Many of the noisiest influencers and trolls of the alt-Right who soared to online fame around 2016 have turned against one another in the years since, engaging in internecine public conflicts. In some cases, they’re attempting to push Donald Trump and his campaign in a more aggressive, radical direction which more closely resembles the spirit of 2016.
Richard Spencer, the Unite the Right rally organiser who once led chants of “Hail Trump” during a 2016 speech as some audience members raised their hands in Nazi-inspired salutes, no longer supports the Republican candidate. This summer, he pledged to vote for Biden — “dementia and all” — despite remaining Right-wing himself, because of his distaste for J.D. Vance and the GOP establishment. He has since suggested — albeit with questionable sincerity — that he supports Kamala Harris, and he has pushed back against Right-wing conspiracies about the Deep State targeting Trump. “The government is not trying to kill Donald Trump,” he wrote. “The government is ready to give Donald Trump the keys to the kingdom.”
Spencer’s turn against his onetime hero is part of a broader trend of the former president’s 2016 supporters from fringe online spaces now considering themselves essentially too Trumpy for Trump, believing the Republican candidate has been steered in the wrong direction by a cabal of donors and advisors.
Nick Fuentes, a young far-Right influencer and Holocaust denier, attended the 2017 Unite the Right Rally as well as the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In the days before the latter event he said: “Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.”
Three years later, Fuentes has become critical of Trump and is waging what he calls a “new Groyper war” against the Republican campaign. “We support Trump, but his campaign has been hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, & donors that he defeated in 2016, and they’re blowing it. Without serious changes we are headed for a catastrophic loss,” he has said. Fuentes has been calling for a return to the rhetoric of the 2016 campaign, and took credit when Trump brought his 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski back into the fold last week. He argued that the far–Right commentators who began criticising the campaign earlier this month were a result of the “Groyper war”.
Fuentes had a falling-out with onetime ally Milo Yiannopoulos, the provocateur who, alongside Steve Bannon, turned Breitbart into the “platform for the alt-right”. Yiannopoulos has accused Fuentes, who was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee, of turning over his own supporters’ names and private information to the federal government in exchange for leniency and being taken off the no-fly list. He also claimed Fuentes encouraged protesters to enter the Capitol building in January 2021, the implication being that he either did so at the request of the federal government, or that he received leniency for those actions in exchange for informing on others.
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