That Young Republican group chat (10-16-2025--Hour3)

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for your support. Alrightye, let's let's talk about the group chat, not the text line, but the group chat. You know, the group chat I'm talking about. Maybe you don't. Yeah, I've been waiting. I've been sort of compiling stuff on this story ever since it popped two days ago over at Politico. And a couple of things. Number one, I am not a registered Republican. I don't move in the Republican park. These circles. I don't know who these people are, these young Republicans. They seem to be apparently mostly from the New York area, it seems like, So I don't know who these people are. I don't know the structure of the young Republicans and the different branches and whatever. I don't follow all of that stuff. I don't know the structure. However, I can say that in politics, just like anything else, when a party, when a political party gains power, it attracts people who are in love with power, and they don't really care about the ideology. They don't care about the principles. They have maybe some sociopathic, psychopathic tendencies personalities, right, so they don't really they don't really care to advance the cause. They are there to advance their own position, and they will use whatever philosophy or principles that are at play in order to serve themselves. Okay, and this was I noticed this back in you know, twenty five years ago, when the Republicans were ascendant in the early two thousands, and they started attracting a lot of these different people, and it was kind of like, wait, wait a minute, who are these people? What are they saying? And that doesn't seem very limited government? D you know that kind of thing. I've talked about the quote woke right before on this program. And for people who aren't aware, these are people that ostensibly call themselves members of the right or conservatives or whatever, but they adopt the same tactics as the woke left. They view themselves as perpetual victims, right, they view themselves as oppressed. They do the same sorts of things that the woke left does, silencing people, deplatforming people. And there is a very wide strain of anti Semitism that is running through that side of the spectrum this and it's called the horseshoe political horseshoe theory, where it's sort of like, you have your extremes and it bends back towards each other. Which is why you're starting to see people on the left quoting and embracing even Marjorie Taylor Green because she's saying that Matt Gates, Tucker Carlson right there, sat Candice Owens. Because those people on the right quote unquote the right are saying things the people on the left also agree with. That's why it's woke, right. They are emerging their meeting sort of at the top of the horseshoe or bottom, depending on how you're holding the horseshoe. I guess all right, So the story from the Politico headline, I Love Hitler, Laked messages expose young Republicans racist chat. This is like twelve pages long. It's a very lengthy story thousands of pages of texts Okay, that political apparently got from an internal private chat group between that included a bunch of these Young Republicans. 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. I'm not even going to say these things that they referred to them, ask I'm not going to say it, but it's not good. It is what you would think. It's all of the racial stereotypes and the words, the slurs that are used. They use those words and slurs. They 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. Then they start naming a bunch of these people. William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans vice chair, used variations of the N word more than a dozen times. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, referred to rape as epic. Peter Jijunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization in New York wrote in a message sent in June that everyone that votes know is going to the gas chamber. Okay, let me stop right here and say a lot of this stuff is done in humor. Okay, I don't endorse any of this. And by the way, they're like, oh my gosh, people are now losing their posts in these organizations. And here's the thing I believe they should. You're going to step up and you're going to engage in this kind of political operation. You need to understand that there are things that you need to say and make jokes about because it will be weaponized against you. And this is one of the other elements of the quote unquote woke right, is that there are actors inside that I don't want to say movement, but over there in that crowd that are pushing you, pushing people to go there. When it comes to Nazism, racism and all that. Right, they want you to say these things and participate in these kinds of things because it will remove you from the battlefield. That's the point. It will make you toxic and now you're off the field. There is a level of psychological warfare going on with the with social media and if you don't understand that, you do not belong in politics. Okay, And that, by the way, how this obviously got leaked is some guy I think his name is Gavin Wax. There are different divisions inside the Young Republicans and some other groups or whatever, and they were vying for power and that's where so this one group that's where these texts came from apparently got leaked to Politico by another Republican. Okay, So like there's that level. And some of these people in the group chats say that they're not so sure that some of these chats, some of these messages weren't doctored. So I keep that in mind as well. The exchange is part of a trove of telegram chats, and I'm not going to go over all of the offensive stuff. I will just tell you that there were really offensive things in there. But there are also things in there that I think were jokes that were obviously jokes, Like the headline that they pull is I love Hitler. That's what they say. But this exchange was when the Kansas State chair informs this guy, Peter Jjunta, that one of Michigan's Young Republicans promised him that the group will vote for the most right wing person to lead the national organization. He responded, quote, great, I love Hitler, So that's a joke. Like, I get that, that's a joke. They're like, they're going to vote for whoever is the most right wing and he's like, well, can't get more right wing than Hitler. So I love him. You know, that's a joke. Some of the other stuff not so much. Not so much. The exchange is part of this trove that Politico got spending seven months of messages coming from Republican these young Republican leaders which by the way, I've never heard of any of these people, Okay, but Democrats in the media. But I repeat myself, they want this to be a huge, huge thing, right, They want this to be as big as Jay Jones well, which they don't really of her, so no, but they are all in on this story. And like, I recognize the double standard, right, I recognize that you guys are paying all this attention to these no name young Republican guys and gals that were in this group chat saying awful things, and you're you're demanding you know that all the Republicans play defender disavow with these no name people that nobody knows. But when it comes to Jay Jones, you're not holding any Democrats accountable. You're not making them play defender dissavow. And when in fact, you try to get Abigail Spanberger running for governor on the ticket with Jay Jones, who wished murder on a Republican and the murder of his two children in front of his family, nowhere to be found. When Spanberger's asked about it, she refuses to say he should drop out, right, So they don't. They're not being held to that standard. So now you've got people on the woke right quote unquote woke right. You've got people over there that are like, well, you know what, Well, then we're going to defend our guys. We're going to say they did nothing wrong, we don't care. We're not going to give them up. We're not going to throw them under the bus. We're not going to disavow any of the things that they said. We're we're not playing by your rules. You're demanding that we do this thing, and we're not going to do it. See. So here's the thing. I don't need anybody to tell me to do that. I me personally, like, I'm going to look at what they said and I'm going to say, yeah, that's disqualifying. You shouldn't be around politics. That's just toxic crap. You shouldn't say that. That's my opinion. You can have a different opinion, but enter the woke right where now it's like you have to take our position, Pete. You have to say what we are telling you to say. And that's when I start saying, you guys are sounding a lot like the left now because I don't have to say that, actually don't. I don't have to defend these guys. I don't have to endorse what they said. I don't have to get any of that on me. I didn't do that. I wouldn't do that. See, that's the fight that's now happening, and the left is urging and goading and rooting for this. That's what they want to see happen because it's a convenient deflection away from the J. Jones story, which by the way, is worse than this right. So don't let here's the thing. If you're like, I'm not going to pay any attention to the chat, I'm not going to pay attention to this story. You're going to say that, then you allow the left off the hook too, because now you don't get to say, what about Jay Jones. You don't get to say that, which is precisely why the left is doing what they're doing and pushing this story. I don't have to pick See, this is the thing. This is a false dichotomy. You know, me with false choices. I do not like them. I resist them. This is a false choice. I can say all of this is wrong. You shouldn't be talking like this because it's not decent. It's just not decent. Be a decent person. That's all. Minimum requirement, just minimum requirement. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. 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The Politico argument and by the way, article, I understand what Politico is doing by publishing the article as well. See here again, this is a false choice for me to have to quote pick a side. Okay, I can see what Politico is doing with the story, and I can see what the what the internal divisions are as told to the Politico reporter. This has to do with an with an intramural fight inside the Young Republican groups. Okay, there are personality conflicts. They are vying for power. They want positions in these different caucuses or conferences whatever they call them. Right, and so the lead of all this stuff was meant to destroy their opponents inside the Republican Party. Okay, so there's like this internecine war going on among these people. I don't know any of them, I don't care to know any of them. Doesn't matter to me. But I can also see what Politico is doing. Okay, together, this is the Politico article. Together, The messages reveal a culture. See what they're doing. They're broadening the lens. They're going to say, this is why these six people and their messages that are vile. Even if it's an attempt at humor. Some of this stuff is not an attempted humor. It's just not. And here's the thing. If you want to be a comedian, then go take your material where you're dropping N bombs everywhere, you're calling people racial slurs, right, go ahead and take this material to the comedy seller or your local comedy joint. Go ahead and use that material on a stage in front of people. Do that there and see how it flies. If you want to test out this comedic value, if you are in an organization, particularly a political one, whose goal is to build coalitions and get people elected so they can then wield power, right, then this is not the way you behave. I don't care how old you are. And some of these people are in their thirties, okay, like the young Republicans. These are people that are like from their twenties all the way up to forty years old. Okay. So it's not like they're just you know, youthful indiscretion they're fourteen year olds or something. That's No, that's not what's happening here. These are guys and gals in their you know, mid twenties up to early thirties. In other words, they should know better not just by their age, but also by the mere fact that you are in a professional organization where optics matter. Do not ever write anything in an email that you don't want to see published on the front page of the paper. That those are words to live by. Okay, even Hunter Biden understood this. You don't put it in an email. You talk about it over the phone. You want to try out this material with your buddy, you want to call them all sorts of names in jests and stuff. Do it over the phone, say it to him. Although now you can probably just record the conversations easily. But here's what Politico is trying to do. They want to broaden this out and smear everybody with this. The messages reveal a culture where racist, anti semitic, and violent rhetorics circulate freely. Here you go, and where the Trump era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party's next leader. So there you go. It's Trump's fault. Trump made these people make anti semitic and racisty comment. It's Trump's fault. No mention of j Jones, no mention of the stochastic terrorism framework here that politico is constructing right when it comes to Democrats, No, no, no, See this is meant as an inoculation against Democrats. Focus on this, everybody, Focus on these evil young Republican chats so we don't have to talk about Jay Jones wanting to murder his Republican opponents while he wins the attorney general race in Virginia. So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. 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If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot org slash Walk for all the dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me? For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments. This is why we walk. Talking about the the Young Republicans group chat. Yeah, and I got a message here from the hellion on the text line, who says, my young video game friends are ruthless on Discord, which is a messaging and voice app. I mean, they say awful things to each other. It's all in fun. They hope somebody leaks theirs. Yeah, then keep it on Discord, use your you know, gamer tag, use some anonymous name and do it there. But again, hanging out with your friends in a gaming chat room and dragging each other with all sorts of offensive slurs, that's a different setting than a group chat with all of the state party chairs and vice chairs and all these poohbahs in your political organization. And they knew this. By the way, Let me go to the end of the Politico article, which, like seven pages in Politico, does acknowledge. Many of the slurs, epithets, and violent language used in the chat often appear to be intended as jokes, and I agree with that they were sure. In one instance, one of the members said about bombing the Young Republican National Federation's convention in Nashville and said, just kidding for our assigned FBI tracker. Right, So he makes a joke about blowing up the place if they don't win their local, their you know, organization's election or whatever, and then makes a joke that the FBI is monitoring the group chat. In another, he considered the totality of the thousands of messages he and his peers had written and what would happen if the public saw them come to light. Quote, if we ever had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked. Yes, correct? Why would you say that? Because you know what you're saying would not be received well. And when you are in the business as these people are, of building a coalition and trying to persuade people that yours is the better philosophy, yours is the better way of governing, and you are the better candidates to lead people, then this sort of thing does not resonate with everybody. It's damaging and hence we are seeing the damage. This is what happens. Correct, you were correct, You're cooked. A lot of these people now have been dismissed, They've been relieved of their duties. Some have apologized, right, they've been condemned by various Republicans, which, by the way, the best response to this I saw was out of Virginia. The Virginia Democrat Party put out a statement calling on the gubernatorial nominee for the Republicans win. Some seers sears must call on all young Republicans implicated in racist text scandal to step down from their positions, and she responds, easy, they absolutely must step down. Now it's your turn, Abigail, Right, because Abigail Spanberger has not called for j Jones to step down. Like the Virginia Democrats are just awful at this They're just terrible at this game. See, and this is proof that they don't really hold this standard for themselves. They just want the standard to be applied to their political opponents. And that's what I'm seeing from a lot of people on the right, including I'm sad to say, Matt Walsh. They seem to want this standard now to be obliterated for themselves, he said, lining up to publicly denounce people on the right at the behest of leftists to hate you and what you dead is pathetic behavior. Yeah, I'm not denouncing any of their behavior in these texts. I'm not denouncing these people because the Left is asking me or demanding me, or requesting it of me. I don't need them to do that. Why would I need them. I don't listen to anything the Left tells me to do anyway, Why would I listen to them on this? I have my own agency. I can make this decision for myself. It's not a matter of what the left wants me to say, it's what I want to say. Se because if I say this, that means I have a consistent standard. And if you've listened to me for any period of time, you know that I constantly argue and advocate for a consistent application of standards. So when somebody on the left says, hey, I would like to murder my political opponent's kid, or somebody should do that in order to affect his policy positions, and I denounce that, I say that's unacceptable. You're creating a permission structure for this kind of behavior and this kind of talk. You shouldn't be saying this stuff. You should be shunned. This is not decent. You should be shamed. When somebody on the right says something similar, I can also say, yeah, a consistent application of my standard is that this is not decent. You should be shamed. That's not acceptable. Matt Walsh says the right doesn't stick together. That's our biggest problem. By far, I don't know. I kind of think the infiltration of antisemites into the right wing influence fear. I think that's a problem. I don't think it's that we don't stick together. He says conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dog piles, disavow attack their allies. I said a few weeks ago that we all need to band together in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, and the answer I got back from a lot of people on the right was basically no. I was not aware of this call. I did not see the rejections to band together on anything. I'm not sure what he's talking about there, but okay, guys, then we'll just lose instead. This is again another false choice. You're giving me, a false dichotomy. I have to now endorse Groyper's I have to now allow Nick Fouentes to be some sort of a freaking spokesperson for conservatism when the guy's a raging anti semi twink like, I don't know, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to allow that guy to speak for me. But if I don't, then that means I want to lose. That's absurd, that's stupid. Okay, that is a false choice being foisted upon me. That is a tactic of the left, hence the term woke. And by the way, this is what has hollowed out the Democrat Party. This inability to police your own, to weed out the worst of actors out of your party. That is why the left is in trouble right now. That's why the Democrat Party is in so much trouble right now. And they are, by the way, for people are like, we just keep losing. Republicans have the White House, they have the House of Representatives, they have the Senate, They've got more than half of all the legislative seats across America. They're doing pretty good. Republicans have been doing pretty well, okay, And the further the left goes off the rails, the more the Republicans benefit. Why on earth would you want this to be associated with you? Why it doesn't make any sense. If the only principle is to win and that's it, then what's the point of winning? What do you get right? If you've abandoned all your principles just for the power, then you're just in it for the power. And that's not why I do this. That's not what I'm about. So that's you know, this is where I get off. You know, here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. 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Call or text eight two eight three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabins of Aashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Let me give you some of the reactions that are out there regarding all of this. For example, Joel Berry, he is the managing editor of The Babylon b He said something I have noticed about this no enemies to the right phenomenon, which I haven't said this yet this hour. So there is this way of thinking that there are no enemies to the right, Okay, and this is why, like you can't criticize or you shouldn't criticize anybody to your right because they're part of this coalition, you know, this movement. No enemies to the right. I'm just going to keep criticizing and targeting the left. No enemies to the right, And that's just a stupid philosophy, it is. It's just stupid. Of course, you can criticize people to your right, to your left, on the right, on the left, if people are behaving badly, you can criticize them, Absolutely you can. But this idea that oh I can't. I can't criticize Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Candice Owens, Tucker Carlson. I can't criticize any of them because they're to the right. Well, if you do that, Pete, you're going to destroy the coalition and the whole movement and all of this. Yeah, no, I but don't. I don't want to be associated with them. I find some of the stuff that they say to be abhorrent and if and a lot of it sounds like it would be coming out of the mouths of jeeh hottists and leftists. So no, I'm not going to So when a left, when a registered Democrat says this stuff, I criticize it. But because they're registered Republican, I'm not supposed to pound sand Man. Seriously, pound sand That's what having no principles is if you think that your principle is no enemies to the right, that means you have no principle except that because nothing matters as long as somebody identifies as on the right, now you don't criticize them. That's dumb anyway, Joel Berry says, the rules seem to be that you're not allowed to attack anybody further right than you, but people further right than you are allowed to attack anybody on the right they want, Which makes sense, right if you think about it. Let's say I am at this position and you are to the right of me. That means I can't criticize you, But you being to the right of me means I am to the left of you, which means you get to criticize me. See what I mean. It's a stupid principle, He says. They can call decent defective conservatives all sorts of names and lists a bunch, but they could accuse you of plotting to murder Charlie Kirk. But if you so much as question their poor behavior, you are met with impassioned please for unity. See the unity goes both ways, though it should. That seems to be less of an appeal to unity and more of a play to hand over the reins of our entire movement to the most extreme and depraved actors who claim to be on our side, quote unquote, which seems unwise. This is why I called it a psiop There are people with sociopathic and psychopathic personality types that embed themselves in any kind of an organization at any level, and they will seek to gain control of it for their own personal use. And there are people in the conservative movement on the right wing, these influencers and stuff. There are people of that personality type I can only assume that are seeking to to cannibalize what Charlie Kirk built. They want his audience, they want his influence. They are trying to hijack the movement that Charlie Kirk was building, to the point where some of them are accusing Charlie Kirk's own friends of somehow or another being a part of an assassination on him, which is nuts. It's just nuts. Tim Poole YouTuber, he did a breakdown of all of the conspiracy theories the other day, all these conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk's murder, and he said something that I have said for a very long time, which is when you hear hoofs, think horses, not zebras right, and the idea that all of these people around Charlie Kirk that were helping him, that were being helped by him, that built this movement, that loved him, that were friends with him, that they somehow or another were involved in his murder. And you got all these people that are quote on the right that are spinning out all of these these fantasies. I'm just asking questions, what do you think it means? Israel did it? That is toxic. That is the wedge they are using to drive into the MAGA coalition, that is the SSIA. Recognize that for what it is. A writer ag Hamilton, he says, it's basically a rule that the right can't have standards, and those who object and insist on standards are the problem. Growing the tent is about finding people who have shared values but some policy differences. It's not about inviting people in who have completely different values and will alienate half the people in the tent. Right. The reason the tent exists is because it unifies people around certain principles. And if you are advocating the abandonment of those principles, then you shouldn't be in the tent. This is my argument with like the woke leftists that infiltrate the churches first, like you saw the Presbyterian Church. They just took down the Methodist Church. Right, They get inside these churches and they rip them apart from the inside. Rather than just going off and starting your own church, just start your own church. No no, no, we want to go in and take over yours. We want to gut it. We want to wear its skin as a suit, and we want everybody to pay homage and tribute and respect to us as we parade around in the skin suit of this formally respected institution. Callin Wright with the Manhattan Institute noted that the left got taken over by wokeness due to the very same idea that there are no enemies to the left sentiment. Everybody on the left had to be protected. They could never say no, no, no, no, that's too far. No no, no, they're too radical. What have I been saying all this time? Democrats, you got a problem inside your party. You need to root this crap out, and they're not doing it. What do you think that's doing to them. Obviously, it's not helping them. Moderate liberals weren't even allowed to criticize the woke, but the woke were allowed to call everybody else on the left racists and transphobes for expressing even minor disagreements with them. Think jk Rowling, who came out against the transgender stuff. She's of the left. But because she said no, there were only women and men and women's spaces should be protected, what happened to her? Right? Pilloried by the more radical leftists because there are no enemies to the left and she was to the right of them on one issue. Do you think that that has helped liberals? Do you think that's helped democrats? It has not. We're seeing the same kind of cancer now in the right, and I know a lot of people on the right one to think that it couldn't possibly happen to us because we have principles. They will use those principles against you. That's how they operate. It is a personality defect. Do not let it consume you. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.