vance’s inclusion on the list has brought him hundreds of millions in donations from other members of the Silicon Valley elite.

Fuentes’ groyper war is actually a war of optics. Trump’s opposition to Project 2025 is largely superficial; many of his policy proposals were written by former Trump aides and current allies. In addition to echoing some of Project 2025’s proposals, Vance also wrote the foreword for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book The early light of dawnBut polls suggest that Project 2025 is becoming increasingly unpopular with voters – it’s only logical that Trump would try to tell voters he had nothing to do with it.

In fact, Trump has also tried 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 was reported at the time. (Fuentes had been invited by Kanye West shortly after the rapper officially changed his name to Ye.) But after Republican leaders criticized Trump for his dinner with Fuentes, Trump claimed he had no idea who Fuentes was.

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

Fuentes, on the other hand, had said “horrible things” 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 ethnic identity,” his heritage or his religion. “I mean, he’s a white supremacist,” Vance said. But unlike the other white supremacists in Trump’s orbit, Fuentes does not express his beliefs in cryptic rants about bug people and elves.