They knew the risk. They typed anyway.
Thousands of private Telegram messages obtained by Politico— roughly 2,900 pages across more than seven months — show a group of Young Republican leaders trading racist slurs, violent fantasies and praise for Nazi imagery like it was campfire banter. The snippets read less like inside-baseball politicking than a lesson in how bile and bravado metastasize when a new generation of party activists feels liberated by the right’s recent shift.
When their own vice chair warned aloud about a leak — “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr” — it was not a rhetorical flourish. It was a plain statement of stakes. And yet the conversation kept spiraling: jokes about rape, “gas chambers,” slurs repeated more than 251 times in aggregate, and explicit cheering for slavery and Hitler.
This wasn’t an anon message board. The chat included chairs, vice chairs, a state senator, staffers embedded in government and party machines — people with real power and access to real institutions. One member, William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh” more than a dozen times. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, called rape “epic.” Peter Giunta, then chair of the same organization, wrote: “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
Giunta doubled down with theatrical cruelty: “Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers.”
And the chat answered him. “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” Joe Maligno wrote. “I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Annie Kaykaty replied.
Those exchanges are not isolated. Members fretted about political optics while also mocking the people they were supposed to recruit or represent. They called Black people “the watermelon people,” compared opponents to monkeys, and joked that a pilot who “looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily” should be rejected: “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,” Giunta wrote.
The chatter is laced with explicit extremism. When Luke Mosiman, chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, floated creating “Nazi edits” to smear an opponent, Rachel Hope answered, “Omg I love this plan.” A later message from Dwyer — “1488” — used a known white supremacist code. And when someone suggested the Kansas delegation would back the most right-wing candidate, Giunta’s response was flat and casual: “Great. I love Hitler.” A smiley face followed.
The rhetoric ranged from slurs to threats to delusional bravado: Giunta said he planned to make a competing Young Republican “unalive himself on the convention floor.” Mosiman shouted “RAPE HAYDEN” in reference to a rival and Walker wrote of a defeated opponent: “Adolf Padgette is in the F—-tbunker as we speak.”
There are human consequences. Since POLITICO’s inquiries, at least one chat member lost their job and another had a job offer rescinded. Prominent GOP figures rushed to distance themselves: Rep. Elise Stefanik, state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt and the chair of the New York State GOP condemned the conduct. Ortt demanded resignations, calling the language “indefensible.”
Some members apologized — but many tried to muddy the waters. Giunta called the release “a highly-coordinated year-long character assassination led by Gavin Wax and the New York City Young Republican Club” and warned messages “may have been deceptively doctored.” Walker said the logs “may have been altered, taken out of context, or otherwise manipulated,” while also adding, “There is no excuse for the language and tone in messages attributed to me. The language is wrong and hurtful, and I sincerely apologize.”
Others in the chat offered thin defenses by omission: Michael Bartels, who lists himself as a senior adviser at the U.S. Small Business Administration on LinkedIn, “didn’t offer any pushback against the offensive rhetoric,” POLITICO reports, and later filed an affidavit alleging he was pressured in internecine factional fights.
The content does more than embarrass: it reveals a pattern of normalization. Experts cited in the POLITICO reporting connect the talk to a broader, coarsened political atmosphere. “The more the political atmosphere is open and liberating — like it has been with the emergence of Trump and a more right wing GOP even before him — it opens up young people and older people to telling racist jokes, making racist commentaries in private and public,” said Joe Feagin, a Texas A&M sociologist. Art Jipson, who studies white racial extremism, told POLITICO that repetition moves ideas from joke to belief: “You say it once or twice, it’s a joke, but you say it 251 times, it’s no longer a joke.”
That normalization matters because these aren’t outsiders. They are activists embedded in campaigns, party operations and state offices. One exchange even made light of allegedly missing funds: “NYSYR Account be like: $500 – Balding cream $1,000 – Ozempik,” Walker quipped, and Giunta joked, “I drained $10k tonight to pay for my next vacation to Italy.” Financial mismanagement allegations have already generated scrutiny — the New York State Young Republicans are tens of thousands of dollars in debt and have missing disclosure forms.
The chat’s casual cruelty targets nearly every minority group and mixes in old-fashioned political nastiness. Crenshaw’s injury is mocked; Italians, Asians, Jews and Black people are derided in detail. One message casually collapses sex into violence: “Sex? It was rape,” Mosiman wrote, to which Walker replies, “Epic.”
Defenders pointed to factionalism inside Young Republican ranks. Giunta claimed the leak was an extortion play, and the intra-party rivalries are real: the chat documents a campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization with a hardline, pro-Trump slate. But factionalism doesn’t explain away the sustained tone. It only raises the question: if these are the words of future leaders, what policies and decisions will they bring with them when they move from chat rooms to office floors?
Even as some denounced the content and others offered mea culpas, the underlying reality remains blunt: a circle of young, connected Republicans used private channels to trade ideas that were racist, antisemitic, misogynistic and, at times, chillingly violent. They knew a leak would destroy them. “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr,” Walker wrote. They were right — and that’s the point. The leak didn’t just burn reputations. It revealed a subculture of the party that, until now, was in plain sight only for those watching closely enough.
