Leaked text messages between young Republican Party leaders are filled with jokes about gas chambers, slavery and rape.
“I like Hitler”: here is one of the thousands of text messages exchanged in the conversation on the encrypted messaging service Telegram obtained by the American media POLITICO.
In the exchange, young Republican leaders call black people apes and “watermelon people,” and discuss sending their political opponents to the gas chambers. They praise Republicans who they say support slavery, and also talk about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide.
Kansas Young Republicans President William Hendricks used slurs to refer to black people. Bobby Walker, who was vice president of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, called the rape “epic.” The president of the same organization at the time, Peter Giunta, wrote in June that “everyone who votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
He was then referring to a vote to elect the next president of the Young Republican National Federation, a Republican Party organization that has 15,000 members aged 18 to 40.
The 2,900 pages of discussions, shared between a dozen Republicans between early January and mid-August, trace their campaign to take control of the organization by advocating a radical pro-Donald Trump platform.
Many of the group’s members already work in government or partisan politics, and one is a state senator.
Contacted by POLITICO, Peter Giunta said the leaked messages reveal a year-long smear campaign “led by Gavin Wax and the New York City Young Republican Club,” in reference to an internal conflict previously unknown to the public.
However, he apologized. “I am sincerely sorry to those who were offended by the insensitive and inexcusable comments contained in the more than 28,000 messages in a private chat group I created during my campaign to lead the Young Republicans,” he said.
“While I take full responsibility for these comments, I have had no way of verifying their accuracy and have strong concerns that the message logs in question have been deceptively falsified,” he added.
Several participants in the conversation declined to comment.
With POLITICO
