Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.

Recently, it came to light that some young conservatives were going hog wild in a bile-filled group chat, sending each other antisemitic, racist, homophobic, and otherwise bigoted texts. In this instance, many of the offenders were students at Florida International University, though some ran prominent campus groups and the chat was kicked off by Abel Alexander Carvajal, secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party.

One could be excused if they thought this was an old story, because a similar chat surfaced this past October, though it involved mainly young conservatives in New York. That chat also went deep into antisemitism, racism, and homophobia, among other vile topics.

At first glance, this may appear to be a new, sinister phenomenon. After all, the current leader of the Republican Party is President Donald Trump, who began his life in American politics by promoting the racist “birther conspiracy” about former President Barack Obama. And every day of his life, Trump has embraced bigotry against practically every race and sexual orientation there is. To be sure, he has heralded a new era of openness with conservative/Republican bigotry—but none of this is new.

The modern conservative movement has roots going back over nearly a hundred years of American politics, and at nearly every turn, its leaders have embraced the same kind of hate as today’s group-chatting conservatives—they just didn’t leave a digital record of their offenses.

The modern strain of conservatives began to take over the Republican Party in the 1960s, with the rise of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. He challenged Republican figures like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, whom conservatives viewed as too much of a centrist. While Goldwater engaged in smaller doses of racial demagoguery, his policy choices made clear where he stood.

Goldwater voted against the pivotal 1964 Civil Rights Act, which federally outlawed various types of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. His rise within the Republican Party reflected an embrace of the politics of Jim Crow, and it alarmed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King broke from his traditional nonpartisan stance and openly opposed Goldwater’s run, remarking, “I feel that the prospect of Sen. Goldwater being president of the United States so threatens the health, morality, and survival of our nation that I can not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represents.”

Years later, before his resignation, President Richard Nixon was recorded on his own listening devices making bigoted remarks about Black people, Jewish people, as well as Italian and Irish Americans.

“The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality,” Nixon said. He also talked about how Black people had “to be, frankly, inbred.”

In a 1971 phone call with Nixon, then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan referred to African delegates serving at the United Nations as “monkeys.”

“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries. Damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes,” Reagan said.

Also, when he first ran for president in 1976, Reagan frequently invoked the story of a “welfare queen” as an example of the excesses of the social safety net. The story, centering on a Black woman, was exaggerated far beyond the facts, but it made clear to conservative racists where Reagan stood. Four years later, he was elected to the presidency and went on to serve two terms, becoming the leading icon of conservatism for decades.

President George H.W. Bush, usually depicted as coming from the more moderate wing of Republican conservatism, nonetheless went full racist during his 1988 campaign. A mugshot of escaped convict Willie Horton, a Black man with an afro, hung on the wall of his presidential headquarters. Horton also featured in a pro-Bush attack ad against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, using Horton as a symbol of Dukakis’ purported weakness on crime.

Bush was happy to weaponize the image of a Black man, no matter that it would negatively affect millions of Black Americans.

When Republican leaders weren’t openly acting bigoted, they were paying homage to one of the most widely listened to voices of hate. For decades, a parade of top Republicans—from presidents to governors to members of Congress—larded praise on Rush Limbaugh and appeared on his syndicated radio show. They had no problem with the man who joined with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in calling Spanish the “language of the ghetto” or called Obama a “Halfrican American.”

More recently, Mitt Romney, the former Utah senator who is often characterized as being from the section of the GOP that doesn’t openly embrace racism, went to a similar well.

Before he was a senator, Romney ran a failed presidential campaign in 2012, during which he sought and received a widely covered endorsement from none other than Trump. Romney wanted Trump’s blessing, even though Trump’s promotion of racist “birtherism” lies against Obama were well known.

The history of conservatism and the GOP makes an unfortunate reality very clear. These young Republicans in their text chains aren’t a new, previously unseen variety of conservative. Instead, they are unfortunately just digital practitioners of the hate that has been at the heart of conservatism in America for decades.