A college Republican coalition claiming 31 affiliated student groups in 14 states that attacked the Trump administration from the right routed its email through the same Microsoft 365 account as a company controlled by white nationalist Nick Fuentes.Until Monday morning, Microsoft’s public sign-in records put the College Republican Patriot Coalition (CRPC)’s web domain in an account registered to NJF LLC, a Fuentes-managed company that also runs his personal website and online store.By Monday evening, hours after the Guardian sent questions to Fuentes and the coalition, the domain no longer appeared in that account, and a Microsoft verification code had been deleted from its settings. Fuentes’s own domains remained in the account.The organization has hinted at ties with Fuentes in the past, but no operational link has been definitively shown until now.The revelation of an operational link between Fuentes and the highlights the inroads that Fuentes and his white nationalist “Groyper” movement have made among younger Republican activists and student organizations.“[Fuentes] advises his young followers to join organizations that are closer to the conservative establishment, and he tells them to ‘hide their power level’ and maybe downplay their kind of most radical ideas,” said Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a non-profit that researches extremist groups.The CRPC has not publicly named its leaders and is not associated with any known registered legal or organizational entity.The Guardian contacted Nick Fuentes and the CRPC for comment.In social media posts on Wednesday, CRPC blamed Tuesday’s midterm defeats on the Trump administration and the Republican party, saying young voters had received “a war on behalf of Israel, stunted deportations, and a flailing economy”.

The statement listed 31 college Republicans groups, including chapters at the University of Florida, Clemson and Iowa State University, and state-level federations in Georgia, Maryland, New York, Tennessee and Virginia.The coalition’s post-election messaging echoed attacks Fuentes made on Donald Trump before the vote. Fuentes posted on 26 October that Trump had “started a war with Iran that we are not only losing but which also destroyed the economy”.

He also reportedly accused Trump of starting the war at Benjamin Netanyahu’s bidding, criticised his failure to deport millions and told viewers of his stream: “Normies don’t like war with Iran. Normies don’t like 3.7% inflation!”But the group has never admitted the apparent affiliation with the far-right podcaster disclosed by the email link.

Simon Dickerman, a former Fuentes associate, said in a 2022 live stream that the coalition “has to pretend like it has nothing to do with Nick Fuentes because Nick has made himself so radioactive to other people”, but the shared Microsoft account is the first confirmed operational link between Fuentes and the coalition.The Guardian contacted Simon Dickerson for comment.Many of the groups on the CRPC statement also belong to College Republicans of America (CRA), which is seeking recognition as the Republican party’s official student wing and has publicly contended with the more established College Republican National Committee over who should represent college activists. CRA’s political director, Kai Schwemmer, appears in the coalition’s Instagram posts this year.The Guardian reported on Schwemmer’s appointment and his history of bigoted statements on live streams in March. (He claims he has abandoned his extremist views.)The Guardian contacted CRA and Schwemmer for comment on CPRC’s shared email infrastructure with Fuentes’ company.Lorber, the extremism expert, said of Fuentes’s so-called “America first” movement: “From the very beginning, Fuentes positioned America First as an alternative to Turning Point USA, and so it makes sense that he has a toehold in alternative campus conservative groups that position themselves as more radical than the mainstream GOP campus groups”.‘A recent antisemitic gesture’Student groups closely affiliated to CRPC have encountered local controversies, often over their promotion of white nationalist ideas, links to white nationalist activists, and endorsement of political candidates who have themselves voiced views similar to Fuentes’s.The University of Florida’s College Republicans chapter has co-authored eight Instagram posts with CRPC this year, and was deactivated by the university in March after photographs reportedly appeared to show members flashing Nazi salutes and posing with Fuentes and Myron Gaines, the antisemitic influencer and podcaster.The university said on social media that the Florida Federation of College Republicans had told it that the state group had “disbanded the local chapter of College Republicans”.

The Guardian reported in March that the chapter’s state leadership had cited “a pattern of conduct that violated its rules and values, including a recent antisemitic gesture”.The chapter sued for reinstatement, and was represented by Anthony Sabatini, the lawyer and former Republican state representative. A federal judge dismissed the Florida case in June after a bench trial, and the CRPC reportedly co-hosted the chapter’s first meeting after the ruling.Then representative Anthony Sabatini after speaking during a legislative session, in April 2021 at the state capitol in Tallahassee, Florida.

Photograph: Wilfredo Lee/APSabatini, a Lake county commissioner who served in the Florida House from 2018 to 2022, headlined a 2022 conference in Tampa that was reportedly organized by former members of Fuentes’s America First Foundation, and reportedly called for a moratorium on immigration, the abolition of the Juneteenth national holiday that celebrates the end of slavery, and telling the crowd: “God bless the nationalist populist movement.”The Guardian contacted Sabatini, UF College Republicans and the Florida Federation of College Republicans for comment.The Florida chapter’s complaint argued that the university had acted in part because they had hosted the Republican “gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, a critic of Israel”. In a post co-authored with the CRPC, the chapter had called the Fishback event the “Largest Candidate event at UF in almost 10 years”.Fishback, a 31-year-old investor, finished third in August’s Republican primary for governor.

His campaign was peppered with controversies arising from his racist remarks.He repeatedly referred to Byron Donalds, the Republican congressman who on Tuesday was elected Florida’s first Black governor, as a “slave”. In July, he wrote in a statement that a dispute had led Donalds “to chimp out on a 5’0 blonde woman in a Naples grocery store”, using a slur that likens Black people to apes.

Fishback has reportedly said he was “not aware of the history” of the comparison.On 28 October, Fishback floated a run for president in 2028. The College Republican chapters at Clemson and Georgia State, both on the CRPC’s list, hosted him on 29 and 30 October.

On Wednesday, Fishback quote-posted the coalition’s election statement with the words “Great statement”.The Guardian contacted Fishback for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJames Fishback speaks to the Republican Assembly of Sumter County at the Warfield Auditorium in Wildwood, Florida, on 16 April. Photograph: Dave Decker/ZUMA Press Wire/ShutterstockAt the chapter’s first meeting after its return, the speakers included Marshall Rawson, the Republican nominee for a north Florida seat in the state house, who reportedly marched with the neo-Confederate League of the South at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In a statement, Rawson said he had been “very active defending historical monuments” throughout his adult life.“Who cares about the lying media when the largest and most active College Republican chapter in the United States is behind you!” Rawson posted on X that week, alongside a photo of himself with chapter members. The chapter’s post about the meeting, co-authored with the coalition, also thanked Tim Marden, the chair of the Alachua county Republican party and mayor of Newberry, who has publicly backed Rawson.The Guardian contacted Rawson for comment.In an email, Marden wrote: “I prefer to use my relationships as an opportunity to influence people in what I believe is a more positive direction.

Life is not an all or nothing scenario.”‘A non-English-speaking hellscape’The Maryland Federation of College Republicans, which is on the coalition’s list and co-authored the Instagram version of Wednesday’s statement, invited the white nationalist Jared Taylor to speak at Salisbury University this spring.Salisbury postponed the talk in March “based on public safety considerations”, saying that anticipated attendance, “counter-demonstrations, and related security needs” had “increased significantly”. It noted that the federation was “not an SU organization” but an outside group renting space on campus.

The university’s College Democrats group had planned a protest for the day of the talk. The chair of the Maryland Republican party, Nicole Beus Harris, reportedly said the party had not been involved and condemned “the advertised event and the speaker’s despicable views”.The talk went ahead on 29 April under heavy security, as dozens of protesters gathered outside at a demonstration organised by the Salisbury College Democrats.

Taylor reportedly called the protesters “a bunch of big babies”.The federation’s then chair, Colin McEvers, at that time a Salisbury student, reportedly introduced Taylor as someone who might have the key to “save our country, to keep it from becoming a non-English-speaking hellscape where white people are spit at, despised and persecuted”. College Republicans of America, which the Maryland federation joined in 2025, said it “did not endorse or sanction the Maryland event”, the Guardian reported in July.A Facebook account with McEvers’ name in its URL now posts under the name Maryland White Republican Council.

On Wednesday, it said: “It is time for the pro-White flank of the right wing that has been censored, suppressed, and cast aside by the establishment to legitimately take the reins of the GOP.”The Guardian contacted the Maryland Federation of College Republicans for comment.Asked about his call for “white advocacy” in the Republican party, McEvers responded in an email that despite a failed effort from the Maryland GOP to censure him, he was able “to secure the Republican nomination for Delegate in Maryland Legislative District 32, become a member of the Anne Arundel County Republican Central Committee, and there have been many people within the party, of all age groups, who have come to accept that White advocacy is both acceptable and necessary for Republican success”.On the Maryland White Republican Council page, he wrote: “White people of all age groups failed to show up for the GOP this year, mostly among young voters. This proves that White people, namely young White men, are a legitimate voting bloc that the Republican Party must explicity advocate for; hence, the White Republican Council, which fundamentally promotes White Advocacy within the GOP in order to get Whites out to vote Republican.”He denied any direct relationship with the CRPC.‘A spectacular failure and a disaster’One of the main public outlets for CRPC is its Instagram account, which features photos of faceless members carrying out flyer drops around the country, memes including racist depictions of Trump administration officials, and retrospective albums of face-to-face meet-ups, many of which redact the faces of members who presumably do not wish to be identified as adherents of Fuentes’s movement.On the blacked-out faces, Political Research Associates’ Lorber said: “It makes it clear that they [are] associated with a radical right politics that they don’t necessarily want traced to their names and faces right now.”Fuentes dropped out of Boston University after he was seen at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and built a following of young men, known as “Groypers,” through his livestreamed show, America First.He was present at the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, though he did not enter the building, and in 2022 dined with Trump and the rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump later said he did not know who Fuentes was.After being banned from YouTube and many other platforms for hate speech, Fuentes was allowed back on X by Elon Musk in 2024. In October 2025 his podcast briefly became the highest-trending on Spotify, and Tucker Carlson gave him a friendly two-hour interview that the Guardian reported in November had set off “a bitter and widening civil war within the American right”.

The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, apologized after initially defending Carlson’s interview.Fuentes backed Trump in 2016 and 2020, but has increasingly attacked him from the right over Israel and what he sees as the insufficient radicalism of the Republican party, especially on immigration.Growing disillusionment has seen Fuentes urge his followers in recent months to disengage from elections or even to vote for Democrats. In February he reportedly told his audience: “Do not vote in the midterms.

The Republicans have to lose.” When Trump went to war with Iran, Fuentes condemned the war and mocked people who had voted for Trump believing he represented a break with US foreign policy. On election day he posted: “Get out and vote Democrat today.” On election night, he reportedly said: “This is literally the worst case scenario for Republicans playing out tonight.

And honestly, I could not be happier.”