Here is yet another story of vile rhetoric in a Republican-based group chat via The Miami Herald: ‘Nazi heaven’: Inside Miami campus Republicans’ racist group chat.
The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”
In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.
I would commend everyone to read the whole thing, but I will note a couple of things.
The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair.
[…]
Another member of the chat, William Bejerano — who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College — was the primary user of the n-word in the group. At one point, he posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n-word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people. Bejerano hung up the phone when reached by the Herald.
Dariel Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time, responded in the chat: “How edgy.”
“Ew you had colored professors?!” Gonzalez wrote at another point. “I reguse [sic] to be indoctrinated by the coloreds.” He told the group he used the term “colored” because, “I was told we cant say black anymore.” A couple days later, he added: “Avoid the coloreds like the plague.” He did not respond to a request for comment.
And,
Beirich, the extremism researcher, said the signals from the highest ranks of the Republican party from the White House — including social media posts echoing white supremacists messages — are being heard across the party.
“Clearly the Trump administration doesn’t have any problem with these extremist views, so we shouldn’t be surprised that young Republicans would be trading in this stuff,” Beirich said. “It’s being sanctioned by the highest office, it’s not disqualifying anymore in the GOP.”
To that point, here are a number of tweets that I had saved, but never finished the post:
Note the font.
Not only does all of this make protestations from administration officials about being called “Nazis” or “fascists” more than a bit absurd, but stories like the one in the Miami Herald are massively concerning about the future of the Republican Party and, therefore, of the country as a whole.
And no one should be dismissing this as just a bunch of “kids.” While I will allow that occasionally over-the-top and even distasteful jokes fly out of the mouths and off the keyboards of people, especially young people, no one goes around vomiting a torrent of racist terms by accident. And praising Hitler and using Nazi-inspired terms is not youthful indiscretion.
I spent decades teaching people this age. I have sons in their twenties. Anyone pretending that college-age kids lack agency or somehow don’t know what they are doing is insane.
This stuff is not harmless, and this is just more evidence that we are in a bad place as a country, and national leadership is not only not worried about it, they are helping foster it.
