PHOENIX — Twenty-three-year-old Alec Beaton has the résumé of a model GOP foot soldier. He’s a former precinct delegate and county Republican youth chair who ran a small Michigan field office for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.
He’s also a self-described Holocaust “revisionist” who views praise for Adolf Hitler as a way to “mess with people.”
“We don’t think Hitler is, like, the worst person ever,” Beaton explained as he roamed a national conference for young conservatives with his friends, joined at one point by an acquaintance on the event staff for the host group, Turning Point USA.
Many Republicans dismiss young people such as Beaton as fringe actors, unrepresentative of the GOP. But there’s a growing unease in the party at their presence among the rank and file. Leaks of offensive group chats and infighting over the bounds of acceptable political discourse are fanning anxiety in the party: Maybe the kids are not all right.
At a conference on antisemitism this month in Washington, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned that he has seen more prejudice against Jewish people “in the last 18 months on the right than at any point in my lifetime,” and that “it is gaining real purchase, especially with young people.”
The fight against antisemitism is winning with “folks in this room with some gray or salt-and-pepper in their hair,” Cruz said.
“But in the college classroom,” he added, “I’m a lot less certain.”
Concern has flared with one scandal after another. In one group chat, Young Republican leaders from several states used racial slurs, casually referenced Hitler and described rape as “epic.” In another meant for GOP students in Miami, participants called for grisly violence against Black people and discussed “Nazi heaven”; a leak prompted the resignation of a Turning Point chapter president who wrote, “I would def not marry a Jew.” At the University of Florida, a statewide conservative group just disbanded a College Republicans chapter after allegations that students gave a Nazi salute.
And online, Republicans have fretted about the rise of white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who courts disaffected young men and has summed up his views as, “Jews are running society, women need to shut the f— up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise.” The College Republicans of America this month appointeda longtime fan of Fuentes as their political director.
Radicalization on the young right has set off a bitter debate in the GOP about how much Republicans should police their movement and how serious a threat its most extreme elements pose. Some dismiss Fuentes and like-minded commentators as online agitators with little real influence — infiltrators trying to hurt the Republican Party. Others are alarmed at the traction they have gotten and say the party needs to push them more forcefully out of the GOP tent.
Fuentes’s young fans, who call themselves “groypers,” didn’t seem like pariahs as they strolled around the Turning Point conference late last year. They said hi to friends they had met at other conservative meetups. They got compliments on their bright-blue hats that helped identify them as Fuentes followers. They crashed at an Airbnb hosting dozens of groypers — a cardboard cutout of Fuentes in the backyard, the words “Splash house” emblazoned on a wall.
The groypers were firmly in the minority: An official straw poll of attendees at the conference found that 87 percent of respondents viewed Israel as an ally, drawing a stark contrast with Fuentes, who rails against Israel.
But the tension over their rise was front-and-center, in the sniping between speakers and the questions coming from the audience.
“We influence the room,” bragged Beaton, a self-described groyper. “We have the power and influence to come in here, and they respect it.”
Hanging out at the Airbnb after midnight, Beaton and his friends buzzed about their brief turn on the main stage of the conference. One of the speakers, the conservative activist James O’Keefe, had recruited young volunteers to walk out with him in blond wigs, a stunt meant to evoke his undercover work secretly recording liberals and journalists.
“Half the people there were, like, us,” Beaton said, meaning groypers. He and his friends met O’Keefe, they said, and told him that Fuentes sent his regards.
O’Keefe did not respond to a request for comment through his media organization. Turning Point declined to comment.
Davis Ingle, a spokesman for the White House, said Trump “has zero tolerance for anti-Semitism” and accused Democrats in Congress of “being taken over by anti-Semitic and anti-American radicals.”
He pointed to Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), who have drawn rebukes from Republicans as well as some Democrats. The lawmakers’ offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Other people at the Turning Point conference were curious about Fuentes. Arnie Hernandez, a Republican from California in his early 30s, didn’t agree with everything he said but followed him on X, and liked that he called out “Israel’s influence on society.” He had met groypers at conservative events; they were friendly.
Hernandez got in line for a conference breakout session on mobilizing Catholic voters. The panelists included the activist Jack Posobiec, who would draw criticism that same weekend for posing with a podcaster who was wearing a hoodie bearing a “Let em cook” cartoon, widely viewed as a reference to the Holocaust and the burning of the bodies of Jewish people.
Eating popcorn as he waited, Hernandez considered Fuentes’s comments. What about the influencer’s declaration that Hitler was “cool”?
“People say … pirates are cool,” Hernandez said. “But at the same time, they’re like, you know, they were murderous savages. And the most interesting thing about villains — they have some sort of aura.”
The doors to the breakout session opened, and Hernandez took a seat not far from a young man in a blue groyper hat.
Republicans worry the online ecosystem that rewards people such as Fuentes is consequential, even if it often distorts reality.
“The migration of our politics online has created a perverse incentive structure,” said David Brog, founding president of the foundation behind the annual National Conservatism Conference. “If you voice anti-Israel and antisemitic views, you get an instant reward in the form of clicks, likes and follows. This fuels the fallacy that the activist base of the party shares these views.”
“So ambitious politicians and commentators trying to position themselves to lead ‘America First’ are misreading these digital leaves,” Brog said, “and coming to some deeply flawed conclusions.”
Few candidates have appealed more explicitly to Fuentes’s followers than James Fishback, a 31-year-old Republican making a long-shot bid for governor in Florida. Running a campaign designed, above all, to seize online attention, Fishback has declared the young men who follow Fuentes to be “incredibly informed” and “very patriotic.”
That attitude has set up an unusual test of the groyper movement’s clout.
On the one hand, Republicans say, Fishback’s campaign is evidence the groyper-curious message has limited appeal — that what gets clicks online does not necessarily translate to votes. He got 6 percent of the GOP primary vote in a recent poll, while the front-runner, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Florida) — who has Trump’s endorsement — led handily with 31 percent.
But Fishback’s ability to draw an enthusiastic young crowd has left some Republicans unsettled. He’s been on the shows of influencers with sizable audiences — the former Fox host Tucker Carlson, the podcaster Patrick Bet-David.
He’s polling better than Florida’s Republican lieutenant governor (4 percent) and former statehouse speaker (1 percent) — all while lobbing racist taunts at his opponent Donalds, who is Black. He calls Donalds “By’rone” and says he wants to “turn Florida into a Section 8 ghetto,” a reference to low-income housing.
“At the beginning, the thing to do was ignore it — you don’t pay attention to every lunatic that runs,” said Gabriel Groisman, a Republican consultant in Florida. His calculus has changed.
“Everybody involved in Republican politics in Florida has an obligation to not just speak out against him,” Groisman said, “but also to draw clear lines … and say this is outside the bounds of what the party will even accept.”
The condemnations, so far, have been muted.
Donalds has largely attacked Fishback as a fake.
“You’re no racist,” he wrote in a retort to Fishback on X last month. “You’re no groyper. You’re no anti-semite. You’re what people hate about politics — performative slop.”
Fishback, meanwhile, is working to tap into “America First” anger over the United States’ entanglements abroad. This month he went to Washington to blast the war with Iran as a “disaster, full stop.”
He paused to survey his mostly male audience — about 30 young people assembled on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol.
“Total sausage fest, guys,” he said. People laughed.
In an interview, Fishback said he disagrees with some of Fuentes and his followers’ views, but meets them all the time at his events and thinks they’re a “fascinating pulse about what’s going on politically.”
“It’s wrong for any party, Republican or Democrat, to try to disavow people,” Fishback said.
Some Republicans are ramping up their efforts to do just that. The California Republican Party last month sent a memo to GOP leaders around the state warning that groypers were making their way into party positions and running for office, requiring a conscious effort to keep them out.
“A radical and divisive iteration of ‘America First’ ideology is growing within the ranks of the Right wing in American politics that is directly at odds with the core founding principles of the United States Constitution,” the memo read, adding later: “The effects of this movement on our conservative American youth cannot be ignored.”
John Park, the party vice chair, said he doesn’t want to overstate the problem. But “this is one of those situations where silence is consent,” he said.
Other Republicans have been less eager to gatekeep. Asked about Carlson’s decision to sit down with Fuentes last year, Trump demurred.
“I don’t know much about him,” Trump said 0f Fuentes, despite having dinner with him in 2022 in an incident that caused an uproar.
If Carlson wants to interview Fuentes, Trump said, “get the word out. Let him. People have to decide.”
The post Bigotry among young conservatives has Republicans on edge appeared first on Washington Post.
