The College Republicans Are Eating Each Other — and the Far Right Is Winning

Meet the Guy Who Got Hired to Register Young Voters

Last month, a Utah county clerk's office thought it would be a great idea to hire Kai Schwemmer, a 23-year-old Brigham Young University undergraduate and rightwing influencer, to help reach younger voters. What followed was the kind of uproar that happens when someone does approximately thirty seconds of Googling before making a hiring decision.

As the Guardian reports, more than 80 prominent Utah women signed a letter protesting the appointment after critics surfaced Schwemmer's record: remarks suggesting women are unsuited for public office, criticism of universal suffrage, endorsement of 'family voting' — a concept associated with Christian nationalists — and attendance at a 2022 conference organized by Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic far-right pundit who has made a career out of being too extreme for even mainstream MAGA.

Schwemmer told the Guardian that many of his most controversial statements were made in jest, taken out of context, or interpreted uncharitably. This is what everyone says after getting caught on tape. Schwemmer is also, as of March of this year, the political director of the College Republicans of America. So that's where we are.

The CRA: Too MAGA for MAGA

The College Republicans of America was founded in 2023. It is three years old. It already claims 350 chapters nationwide and is still growing, according to the Guardian. This kind of growth doesn't happen by accident — it happens when you identify an underserved market, and the market the CRA identified is college conservatives who think the existing Republican Party isn't radical enough.

CRA president Martin Bertao, an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, responded to the criticism of Schwemmer's appointment with a statement that read: 'I would like to apologize… to absolutely NOBODY,' followed by a declaration that the 'CRA will never back down to the WOKE mob!' This is the guy running the fastest-growing college Republican organization in the country. He is a student at one of the most liberal universities in America and he is very angry about it.

The CRA leaped to endorse Trump almost immediately after he announced his 2024 campaign, the Guardian notes, while the more established National Federation of College Republicans initially backed Nikki Haley and didn't endorse Trump until a month before the general election. Bertao has also taken shots at the College Republican National Committee — the oldest group in the movement — for issuing a statement asking Americans to respect Trump's fraud conviction. Respecting a legal verdict. That was too moderate.

Three Factions, Zero Recognition, Maximum Chaos

Here is the organizational situation: there are now three major national college Republican federations, they are all fighting with each other, and the Republican National Committee officially recognizes none of them. Zero. The movement that once served as a talent pipeline for Karl Rove, Paul Ryan, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Kevin McCarthy — not exactly a Mount Rushmore of civic virtue, but still — is currently operating in a state of total factional chaos.

'As of right now, no one is getting recognition because of this infighting,' Chaston Atkins, chair of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, told the Guardian. Atkins' group made a deliberate choice not to affiliate with any of the national factions. His assessment of the situation: 'It looks very childish.' When the guy who opted out of the fight calls it childish, that's a tell.

The CRA has meanwhile been building relationships abroad, cultivating ties with rightwing nationalist parties in Europe, per the Guardian. Nothing says 'this is a normal American student organization' quite like an international network of nationalist parties. The NFCR and the CRNC did not respond to requests for comment, which is its own kind of comment.

The Charlie Kirk Effect

Charlie Kirk, the far-right organizer and Turning Point USA founder, was killed last year. The Guardian reports that after his death, a groundswell of students rushed to join campus conservative organizations, though the long-term staying power of that wave is hard to measure. Turning Point USA is now run by his wife, Erika Kirk, and continues to operate in a slightly different lane — catering, per Atkins, to previously apolitical young people from conservative Christian backgrounds, while the college Republicans tend to attract students who were always going to be political.

The distinction matters. TPUSA is a media and influence organization with a campus footprint. The college Republicans, whatever their current dysfunction, have historically been where future politicians and operatives cut their teeth. The question is what kind of politicians and operatives the CRA model produces — and whether the Republican Party, having been thoroughly remade in Trump's image, will even notice the difference.

The Future Is Already Here and It Is Extremely Online

The factional war inside the college Republican movement is, as the Guardian frames it, a mirror of the broader tension inside the national party between Reaganite conservatives and MAGA populists. But the MAGA side isn't just winning — it is running up the score. The CRA emerged specifically because there was demand for a college Republican group that would treat Trump's 2016 flirtation with moderation as a bug rather than a feature.

What the CRA actually represents is the first generation of political operatives raised entirely on the far-right internet — people for whom Nick Fuentes is a familiar name, 'family voting' is a coherent policy position, and Donald Trump is a useful vehicle who could stand to be more aggressive. These are not fringe curiosities. Bertao is at Berkeley. Schwemmer was just hired by a county clerk's office. They are already inside the building.

The question that nobody in the Republican establishment seems to want to answer is what it means when the next generation of your party's campus organizers thinks the current leadership is too soft.