America’s Nazi Problem

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No less an authority on right-wing extremism than Laura Loomer, Donald Trump’s wacko loyalty policeman, said it: Republicans have a Nazi problem, warning that there are those “trying to redefine” the party “so it can become modern-day Hitler Youth.” 

When a Loomer admits it, you know this is a real problem, not just a liberal fabrication. 

The Republicans’ entanglement with Nazism — especially after a recent kerfuffle involving conservative hero Tucker Carlson, Nazi apologist Nick Fuentes, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts (more on that to come) — has been much written about, as GOP stalwarts argue over whether they should denounce Nazi sympathizers or make common cause with them. This is a debate that really shouldn’t be a debate at all, and certainly not one that requires another disquisition on the Republicans’ moral bankruptcy. 

But I am delivering one nonetheless, because — no matter how much space this courtship has been given, no matter how many pundits decry the celebration of Nazis and the canonization of Adolf Hitler by large segments of the conservative movement, no matter how often conservatives trot out antisemitic tropes, and no matter how often conservative leaders declare that this would be a much better country if it were a dictatorship — the fact that one of our two major parties actively, publicly, enthusiastically embraces Nazism should be a scandal, a horror, and a disgrace. Not something to be promptly forgotten, as it has been, but something that should be a front-page story every single day.

Lest we forget — and Republicans seem to have forgotten — the Nazis were the bad guys, the very personification of evil, the force that hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat, and the gleeful, bloodthirsty murderers of millions. They needed to be destroyed, forever castigated as the very worst of humanity, not emulated. Yet emulated they are. 

So, yes, Ms. Loomer: The Republicans do, indeed, have a Nazi problem, and that means America has one too.

‘Great. I Love Hitler’

It would be easier to dismiss this romance with Nazism if the ardor were only at the fringes of conservatism. But as we all know by now, the fringes have become the mainstream, and Nazi flirtation is not a stumble of Trumpist Republicanism, but a dominant strain of it, especially the racism. 

Last October, Politico reported on a chat room of Young Republicans (YR) officers from New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont blithely bantering about Blacks (“watermelon people”), using variations of the N-word to refer to them at least a dozen times, and saying of an NBA game, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch a monkey play ball”; asking, with regard to how to deal with opponents, whether “we can fix the showers” because “gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” with one adding, “I’m ready to burn people now”; commenting on DEI initiatives that “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there”; speaking approvingly of a GOP teenage organization in Orange County, NY, “They support slavery and all that shit.” 

Several chatters talked of a scheme to defeat a rival candidate for office by linking her to pro-Nazi propaganda, then thought better of it because that might actually improve her chances of winning. Another participant invoked 1488, neo-Nazi coded numerology: 14 standing for the number of words in a white supremacist statement by David Eden Lane, who murdered the Jewish radio host Alan Berg; and 88 for “Heil Hitler,” H being the eighth letter in the alphabet. 

When told that the Michigan YR delegation would be voting for the most right-wing candidate for national chair, the chair of the New York chapter and an aspirant for the national job, Peter Giunta, responded, “Great. I love Hitler.” 

These, one should be reminded, are the future leaders of the Republican Party and the vanguard of the party now.

Just ‘Kids’ Talkin’

One might have thought the Republicans would hasten to distance themselves from this ugliness because it would alienate decent-thinking Americans. But no. Rather than condemn the language and its perpetrators, many in the Republican leadership had another reaction entirely. 

JD Vance: Stop worrying about what kids in their thirties say in groupchats. pic.twitter.com/YfiyhaVZoA

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) October 15, 2025

Vice President JD Vance excused them as “kids” saying “edgy offensive” things. “By focusing on what kids are saying in a group chat — grow up! I’m sorry,” Vance said, even warning that there are always malcontents in the shadows seeking to delegitimize conservatives. “I love Hitler” is just a joke, right? How about Vance telling that to the families of those who perished in his gas chambers or of the American soldiers who gave their lives fighting him?

Though “kids will be kids” would hardly be exculpatory even if they were kids, Mother Jones determined that these were not exactly offensive teenagers. Eight of the 11 participants for whom Mother Jones could find ages were between 24 and 35 years old. One “kid” was the communications assistant for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. Another “kid” was employed by the New York State Unified Court System. A third “kid” was a state senator in Vermont. Giunta himself was chief of staff to a New York assemblyman.

From Fringe to Core

And these “kids” aren’t the fringes of the fringes either. They are not only the future of the Republican Party, they are also at the very center of modern Republicanism right now. The conservative writer Rod Dreher visited Vance at his residence last November after the chat room fiasco and expressed his concerns about the neo-Nazi surge. How deep this concern really went is difficult to say since Dreher, who lives in Hungary, also reported cheerfully how well Vance got on with Hungarian strongman and fellow visitor Viktor Orbán, a neo-Nazi himself.

Dreher quoted what he called a “DC insider” who estimated that between “30 and 40 percent of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes” — the provocateur whom New York Times columnist David French has called the “most notorious fan of Adolf Hitler in American public life.” 

And Dreher observed that one of the appeals of Fuentes is his “rage and willingness to violate taboos,” including his antisemitism. “Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in antisemitism,” Dreher wrote. “They even use it as a litmus test of who can and who can’t join their informal social groups.” 

And Dreher, in another instance of the depth and likely endurance of this neo-Nazism among the Republicans, despaired that the “gatekeepers of the Right aren’t going to be able to make it go away because they have less power than ever. Dealing with this will require great skill, and subtlety and courage.” None of which is obvious among Republicans.

This kind of appeal, after all, is in large measure why Trump won the presidency — because he would show those disgruntled conservatives how to own the libs, and what better way to own them then to embrace Nazism, the very embodiment of everything that an enlightened, tolerant, liberal society abhors.

It should come as no surprise whatsoever that the conservative movement generally and the Trumpist Republican Party specifically are morally bankrupt, and that they would naturally excuse racist, homophobic, misogynistic, antisemitic, nativist, and Nazi effusions. That is what Dreher is leaving out: not only how Republicans have long engaged in sotto voce antisemitism (Nixon’s antisemitic musings were not far from the Nazis, and one-time Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan, who is now being rehabilitated, was a notorious racist and nativist and had to fend off charges of antisemitism), but also, and more pointedly, how the so-called gatekeepers of the right encourage this.

If, as Dreher says, “antisemitism is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation,” it is not because it is antagonistic to conservatism but wholly consonant with it. This kind of appeal, after all, is in large measure why Trump won the presidency — because he would show those disgruntled conservatives how to own the libs, and what better way to own them then to embrace Nazism, the very embodiment of everything that an enlightened, tolerant, liberal society abhors.

‘A Nazi Streak, From Time to Time’

The way to stop it, if one really wanted to, is to stop Trump, to repudiate his amorality and the way he treats people, to repudiate white supremacy, to promote a more compassionate society and regenerate morality. 

But Republicans can’t do that because, as Trump so amply demonstrates, white supremacy and neo-Nazism are not just the expression of rambunctious neo-Nazi kids, but the very foundations of modern Republicanism. 

In fact, Trump rewards it. Paul Ingrassia, a young attorney who attracted Trump’s attention through his virulently pro-Trump Substack, was appointed to the Office of the Special Counsel, which examines whistleblower complaints, despite being only two years out of law school and having a glaring lack of experience.

But it wasn’t a lack of experience that torpedoed Ingrassia’s nomination. It was his racism. In texts leaked to Politico, Ingrassia railed against Martin Luther King Jr. Day, saying it “should be tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs” and Black holidays should be “eviscerated” from “kwanza to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth.” Politico also quoted him saying that one should “never trust a chinaman or Indian” and reported his advising Trump that education should focus on “elevating the high IQ section of your demographics, so you know, basically young men, straight White men.” 

Even that probably wouldn’t have terminated his nomination if Ingrassia hadn’t also admitted shamelessly that “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time.” 

A handful of Republican senators found that one Nazi too far, and Trump, realizing it would be defeated, withdrew the nomination. Though, apparently, even claiming a Hitler gene still wasn’t enough to end Ingrassia’s employment. Instead, Trump appointed him to be deputy general counsel of the General Services Administration, a position not requiring Senate approval and one in which he is still serving.

Using Anti-Antisemitism in His War on Higher Education

For decades, Republicans have largely, save for squeaky wheels like Buchanan, kept their antisemitism and Nazi inclinations under wraps because they didn’t play well with the general electorate, which still had some vestiges of virtue and a susceptibility to shame. 

Nevertheless, Jews knew those Republican proclivities. (Dreher himself cites conservative colleagues who mention the old canard that conflates Jews and communists as an excuse for attacking them.) Republicans were the white Protestant establishment, which also happened to be the wellspring of American antisemitism. In the ramp-up to World War II, they were the ones chiefly calling for isolationism and threatening Jews for trying to push America into the conflict to save their coreligionists in Europe. 

In my parents’ Jewish home, I grew up with that knowledge — as did, I suspect, most Jews — and it is one reason why American Jews vote overwhelmingly Democratic. This isn’t only a liberal’s analysis. William F. Buckley wrote a book about Republicans and antisemitism. The vibrations of antisemitism were unmistakable, and not only in the party’s lunatic fringe.

Donald Trump knew how to play antisemitism to his advantage, posturing to help Jews while also pacifying his own staunchly antisemitic supporters. Recall that, observing the neo-Nazi and white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville in 2017 who warned of “Great Jewish Replacement,” Trump famously said that there were “very fine people” on both sides. 

His real coup, however, came last year when he seized on the campus protests against the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and, on the pretext of — wait for it — battling antisemitism, basically declared war on America’s system of higher education, which he regarded as an enemy of his orthodoxy and entire agenda.

This is no place to litigate whether anti-Zionism is also antisemitism or whether those who protested the slaughter of Palestinians were targeting all Jews for being responsible (no doubt, some protesters were, some weren’t, and a sizable number were probably Jews themselves). 

But Trump, as he has divided the country generally, managed cleverly to divide Jews between those who excused Netanyahu’s policies and those who were aghast at them, not because he really had any deep antipathy to antisemitism — this was the man, after all, who had dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago, and who had filled his administration with white Christian nationalists — but because it was a good political gambit. How could this friend of Israel possibly be a Nazi sympathizer? 

Sadly, some of our best universities fell victim to this bullying and extortion — a terrible irony that education, which had long been one of the chief means of advancement for Jews, was now being undone by someone who claimed to be acting in their interests. Sadly, too, a whole lot of Jews, though not anywhere near a majority, fell for it as well. Trump knew stooges when he saw them.

For a counterpoint example of how some Jews have refused to swallow the bait and how some did, just look at liberal Ezra Klein’s podcast with left-wing historian John Ganz on antisemitism, and right-wing Ross Douthat’s podcast on the same issue with right-wing Israeli politico Yoram Hazony. 

Ganz condemns the right’s antisemitism; Hazony claims that antisemitism is all on the left, and he has the audacity (stupidity?) to say that Trump’s alleged antisemitism was “hot air.” 

As for the young antisemites who follow Fuentes, Hazony has their backs too. Not antisemitic, he claims. “They are just people who are thinking about these things and saying: You know what? Gosh, I don’t really know.” (Make note of how much space the Times gave this idiot.) Which is to say, a lot of Jews are afraid to point out antisemites when they see them, or act as though they are oblivious to them if doing so pacifies Trump. They protect them instead.

Bride and Groom Feeding Each Other the Wedding Cake

None of the antisemitism and neo-Nazism in conservative precincts was exactly secret. Far from it. It was everywhere if one looked for it. An article by Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic last September cited Candace Owens, a right-wing star with the ninth most popular podcast on Spotify, once asking rhetorically, “What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” (Gee, maybe it has something to do with lies, a murderous totalitarianism, a play for world domination, and the Holocaust?)

But most people didn’t look for it, and the legacy media were largely silent about how deeply neo-Nazism had entrenched itself in the MAGA movement — one assumes, again, out of fear of Trump reprisals. 

The neo-Nazism had been quietly percolating. Then Tucker Carlson — a friend and adviser to Trump (“I’ve never talked to him more,” Carlson told The Washington Post recently) and one of the most prominent figures on the American right, with a following estimated at 22 million — conducted a two-hour interview with Nick Fuentes, the leader of the Groypers. That is the movement of young neo-Nazis among conservatives named after their mascot, a frog-like creature akin to the right-wing mascot Pepe the Frog.

Trump obviously didn’t invent neo-Nazism; these impulses have long existed in our culture. But it was Trump who loosed them into the political mainstream. These impulses were restricted to the loons, but it was Trump who made them respectable.

Before addressing Carlson, it is worth noting that Carlson may have been the fire, but Trump was the spark. Dreher is probably right that young Republicans — especially males fed up with the world, certain that it is arrayed against them; bristling at homosexuality (that chat room was profligate with anti-gay slurs) and transgenders but also deeply, deeply hostile to women; certain that Blacks and immigrants are gaining advantages denied to them, and that immigrants were mongrelizing the white race; blaming Jews for constructing this system that favors the educated and disfavors them — are driven by the sense of social destruction that animates their movement but also animates Trump’s and, not incidentally, animated Hitler and the Nazi movement.

Trump obviously didn’t invent neo-Nazism; these impulses have long existed in our culture. But it was Trump who loosed them into the political mainstream. These impulses were restricted to the loons, but it was Trump who made them respectable. These impulses, so Hitlerian in their character, would and did repulse most Americans, but it was Trump, who, according to his former chief of staff John Kelly, said that Hitler did “some good things” and legitimized Hitler as a model to his supporters rather than a monster. 

Trump fed the Tucker Carlsons and the Nick Fuenteses, and they fed him, until the two melded. Trump can profess not to have known who Fuentes was when Kanye West brought him to Mar-a-Lago, but that seems disingenuous by half. He knew. He knew and he was happy, one assumes, to have him there — this moral nullity who says he is the great scourge of antisemitism but embraces antisemites.

The Fuentes Hits the Fan

Carlson’s têtê-à-têtê with Fuentes was not his first with neo-Nazi admirers. The odious Candace Owens was a frequent guest on the podcast, and he had hosted a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, whom Carlson praised as the “most important popular historian working in the United States today,” after Collum argued that Winston Churchill was the real “villain” of World War II and Hitler a man who just wanted to “reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” (For MAGA, note that the Jews were a “problem.”) 

But the Fuentes interview struck a nerve, in spite of the fact that by Fuentes’s standards, and even by Carlson’s, it was pretty much of a snore, with a few provocative statements about women (they must be “subordinate” and “hero worship” their husbands); a remark that Fuentes is a “fan” of Joseph Stalin; a lot of palaver about Israel and Jews and how Jews are unassimilable so long as they feel loyalty to Israel; and a few conspiratorial notes about 9/11. 

Yet while avoiding Fuentes’s embrace of Hitler, whom Fuentes once called “cool,” it did strike that nerve — possibly because Fuentes spews his hate evenly with no embarrassment whatsoever; possibly because he is clearly so popular among young Republicans (historian John Ganz told the Times’s Ezra Klein that every single person on the right under 40 “is exposed to extremely high levels of Groyper content”), especially men; and possibly, just possibly, because what he says resonates with the Republican Party nowadays in a way it never had previously. 

In fact, the immediate problem seemed to be that Fuentes was really catching on, and there was so little blowback. Once again: Carlson is one of the leading voices of conservatism, perhaps the media’s leading voice, and he didn’t even attempt to parry Fuentes. He encouraged him.

Then, as you surely know by now, all hell broke loose. Because Carlson wasn’t just another of the right-wing nuts but the King Nut, and because he gave a platform to an antisemite and Nazi apologist, a few Republicans were in a tizzy. 

The nature of the contretemps is probably less important than the fact of it. The fact of it is that Kevin Roberts — whose Heritage Foundation had drafted Trump’s pathway-to-dictatorship Project 2025 program — leapt to Carlson’s defense. He issued a video that used several of the same antisemitic tropes that were Fuentes’s stock-in-trade — a “globalist class” and a “venomous coalition” were the ones attacking Carlson. 

That triggered a rebuttal from some conservatives and even members of the Heritage board, who demanded a retraction, which Roberts gave — sort of. Five of them eventually resigned. For his part, when asked about Carlson after the interview, Trump responded with a quintessentially Trumpian comment: “He said good things about me over the years. I think he’s good.”

But if you pause for a second and think about what this whole episode was about, it was about whether Republicans now openly endorsed antisemitism, white supremacy, and even Hitler fandom. It was about whether America had become the very nation it had fought an existential war to stop. 

Lindsay Graham, who is not one to talk, even felt compelled to aver that he was a member of the “Hitler Sucks” wing of his party, which suggested that there was a “Hitler Does Not Suck” wing.

There is, and it is very large — frighteningly large, dangerously large, large enough to possibly own one of our two major parties.

Putting Their Nazi Where Their Mouth Is

This Nazi bromance is not just a matter of words. It is a matter of policy. I doubt anyone else will say it because it seems extreme, too hostile. So I will. After all, if the jackboot fits… The Trump Republicans not only talk like neo-Nazis, they act like them. 

The roundups of immigrants and deportations; the stationing of the military in American cities to arrest American citizens; the dismantling of programs whose primary purpose was to challenge white supremacy and deliver on the promise of equality; the capitulation of Congress and the Supreme Court to the president and his general lawlessness; the pressure on the press to do the leader’s will or else (see, for example, CBS); the rewriting of history to conform to the leader’s idea of his own greatness; the disregard for science and the promotion of pseudoscience; the constant and unrelenting scapegoating; the invasion of sovereign nations to plunder their resources (after TACOing, Trump keeps circling back to Greenland and still has his eye on Canada); the attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of this country and the calls to hang public officials; the destruction of the world order that kept authoritarians in check; the weaponization of the legal system and the persecution of opponents; the celebration of machismo; the monumentalizing of the leader and the constant puffery; the patrimonialism that puts the interest of the leader ahead of the public interest: Each of these is torn directly from the Nazi playbook, and that isn’t even the half of it. 

Some in the media are finally waking up to the crosshairs — or is it a swastika? — that Trump and his legions have fastened upon our elections, beginning with the midterms. The hand-wringing is audible as it becomes increasingly apparent that pretexts will be sought, and very likely found, to “nationalize” the election, handing the Trump regime unconstitutional (but who cares?!) influence over every aspect, from eligibility and registration to casting and counting. Strategies and tactics to oppose this putsch seem inchoate and less than reassuring.

And if we have ceased to be a democracy here at home, we are now internationally a rogue nation with a government by, of, and for one man. But, then, you already knew that. 

More mysterious is why, given the scope of this assault on democracy, given the danger it poses to the entire American experiment, the Nazification of America isn’t the biggest story in our media ecosphere. Or as a colleague recently put it: “We are the bad guys now.” That deserves a headline — actually a score or more of headlines.

Decline of the West Meets Triumph of the Will

But here is something else you may not know — not just that Republican words repeat Nazism’s, not just that Republican policies have Nazi-like components, but that the very philosophy of Trumpian governance is nearly identical to that of the Nazis. 

This is the deepest and most dangerous affinity, one that depends not only on that old reliable antisemitism, but also on animosity toward progressivism generally and even, even, toward the Enlightenment. 

The entire MAGA/right-wing/Republican movement is built on one idea, and it isn’t so much a political one as it is a historical one, at least a faux-historical one: MAGA believes and says that the West, by which it means civilization itself, is in steep decline, undone by a congeries of forces that promulgate decadence. By liberals; by women; by minorities; by non-Christians and Jews; by immigrants, of course; and by anyone who taints the purity of whites. (The Groypers, who hate women, also call for pornography to be outlawed and pornographers imprisoned.) 

And it follows that Trump and MAGA see themselves as the saviors of not only America, but the entirety of Western civilization — the ones who will rescue us all from decadence. For them, this is much more than politics. This is existential. 

Never mind that Trump is decadence personified. Like the Nazis, they will save us.

The right, Trump’s right, Putin’s right, Orbán’s right: All are beholden to the idea of a world in ruins and to the idea that the remedy for decadence is a strongman who abjures democracy, which allegedly got us into this situation. This is what unites them. 

These authoritarians have become much enamored of the early 20th-century German mathematician Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, his massive post–World War I analysis of how nations, like organisms, go through life cycles, eventually leading to civilization. This Spengler defined disapprovingly as an end stage of exhaustion, decrepitude, and lack of vitality, which, in turn, leads to Caesarian rule. 

Such a trajectory helped make his book a popular one among Nazis — though Spengler himself was no Nazi and gave no credence to racial purity — and is the reason it is now popular on the American right. 

Indeed, the idea of decadence beaten back by white Christian male heroes seems to resonate with our own vice president. Appearing last December at a Turning Point rally at which he refused to condemn Fuentes or Carlson — “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform” — Vance said, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore” and the US “always will be a Christian nation.” 

He added that “Christianity is America’s creed, the shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond.” 

Absolutely false as it is, this declaration rhymes perfectly with Fuentes’s assertion that: 

On some level, we do need to be exclusive, not inclusive. We do need to be right wing. We do need to be Christian. We do, on some level, need to be pro-white, not to the exclusion of everybody else, but recognizing that white people have a special heritage here as Americans.

This doesn’t leave much room for non-whites or non-Christians, including Jews, which is the point. Whether Trumpian Jews want to admit it or not, Vance is advocating for a purity doctrine, just as another political party once did.

Perhaps no one really cares much that neo-Nazism is perfectly acceptable among a large swath of Republicans, perhaps a majority. As Rolling Stone put it, “The outrage cycle is apparently over now, and Fuentes has come out on top,” being “courted by some of conservative media’s biggest names.” 

That is not “hot air,” as Hazony would have it. The younger generation of conservatives, the Groypers — who came of political age in the last decade, the Trump decade — don’t know much beyond Trump or much about a political period before him when civility was honored and race and religious hatreds were shamed. 

Trump changed all that. Trump coarsened his young acolytes as he has coarsened everything. 

To them, Nazis may not be the bad guys. They see themselves as defenders of an antediluvian culture against the so-called champions of modern decadence. It is doubtful that Trump sees himself as a defender of any culture, antediluvian or otherwise, and certainly not against decadence. But in seeing himself as an exponent of the will to power in a jungle of a world, Trump’s vision and theirs dovetail beautifully. 

Which is yet another way in which Trump has destroyed our moral decency — by corrupting a whole generation of young men. 

But anyone who can’t tell the difference between a Nazi and those who fight Nazism is a threat to society and a threat to civilization itself as it is commonly understood. So, yes, Republicans may have a Nazi problem; and if they do, so does America; and if America has one, so does the world.

One last time for those who still don’t seem to get it: The Nazis are the bad guys.

Neal Gabler is now a contributing editor at WhoWhatWhy.