Turns Out Young Republican Leaders Are Really Racist in Group Chats
On Tuesday, Politico published the contents of a Telegram chat called the “RESTOREYR WAR ROOM” that featured prominent young GOP operatives involved in a power struggle over the leadership of the Young Republican National Federation. As they argued over the vision of the group, they agreed on one thing — to text each other the most racist things imaginable.
One of the most active members of the chat is Peter Giunta, the former president of the New York State Young Republican Club who resigned from his position late last month. After a flight to Charleston, South Carolina, landed earlier this year, he wrote to the group that “if your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there.” During the NBA playoffs, another member asked if he was watching the New York Knicks game. “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball,” Giunta wrote back. On another occasion, he called Black people “the watermelon people” and wrote “I love Hitler.”
Racial slurs are used liberally. William Hendrix, the vice-chair of the Kansas Young Republicans, used the N-word more than a dozen times. “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food,” he wrote in July. “Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?” Politico reports that throughout the chat, “epithets like ‘f- - - - -t,’ ‘retarded’ and ‘n- - - -’ appeared more than 251 times combined.”
It wasn’t just organizers who were writing atrocious things. In one exchange, a staffer for New York State senator Robert Ortt wrote about how a mutual friend “dated this very obese Indian woman for a period of time.” In response, Giunta wrote that this woman “was not Indian.”
“She just didn’t bathe often,” wrote Samuel Douglass, a state senator from Vermont. Elsewhere, his wife — the Vermont Young Republicans’ national committeewoman — wrote to him that he made a mistake in “expecting the Jew to be honest.”
Several of the Republicans exposed for their private racism apologized in statements to Politico while also claiming that the leak of the chat was designed to derail their careers. Giunta, for one, claimed that the chat release was the result of a “year-long character assassination led by Gavin Wax,” referring to the former president of the New York Young Republican Club. Wax, who now works for the State Department as the chief of staff in the Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, declined to comment to Politico.
Some members of the chat seemed aware that their racist ideas and toxic attempts at humor could come back to bite them. Bobby Walker, the current leader of the New York Young Republicans who said that rape was “epic” and used the F-word, wrote that “if we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked.”