An ugly feature of the Republican Party in the MAGA era resurfaced this month in Florida, even though the GOP has long been trying to hide it.

A WhatsApp group chat for Republican students started by the secretary of the Miami-Dade County GOP was recently leaked to the Miami Herald and the conservative website The Floridian. Messages from last fall show participants spewing hatred against Jews, graphically describing violence against Black people, demeaning women and LGBTQ individuals, and even glorifying a mythological “Nazi heaven” imagined by Heinrich Himmler.

Sadly, none of it was a surprise. While racism’s roots run deep in America and many factors contribute to it, Florida’s Republican leaders have spent the last eight years helping stoke the fires. They’ve passed laws designed to silence dissenting views on race, gender and religion in classrooms while pledging allegiance to a president who is trashing moral norms and demonizing people based on their race and skin color.

According to news reports, the messages used racial slurs more than 400 times. One member of the chat reportedly posted a block of text graphically describing the brutality he suggested could be inflicted on Black people — using verbs like “kill,” “exterminate,” “crucify,” “behead” and “dissect.” Another member of the group, the chapter president of Turning Point USA at Florida International University (FIU), renamed the group chat after a mythical racist civilization called Agartha.

FIU President Jeanette Nuñez has condemned the hatred. She released a statement Tuesday noting that the university has “initiated charges” stemming from violations of its nondiscrimination policy and its student conduct code. FIU’s provost also said that the students involved could not be expelled from campus because of their First Amendment rights. They noted that another person in the chat who was not a student has been banned from campus. The university's Turning Point USA chapter announced that its president has stepped down. Nuñez's office did not respond to interview requests for this column.

The investigation is the least Nuñez could do. Until last year, she had spent six years as the state’s lieutenant governor and eight as a state legislator ushering in laws aimed at an illusory “war on woke.” The laws restricted discussions of race and gender in classrooms; pulled books off school shelves written by Black authors; removed books about the Holocaust; censored racism references in college textbooks; ended dozens of courses at universities; and prevented professors from providing historical context about systemic racism, inequality and bigotry.

Nuñez would have been better off also acknowledging that she and other Republicans had helped fuel animosities and bigotry like those that poisoned her students’ chats.

But such a reckoning is unlikely. Florida Republicans have proven themselves more interested in crushing academic freedom, building an education system that fits a White nationalist worldview, and “owning the libs” than in confronting racism and antisemitism in their ranks.

For his part, Florida’s top GOP official, Governor Ron DeSantis, said nothing. The GOP’s legislative leadership and congressional delegation in the state gave it little more than lip service. And Evan Power, the head of the Florida Republican Party and a candidate for Congress, offered an “internal review” but would not commit to forcing out the chat’s organizers.

We’ve seen this before. Back in October, Politico obtained thousands of text messages from leaders of Young Republican chapters across the country in which members joked about gas chambers, slavery and rape. And South Florida was rocked by a similar scandal just months ago. In January, a group of high-profile White nationalist influencers including Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes arrived at a Miami Beach nightclub performing the Nazi salute. The club allowed them to play the song “Heil Hitler” by Ye. Local city and county officials condemned the behavior. The nightclub owner fired the responsible staff, but no one on the right or in the GOP said much about it.

Republicans are in a bind. They have created conditions they can’t control. A recent YouGov poll showed that young conservative voters ages 18-34 are the most antisemitic of any age group. A survey by the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute found that nearly one in four Republican voters ages 18-29 admit to being racist.

That could mean trouble for the leading Republican candidate for Florida governor, Byron Donalds, a Black congressman who grew up in Brooklyn. Two conventional Republicans and a relative unknown, Republican James Fishback, all of whom are White, are challenging him. Fishback, whose campaign relies on antisemitic and racist rhetoric, is polling at 4% overall, but he has the support of 32% of young adults.

This is the age group the organizers of the FIU chat had strategically aimed to influence. In addition to the secretary of the Miami-Dade GOP, the organizers reportedly included the membership director of the FIU College Republicans.

These young people are positioning themselves to be the future of the Republican Party — and the US. It’s no longer enough for Republican leaders to verbally condemn their behavior. It’s time to either dismantle the machines that are rewarding their hatred, or to drive every Republican who does nothing about it from office.

If Republican leaders choose instead to ignore hatred within their own ranks, they will own what comes next.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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