More For the “Why Do They Call Us Nazis?” File
Here is yet another story of vile rhetoric in a Republican-based group chat via The Miami Herald: ‘Nazi heaven’: Inside Miami campus Republicans’ racist group chat.
The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”
In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.
I would commend everyone to read the whole thing, but I will note a couple of things.
The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair.
[…]
Another member of the chat, William Bejerano — who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College — was the primary user of the n-word in the group. At one point, he posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n-word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people. Bejerano hung up the phone when reached by the Herald.
Dariel Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time, responded in the chat: “How edgy.”
“Ew you had colored professors?!” Gonzalez wrote at another point. “I reguse [sic] to be indoctrinated by the coloreds.” He told the group he used the term “colored” because, “I was told we cant say black anymore.” A couple days later, he added: “Avoid the coloreds like the plague.” He did not respond to a request for comment.
And,
Beirich, the extremism researcher, said the signals from the highest ranks of the Republican party from the White House — including social media posts echoing white supremacists messages — are being heard across the party.
“Clearly the Trump administration doesn’t have any problem with these extremist views, so we shouldn’t be surprised that young Republicans would be trading in this stuff,” Beirich said. “It’s being sanctioned by the highest office, it’s not disqualifying anymore in the GOP.”
To that point, here are a number of tweets that I had saved, but never finished the post:
Note the font.
Not only does all of this make protestations from administration officials about being called “Nazis” or “fascists” more than a bit absurd, but stories like the one in the Miami Herald are massively concerning about the future of the Republican Party and, therefore, of the country as a whole.
And no one should be dismissing this as just a bunch of “kids.” While I will allow that occasionally over-the-top and even distasteful jokes fly out of the mouths and off the keyboards of people, especially young people, no one goes around vomiting a torrent of racist terms by accident. And praising Hitler and using Nazi-inspired terms is not youthful indiscretion.
I spent decades teaching people this age. I have sons in their twenties. Anyone pretending that college-age kids lack agency or somehow don’t know what they are doing is insane.
This stuff is not harmless, and this is just more evidence that we are in a bad place as a country, and national leadership is not only not worried about it, they are helping foster it.
Of course, if it’s a Black kid who committed a crime, gotta try the defendant as an adult.
I, too, taught college for decades and don’t recall anything like this. I wonder if it’s a masculinity thing on the part of these students? Aren’t Nazis portrayed as the ultimate in manhood in some porn?
Also, going back to the alt-right more than a decade ago and continuing with today’s groypers, attempting to conceal racism by dressing it up as edgy humor has become a deliberate strategy to mask their intentions. An entire generation of white supremacists emerged in the 21st century from online meme culture that began initially in the form of PC-bashing humor. Nick Fuentes has mastered this strategy, enabling him to talk to different audiences without changing much of his rhetoric.
‘And no one should be dismissing this as just a bunch of “kids.”’
Emphasizing this point: they are pipelining this garbage straight into the government. The white supremacist propaganda on the Department of Labor’s social media came from a 21 year old
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/politics/trump-administration-social-media-homeland-security.html
Has the Republican party changed, or has it merely dropped the mask of respectability?
@Kathy:
Remember the “Anger Translator” sketch from Key & Peele? Trump is sort of that to the average Republican.
@Kathy: Both. The Republican Party has had the Nazi wing since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, but thought they could keep it under control. We can debate when, exactly, they lost control (Tea Party? Trump?), but that Nazi wing was poking its head up as a real threat with David Duke and Pat Buchanan.
And good, hardworking, reasonable Republicans tut-tutted this, thinking that the Republicans were just using the racists to get the votes to lower tax rates. And, given that Trump lowered tax rates, can we really say that they’ve lost control?
To be fair, that’s the attitude a lot of the Democrats had towards the racists when they depended on them for votes to set up the New Deal. My theory of American history is two ideologically opposed groups, neither with the power to implement their ideas, courting the racists who are the deciding vote, and hoping not to get bitten too badly.
There’s probably some fun animal-based story that describes it. Not the Scorpion and the Frog though, as the Scorpion never offers anything to the Frog like the votes to lower tax rates.
This feels kind of like these people in the chat are all vying to top each other with regard to who can post the most outrageous thing. It’s kind of like a game to them, only it has serious consequences.
In part, they are demonstrating to one another that they aren’t afraid of being called a Nazi. I think it’s kind of like a thing that can happen when a gay man knows there’s someone around who is a homophobe, they swish a lot harder.
I’m not excusing or dismissing it. If you say something enough, you start to believe it. I’m just trying to understand it.
@Gustopher:
I think there was somewhat of an evolution where there were a number of Dixiecrat-turned-Republicans still in Congress, probably the best-known being Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. Back then, there was a controversy involving several Republicans going to a conference at the Council of Conservative Citizens, an open white supremacist group (it once went by the name the White Citizens Council). But there was a common perception that this sort of thing was on its way out, and the way Republican leadership swiftly condemned Trent Lott’s 2002 remarks praising Thurmond’s 1948 presidential run, leading to Lott stepping down as Senate Majority Leader, was taken as a sign that the GOP did its home cleaning, so to speak.
I think an underappreciated factor in the resurgence of far-right influence in the GOP was the decline in neoconservatism following the failures in the War on Terror. There is a fairly direct historical connection between right-wing anti-interventionism and anti-Semitism, and it got a boost in part because neoconservatism originated with primarily Jewish intellectuals in the ’70s who started out on the left, and also because it helped foster stalwart support for Israel in the GOP, leading to a coalition that included evangelicals who saw the return of Jews to the Holy Land as part of prophecy (in which the Jews would eventually be destroyed and either convert to Christianity or be sent to Hell). Frankly, the coalition was already starting to fray following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the rise of Pat Buchanan in the wake of the Persian Gulf War a sign of what was to come. But 9/11 led to a resurgence in aggressive foreign interventionism being tied to the GOP’s ideological identity. The ultimate failure of this project restarted the return of the paleocons at just around the time of the rise of Obama, which gave them a new motivation for being increasingly white supremacist.
One key point in all this is that the new white supremacists included a lot of young people from all over the country, not just the South, who didn’t necessarily have any generational connection to the Dixiecrats of old.