(This article was published on November 16, 2025. It was updated on November 17 at 12:55 p.m. EST, with the addition of the section toward the end “Trump backs Carlson, Fuentes celebrates.”)

By Argiris Malapanis

A string of incidents over the last month has revealed the extent to which bigotry and Jew hatred have taken center stage in the Republican Party and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, which ushered Donald Trump to a second term in the White House.

These events show how deep anti-Black racism and antisemitism are within the ultra-right. This political current has the wind in its sails with Trump’s electoral victory last year and the actions of his administration since January — especially sweeping arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrant workers and attacks on democratic rights.

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This widespread antisemitism and racism within the right wing have also led to a public debate among conservative politicians and pundits. And they have taken the fig leaf off Trump’s claims that he is combating antisemitism by arresting and trying to deport pro-Palestinian students, academics, and others; strong-arming universities like Columbia; and threatening non-profits and other groups opposing his policies by applying terrorism designations and more.

Young Republican leaders spew racism

On October 14, the news site Politico revealed 2,900 pages of leaked chats from a Telegram group chat involving Young Republican leaders. The chats included racist and other offensive language.

Members of the group, which included people actively working with elected officials and some attempting to take leadership positions in the national Young Republican organization, were aware that if the contents of their messages were revealed they could face severe repercussions.

“If we ever had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked fr fr [for real, for real],” said Bobby Walker in the chat. Walker had recently been made chair of the New York state Young Republicans.

But the Young Republicans kept typing away, sharing racist comments and other offensive messages.

As Politico reported, chat members referred to African Americans as monkeys and “the watermelon people.” They joked about killing political opponents by putting them in gas chambers. “I love Hitler,” one chat member quipped, who also made antisemitic comments. Another participant called the rapes of Native American women by Spanish colonizers “epic.” One member expressed support for Republicans he believed backed slavery. And another boasted about the possibility of driving a competing Young Republican opponent to suicide.

Later, someone in the chat staying in a hotel asked its members to “GUESS WHAT ROOM WE’RE IN.”

“1488,” responded Alex Dwyer, the chair of the Young Republicans in Kansas. White supremacists use the number 1488 because 14 is the number of words in the white supremacist slogan “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, and 88 is often used as a shorthand for “Heil Hitler.”

On October 15, Newsweek published a full list of the nine Young Republicans involved in these offensive chats. They were from Arizona, Kansas, New York, and Vermont.

The revelations caused a public outcry.

The Young Republican National Federation called for resignations. The Kansas Young Republican group was shut down and a handful of those involved in the racist chat lost their jobs. The New York state GOP organization voted to suspend its Young Republican group. One of the chat members, Vermont state senator Samuel Douglass, is facing calls to step down after the revelations.

Democrats and most Republican politicians denounced the language used. One notable exception was U.S. vice president J.D. Vance.

In a post on X, Vance pointed at Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general Jay Jones, who was embroiled in a texting scandal of his own. It was revealed earlier in October that Jones texted a colleague about shooting a Republican political adversary.

Vance said Jones’s comments were “way worse” than the Young Republicans’ group chat, adding that he refuses to “join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

‘I have a Nazi streak’

But the pearls kept coming.

On October 20, Politico revealed, once again, that Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistleblower complaints and allegations of political interference in the civil service, told a group of fellow Republicans in a text chain that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be abolished.

Ingrassia, who had a Senate confirmation hearing scheduled for October 23, made the remarks in a chain with a half-dozen Republican operatives.

“MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” Ingrassia wrote in January 2024, according to the chat.

Using an Italian slur for Black people, Ingrassia wrote a month earlier in the group chat, according to Politico: “No moulignon holidays … From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth.” He added, “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”

In another group chat in May 2024, Ingrassia wrote, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” One of the people in that text group said in an interview that Ingrassia’s comment was not a joke, and three participants pushed back against Ingrassia during the text exchange that day.

The day after the publication of Politico’s report, at least five Republicans in the U.S. Senate told the Washington Post they opposed Ingrassia’s nomination. Ingrassia then announced he was withdrawing, while the White House said he was no longer the nominee.

Antisemitism takes giant step onto MAGA center stage

The controversies kept piling up.

“The latest controversy began — as it often does — with one man: Tucker Carlson,” Politico reported on October 31, referring to the right-wing political commentator and host of The Tucker Carlson Show on TV.

“On Monday [October 27], Carlson released an extended interview with Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist commentator, Holocaust denier and antisemitic provocateur,” Politico explained.

According to political theorist and historian John Ganz, Nick Fuentes is “the most popular representative of neo-Nazism in America.”

Politico continued: “The interview, in which Fuentes expounded on his longstanding criticisms of Israel and attacked leading Jewish figures on the right, drew broad condemnations from many conservatives, who accused Carlson of platforming Fuentes without pressing him on some of his more controversial statements, which include praise for Adolf Hitler and calls to execute ‘perfidious Jews.’” 

The dispute dominated news and opinion headlines for days.

“Antisemitism took a giant step forward this week onto MAGA center stage,” wrote Ben Lorber in an opinion column on the news site The Hill on October 31.

“It started on Monday when Tucker Carlson hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his show — MAGA’s biggest platform — to discuss Israel and ‘organized Jewry.’ The fallout was immediate, as conservatives fiercely debated the admissibility of antisemites like Fuentes into the conservative big tent,” Lorber noted.

“On Thursday [October 30], the Heritage Foundation dropped a bombshell when its president, Kevin Roberts, released a video defending Carlson and calling for Fuentes to be debated, not shunned.”

The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank. A number of its leaders authored Project 2025, a 2023 blueprint on how conservatives would govern if Trump were to win the presidency in 2024. During his election campaign, Trump misled the public by claiming he had  “nothing to do with” Project 2025. But once in office, Trump  implemented many of its prescriptions and appointed architects and supporters of this plan to staff his administration.

“Roberts argued that conservatives should put loyalty to ‘Christ first, and America always’ before reflexive support of Israel, no matter the tremendous pressure they might receive from the ‘globalist class,’” Lorber said.

“That dog whistle conjured up antisemitic images of a parasitic, transnational Zionist lobby arrayed against Christian nationalism,” Lorber continued. “And now Fuentes is taking a victory lap, flanked by MAGA’s leading pundit on one arm and MAGA’s leading think tank on the other, his toxic brand of antisemitism poised to waltz into the conservative mainstream.

“Heritage seems to have taken a sudden and dizzying turn; for more than a year the organization sought to elbow its way to the front lines of the fight against antisemitism, which it associated exclusively with the pro-Palestine left.

“In October 2024, Heritage released Project Esther, an authoritarian playbook much like Project 2025 (from which it derived its namesake) calling on the Trump administration to ‘disrupt’ and ‘degrade’ pro-Palestine advocacy using the full force of the state. Once in office, Donald Trump moved quickly to fulfill many of its goals, locking up activists like Mahmoud Khalil, strong-arming universities like Columbia, and threatening advocacy organizations with lawsuits, terrorism designations, revocation of nonprofit status, and more.

“When Project Esther launched, its backers dismissed any need to include the fight against right-wing antisemitism in its mandate, arguing that the left represented the only real threat to Jewish safety. Many flat-out denied the very premise that antisemitism exists within the conservative movement. ‘I refuse to acknowledge that [antisemitism] is part of the conservative movement and that [white supremacists] are my problem,’ James Carafano, a leader of Heritage’s Task Force on Antisemitism, told Jewish Insider, ‘because white supremacists are not my problem, because white supremacists are not part of being conservative.’

“Now, many of Project Esther’s Jewish supporters are singing a different tune. Rabbi Yaakov Menken, head of the far-right Coalition for Jewish Values, a Project Esther partner, lamented on X that ‘Heritage has chosen to vocally stand with an antisemite … the consequences will be far-reaching indeed.’”

The controversy revealed a widening rift among conservatives. A number of Heritage Foundation staffers resigned to protest what they perceived as defense of Fuentes, an avid Jew hater, by their organization’s president.

Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, a consequential figure in the Trump movement, blasted Carlson on November 3, calling him “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America,” adding fuel to this incident that sparked a staff shakeup at the Heritage Institute.

“The issue here isn’t that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last week. He has every right to do that, of course,” Shapiro said in an episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show” released that day. “The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes and that the Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance.”

Faced with such swift opposition, Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, tried to walk back his defense of Fuentes. But the genie of Jew hatred had already entered the GOP mainstream.

J.D. Vance, Victor Orban, and Groyperism

Similar revelations on the spread of antisemitism within the extreme right, especially its younger adherents, came recently from Rod Dreher, a confidant in the U.S. vice president’s political circle.

Dreher is a U.S. conservative writer and editor currently living in Hungary. He was a columnist with The American Conservative for 12 years, ending in March 2023, and remains an editor-at-large there.

On November 11, Dreher published a Substack column with a detailed account of a recent White House session he attended in the study of J.D. Vance, which included Hungary’s right-wing prime minister Victor Orban. His article also includes conclusions about developments among conservatives, and the ultra-right, in particular, based on many discussions he held while in Washington with people in the orbit of the Trump movement. The fact that Dreher is himself a rightist lends legitimacy to his observations.

“The Groyper thing is real,” Dreher wrote. “It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.”

The Groypers or the Groyper Army Dreher was referring to is a far-right constellation loosely defined as followers, fans, or associates of white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

“Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil,” Dreher continued. “It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down. It really does.”

Dreher also summarized discussions with young rightists that illustrate, in his view, the state of mind of many in that generation of right-wingers.

One of them “went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed,” Dreher reported about one of these exchanges. “The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote,” Dreher said.

“Well, they do want to burn it all down, I was told,” Dreher noted. “And I came away with the feeling that they are only tenuously dedicated to democratic politics. I told one very smart and decent Zoomercon who despises the anti-Semitic turn in his circles that I’ve been hearing that fascism — actual ideological fascism, not the media’s idea of anybody to the Right of Lindsey Graham — is gaining traction among young white British males.”

Zoomercon is a nickname used in conservative political circles to refer to “Zoomer conservatism,” a political movement among Gen Z (Zoomer) conservatives.

Dreher continued. “He said, innocently, ‘So what’s wrong with fascism?’ He meant it, not in a challenging way, but in a way that conveyed the sense of we have to think about this now. He talked about how the disintegration of our culture is accelerating, and liberal democracy seems impotent to stop it. He went on to explain that if he had to choose between living under left-wing authoritarianism or the right-wing version, then that wouldn’t be much of a choice. To be clear, he wants neither, but he fears that the disintegration of our culture is going to put us all in the position to have to reconcile ourselves to one or the other…

“You cannot simply point at the Zoomers and say, ‘Thou shalt not,’ and expect it to work. The problems are too deep and complex, and anyway, they have learned to have no respect for authority.

“Why should they? The institutions of our society, as they see it, have lied and lied and lied, and still lie. They still lie in many ways about race (e.g., refusing to be honest about black crime), they lied about Covid, they lied about males and females, and they forced the insanity of gender ideology on us all. The military lied about Iraq. The universities embraced and enforced ideologies of lies. The Catholic Church lied about sexual abuse, and the connection to the prevalence of sexually active gay priests honeycombing the institution. They lied about the benefits of mass migration and diversity. They lied about Trump and Russia. The political parties and their corporate allies lied about what globalism would mean for ordinary people…

“I could go on — boy, could I — but you get the idea. Trust in the system is gone. Hell, I share most of these conclusions myself!” [Emphasis in the original.]

While Dreher distanced himself from explicit association with Groyperism, he seems committed to the right wing.

In addition to other reactionary ideas he expressed above, it was impossible to overlook this observation Dreher made in the first paragraph of his blog.

“I’m really glad that JD [Vance] got to experience the actual, living Viktor Orban in person, and to see for himself how wrong the propaganda is. They got on very, very well.”

It must be noted here that Orban has been frequently accused of antisemitism, particularly for promoting conspiracy theories about the Jewish billionaire George Soros. In 2022 he was condemned by the International Auschwitz Committee for comments in which he criticized mixing “with non-Europeans.”

Trump backs Carlson, Fuentes celebrates

Trump, who had stayed silent through these controversies about the overt bigotry of a growing number of his supporters, broke his silence on November 16.

“Trump weighed in on the other issue causing huge ructions within MAGA — media star Tucker Carlson’s decision to offer a friendly platform to white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has voiced admiration for Hitler and Stalin,” Politico reported on November 17. “The conservative movement has been tearing itself apart for weeks over the Carlson-Fuentes interview, with prominent figures like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and podcaster Ben Shapiro demanding both men be condemned,” the news site noted.

“Last night, Trump broke his silence,” Politico continued, “and was unequivocal in his support for Carlson: ‘I think he’s good,’ Trump said of Carlson. ‘We’ve had some good interviews … If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.’ Trump was also pressed on a dinner he had with Fuentes back in 2022, and said only (as he did at the time) that he hadn’t known Fuentes and hadn’t known he was coming to the event.

“Needless to say, Trump’s support is a big deal in conservative circles, where supporting or condemning Carlson for platforming Fuentes has become a huge dividing line. It seems pretty clear Trump has no interest in condemning figures to the right, no matter how extreme. ‘Thank you Mr. President!’ a gleeful Fuentes wrote on X, and plenty of his far-right supporters were celebrating too.”

Why did Trump do this? Because he knows he may need neo-Nazi thugs like Fuentes, and mouthpieces like Carlson, in the future.

Such racism and Jew hatred are not new in U.S. ruling circles. But they are now expressed — and accepted — more openly.

Danger of Jew hatred ‘no longer over the horizon’: It is here

Two years ago, World-Outlook published a review of the pamphlet How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism. An excerpt from that review seems to be a fitting conclusion to this article.

The booklet’s author is Marxist scholar George Novack, who was from a Jewish family that emigrated to the United States. His essay, republished as a pamphlet in 1969 and promoted by its publisher for decades, began as a review of a collection of writings by another Marxist scholar, Isaac Deutscher.

“The brutality of the Israeli regime does not allow us to forget centuries of Jew hatred throughout the world that culminated in the Nazi Holocaust. Such Jew hatred continues to find expression today. The recent [October 7, 2023], cold-blooded murder by Hamas of Israeli civilians, including children, is a stark example,” the World-Outlook review stated.

“Novack was also fully aware of the dangers posed by Jew hatred and understood its source. ‘Deutscher addressed a sober warning about the fate awaiting them if they clung to capitalism and chauvinism, not only to the Israelis, but to those Jews in the imperialist metropolises,’ Novack wrote, ‘who complacently live under the mistaken impression that anti-Semitism is a spent force there. They are blind to the fact that such prejudice festers in many crevices of the Western countries and, in the event of acute insecurity, can burst forth with sudden ferocity, as it did in crisis-ridden Germany between the wars.’

“Again, he cited Deutscher’s words: ‘Let this society suffer any severe shock, such as it is bound to suffer; let there be again millions of unemployed, and we will see the same lower-middle-class alliance with the Lumpenproletariat, from whom Hitler recruited his following, running amok with anti-Semitism. As long as the nation-state imposes its supremacy and as long as we have not an international society in existence, as long as the wealth of every nation is in the hands of one national capitalist oligarchy, we shall have chauvinism, racialism, and, as its culmination, anti-Semitism.’

“‘Such a prediction may seem far-fetched and unduly alarmist,’ Novack added, ‘to those privileged and short-sighted Anglo-American Jews who have been sunning in the prolonged prosperity and social stability of the post-war decades. Yet it is based upon a keen insight into the ultimate direction of the main motive forces of capitalist development in our time. The warning has direct relevance for American Jews, young and old, who regard the Jewish problem as something remote from them and confined to Israeli-Arab relations…

“‘But if, with Deutscher, we look beyond the present conjuncture, there is danger for the Jews lurking over the horizon. Should there be a grave social crisis and a strengthening of ultrareaction, anti-Semitism could experience a frightening growth here.’

“The economic, social and political crises that confront working people the world over, as a consequence of the workings of capitalism, mean that the danger Deutscher and Novack warned of is no longer ‘over the horizon.’ It is here.”

The same can be said about anti-Black racism and other forms of bigotry, which, like Jew hatred, rear their ugly head as defining features of an emboldened ultra-right amid conditions that generate economic desperation and social frustration among millions of working and middle-class people.

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