Generational Failure
The leak of a Young Republican group chat shows the Republican Party's total failure to empower responsible leaders.
Two years ago, I wrote my failed 2013 campaign for Young Republican National Chairman. One of the most important sentences I wrote was:
These days the National Young Republicans seem to have been turned by Chairman Rich Loughery into his own personal vanity project to make benefit glorious leader. Meanwhile, local clubs like the Washington DC Young Republicans and New York Young Republicans have made populism and worshipping Donald Trump the centerpiece of their existence.
Such behavior on the account of national and these certain local groups makes it difficult to attract younger voters to even consider voting Republican, much less joining the organization and becoming a conservative activist.
The leadership may have changed, but I had no idea how bad it actually was:
Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”…
The exchange is part of a trove of Telegram chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than seven months of messages among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. The chat offers an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.
Well, that should be a complete fucking embarrassment for everybody who is a Young Republican, everybody who was a Young Republican, and anybody even tangentially associated with the Republican Party.
Look, we all know why this happened: Donald Trump’s history of racism and misogyny ensured he would be surrounded by racists and misogynists in his orbit. Those Republican leaders then empowered elected officials around the country to act like this, which empowered younger Republicans who volunteered on their campaigns and worked on their staffs to act like this. And when Turning Point USA became the focus point for the Trump campaign for recruiting younger conservative activists, the Young Republicans were going to be in trouble.
This is the logical result of a ten-year feedback loop that started when Trump came down that fucking Escalator.
Fortunately, these allegedly bigoted assholes were not elected at the Young Republican Convention in Nashville this summer. The elected Young Republican National Federation leadership quickly and wisely condemned these folks.
Admittedly, they probably published that statement with glee after the contentious race between Chairman Hayden Padgett and challenger Peter Guinta, who was Padgett’s opponent and leader of the Restore YR slate whose group chat was leaked. But the forcefulness of the statement left few questions.
Of course, the fallout from this chat will be significant for the YRNF. The Kansas GOP claims to have already disbanded the Kansas Young Republicans over the incident.1 People will continue to lose their jobs. Officers will be forced out.
And that is how it should be. The people who said such thick-headed, offensive, racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic things should never be given an office of public trust, should never serve in any party leadership, and should never be given any responsibility over a campaign again and again.
For decades, Republican leaders have told the Young Republicans that they are “the future of the party.” It’s about high time that all of them start acting like it.
The Kansas Republican Party has no power to actually do that as the GOP and the YRNF are separate organizations.