Are College Republicans OK?

Over the past few weeks, a growing contingent of far-right campus Republicans have encountered pushback to their extremist views—including from other conservative students.

Earlier this month, The Miami Herald exposed hundreds of racist, homophobic, sexist and antisemitic messages written by some college Republicans at Florida International University in a group chat they referred to as “Nazi Heaven.” The Florida Federation of College Republicans (FFCR)—a moderate organization affiliated with the National Federation of College Republicans—condemned the messages as “sickening, abhorrent and completely unacceptable” and said “such rhetoric does not reflect the values of the party.”

Last week, a group called the Georgetown University College Republicans wrote in a now-deleted post on X that “Muslims have no place in American society. Their religion is incompatible with our Christian Nation.” The university is investigating; leaders of the group said the post was made without their permission and “was inconsistent with the values of our organization.”

And last Saturday, the University of Florida announced plans to deactivate the UF College Republicans at the request of the FFCR, which alerted university officials to a 2025 picture of a UF College Republicans member making a Nazi salute. In a statement, the university said it “emphatically supported its Jewish community and remains committed to preventing and addressing antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.”

But the UF College Republicans wrote on X that because they’re not affiliated with the FFCR—they are instead a member of the separate College Republicans of America—the state organization doesn’t have the authority to deactivate the group, and they accused the entity of a pattern of lying “to silence christian [sic] conservative groups on campus.”

On Monday, the UF College Republicans filed a lawsuit against the university, alleging that it violated the club’s First Amendment rights and engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” when it deactivated the club “to silence” and “chill its future speech.”

‘A Bellwether’

Such infighting and division are nothing new for the modern Republican student movement.

The College Republican National Committee originated in 1892 and is still in operation, but numerous other college Republican factions have emerged amid the rise of President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement—including the National Federation of College Republicans in 2022 and the more hard-line College Republicans of America in 2023. The latter group, which represents the deactivated UF chapter and some 200 others, said it formed in response to the original CRNC falling “into disrepair” with the goal of transforming “College Republicans into an organization that battles on the front lines for our values and changes hearts and minds in communities long abandoned by both political parties.”

While College Republicans of America doesn’t explicitly exclude anyone for their religion, some conservative Jewish college students were alarmed by its decision last week to appoint Kai Schwemmer, an ally of white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, as its new political director.

Experts say the campus-level discord reflects fractures within the larger Republican Party, which are only deepening as the United States and Israel wage war on Iran.

“Traditional older conservatives are more likely to see U.S. and Israel aggression in the Middle East as a good thing versus this younger, further-right generation that’s willing to come out and throw up Nazi salutes,” said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a community scholar affiliate at Indiana University and author of Resistance From the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars. “If anything, watching what happens between the college Republicans is sort of a bellwether for the politics of the future.”

Mounting right-wing criticism of the war in Iran is indeed part of what is fueling the latest campus controversy surrounding the UF College Republicans.

According to the group’s lawsuit against the university, the Nazi salute in question “did not constitute a true threat, incitement, or otherwise unprotected speech,” and it asserts that UF “likely” deactivated the group because it hosted James Fishback, a Republican running for governor of Florida and “a critic of Israel,” at a widely attended campus event last week.

“I have zero political experience,” Fishback said to hundreds of students packed into UF’s student union. “I have zero years of going to the United States Congress, spending money that we don’t have, to buy weapons that we can’t afford, to give them to a country that is committing war crimes, known as Israel.”

‘New Right, True Right’

Although President Donald Trump and many of his Republican allies have cited their commitment to curbing campus antisemitism as justification for opening dozens of federal investigations into universities, Anthony Sabatini, the lawyer representing UF College Republicans, said that in this instance the university is using antisemitism accusations as an excuse to carry out a longer-held desire to shut down the group.

“There’s been an effort to equate any criticism of Israel as automatic antisemitism. The club has hosted figures who are highly critical of American–Israel relations, war in Iran and Israel’s actions in Gaza, which are a big contention point for young conservatives. That was why they were targeted,” Sabatini, a former Republican member of the Florida Legislature, told Inside Higher Ed. “When an alleged member did a Nazi symbol, that was used as a pretext to silence a club that was simply already critical of Israel.”

Sabatini alleged that the university also targeted the group—which he described as “part of the new right, the true right, the hard right”—for its “Christian, pro–Western civilization” values.

“Most Republican college clubs on campus don’t have strong views and they’re usually very innocuous organizations. They barely have any identity other than toeing the party line for mainstream Republicans,” Sabatini said. “This is a unique group because they’re much more vocal and hard-right than the average college Republican group. That’s what makes them different. That’s why they were targeted.”

The group’s narrowed definition of what constitutes a true Republican—aligned with Christian and Western values—isn’t surprising, said Amy Binder, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives.

“This is a reflection of what President Donald Trump is doing, too—casting aspersions on people who are not right enough or Republican enough,” she said. While branding themselves as a Christian nationalist organization may attract some new followers “who otherwise wouldn’t consider themselves Republican,” over all it may “turn off a larger number of people who don’t want to be associated with that.”

And the pushback to the UF College Republicans may also be an indication of the national Republican Party’s appetite for extremism, Binder added.

“Young people and college students push the envelope earlier and harder than the larger society, but the larger society sets outside parameters,” she said. “If those outside parameters are pushed to the extreme, that gives young people permission to also push the envelope.”