The University of Florida’s move to boot a Republican student organization off campus Monday came after a photo posted online showed a member doing a Nazi salute.
The UF College Republicans quickly fought back in federal court, filing a lawsuit later that day arguing the school violated its First Amendment rights.
The Nazi salute photo and other photos of members pictured with prominent far-right figures, such as white-nationalist Neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes and manosphere creator Myron Gaines, circulated on social media late last week after an activist posted them to X, tagging the FBI and UF.
UF Interim President Donald Landry said in a statement that the Florida Federation of College Republicans, an organization that oversees campus Republican organizations, contacted the university after the photos circulated and said it had disbanded the UF chapter. That prompted UF to deactivate the UF College Republicans as a registered student organization.
The Florida federation cited “a pattern of conduct that violated its rules and values, including a recent antisemitic gesture.” The UF College Republicans have been active on X for years, at times posting content with anti-LGBTQ sentiments and promoting Fuentes.
“The University of Florida has emphatically supported its Jewish community and remains committed to preventing and addressing antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and harassment that are threatening and disruptive to our students,” Landry’s statement said.
The organization’s shuttering comes just weeks after Florida International University launched an investigation into leaked group chat messages from campus conservatives that included more than 400 uses of the N-word slur, descriptions of women as “whores”, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ slurs and praise of Nazi politics, according to the Miami Herald.
Anthony Sabatini, a Lake County commissioner and conservative firebrand, is representing the UF College Republicans in federal court, arguing the university is retaliating against the group for protected free speech.
Sabatini confirmed the Nazi salute photo was a “final straw” for UF, saying group members feel the university has targeted them for their far-right views “for a while.”
“They’re edgy. I’ll put it that way,” Sabatini said of the UF College Republicans.
The photo, the controversy at FIU and a UF College Republicans’ March 11 event with Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, who has repeatedly called his Black opponent Rep. Byron Donalds a “slave,” were used to shut the group down and replace the far-right leadership with more tame, “vanilla” conservatives, Sabatini said.
The UF group also claims it isn’t affiliated with the Florida Federation of College Republicans, he said, so UF shouldn’t shut it down based on what that group says.
Past Instagram posts from the federation group show the UF College Republicans as an affiliated chapter.
The UF College Republicans said in a Saturday post to X that it is part of the College Republicans of America, not the federation, but the UF chapter was not listed on that organization’s website and hasn’t been listed there dating back to at least 2023, according to archived webpages.
In a post to X, Florida Sen. Rick Scott celebrated the group’s removal from UF’s campus.
“Antisemitism has no place in the Republican Party, higher education or our country,” he wrote.