The Groyper war against Vivek Ramaswamy

By Aneela Mirchandani

In a pre-Christmas livestream titled “Responding to my enemies,” Nick Fuentes, neo-Nazi influencer, declared war against Republican biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in his campaign for Ohio governor. 

“I’m going to go to Ohio, and the word we are looking for is ‘denial,’” Fuentes said. “We have to deny Vivek Ramaswamy the governorship. This is the only race I care about in 2026.”

The first hurdle Ramaswamy will have to clear is the Republican primary in May. Fuentes has vowed to sabotage his candidacy in both the primary, and if that doesn’t work, in the November general, even if that ends up ceding the race to the Democrats. “Do not give the anchor baby your vote,” he said to his audience. 

Fuentes has a rabid following among Generation Z conservatives who call themselves Groypers. With over a million followers on X, and over half a million on Rumble, a “Groyper war” against Ramaswamy represents a real risk for his candidacy.

Those numbers actually understate Fuentes’s influence. The 27-year-old has recently been at the center of the Republican party’s factional war between the traditional, pro-Israel, pro-free market side, which skews older, and the younger, anti-immigrant, anti-Israel, shock-jock side that openly professes White Christian identity politics. Nick Fuentes and his online Groyper Army have been at the forefront of the latter. 

At various times, he has called Hitler “cool” and “electrifying,” rails on “organized Jewry” on a regular basis, and uses slurs like “jeet” against Indians.

Despite his constant norm-breaking, in October, he was granted a two-hour-long sympathetic interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which raised his profile further. 

Fuentes claims the label “America First” for his movement, and hosts a podcast by that name. That slogan, also adopted by President Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign, has been criticized by historians as evoking a nativist, anti-Semitic movement from the 1930s. 

Fuentes did not respond to repeated requests for comment from AsAmNews.

Among the critics of the blood-and-soil nationalism of the Groypers is Ramaswamy himself. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Ramaswamy framed the choice starkly, painting Groyperism as anti-American and contrary to conservatism, and spoke up for a values-based conception of Americanism. “America isn’t a place, it’s an idea,” he said in 2022.  

Ramaswamy repeated that critique in a Dec. 21 speech at AmFest 2025, a days-long convention held by Turning Point USA, the group founded by slain influencer Charlie Kirk. He called out Fuentes by name for his comments praising Hitler, and for using the slur “jeet” against Second Lady Usha Vance. 

“I will tell you this idea of a ‘heritage American’ is about as loony as anything the woke left has come up with,” Ramaswamy said in his speech. He got a standing ovation. Despite the slurs he is subjected to on social media as the son of Indian immigrants, Ramaswamy pointed out that his domination in the Republican polls in Ohio showed that these ideas did not have wide appeal beyond a committed online group.

However, Fuentes’s White nationalist beliefs are said to be increasingly popular among young Republicans. Although he was not invited to AmFest 2025, multiple speakers used him as a foil and denounced him by name, sometimes to boos. The attempt to sabotage Ramaswamy will be a real test of his influence.

Fuentes is going up against a formidable foe. Ramaswamy’s candidacy has been endorsed by Trump and the Ohio Republican party, and according to the last filings with the Ohio Secretary of State’s office has almost $10 million in contributions. Until November, his only challenger for the Republican nomination in the May primary had been political outsider Heather Hill, whose candidacy had not attracted much notice. 

But since early December, Perrysburg car builder Casey Putsch has thrown his hat in the ring on an “America First” platform to “save” Ohio from Ramaswamy. His campaign is attracting the attention of Groypers on X, and has shot up to 25% on online betting markets like Polymarket.

“I think Vivek is disgusting,” Putsch said in his announcement video. He has criticized how Ramaswamy made his wealth, his closeness with the Silicon Valley tech moguls, and his openness to more immigration. He also targets Ramaswamy’s Indian heritage. 

“His parents are from India,” Putsch said in the announcement video, making fun of his name. “Vivek is actually Indian…. He just seems to have massive contempt for Americans…. I think he thinks we’re stupid.”

This gets to the heart of what the Groypers, by their own saying, find objectionable about Ramaswamy: despite having been born and raised in America, they see him as irredeemably foreign because of his heritage.

“America is under attack through mass migration, which is changing the racial demographics of the country,” Fuentes said in his livestream. “…To demographically change the country exclusively through immigration from nonwhite third world countries…is the most existential, life-threatening attack on America that has ever happened. It is worse than 9/11, World War II, the Civil War, all rolled into one.”

Later in the same video, Fuentes spoke about Indians in particular. “Nobody wants to live in a country and share it with 200 million Indians…millions of people from third-world sh*tholes, they don’t even share our alphabet, they don’t even come from a Christian country, we have nothing in common with them, their food smells like sh*t, they have different customs…nobody wants that. Black people don’t want it, white people don’t want it, even many of the assimilated immigrants they don’t want it… We want to live in a country that resembles the 40s.”

A divide amongst Trump supporters

Around Christmas 2024, a civil war erupted among Trump supporters with those who identify as “America First” rebelling against Trump’s Silicon Valley supporters’ plans to lift caps on high-tech immigration from India. The weeks-long online war, which centered on the tech worker H-1B visa, had Elon Musk throwing expletives against those who wanted to ban H-1Bs. 

“If you’re expecting JD Vance to come out and save MAGA from the Tech Bros, remember that his son is literally named Vivek,” Fuentes said on X.

At the height of the battle, Ramaswamy spoke up. In a much-derided long post-Christmas tweet, he suggested that Americans were losing out against engineers from Asia in the employment stakes due to flaws in American culture that looked down on nerds. 

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” he said. 

Since that tweet, anti-Indian hate exploded on social media, and Ramaswamy has become a prime recipient of it — driving him off social media. Slurs like “Yeet the Jeet” and a hashtag “#OperationChimpOut” proliferated on X. 

“Turns out the ‘waste’ that DOGE wanted to cut from America was Americans,” said a columnist from The Blaze. At this time, Ramaswamy had been announced as the co-leader of DOGE, Musk’s newly-formed cost-cutting agency. According to a Politico report, Republicans in Trump’s inner circle found that tweet so unpalatable that Ramaswamy was made to depart his position before a single day of work. 

The tweet has been derided as arrogant even by Democrats. The Democrat running against Ramaswamy for Ohio governor, Amy Acton, recently released an ad where a multiracial cohort of “real Ohioans” read out his tweet with no further commentary. 

Ramaswamy’s campaign staff did not respond to emailed questions from AsAmNews.

Conflict within the Republican party

Beyond Ramaswamy, Fuentes’s loudly proclaimed racism represents a real threat to the Republican party’s electoral prospects in general. In 2024, for instance, Indian Americans had shown a meaningful shift to the right. However, in 2025, those gains appear to have been erased.

For decades, gatekeepers in the conservative movement have tried to cut off anti-Semites and racists from their movement. In the 1950s, National Review editor William F. Buckley expelled all sorts of “antisemites and kooks” from the movement, as described in an essay by Matthew Continetti. Ramaswamy’s attempt to expel Groyperism follows that same tradition. 

However, with social media, gatekeeping is almost impossible. Fuentes was banned from YouTube in February 2020, but continued streaming on Rumble. He was banned from Twitter (now X) in 2021, and brought back by Musk in 2024. Through it all, his influence has continued to build. 

As a testament to this, even Nalin Haley, the biracial son of former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who is also of Indian heritage, has been sounding Groyperish on X where he has an America First bio. He recently called Ramaswamy anti-American and demanded that Israel’s Jewish leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, attend Mass while in the U.S., because “Christ is King” — a slogan popularized by the Groypers. 

The Trump administration’s recent moves against the skilled worker H-1B visa, the vast majority of which goes to Indians, shows that such America First beliefs have also had some influence on the top levels of government.

In the aftermath of the Tucker Carlson interview, the behind-the-scenes scramble to disavow Fuentes got so intense that it might have caused the implosion of the venerable conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. 

During the interview, Carlson sanitized Fuentes’s inflammatory rhetoric and commiserated with him about the largely unsuccessful attempts by “Zionist Jews” to cancel him. 

“So…maybe you won,” Carlson said, summing up his current ascendancy over rightwing mindshare. “Oh, certainly,” Fuentes responded.

The Carlson interview drew flak from many Republicans — among them, Texas Senator Ted Cruz — for platforming Fuentes. It was probably the biggest audience Fuentes had received yet.

However, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, stood up for Carlson’s decision to interview Fuentes as a free speech issue. “Their attempts to cancel him will fail,” he said. 

According to a report from CBS News, Roberts’s defense of the interview threw the group into turmoil. Within the first week, several members of the anti-semitic task force exited the group. Over the next few months resignations have continued, leaving the influential group a shell of its former self.

***

Regardless of how it turns out for Ramaswamy in 2026, Fuentes has promised to continue dogging the heels of the GOP until they promise an immigration moratorium. He has threatened to turn the Groyper Army against Vice President JD Vance’s likely run for president in 2028. 

“Listen, Jelly Donut,” Fuentes said, “We are going to squeeze you from now until 2028.”