Oops, it happened again. Leaked chat logs have once more exposed young MAGA activist leaders giddily participating in racist, antisemitic, violent conversations. The Miami Herald obtained logs from a WhatsApp group chat created by the secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party for conservative students at Florida International University. The chats, published Thursday, capture young conservatives in uninhibited conversations replete with violent fantasies and racist and antisemitic slurs.
This kind of thing keeps happening — yet the right generally yawns every time. In 2023, three rising stars of the conservative movement were outed for past racist or antisemitic behavior; they all still have careers in politics and commentary. It happened again in 2025, when leaked group chats among New York Young Republicans (some as old as 35) revealed unabashed racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric. Vice President JD Vance quickly defended the participants’ chats as just “what kids do.”
If you think the racism and bloodlust of the MAGA movement is extreme now, then just wait till the kids grow up.
As for the most recent exposure, according to the Herald, one member of the FIU chat 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.” Another chat member reportedly used “the k-word, a slur for Jewish people” and said, “You can f–––k all the [k-word] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.”
The president of FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter — part of the vast network of conservative campus activism co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk — responded, “I would def not marry a Jew.” At another time in the chat, he declared, “I’m more authoritarian than you buddy, I think the church should run the government.”
The Floridian also obtained the chat logs and printed some in their entirety. They are spine-chilling in their fascism, racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, violence and, naturally, antisemitism. But you should read them, because these are the young leaders of conservatism — potentially the future of the Republican Party. If you think the racism and bloodlust of the MAGA movement is extreme now, then just wait till the kids grow up.
Let us not overlook that these chats took place at a school in South Florida, a region with a substantial Jewish population and MAGA media and activist presence. Nor should we overlook the fact that it was the fingers of the president of FIU’s TPUSA chapter that typed out expressions of rank antisemitism and theocratic Christian nationalism.
Meanwhile, right-wing media stars like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss are fighting some of their former friends and allies in the war on “wokeness” — including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly — due to accusations of antisemitism, platforming antisemites and trafficking in fake conspiracy theories. (In Owens’ case, the accusations are incontrovertible.) Which side of the MAGA movement gets to carry on Kirk’s legacy among young right-wingers is at stake.
But you won’t find any social media posts from Shapiro or Weiss — or even articles on their sites, The Daily Wire and The Free Press — about the FIU heirs to the legacy of their pal Charlie Kirk being Nazi group-chat members.
Such silence is one reason all this happened. As racism and other forms of bigotry (especially xenophobia and Islamophobia) were being normalized on the right, far too many mainstream conservatives, libertarians and right-leaning heterodox types waved off such behavior as inconsequential, silly edgelord stuff — if they took exception to it at all. Concerns about the rise of neofascist street militias with close ties to President Donald Trump and the peddling of outrageous lies about voter fraud in the 2020 election paled in comparison to concerns about various “woke” atrocities. Even now, when confronted with right-wing racism, some right-wing “thought leaders” pathetically characterize it as “woke right,” or blame the left for inciting the reaction. (Right-wing gutter racism is only a few years old, or so the thinking apparently holds.)
As long as the targets were immigrants and Muslims and trans people, there was no crisis on the “rational” right.
As for Kirk’s legacy, two days before his assassination he posted to X, “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” The Daily Wire, The Free Press, other right-of-center sites — and even The New York Times’ Ezra Klein — memorialized Kirk as a model of political civility and bravery. Earlier this week, Kirk’s influence on the political mainstream was channeled by 32-year-old freshman MAGA Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas, who posted to X, “Mass Islamic migration is killing us.”
Meanwhile, in 2026 the Department of Homeland Security uses neo-Nazi imagery and music in its social media recruitment posts, and Trump and Vice President JD Vance engage in blatant racism against Somalis and other groups. While it is deeply disturbing that Candace Owens’ antisemitic conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination are finding a wider audience, I’d argue that flagrant racism at the top levels of the federal government is a little more important in the immediate term. The lower-key bigotry in the Trump administration shouldn’t be ignored, either. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a declaration that should chill the spine of any American who believes in the freedom of religion (one of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment), but particularly Jewish Americans concerned about the rise of antisemitism on the right. Hegseth announced that the U.S. and all Western nations are “united by our heritage” and “Christian nations under God.” That is not only untrue, it’s also a maximalist statement — and it says plainly who is less of an American than Hegseth’s preferred Americans. As I wrote in November 2025, when Shapiro’s feud with Carlson (over the latter’s chummy chat with the antisemitic white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes) was heating up, “The conundrum lies with mainstream MAGA stars like Shapiro wanting to clean the bigotry out of their house on an a la carte basis — but fear and loathing of ‘the other’ is as MAGA as a red baseball cap.” Influential voices on the right simply refuse to acknowledge their own complicity — whether through silence, accommodation or tacit agreement — in the normalization of unabashed bigotry on the right. As long as the targets were immigrants and Muslims and trans people, there was no crisis on the “rational” right. But the leaked FIU chats once again offer a window into what the future may very well look like on the right, if their sentiments continue to be left unchecked. This is the future of Turning Point USA, of conservatism, of the Republican Party. These are the right’s own little monsters, but they’re all of our problems today and tomorrow.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
