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A recent poll of young right-wingers also showed that 54% of Republican men under 50 deny the Holocaust, while around a third of young Republicans self-identify as racist.
The new political leader of the College Republicans of America is an "avowed and overt supporter" of one of the nation's most infamous white nationalists, Nick Fuentes, according to a disturbing report compiled by the group Right Wing Watch.
The College Republicans of America (CRA) was created in 2023 amid an ugly split with the more mainstream College Republican National Committee (CRNC), which it has accused of becoming overly bureaucratic and poorly managed. It describes its mission to "replace the CRNC and to aid the GOP in cultivating the next generation of Republican activists, staffers, and leaders."
While CRA is newer and less directly embedded within the national Republican Party structure, it claims to be "America’s largest national College Republican organization,” with more than 300 active chapters at schools around the country—roughly four times that of competing campus GOP groups, according to the organization.
Last week, the group announced that it had chosen a new political director, Kai Schwemmer. As Kyle Mantyla, a senior fellow at Right Wing Watch parent group People For the American Way, explained:
Schwemmer is an overt 'groyper,' which is the term used by followers of Hitler-loving racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, Christian nationalist, fascist, white nationalist, Nick Fuentes.
Schwemmer, who goes by the nickname "Kai Clips," has his own show on Fuentes' invitation-only streaming platform Cozy.TV, and was featured as a special guest at Fuentes' 2022 "America First Political Action Conference" in Orlando, which was held as a more explicitly white nationalist counter to the Turning Point USA conference.
That same year, Schwemmer described himself as someone "affiliated with America First," Fuentes's political movement. He also appeared in a 2022 pro-Fuentes documentary titled "The Most Canceled Man in America."
In a clip of that documentary, which Right Wing Watch posted to social media, Schwemmer explained that an episode of Fuentes' nightly program, titled "Demographics or Destiny," introduced him to the conservative movement and "woke me up on immigration."
Fuentes, who once described himself as "just like Hitler," has called for the mass deportation of nonwhite immigrants and has said he favors a "whites-only immigration policy" to sustain "white demographics."
Schwemmer said Fuentes' shows are "a little bit controversial" and "hyperbolic," but "obviously humorous." He added that Fuentes is "deeply politically engaging," as "behind every joke is some commentary."
Ben Lorber, an extremism researcher for Political Research Associates, explained in a social media post on Tuesday that "Schwemmer was in Fuentes' inner circle in 2021, and since then has strategically downplayed his support to avoid controversy."
He pointed out that Schwemmer still has a long history of questionable online activity, including posts and messages glorifying the Unabomber and boasting about his meeting with the antisemitic author E. Michael Jones. He has also shared jokes insulting Jewish people and mocking the Holocaust.
During the second presidency of Donald Trump, especially, the radicalization of young right-wingers has been brought to the forefront, as leaked group chats from college Republicans in several states—including New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont have revealed members trafficking in overt racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and other forms of vile bigotry that often veered into calls for violence and genocide against minority groups.
Just last week, The Floridian reported that the secretary of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party was involved in a WhatsApp group chat nicknamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”
Participants in the group, which included members of the head of the Florida International University Turning Point USA chapter and the then-recruitment chair of FIU's college Republicans, "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," according to later reporting by The Miami Herald.
Recent polling of young right-wingers conducted by the conservative Manhattan Institute has suggested that these sorts of views are increasingly becoming common.
About 31% of Republicans under the age of 50 said they themselves express racist views, while 25% said they express antisemitic views. Just 4% of those over 50 said they expressed each of these views in the December 2025 survey.
More than a third of all Republicans who answered the survey, 37%, said they share Fuentes' view that the Holocaust was "greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe," with a majority of men under 50, 54%, expressing this view.
Schwemmer, who appeared as a guest of Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) at last month's State of the Union address has said he does not use the same sorts of extremist, often overtly genocidal, rhetoric that Fuentes does because he has "more authentic political aspirations" and does not want to create "angles of attack" for his opponents.
Schwemmer has not denounced the views espoused by Fuentes and says there is "absolutely a place and a value behind making those kinds of jokes, saying those kinds of words, trying to push the envelope socially and trying to remove the lens of political correctness from our lives."
"This seems to be Schwemmer's role in the movement," Mantyla said. "Putting a moderate face on America First's racist, antisemitic, and radically authoritarian agenda."
Looking back at exemplary moments of American liberalism to counter MAGA rhetoric is an entirely understandable and even comforting move to make, but there is no golden age to return to.
Stephen Miller misses no opportunity to exult in racism and xenophobia. Friday’s Common Dreams headline gets right to the point regarding Miller’s most recent offense: “’Horrible Racist’ Stephen Miller Slammed for Using Classic TV Christmas Special to Bash Immigrants.”
Apparently Miller spent Christmas day watching a 1967 holiday special called “Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras” and, being the miserable misanthrope that he is, the show—featuring Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, two very famous children of first-generation Italian Americans—prompted him to wax nostalgic about a world in which America was Great and there was no mass immigration. Everything that Miller says or does deserves outrage, and his X post was no exception. One form the justified outrage has taken recently crossed my Facebook feed:

The Sinatra video that has gone viral is a clip from a 10-minute film short that premiered in November, 1945 called “The House I Live In.” It’s a powerful film, featuring a young and very charismatic Sinatra both speaking and singing against bigotry and for toleration and cultural pluralism.
The film begins with Sinatra, playing himself, in the studio recording a love song. He then takes a break, goes outside, and encounters a group of boys on an unnamed American city street who are very much modeled on Hollywood’s 1940s “Dead End Kids.” He finds them taunting a young, somewhat different-looking boy who is pretty clearly Jewish, and stops to interrupt the taunting and to engage them in conversation about the meaning of “America.”
When the boys inform him that they are bullying the (Jewish) boy because “we don’t like his religion,” Sinatra teases them: “You must be a bunch of those Nazi werewolves I’ve been reading about.” When one of the boys incredulously suggests he is “screwy” to think this, Sinatra replies: “Not me, I’m an American.” When the boys insist that they too are Americans, and one of them volunteers that his father had indeed been wounded in the war, Sinatra points out that the dad had probably needed a blood transfusion, and then points to the excluded boy: “Maybe his pop’s blood saved your dad’s life.”
Sinatra then delivers a monologue:
Look fellas. Religion makes no difference, except maybe to a Nazi or somebody who’s stupid. Why, people all over the world worship God in many different ways. God created everybody. He didn’t create one people better than another. Your blood’s the same as mine, mine’s the same as his. Do you know what this wonderful country is made of? It’s made up of a hundred different kinds of people and a hundred different ways of talking. A hundred different ways of going to church. But they’re all American ways. Wouldn’t we be silly if we went around hating people because they comb their hair different than ours?... My dad came from Italy. But I’m an American. But should I hate your father because he came from Ireland or France or Russia? Wouldn’t I be a first-class fathead?
He then tells them a story about how, after Pearl Harbor, American airmen had inspired the entire country by bravely bombing a Japanese battleship: “They sank it, and every American threw his head back and felt much better. The pilot of that ship was named Colin Kelly, an American and a Presbyterian. And you know who dropped the bombs? Meyer Levin, an American and a Jew. You think maybe they should have called the bombing off because they had different religions?”
Sinatra then heads back to the recording studio. But before entering, he stops to sing for the boys the song he is recording inside, “The House I Live In.” Here are the lyrics:
What is America to me?
A name, a map, the flag I see,
A certain word, "Democracy."
What is America to me?
The house I live in,
A plot of earth, a street,
The grocer and the butcher
And the people that I meet,
The children in the playground,
The faces that I see;
All races, all religions,
That’s America to me.
A place I work in
A worker by my side
A little town or city
Where my people lived and died
The howdy and the handshake
The air of feeling free
And the right to speak my mind out
That’s America to me
The things I see about me
The big things and the small
The little corner newsstand
And the house a mile tall
The wedding and the churchyard
A laughter and the tears
And the dream that’s been a growing
For 180 years
The town I live in
The street, the house, the room
Pavement of the city
Or a garden all in bloom
The church, the school, the clubhouse
The millions lights I see
But especially the people
That’s America to me.
Sinatra then smiles, returns to the studio, and the boys walk off together, inviting the Jewish kid to join them, while the music of “America the Beautiful” plays in the background.
The film is very powerful and uplifting. It is emblematic of the spirit of American liberalism in the immediate aftermath of WWII, a spirit perhaps symbolized by the stardom of Sinatra, the child of working-class Italian immigrants who grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. Critics of Miller, and of President Donald Trump, are right to invoke the film, and to evoke the idealism of Rooseveltian liberalism, as a reproach to MAGA xenophobia.
At the same time, there are at least three important ways that the film exemplifies the limits of Rooseveltian idealism and the depth of the forms of illiberalism repudiated in the very lyrics of “The House That I Live In”—forms of illiberalism with which we are still reckoning today.
The first relates to the political circumstances surrounding the song itself. The music was written by Earl Robinson, a composer and folk musician from Seattle who belonged to the Communist Party from the 1930s through the 1950s; collaborated with Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and other well-known leftist artists and performers; and was blacklisted during the McCarthy period. And the lyrics were written by Lewis Allan, the pseudonym of Abel Meeropol, also a Communist at the time, who also composed the lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching song made famous by Billie Holiday, and later adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their parents were executed as Soviet agents in 1953.
Robinson and Meeropol were two of the hundreds of writers, artists, musicians, and performers who made seminal contributions to American culture during the 1930s and 1940s in connection with the Popular Front, described by historian Michael Kazin as “a vigorously democratic and multiracial movement in the arts and daily life that was sponsored but not controlled by the Communist Party.” The patriotic rhetoric of “The House I Live In”—both the song and the film—bears the traces of Popular Front leftism even as the connections to the left, and to anti-capitalism, were as disguised, and erased, as the actual name of the lyricist.
The second is the way in which the film’s repudiation of antisemitism, and its message of tolerance, is advanced—through an understandable anti-fascist patriotism that is juxtaposed to evil “Nazi werewolves” and invading “Japs.” Sinatra’s uplifting story of the bombing of the Japanese battleship Hiruma three times uses the racist term “Japs.” Erased from the story are some very memorable recent events: the wartime incarceration of well over 100,000 Japanese Americans; the 1945 American fire-bombing of Tokyo that killed over 100,000 Japanese civilians; and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, months before the film’s release. (It is worth nothing that the film’s producer-director, Mervyn Leroy, also produced the 1944 film “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” a glorification of the 1942 “Doolittle Raid,” the first US bombing of Tokyo, starring Spencer Tracy). The film’s valorization of American democracy is thus linked to a racially-tinged narrative of American innocence with increasingly illiberal ramifications as the Cold War evolved.
And there is, finally, the striking fact that while Sinatra powerfully gives voice to the idea that “God created everybody, he didn’t create one people better than another,” and that “your blood’s the same as mine, mine’s the same as his,” every person in the film—Sinatra, the boys, the studio orchestra—is white.
To point these things out is not to disparage “The House I Live In,” a very important cultural creation that contained genuinely progressive elements while also condensing some of the contradictions of its time. It is simply to note the complexity of the recurrent historical contests over what it means to be “an American,” and the lack of innocence of even the most appealing episodes of the past. Trumpism is xenophobic, racist, deeply anti-liberal, and literally reactionary. Looking back at exemplary moments of American liberalism to counter MAGA rhetoric is an entirely understandable and even comforting move to make. Rewatching “The House I Live In” this holiday season was genuinely uplifting for me. But post-WWII liberalism at its height was no Golden Age, and we can no more return to it than we can to the time of Andrew Jackson, or William McKinley, or 1920s racist Madison Grant, or George Wallace, or Bull Connor, or whoever it is that warms Stephen Miller’s deformed and shriveled heart.
The head of one group decried the ADL's "disproportionate attention on left-of-center activists’ views on Israel while failing to apply the same scrutiny to the Trump administration."
The heads of three left-leaning US Jewish groups on Monday admonished the Anti-Defamation League after the controversial watchdog once again conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism in its latest report on New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his transition team.
The Anti-Defamation League noted approvingly in its updated "Mamdani Monitor" that "at least 25 individuals" in the democratic socialist's transition team "have a past relationship with the ADL or partner organizations, or a history of supporting the Jewish community."
The group also appreciated that "Mamdani's team can and will respond appropriately" to actual incidents of antisemitism, pointing to last week's resignation of Catherine Almonte Da Costa, Mamdani's former director of appointments, following the revelation of antisemitic social media posts she published in the early 2010s.
However, the ADL said it remains "deeply concerned" by Mamdani's statements and actions, highlighting what the group claimed were "many examples of individuals who have engaged in some type of antisemitic, anti-Zionist, or anti-Israel activities and/or have ties to groups that engage in such activities" among the mayor-elect's transition team appointees.
"These activities include spreading classic antisemitic tropes, vilifying those who support Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland, seeking to undermine the legitimacy and security of the Jewish state, and more," the ADL said, adding that "at least a dozen transition committee appointees expressed support for the anti-Israel campus encampments in the spring of 2024."
The Mamdani Monitor also noted that "at least 20% of the 400-plus appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which openly glorifies Hamas’ October 7 attack... Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a fringe group that advocates for the eradication of Zionism and demonizes Zionists; Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a New York-based radical anti-Zionist organization... and others."
Asked about the report during a Monday press conference, Mamdani said, "We must distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government."
“The ADL’s report oftentimes ignores this distinction, and in doing so it draws attention away from the very real crisis of antisemitism we see not only just in our city but in the country at large,” he continued. “When we’re thinking about critiques of Zionism and different forms of political expression, as much of what this report focuses on, there’s a wide variety of political opinion, even within our own 400-plus transition committee.”
Critics say the ADL's claim in the update that it "has long distinguished between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies and antisemitism" is belied by not only the Mamdani Monitor's language, but also its own significantly expanded definition of antisemitism and antisemitic incidents, which include protests against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza.
Jamie Beran, CEO of the progressive group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, said in an X thread that "we were disappointed but not surprised to see today’s ADL report continue their conflation of criticism of the Israeli government’s actions with antisemitism" and the group's "favoring of Trumpian tactics over bridge building and its prioritization of fearmongering over the safety of American Jews and our neighbors."
Beran continued:
The ADL of today seems to have three interests: keeping their right wing megadonors happy, protecting the current Israeli government’s violent far-right agenda by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and cozying up to [US President Donald] Trump to stay close to power.
None of this fights antisemitism. Their McCarthyist Mamdani Monitor is the first of its kind because the ADL chose not to deploy a similar tactic when their bedfellows offered Nazi salutes, hired and pardoned neo-Nazis, and continued to openly spread dangerous antisemitic conspiracy myths.
"If the ADL truly wanted to fight antisemitism—like we do every day—they would actually confront it at its roots and how it works alongside all forms of bigotry, not instrumentalize it for an unpopular political agenda that has nothing to do with Jewish safety," Beran added.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Jewish group J Street, also rejected the ADL's "continued conflation."
“J Street continues to be deeply concerned by the ADL’s ongoing use of its so-called ‘Mamdani Monitor,’ which goes well beyond combating antisemitism and too often conflates legitimate political speech with hate," Ben-Ami said in a statement Monday.
Ben-Ami asserted that there is "something deeply wrong when major Jewish leaders and institutions focus disproportionate attention on left-of-center activists’ views on Israel while failing to apply the same scrutiny to the Trump administration and MAGA leaders, whose blatant antisemitism and ties to white nationalist movements pose a clear and dangerous threat to American Jews."
"Our communal institutions should fight antisemitism consistently and credibly, wherever it appears—not selectively, and not in ways that inflame fear or deepen division," he added.
Another liberal Jewish antisemitism watchdog, Nexus Project, also decried the ADL update, which it said "repeatedly blurs the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism."
J Street among the groups supporting the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act (ARPA), legislation introduced last week by US Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) in the wake of the Sydney Hanukkah massacre.
According to Nadler's office, the bill "clearly states that it is against the policy of the United States to use antisemitism as grounds to pursue ulterior political agendas, including attacks on educational institutions, suppressing constitutionally protected speech, or any other enforcement of ideological conformity."
ARPA stands in stark contrast with the Antisemitism Awareness Act (ARA), which was introduced in 2023 by Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ, Max Miller (R-Ohio), and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) in the House of Representatives and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) in the Senate.
The bill would require the Department of Education to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism when determining whether alleged harassment is motivated by anti-Jewish animus.
The ADL has pushed a wide range of governments, institutions, and organizations to adopt the IRHA definition, which conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and colonization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
House lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the legislation last year; however, the bill remains stalled in the Senate.
Zionism—the settler-colonial movement for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—is being rejected by a growing number of Jewish Americans due to the racism, settler-colonialism, illegal occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide perpetrated by Israel and rooted in claims of divine right and favor.
Jewish-led groups like JVP, IfNotNow, and Jews for Economic and Racial Justice (JERJ) have been at the forefront of pro-Palestine demonstrations since the start of Israel's war and siege on Gaza, which have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing; 2 million others displaced, starved, and sickened; and most of the coastal strip in ruins.