In a world spiraling into war, with AI rising and jobs falling, it’s easy to miss the little things — like a spate of young Republicans praising Hitler.
Not so long ago, hugging Hitler was one of those lines you just didn’t cross in a decent democracy, and for good reason: fascism, the Second World War and genocide. Murdering millions of humans should never inspire admiration.
But that’s what’s been happening with increasing regularity, revealed by a recent string of unhinged text chains revealed among young Republican leaders. This isn’t an outlier or a one-off. It’s a pattern and a problem.
Last week, the Miami Herald revealed the contents of an extensive group chat started by the secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party, for conservative students at Florida International University. The chat quickly degenerated into a cesspool of racism, violent fantasies, and Hitler-admiration. The n-word was used over 400 times, including in ruminations on the best ways to murder African Americans (curb-stomping and crucifixion were mentioned by one allegedly pro-life member of the chat). The chat also included extensive references to women as “whores,” fantasies about all-white immigration laws, and free-flowing hatred toward Jewish Americans. The chat group was named “Gooning in Agartha” — which is a strange combo platter suggesting ornate masturbation rituals in “Nazi heaven.”
Now, an isolated bout of hate-flu perhaps could be dismissed, but it directly echoed another group chat of national young Republican leaders uncovered by reporters at Politico less than six months ago. In this Telegram chat, leaders from New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont let their bile casually flow.
The then-chairman of the New York State Young Republicans, Peter Guinta, bragged: “I love Hitler.” The unguarded Guinta said that anyone who voted against him in his quest to lead the 15,000-member Young Republican National Federation “is going to the gas chamber.” To which the now former general counsel of the New York state Young Republicans, Joe Maligno, replied, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.” For the hate trifecta, Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committee member, got in the spirit by saying, “I’m ready to watch people burn now.” These threats were in the context of trying to win an election on a hardcore pro-Trump ticket in which only “true believers” were wanted. The violence-inclined Nazi-admiring partisan apparatchiks were the strongest supporters of the current American president.
The Telegram chat’s parade of racism (playoff basketball games dismissed by saying, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball”), the description of rape as “epic,” along with the usual anti-gay and anti-Jewish slurs, and the incel spray of statements like “sex is gay,” show a deep core depravity when these young Republican leaders thought no one was listening. It should be said also that these participants were not misguided kids but full-fledged adults — Young Republican groups cover up to the age of 40. This reflects a dark permission structure that has been unleashed, a magnet for the Hitler-curious, the dark underbelly of the MAGA movement.
When the story about the Telegram chat broke last fall, state Republicans quickly distanced themselves from these young “leaders,” but national Republicans refused to denounce them, spurring the instant classic Time headline: “White House Shrugs Off Leaked Chats from Young Republicans Praising Hitler.”
This should be the least difficult thing in the world to denounce. The failure to do so seems like an odious extension of the “no enemies on the right” approach to politics: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, no matter what they might say. This fundamentally blurs the difference between healthy political competition and politics as a war against enemies, not fellow citizens. This is the Pandora’s box that has been opened up — and the furies are still flying.
Days ago, Kai Schwemmer was unveiled as the new political director of the College Republicans of America. He’s a self-identified “Groyper” with extensive ties to Hitler-admiring, far-right podcast host Nick Fuentes. Researcher Ben Lorber uncovered Schwemmer’s social media history of promoting white nationalist propaganda, unpacked here by MS NOW.
In other words, this problem isn’t being contained, it’s proliferating — from the new generation roots of the party, which portends plenty of future problems even in a post-Trump GOP. Something ugly is being unleashed.
The center-right Manhattan Institute did a survey of national Republicans and found that 17 percent can be classified as “anti-Jewish Republicans” — including majorities of Hispanic Republicans, Black Republicans, and Republican men under 50 believing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.”
The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal also conducted a focus group with younger Trump voters and — admirably bypassing any impulse to self-censor — quoted a 20-year old self-described “very right wing” Christian landscaper named Andrew, who explained some of the synaptic logic: “I’m very pro-strong executive, strong leader, strong man. I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, we have to take Germany back for Germans. And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population.”
The kids are not all right. In our horseshoe political world where the far-right and far-left circle back and overlap, there is an increasingly urgent problem with antisemitism on the extremes bleeding into the mainstream, and it needs to be clearly condemned whenever and wherever it rears its head. But outright admiration of Hitler is a dangerous, uncut dose of this ancient brand of hate.
This didn’t come out of nowhere. There was evidence of an ugly permission structure in Trump’s refusal to denounce David Duke in 2016, the both-siderism after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in which khaki’d men with torches shouted “Jews will not replace us,” and the presence of at least give self-described Nazis at the January 6 attack on the Capitol, as I reported in a CNN “Reality Check” segment. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols — himself a former Republican — recently catalogued the Trump’s administration’s increasing use of Nazi iconography in an article concisely titled, “The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem.”
We cannot allow this depraved new low to be normalized in America. The autocratic impulse that leads weak people to fall under the sway of a self-styled strong man leads to lethal places. This problem is erupting from the base, particularly from younger members, who should be the most idealistic participants in our politics. It cannot be contained, it must be confronted consistently — particularly from Republicans. Each party has an obligation to police its own extremes and there is nothing more extreme — and evil — than Adolph Hitler and his genocidal goosestepping thugs. If you can’t clearly and confidently call out Nazi admirers in your own party, then you’ve put party over country, conscience, and common sense.
