Utah Rep. Trevor Lee didn’t just post a hot take on social media last week. He copy-pasted one straight from the white nationalist playbook and slapped his name on it.
And this wasn't a one-off. Lee, a Republican from Layton whose anti-immigration bills stalled during the 2026 session, has spent recent months borrowing vocabulary from the far-right fringe. Last week's X/Twitter post just happened to be the least subtle version yet.
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Today is the first day congressional candidates can file to run for the 2026 election. (3/9/2026)
8 days - Neighborhood caucus night. (3/17/2026)
33 days - Utah Forward Party nominating convention (4/11/2026)
48 days - Utah State Republican and Democratic State Party nominating conventions (4/25/2026)
107 days - Utah's 2026 primary election (6/23/2026)
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974 days - 2028 presidential election (11/7/2028)
The post read, “Diversity isn’t our strength. It lowers your wages, marginalises (sic) your culture, increases your crime, fills your hospitals, occupies your housing, ruins your schools, consumes your taxes, tightens your laws, restricts your freedoms, endangers your children, and calls you racist.”
Diversity isn't our strength. It lowers your wages, marginalises your culture, increases your crime, fills your hospitals, occupies your housing, ruins your schools, consumes your taxes, tightens your laws, restricts your freedoms, endangers your children, and calls you racist.— Trevor Lee (@VoteTrevorLee) March 5, 2026
It would be easy to wave it off as an online tantrum or Lee self-soothing after his anti-immigration bills stalled during the 2026 session. But it wasn’t original—and it wasn’t harmless.
The phrase Lee posted isn’t original to him. It’s a racist copypasta that’s circulated for years in alt-right and white-nationalist online cesspools like 4chan, 8chan and Gab. The original author is unknown.
It emerged as a backlash to “Diversity is our strength” campaigns in Canada and Europe after the 2015 refugee crisis, when over 1 million refugees, mostly from Syria, entered Europe. The phrase quickly became part of “Great Replacement” theory, the conspiracy theory that political elites are engineering the replacement of white Americans through immigration.
It’s been echoed by conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, who did a segment in 2018 called “Diversity isn’t our strength. Unity is.” More recently, Benny Johnson delivered a speech to the Heritage Foundation titled “Diversity is not our strength; it’s a poison.”
Few politicians have used the full copypasta, but “Diversity is not our strength” has become a staple in mainstream GOP rhetoric, up to the highest levels of the Trump administration.
Vice President JD Vance has told crowds that “Your diversity is not your strength…your strength is in your unity of purpose.”
In February 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called “Diversity is our strength” the “single dumbest phrase in military history.”
Online, the full copypasta has taken on a different life. It’s become a creed for white nationalist and anti-immigrant groups, mostly in digital spaces where it’s used to “red pill” users by framing societal ills as the result of racial and ethnic diversity. It shows up as memes overlaid on photos of crowded hospitals or schools, or paired with out‑of‑context crime stats. It also surfaces in the lyrics of “fashwave” (fascist synthwave) and white‑power skinhead music.
The rhetoric has also been found in the manifestos of mass shooters. The same reasoning formed the backbone of the 2019 Christchurch and 2022 Buffalo shooters’ manifestos, who argued that “diversity” is a code word for “white replacement.”
This is not the only far-right rhetoric that Rep. Lee has in his vocabulary.
In a February interview with Politico, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox criticized the “Heritage American” movement, which is a phrase used in far-right and white supremacist communities to suggest certain citizens, typically those with long-standing European ancestry, are “more” American than others.
Lee defended the idea in response to criticism.
“‘Heritage American’ isn’t a rejection of that coalition; it’s a call to prioritize the forgotten workers & families sold out by decades of globalist policies that flooded markets with cheap labor & offshored jobs. Demographics have shifted, but that’s not ‘nativism’ it’s reality after betrayals by both parties. Trump’s victory proved we can build a bigger tent without erasing core American values,” Lee posted.
You’re right that Trump’s ‘24 win echoed Reagan’s optimism & broad appeal but “Heritage American” isn’t a rejection of that coalition; it’s a call to prioritize the forgotten workers & families sold out by decades of globalist policies that flooded markets with cheap labor &…— Trevor Lee (@VoteTrevorLee) February 20, 2026
That’s not what “Heritage American” means in the circles where it originated. The term comes from the Groyper movement—followers of white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes—who use it to redefine American identity as exclusively European descent traceable to the Colonial Era or Civil War. In their worldview, diversity is an “existential threat” to the nation’s survival, and ethnic homogeneity trumps pluralism every time.
The “Heritage American” rhetoric has been criticized by some mainstream conservatives as being un-American. But Lee doesn’t seem to care.