Recently, the Miami Herald exposed the savage dialogue of a lengthy group chat for conservative students at Florida International University created by Abel Alexander Carvajal, the secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party.

The so-called chat rapidly degenerated into a despicable tirade of racism, violent fantasies, and praise for Adolf Hitler. The N-word was used more than 400 times, and the rant including advice on how to effectively murder Black American and intense, searing hatred toward Jewish Americans.

Yes, in the year 2026 there are still groups of young Republicans saluting Hitler.

In the not-too-distant past, embracing Hitler was one of those things you just did not do for obvious moral reasons. Murdering millions of human beings should never garner or inspire admiration. Nonetheless, such antics have been occurring with routine frequency among young Republicans in what has become an alarming pattern.

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.

The problem isn’t being tamed. It’s 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. The Manhattan Institute, a politically right-leaning think tank, conducted a survey of national Republicans and found 17 percent could be defined as “anti-Jewish Republicans” — including pluralities of Latino, Black, and Republican men under the age of 50 believing the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.”

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 digestible to many voters, including numerous Latino voters who turned out in record-breaking numbers for Trump in 2024. Many of those same voters have come to view Trump’s second installment as thoroughly horrendous.

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 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 diversification 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 Thanksgiving speech, Trump unambiguously stated 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 espouse white nationalist talking points and conspiracy theories.

Despite fierce infighting, today’s GOP is the most uniformly 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 three decades later.

A decade after Trump’s first election, there doesn’t appear to be a sizable group of Republican voters who don’t think immigrants are invading our country or that wealthy globalist oligarchs are 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.

The indisputable truth is 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 combat at all costs.

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Copyright 2026 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.