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Young conservatives have a bigotry problem — and everyone on the right has a responsibility to reckon with it.
Nicholas Rafael, the now-suspended treasurer of the New York Young Republican Club, has been linked to an X account — @basedredford — from which he allegedly sent out all sorts of bigoted and antisemitic messages.
His is just one of dozens of scandals rocking the young conservative world, which has been taken over by “edgelords” who say the most offensive things possible for sport. They are a danger to the Republican party and to America’s social fabric — and conservatives of all ages have a responsibility to condemn their behavior.
Rafael isn’t the only bad apple to come out of the NYYRC. In November, its former vice president Vish Burra was fired as a producer at One America News for posting an AI-generated video depicting Jews as “scheming” cockroaches counting money in a dark room.
According to reporting from New York Magazine, Rafael operated an anonymous X account which called Texas Senator Ted Cruz a “Israel first goy slave” and declared, “It’s literally a historic FACT that your society will thrive when you kick the Jews out of town.”
The magazine reported that the account was followed by members of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) and published an image it claims is Rafael giving a sieg heil salute in Nazi paraphernalia.
Rafael was put on leave by the club. He did not respond to The Post’s request for comment via a NYYRC spokesperson, though he told New York Magazine that the photo was not real and the account was not his. An attorney for the NYYRC told The Post that an internal investigation is still pending.
NYYRC president Stefano Forte told The Post that the group has thousands of members and that its “purpose is to allow these people to express their ideas in an honest and respectful manner. We obviously take swift corrective action when it appears that one of our members has not done so,” he said.
It’s part of a national trend among young conservatives, who are choosing shock-jocking over engaging in actual discourse. A former president at a major university’s Republican club who remains close to campus leadership told The Post the development is alarming to him.
“Because we’ve been up against political correctness for so long, there’s an eagerness to challenge — and even slaughter — the sacred cows, the pieties of the left,” said the former president, who asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons. “People will make edgy jokes… and with some people, it’s actually malicious.”
Young people who consider themselves conservative, he said, are less likely to be fans of relatively moderate voices like Ben Shapiro and more likely to follow far-right streamers like Nick Fuentes. “It’s only going to get worse and worse,” he warned. “There doesn’t really seem to be a bottom, and that’s what’s so sad.”
The edgelord problem is by no means unique to NYYRC (who, to their credit, turned away Nick Fuentes from a gala in December). The young conservative movement has been battered by controversy after controversy in recent years.
In March, a leaked group chat saw young Republican club members at Florida International University use the n-word more than 400 times, along with jokes about beheading, dissecting and crucifying black people.
That same month, a photograph circulated showing members of the University of Florida Federation of College Republicans throwing up Nazi salutes.
At Georgetown, the official account belonging to the school’s College Republicans chapter sent a now-deleted tweet reading, “Let’s Be Honest: Muslims have no place in American society. Their religion is incompatible with our Christian Nation.”
The College Republicans of America appointed Kai Schwemmer — a 23-year-old edge lord acquaintance of Nick Fuentes who had bragged about being “0% Jewish” and called himself “an anti-universal suffrage guy” — as national political director in the spring.
In April, Harvard’s Republican club posted images of an Eid festival held on campus, suggesting that the “historic Quincy Courtyard had been turned into a bazaar selling Hijabs, Burqas and Qurans” and declared “Harvard has been captured.”
Last October, a Politico report analyzing 28,000 messages sent between leaders of the Young Republicans organization across the country — including those from New York, Kansas, Vermont, and Arizona — uncovered hundreds of slurs, praise for Hitler, and jokes about rape and slavery.
The New York State Young Republicans disbanded after the incident.
This sort of behavior is the result of a generation being raised on internet memes and rage bait. They correctly decided that political correctness has gone too far, but their strategy for countering it — violating every rule for attention — is remarkably short-sighted.
Too many young people are beginning to believe that being a conservative also means being a racist shock-jock who cares more about edgelording than any coherent political ideology. This new rise of discourse isn’t a coherent political position. It’s performance art. And it’s just plain stupid.
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