“Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.” Is the line from Berlin 1939? Or Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2025? If you guessed both, you’re correct.
The recent version appeared this past fall in The Harvard Salient, the university’s undergraduate conservative magazine, in an article about the threat of migration to Western civilization. The author, sophomore David F. X. Army, denied that he was intentionally quoting Adolf Hitler, who delivered a nearly identical line in a speech to the Reichstag in 1939. And his editor claimed that the wording was a common nationalist construction.
But if there were any question about Army’s true sympathies, The Harvard Crimson reported that a previous version of the article featured the Nazi emblem of an eagle clutching a swastika in its talons. Any doubt still? The draft also included the headline “Racial Fraternity” and the subheadline “Nur fur Deutsche,” a phrase used to mark territory prohibited to Jews and non-Germans.
It seems like just yesterday that Congresswoman Elise Stefanik was calling her alma mater Harvard, in rather hyperbolic terms, the “epitome of moral and academic rot in higher education,” over the complaints of anti-Semitism among woke students. Now, it appears, the same white Christian nationalist streak that’s battling for dominance in the Republican Party has taken root at America’s oldest university. While it’s true that most conservatives at Harvard—a still almost entirely liberal institution—aren’t extremists, there’s enough anti-Semitic, racist, and sexist high jinx playing out in once normal conservative campus spaces that it’s causing concern. As a Harvard professor put it to me, using the term for followers of Nick Fuentes, “They are Groypers who use big words.”
The Salient, in its initial incarnation, from 1981 to 2013, had been a respectable counterweight to the prevailing liberal culture; Ross Douthat was the editor when he was a student. In 2021, it was relaunched by a small group of students, including Jacob Cremers, then a sophomore. Frustrated by the lack of conservative viewpoints on campus, he wanted to bring some balance back to the discourse and to do so with Douthat-style civility. “An important part of the vision is to be charitable and to love your enemy, a Christian idea,” says Cremers, who has gone on to become a Salient board member.
When Cremers and the old guard graduated, a trio of three fervently Catholic military veterans took their place: Army, Declan I. M. Deady, and Richard Y. Rodgers. Army and Rodgers had been thrown together randomly as roommates freshman year, which, Rodgers says, “feels providential in retrospect.”
As a Harvard professor put it to me, using the term for followers of Nick Fuentes, “They are Groypers who use big words.”
As one of the few Christian conservatives on campus, Rodgers found the classroom dynamics disappointing. “Too many discussions are conducted as if the conclusion has already been agreed upon and the only task is to perform the right moral vocabulary on the way there,” he says, adding, “A large number of students are here just to be credentialed. They aren’t curious, they aren’t serious, and they often have astonishingly little appetite for argument, first principles, or truth-seeking.”
At the Salient, where he and Army went on to meet Deady, Rodgers says he found an intellectual home. “What bound the three of us wasn’t social convenience so much as shared priorities, principally the desire to build something serious rather than merely express ourselves, which people would rightly not be interested in. The Salient was the first place those instincts became organized into work.” But their quest for serious inquiry, it seems, took a dark turn.
Starting last fall, curious Harvard students, stumbling out of their dorm rooms to find the Salient at their feet, were greeted by a series of eyebrow-raising articles. Like the one that argued for a return to making Harvard single sex, because, as the authors (writing anonymously, as has sometimes been the practice at the magazine) explained, “co-education forces men and women into a shared educational experience calibrated to the lowest common denominator, often the female mode of learning.”
Or the article by Deady that argued that no group has been victimized by Harvard more than Christians, “the very community she was founded to serve and educate.” Or the one by Rodgers and Army in response to Charlie Kirk’s murder that said, “Leftism is not merely a rival policy set or an alternate party program. Leftism is a mental illness.... They want you dead.” Rodgers is similarly forward on his X feed, with posts such as: “Bring back Colonization. Bring back the crusades. Bring back Christian supremacy.”
A Coming “Civil War”
All this would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In 2016, the Harvard Republican Club (H.R.C.) declined to endorse Trump in the general election. “His authoritarian tendencies and flirtations with fascism are unparalleled in the history of our democracy,” the club said in a statement at the time. “He hopes to divide us by race, by class, and by religion, instilling enough fear and anxiety to propel himself to the White House.” In 2020, the H.R.C. decided to endorse Trump after “spirited conversation.”
In 2024, H.R.C. president Michael Oved (’25) embraced Trump more wholeheartedly and expanded the club’s membership by intentionally bringing in an ideological range of speakers, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, to Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw, a George W. Bush conservative who’d left the G.O.P. in disgust. “We positioned the club as a big-tent organization to attract as many self-identified Republicans and conservatives as we could,” Oved says.
On Election Night, MAGA students partied loud and hard throughout Harvard Yard, shouting and stripping off their shirts, despite the November chill. Still, Oved, a rather affable sort, was appreciated by even some of his liberal politico classmates for good-faith efforts to engage in an exchange of ideas.
His successor has been another story. For the past year, until December, when elections were held, the president was senior Leo Koerner, who exudes the quiet confidence that he’s a comer. Koerner was interviewed on Fox News last February, and his name has become known throughout campus, eliciting a kind of fascination. In part, the curiosity is due to his throwback personal style. He’s a ham-radio enthusiast who can sometimes be seen in a stand-collar Styrian jacket, hearkening back to Archduke Johann of 19th-century Austria. It’s an arresting look, especially in light of his background.
“Bring back Colonization. Bring back the crusades. Bring back Christian supremacy.”
Koerner was raised in deepest-blue Cambridge and attended the artsy private school Concord Academy. His father, Joseph Koerner, is a distinguished art historian and longtime Harvard professor, beloved for his cultivation and gentleness. Joseph is also Jewish. He’s a committee member of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, and in 2019 he released the documentary The Burning Child, about his Jewish Austrian grandparents who vanished in the Holocaust.
According to Harvard Magazine, during high school, Koerner grew distrustful during the coronavirus lockdowns over what he saw as government overreach. When he got to Harvard, he began immersing himself in Plato and Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Over the course of his studies, he converted to Catholicism.
Koerner’s mission is to funnel Harvard Republicans directly into the Trump administration and to expose them to the “people on our side who are fighting on all fronts,” as he said in November on a podcast hosted by New Founding, a right-wing venture-capital fund devoted to building the “America you want to live in.” Those voices have included blogger Curtis Yarvin, who has argued that our democracy should be replaced by a monarchy ruled by a C.E.O., and who participated in a debate on campus in May; and Steve Bannon, who spoke at Harvard’s Conservative and Republican Student Conference last February.
To Koerner, it was a watershed moment when Bannon exhorted the crowd gathered in the ballroom of the Charles Hotel: “There’s going to be close to a civil war, and the side that wins is the side that says we’re not going to quit. Do you have the guts to do that? Do you really? Do you really? Ask yourself that tonight.” This was a call to action—to give up chasing predictable careers in consulting and Fortune 500 companies and fight to the death. “We weren’t ready at the time, but maybe we are now,” Koerner told the New Founding interviewer.
The H.R.C. is Koerner’s moderate group—the one that’s operating in the open. The other one that he led through 2024 is the John Adams Society, a semi-secret debate group. Founded in 2014, it was for several years a place for conservatives—including women, Jews, and people of color—to immerse themselves in the Western canon, away from the perceived decay and decadence of modernity. In their view, truth and virtue lie with the philosophers and writers of antiquity: Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas.
Catholicism was exalted within the society, but Jewish members also felt the appeal of the group’s intense religiosity. “There was an actual commitment, at least in speech, toward becoming a virtuous person,” according to a former member. Then, in tandem with the ascendancy of the hyper-masculine, dissident online right, the goal started to shift, becoming “this obsession with the acquisition of political power.”
As Carter Stewart (’25), who chaired the John Adams Society in 2023, said on the same New Founding podcast, “It doesn’t matter how much Plato you’ve read or how much you care about preserving the thought and the culture of the West, unless you’re able to win. Unless you’re able to actually take power in America, all of that’s going to go away.”
Stewart, who now works as an associate at New Founding, passed the mantle of the John Adams Society—and the mission—onto Koerner. During his term, the club’s motto was changed from “Harvard’s premier undergraduate debate organization for political and moral philosophy” to the “premier organization for the reinvention of man at Harvard Square.” According to a former member, he allegedly initiated the exclusion of women from the club; it is now effectively all male. Sometime during the 2024–2025 school year, in the middle of the club’s debates, listeners allegedly began raising their hands to ask a question by making the Nazi salute, according to another former member. The gesture was done supposedly in a jesting spirit, but it became pervasive enough to signal to Jewish members that the club was maybe not for them. (Koerner did not respond to a request for comment.)
“No Surrender”
The crew at the Salient—whose membership overlaps with those of the other conservative groups—is as open with their beliefs as the John Adams gang is stealthy. As with Koerner, they have caught the attention of their classmates for their style. Deady instantly captured the heart of his future girlfriend with this getup, which he wore in English 97: “The guy was wearing a bright blue, teal even, silky bomber jacket with Van Gogh’s cherry blossoms printed on it,” she wrote on her Substack. “He was wearing khakis, too, and old man leather loafers, and when he stood up there was a chain of silver rosary beads hanging down, appended to his belt loop. He wore on his face a handle bar mustache, twirled up at the ends with wax, and some glasses. What a fucking look, man.”
And then there’s Army. “So loud and proud” is how fellow sophomore Ivy Kargman recalls him from their philosophy class. Every lecture, there he was with the beard, the suit, and the briefcase, sitting in the front row, raising his hand with “outlandish questions.” Of René Descartes’s claim that the soul is genderless, “David sits down and is like, ‘I just think we need to discuss the difference between men and women and how there’s an innate difference between us. And I just have to refute René in this case’—always on a first-name basis with the philosophers we worked with,” Kargman recalls. “It would’ve been one thing if he actually used the text to support these arguments, but he clearly did not do the reading and would just speak off the dome.” In a statement to Air Mail, Army responded, in part, “My argument was directly responding to class material regarding Descartes’s unsound metaphysics.… As regards my sartorial decisions, I treat dressing well as a form of respect for the people around me and the environment I am in.”
Another Harvard classmate, an Israeli military veteran, got an earful from Army one evening during his first week of college, when he went out for drinks with a group of fellow vets. Before a word was exchanged between the two men, Army slammed his beer on the table, the student recounts, and demanded to know what a member of the I.D.F. was doing at the gathering. Later in the evening, Army said to him, “If you ever see me at a social event, stay away from me.” The student was taken aback and said that his statement sounded violent. To which Army replied, “Yeah, it did.”
Army stands by his actions. “I do not, in a personal capacity, associate myself with anyone who has participated in or materially contributed to the massacre that is ongoing in Gaza,” he says, “and so I told the individual to avoid me in social situations in future. This was not a violent statement in any way.” (Let it be said that Army did not produce any articles about the Palestinian plight in his time at the Salient, and in his article the “Abolition of Peoples,” he wrote, “Islam et al has absolutely no place in Western Europe.”)
“I just think we need to discuss the difference between men and women and how there’s an innate difference between us. And I just have to refute René [Descartes] in this case.”
In October, two Salient staffers had had enough—both of what they were seeing published in their outlet and of their editors’ behavior behind closed doors. They leaked a trove of material to the 10-person Salient board of directors, which includes old-school conservatives such as former Trump labor secretary Alex Acosta and legendary Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield. The documents, which The Harvard Crimson soon obtained, included the edit history of Army’s article (the one with the Hitler line and Nazi imagery) and an internal discussion about it among the editors. As reported by The Harvard Crimson, right after the issue was distributed, Salient writer Jason Morganbesser messaged Army in a group chat, saying that he wanted an explanation for the line appearing in the magazine.
Army: “I wrote that from my own brain, quoting no one. You can relax Jason lol.”
Morganbesser: “Adolf Hitler’s policies are incongruent with my values, personally.”
Army: “I’ll quote who I want. I didn’t quote Hitler, but I’ll make sure I quote him on my next article.”
There was more in the trove, still, including a planned issue called Cruel & Unusual, which contained an article urging the United States to “begin the implementation of the death penalty at a grand scale”; a call to strip Guantánamo detainees of their remaining rights; and, for good measure, a defense of the Spanish Inquisition. Also, a group chat between Rodgers, Deady, and deputy editor Charles Bratton II that featured numerous uses of the n-word with playful emojis in place of the vowels.
The Salient chats mirror those involving state-level Young Republicans recently revealed by Politico. While J. D. Vance brushed off the revelations—“Kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” he said, though the participants were men in their 20s and 30s, some in elected positions—the Salient board announced on October 26 that it would be suspending operations.
“I’ll quote who I want. I didn’t quote Hitler, but I’ll make sure I quote him on my next article.”
In a statement, the board members described the offending material as “reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning” and “wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands.” They also cited “deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization.”
The board lawyered up and launched an investigation. In response, the magazine’s editors girded for a fight. Rodgers called the investigation “an unauthorized usurpation of power by a small number of individuals acting outside the bounds of their authority,” revealing a failure to grasp what the word “board” means. Deady posted on X, “There should be no surrender to these people. Anyone who makes an alliance with power against truth is no friend.”
But for Rodgers, the writing was on the wall. He and his editorial masthead resigned. In December, the Salient announced that Sarah Steele, who was president last year, would be returning as interim president when the magazine resumes publishing, which is this month. Morganbesser, who’s effectively replacing Rodgers as managing editor, wrote in an apology to the community, “There is no place for antisemitism, misogyny, bigotry, or any kind of hate at the Salient—or in the conservative movement that it seeks to uphold.”
Harvard itself has stayed out of the matter, with Dean David Deming telling The Harvard Crimson in October, in reference to Army’s article, “Students have a right to express themselves, and other students have a right to be outraged at the expressions that others give.”
The Salient crew is anything but chastened. In a statement to Air Mail, Deady wrote, “While the leadership and organizational changes at the Salient were ostensibly conducted for interpersonal reasons, in reality they were a personal attack aimed at discrediting people with dissenting political beliefs. Under the leadership of Richard Rodgers, there was a push for the organization to shift away from the milquetoast conservatism that had become standard and embrace truly right wing beliefs.”
For Rodgers’s part, he says he’s been aghast to discover “that even within right-wing spaces you can find entrenched Bolshevik habits sometimes directed against their own.” If he has one regret about how he handled the situation, it’s that he didn’t dispose of the traitors sooner. “I kept hoping the institution could absorb that liberal malice without being captured by it. That hesitation was a mistake.” He’s confident that the new Salient will fail and teases a comeback: “On the publishing side, I have it on good authority that something big is in the works.”
Evgenia Peretz is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a screenwriter. Her recent documentary series, Anatomy of Lies, based on her article about Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch, is streaming on Peacock
