Recently, the Miami Herald exposed the savage dialogue of a lengthy group chat for conservative students at Florida International University that the secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party provoked. The so-called chat rapidly degenerated into a despicable tirade of racism, violent fantasies, and perverse praise for Adolf Hitler. The group mentioned the N-word more than 400 times and provided advice on how to murder Black Americans most effectively (the group’s pro-life members suggested curb stomping and crucifixion). The retrograde rant included ongoing references to women as “whores;” fantasies about all-White immigration laws; and intense, searing hatred toward Jewish Americans. The chat group’s name - “Gooning in Agartha” - was a peculiar combo platter suggesting ornate masturbation rituals in “Nazi heaven.”

In a nation engaged in another devastating war with inflation and gas prices rising and unemployment on the rebound, there are still groups of certain Young Republicans saluting Hitler. In the not-too-distant past, embracing Hitler was one of those things you just did not do in a reputable democracy for obvious moral reasons: Nazism, World War II, and targeted genocide. Murdering millions of human beings should never garner or inspire admiration. Nonetheless, such antics have been occurring with routine frequency, which a current trail of mentally deranged text chains among Young Republican leaders has revealed. More alarming is that such an incident is not an aberration or outlier - it’s a commonplace and problematic pattern.

Indeed, to add insult to injury, the College Republicans of America elected Kai Schwemmer as its political director. He is a self-identified “Groyper” with extensive ties to Hitler-admiring, far-right podcast host Nick Fuentes. Investigator Ben Lorber exposed Schwemmer’s social media activity promoting White nationalist propaganda, as MS NOW reported. In essence, the problem isn’t being tamed; rather, it is compounding - from the Republican Party’s younger millennial and Generation Z segment, which will undoubtedly cultivate ample conflicts even in a post-Trump Republican Party. Something despicable, dispiriting, demented, and deplorable is being unleashed and ungoverned. The Manhattan Institute, a politically right-leaning think tank, conducted a survey of national Republicans and found that 17 percent could be defined as “anti-Jewish Republicans” - including pluralities of Latino, Black, and Republican men under the age of 50 believing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Yes! You read that correctly!

Truth be told, it was not only younger voters who adhered to such nativistic rhetoric. Since Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2016, the Republican Party has increasingly embraced racial identity as its political brand. Trump’s acute focus on supposedly violent “illegal” immigrants resulted in a 21st-century nativism that was more psychologically and emotionally digestible to many voters, including numerous Latino voters who turned out in record-breaking numbers for Trump in 2024. However, many of those same voters eventually viewed the second installment as thoroughly horrendous.

Indeed, more than a year after Trump’s return to the presidency, public sentiment appears to be dramatically moving away from MAGA nativism. The president’s dropping poll numbers on immigration - initially one of his signature and politically advantageous issues with voters - suggests that Americans do not condone the gestapo-like tactics or his deportation agenda’s vile brutality in disproportionately targeting non criminals. Perhaps some American citizens have awakened to the more truthful realization that MAGA nativism is less concerned about tackling supposed “criminality” than about focusing on reversing if not outright nullifying the increasing “diverisfying of America.”

Trump has been at the forefront of denouncing the nation’s foreign-born population of 50 million people, including its 25 million-plus naturalized citizens. In his incoherent, conspiratorial-minded speech last Thanksgiving Day, Trump unambiguously stated that his nativist agenda targets all immigrants - period. While he singled out entire ethnic groups such as the Somali communities in Minnesota and Ohio, the president derided most foreign-born people of being parasitic and criminal entities sent to America from “prisons” and “mental institutions” in their native countries. The recent escalation in rhetoric against legal immigrants and naturalized citizens demonstrates the true power of the far-right’s control of the Republican Party, whose more prominent leaders unabashedly publicly espouse White nationalist talking points and conspiracy theories.

Despite its fierce infighting, today’s GOP is the most uniformly (and explicitly racially) nativist it’s been since the early 1920s, when Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act into law to keep America “American” (that is, majority White and preferably Anglo-Protestant). We can trace the GOP’s real civil war to the early 1990s, when Patrick Buchanan challenged then incumbent President George H.W. Bush for the 1992 Republican nomination. Buchanan was the original MAGA candidate, as many have since noted. From the border wall, protectionism, and his famous, or rather infamous, Cultural War speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention to his virulently racist attacks against Mexican immigrants, Buchanan provided the bridge for Trump to cross over three decades later.

The collapse of the neocon/global conservatism agenda during the 21st century’s inaugural decade resulted in a rabid siege of the disturbed, disgruntled, distressed and previously demoralized reactionaries and nativists who saw the Republican Party’s genuine embrace of globalism and multiculturalism as a stark betrayal of the Old Right’s isolationist and parochial values. Once its nativist, reactionary candidate reigned victorious in November 2016, the GOP rapidly transformed into a xenophobic party with an ever-increasing White nationalist block of voters.

A decade after Trump’s first election, there is no concrete evidence of the percentage of Republican voters who are at odds with the notion that immigrants are “invading” the country or that wealthy globalist oligarchs are intentionally and sadistically attempting to disrupt Western civilization by supporting non-White immigrants in an effort to remove White populations. Their agenda is far from monolithic, and stark differences exist. Certain White nationalists perceive Islam as the major menace, while others are more psychologically unsettled with the increasing Latino population.

Ethnic, religious and group blaming aside, the indisputable truth is that hardcore nationalists have seized control of the Republican Party. Paradoxically, these same White supremacists are waging demonstrably intense battles among themselves to decide what brand of White nationalism will reign supreme. It is a disturbing and alarming phenomenon that we must heavily monitor and combat at all costs.