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When the Utah county clerk’s office announced last month that it was hiring Kai Schwemmer – an undergraduate at Brigham Young University and a rightwing influencer – to help reach younger voters, an uproar ensued.
An energetic and fast-talking 23-year-old, Schwemmer is a rising star of campus organizing at the College Republicans of America (CRA). He is also a prolific livestreamer with a record of provocation – which returned to haunt him when more than 80 prominent women in Utah signed a letter protesting against his hiring.
Drawing on reporting earlier this year by the Guardian, critics noted that Schwemmer, who had been appointed as chief deputy clerk, had made remarks suggesting women are unsuited to public office, criticizing universal suffrage and endorsing “family voting”, a concept sometimes associated with Christian nationalists. In 2022, he attended a conference organized by Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic far-right pundit, and appeared in a supportive documentary about him.
In March, Schwemmer was also named political director of the CRA, the country’s fastest-growing national federation of college Republicans. When critics raised similar concerns, Martin Bertao, the group’s president, responded: “I would like to apologize… to absolutely NOBODY,” adding that the “CRA will never back down to the WOKE mob!”
The controversies dogging Schwemmer, and the CRA’s cavalier response, are illustrative of the extent to which parts of the college Republican movement – not to be confused with, though also not unlike, the scandal-plagued Young Republicans – have been won over by a hard right that views moderate Republicans with scorn, apes Donald Trump’s confrontational style, and has ties to extremists.
Republican student groups have long acted as a talent pipeline to the national party and helped turn out voters. But ideological, personal and financial disputes in recent years have split the movement into three main national college Republican groups. Since its founding just three years ago, the CRA has grown rapidly, outflanking and displacing two more established – and more moderate – rivals in part thanks to its radical posture.
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No one is getting recognition [from the RNC] because of this infighting
Chaston Atkins
The CRA is “more ideologically aligned with the next generation of Americans” than other college Republican groups, said Bertao, who is an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.
Each of the three groups views itself as the movement’s true voice – but none are officially recognized by the Republican National Committee.
“As of right now, no one is getting recognition because of this infighting,” said Chaston Atkins, the chair of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, which has made a deliberate choice not to affiliate with any of the national groups. “It looks very childish.”
The factional fighting mirrors tensions in the national party between Reaganite conservatives and those who have embraced Trump’s rightwing populism. At the same time, the sidelining of moderate college Republicans raises questions about the future of a right whose rising leaders tend to be arch-conservative young men, nursed on the far-right internet, who often think that Trump is not radical enough.
The college Republican movement in the United States is more than a century old, and made up of campus clubs that often join state and national federations.
While these clubs and federations hold little political influence in and of themselves, many prominent politicians and activists on the right – including Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Kevin McCarthy – had their first taste of power as student politickers in the college Republican movement.
After Charlie Kirk, the far-right organizer and influencer, was killed last year, a groundswell of students rushed to join campus conservative organizations, though the long-term staying power of that groundswell is difficult to gauge.
The organization Kirk founded, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), which is now run by his wife, Erika Kirk, has an overlapping but different niche than traditional college Republican organizations. TPUSA, Atkins said, increasingly caters to previously apolitical young people from conservative Christian backgrounds who wish to see their values better reflected in society, whereas born political animals tend to gravitate to the college Republicans.
Erika Kirk takes the stage during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, on 18 December 2025. Photograph: Cheney Orr/Reuters
When Trump first ran for president, in 2016, many college Republican groups were embarrassed to be too closely associated with a candidate viewed as a loose cannon. As Trump remade the Republican party in his own image, that changed – and the CRA emerged as an upstart ready to most zealously embrace the Maga zeitgeist.
Founded in 2023, the CRA leaped to endorse Trump soon after he announced his 2024 re-election campaign, Bertao said, in contrast to the more center-right National Federation of College Republicans (NFCR), which initially favored Nikki Haley and waited until a month before the general election to endorse Trump.
Bertao also criticized a third group – the country’s oldest, the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) – for having put out a statement urging Americans to respect the verdict when Trump was convicted of fraud in New York.
The NFCR and the CRNC did not respond to queries.
The CRA now claims to represent 350 college chapters nationwide, and continues to grow. Earlier this month it admitted the College Republican Federation of Alabama, which represents six chapters in that state. Its leadership has also increasingly cultivated ties with rightwing nationalist parties in Europe.
Schwemmer told the Guardian that many of his most controversial remarks were made in jest, taken out of context, or interpreted uncharitably. Regarding his attendance at a conference organized by Fuentes, he said: “I’ve been to libertarian conferences and events that leftwing people have put on, and I’ve entirely disagreed with what they’ve had to say.”
Salisbury University in Maryland postponed a speaking event featuring Jared Taylor on 6 March 2026 after backlash and cited safety concerns. Photograph: Baltimore Sun/TNS
This year several local college Republican clubs affiliated with the CRA have gotten into hot water.
In March, a college Republican club at the University of Florida sparked outrage when someone allegedly tied to the club was photographed making a Hitler salute. Soon after, the CRA announced that it was accepting the club as a member.
Earlier that month, the club hosted James Fishback, a long-shot and fiercely anti-Zionist Republican primary candidate for governor who has built a small but dedicated following among college-aged young people with humor that winks at the antisemitism and racism of the online far right.
The CRA and a lawyer representing the club in Florida have said that the person photographed was merely someone who had attended a club event, and held no leadership role.
The same month, a CRA club at Georgetown University wrote on social media that Muslims “have no place in American society. Their religion is incompatible with our Christian Nation.” After a backlash from other campus groups as well as some of its own members, the group deleted the message.
“We affirm the First Amendment rights of all Americans and we are called to love everyone,” a spokesperson for the club at Georgetown told a campus newspaper. “Our properly articulated position is that sharia law is incompatible with Western civilization and American society as it seeks to oppress women and persecute religious minorities.” The CRA told the Guardian that the club’s “actions and sentiment were not wrong; Islam is not compatible with the West”.
And in April, a CRA club at Salisbury University in Maryland invited the writer Jared Taylor to speak with students. Taylor is a self-described “white advocate” whom critics have accused of promoting white supremacy, a label he rejects. According to a New York Times reporter present, Colin McEvers, the college Republican who organized the event with Taylor, introduced him as someone who could help “save our country, to keep it from becoming a non-English-speaking hellscape where white people are spit at, despised and persecuted”.
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We view our role as supporting the Republican party and supporting the administration
Martin Bertao, CRA president
The CRA said that it did not endorse or sanctionthe Maryland event. It has also said that “[a]ny sort of bigotry and hatred is wrong and should be widely condemned.”
The CRA also said that it allows individual chapters to “decide on who to bring as speakers because of how different every state and campus is. However, when chapters go away from the main beliefs of our organization, we do intervene and draw clear lines.”
Bertao disputed, in part, the idea that the CRA is more radical than other college Republican organizations. “We don’t necessarily take policy perspective positions,” he said. “We view our role as supporting the Republican party and supporting the administration.”
Yet the CRA’s close mirroring of Trump might come to pose problems for the organization. Recent polling has shown that younger Republican voters are, compared with older ones, less supportive of American intervention abroad, less supportive of Israel, and less in lockstep with Trump.
The CRA’s own website seems to indicate a possible mismatch with a president currently at war with Iran; its mission statement calls for “a conservative movement that prioritizes the needs of the American people … and adheres to non-interventionist policies”.
That dynamic can be seen with Fishback, the Florida candidate for governor; although he trails the Trump-endorsed candidate, Byron Donalds, by a huge margin, polling shows that he is vastly more popular with likely Republican voters aged 18 to 34.
James Fishback speaks to the Republican assembly of Sumpter county in Wildwood, Florida. Photograph: Dave Decker/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
At the same time, survey data does not yield much evidence that younger Republicans, on the whole, hold more radical views than older Republicans on hot-button cultural issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage, Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), said. She suspects that the radical turn of some college Republicans says more about the views of conservative elites – and aspiring elites on campuses – and their desire to secure influence within the movement.
More hardline views are pushing to the fore, she speculated, as “the activist class within the GOP [struggles] over the direction of their party”.
Asked if the CRA’s membership or mission might conflict with its pro-Trump stance, Schwemmer disagreed: “I think all of us are grateful for the revolution that occurred in conservative politics in 2016, even if we since have disagreed with many of the things the president has done.”
College conservative groups tend to mirror “some of the larger fractiousness on the right”, said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. Historically, insurgent factions periodically emerge to challenge establishments they perceive as having sold out to the political center, displacing them before eventually facing similar rebellions.
Amy Binder, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins who has co-written two books about political organizing on campuses, noted that when she worked on the first – published in 2013 during the Obama administration – she observed two distinct styles of campus conservatism.
Conservatives at smaller, elite schools tended to emphasize the idea of civil discourse and intellectual persuasion and avoid sharp elbows that might rub their peers – and possible fellow future leaders of industry – the wrong way. In contrast, conservatives at big state schools tended to lean into provocation, with stunts such as “affirmative action bake sales” – where baked goods are priced differently according to the buyers’ ethnicity – that might offend people on large, diverse campuses but also impress rightwing political organizations scouting brash young talent.
“They didn’t care if they set off their liberal classmates,” Binder said. “In fact, they thought that was great.” To attract media attention, their attitude was “go big or go home”.
By the time she co-wrote her second book – published in 2022, as the “woke” backlash was gathering steam – the second style had come into its own, and was by far the dominant strain. “Anything that was more civil was really disparaged as being establishment – boring, out of fashion.”
For its part, the Utah county clerk’s office backtracked, partly, in its hiring of Schwemmer; after a furor, the office announced that his job would be adjusted to a more junior role.
Radicalism currently has the upper hand in many quarters, but the future is difficult to predict, noted Atkins, the college Republican in Georgia. Clubs at many schools often have just a handful of members, meaning they may change affiliations quickly because of political winds or the views of a determined faction among the leadership. Similarly, he feels that the CRA has tied itself too closely to the personhood of an unpopular second-term president who will soon diminish in influence.
For those reasons, he cautioned against extrapolating too much from the momentum of the CRA or any other group or faction. “It can change in the blink of an eye,” he said.