Leaked Telegram chats from the Young Republicans—spanning seven months in 2023—reveal William Hendricks (Kansas) and Bobby Walker (former NY vice chair) using racial slurs like "monkeys" and "Nigo," with Walker calling rape "epic." Peter Gwinta, then-NY chair, joked about gas chambers for political opponents and Epstein document suppression. Gavin Wax, a Trump staffer, was linked to the leaks via an affidavit from Michael R. Bartells (SBA advisor), though Wax denied it. While not criminal, the rhetoric mirrors past extremist exchanges—like Jay Jones’ 2022 texts—and highlights a fraternity-like factionalism in GOP youth groups, where hardline Trump-aligned chapters clash with moderates. Such unchecked language risks normalizing dangerous ideologies as these members ascend politically. [Automatically generated summary]
I believe people have a chance in free society to ultimately goof around.
If you're in politics, probably not a good idea at the end of the day, but to come after these people, like they're treated like they committed a crime.
They get a giant hit piece written about them, you know.
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 landed Republicans or lauded Republicans who they believe support slavery.
William Hendricks, the Kansas Young Republicans vice chair, you used the words, I'll let you do this, Tim.
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.
Ooh, that's interesting.
Okay.
Peter Gwinta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote a message sent in June that said, Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.
Gwenta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP's 1500 or 15,000 member political organization for the Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.
I got a quick little anecdote, and we'll get to the story.
You know, when I was little, when I was like 12, 13 years old, my dad was like, You got to go to, you got to do some more public speaking.
I was like, I think I already know how to do this just fine.
And he's like, no, no, no, you got to go to Toastmasters.
So I went to this Toastmasters thing with a family relative, and like that guy was crazy and ended up crashing out later.
That's a long story, kind of irrelevant to the discussion today.
But it's literally this event where you have like immigrant people, like Chinese people, Indian people, like Korean people that speak English as like a second or third language.
And the job is to like present a speech, right?
And you have like these like white dudes, like these like middle-aged white dudes that wear like blazers and stuff, and they go and like lord over the immigrants because they can speak English like a lord of the flock.
That's what this reminds me of a little bit.
But replace, you know, second or third language with just plain and inexperienced.
The exchange is a part of a trove of Telegram chats obtained by Politico and spending 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.
Listening since Politico began making inquiries, one member of the group chat is no longer employed at their job and a number's job offer was rescinded.
Prominent New York Republicans, including Reb Elise Stefanik and state Senate minority leader Rob Oort, have denounced the chat and festering resentments among young Republicans have now turned into public recriminations, including allegations of character assassination and extortion.
A liberating atmosphere.
The 2,900 pages of chat shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August chronicled their campaign to seize control of the National Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform.
Many of the chat members already worked inside government or party politics.
And one, I'm a state senator.
Now I'm very important.
Yeah, I mean, dude, it's literally like, we, I know a guy like this.
Like, literally, like, like, struts around all day in a suit.
So I'll give you guys a little background into like what the young Republicans are and like how the operation works.
But basically, like you saw earlier, this is a national federation.
So, like, there's it's members from 18 to 40.
They kind of like operate like a frat system for the Republican Party.
That's like the easiest way to like, uh, to create an analogy for this.
So, each state and each city has its own chapter that runs like independently with its own leaders.
They've got their own events.
They've got tones that are some moderate.
So, like some chapters are a little bit more moderate.
Some chapters are a little bit more hardline where they're just like, you know, spewing, you know, crazy shit.
But overall, they are connected under like one organization, which is the Young Republicans National Organization, which acts as like the headquarters.
Just like if you had a fraternity or sorority, there's one overarching one and they have a bunch of chapters across different colleges.
So, like, they work really closely with the Republican Party and they help like run campaigns.
They do fundraisers.
They do voter outreach.
And then they even technically, they're technically separate, separate, but they function as like a training pipeline for the GOP.
So it's kind of like recruiting for the next generation of Republican leaders.
And so they're like, they give these like young people hands-on experience and campaign work.
And a lot of these people go into like these, you know, offices of, you know, existing GOP members and they'll run their campaigns.
They'll do a lot of the free work for these people and the behind the scenes and doing the rallies and running around and like getting endorsements.
In my opinion, what it really is, and we'll cut back to the camera for a second.
In my opinion, what all this really is, is ultimately, if you're one of these like minor political facelords, like you're like a state senator or something, you have to have like a gaggle of geese, like a gaggle of like other young dudes that look nice and are like in like nice clothes and the suits and the sports jacket, because it creates like an air of sophistication.
I was at, and we had talked about this earlier, but I'll reiterate this for the people who just joined.
So, you know, probably like earlier this year, I had attended this like Republican event.
Like now I'm independent, just to clarify that, but I lean more.
But I lean more right.
So like, I was just curious about like what the political space was like and like local events and stuff.
Like I wouldn't go to a Democratic convention type of thing.
So long story short, I went to this event and the guy there, there was this, it was a bunch of boomers just voting on a bunch of issues.
They didn't really have like they do like things on a local level for like the local Austin Travis County jurisdiction, like things that people don't really care about.
They vote on and run that stuff.
There's this one guy and he's like dressed up like to the nines.
He's got like this suit on.
He's got his hair slicked back.
He's just like looking like a true politician.
And he gets up and he goes and gives like this speech because he wanted to get this chair at the event.
And he's just, he's, he goes after the event and he comes up to me and I start talking to him and I'm asking him like, oh, and he's like, yeah, I'm part of the Young Republicans Club.
They opened up another chapter, which had like they had, they were newer to the Travis County, but they were a little bit more normal.
I went to those ones just for a little bit.
But overall, I was just like, I'm not, I'm not, I don't want to be part of like the fucking, you know, boots on the ground slop that I have to just be raised into one demographic and just basically be brainwashed.
Like, I'd rather have, if I'm going to get into political, I'd rather go a different route on my own and figure it out from there.
The group chat spoke freely about the pressure to cow to Trump.
That's not how you spell cow in this sense.
The person writing this article is kind of an idiot.
To Trump to avoid being called the rhino, which means Republican in name only.
The love of Nazis within their party's right wing and the president's alleged work to suppress documents related to wealthy financier, Jeffrey Epstein's child sex crimes.
Trump's too busy burning Epstein files based.
Based Alex Dwyer, the chair of Kansas Young Republicans wrote in one instance, Dwyer and Katie Katie or K Katie declined to comment.
Maligno and Hendricks did not return requests for comments, but some involved in the chat did respond publicly.
This, the Italian guy, the fat Italian guy who's based.
Gwenta claimed the release of the chat as part of a highly coordinated year-long character assassination led by Gavin Wax in the New York City Young Republican Club.
In allusion to I got a burp, allusion to a once obscured intercene war, which is now spilled into the open.
The logs were sourced by way of extortion and provided to Politico by the very same people conspiring against me.
What's most disheartening is that despite my unwavering support of President Trump since 2016, rogue members of this administration, including Gavin Wax, have participated in the conspiracy to ruin me publicly simply because I challenged them privately.
Wax, a staffer in Trump's State Department, formerly led the New York Young Republican Club, a separate city-based group that is at odds with the state organization.
The New York State Young Republicans, he declined to comment.
Despite his allusions to infighting, Gwento still apologized.
I'm sorry.
Who are those who are offended?
Never apologize.
That's rule number one.
That's the big mistake.
He could have had a whole career out of this if you just didn't apologize.
He would have had, you know, 100,000 subscribers the next day.
And he could have become a big media figure.
He may still do that.
But the number one rule of this is you never apologize to these people.
I created during my campaign to lead the Young Republicans.
Well, I take complete responsibility.
Oh, no.
I have had no way of verifying their accuracy and I'm deeply concerned the message logs in question may have been deceptively doctored.
At least one person in Telegram chat works in the Trump administration, Michael Bartells, who, according to his LinkedIn account, serves as senior advisor in the office of general counsel within the United States Small Business Administration.
Bartells did not have much to say in the chat, but he didn't offer any pushback against the offensive rhetoric in it either.
A notarized affidavit signed by Bartels and obtained by Politico also sheds light on the inter-party rivalry that led to the Restore Young Republican War Room telegram chat to be made public.
Bartels references Wax as well.
He wrote that he did not give Politico the chat and that Wax demanded in a phone call that he provide the full chat log.
Yes, and we have that affidavit here.
And this comes from Milo Yiannopoulos.
And I believe, yeah, this is Bartel's.
It's the same thing.
So this is an affidavit, which is a sworn statement that someone makes under penalty of perjury.
What an affidavit is.
I, Mark, Michael R. Bartells of Washington District of Columbia, being duly sworn, deposes affirm upon oath.
I was in the group chat.
To my knowledge, the Restore Young Republican group chat is the same group that Politico has attempted to obtain.
I was on August 16th, 2025, the executive secretary of the New York Young Republican Club.
I was demanded to provide a full log of the Restore YR chat by Gavin Wax over a dispute about related matters on August 16th, 2025.
The demand was made via telephone and, to my knowledge, was not recorded.
When I attempted to resist that demand after providing some of the requested information, Wax threatened my professional standing and raised the possibility of potential legal action related to an alleged breach of a non-disclosure agreement.
My position within the New York Republican Club was directly threatened.
After this conversation, I did not provide the logs.
I was removed from access for most young Republican communications channels, leadership chats, and his company email.
Multiple contacts also began to receive alleged details of my personal life from Wax.
After these events took place, I provided Gavin Wax's associate, Nathan Berger, with the archive logs of the group of the group text.
I did not have definitive knowledge of what happened to the logs after that point, blah, blah, blah.
I did not give the logs to Politico under penalty of perjury.
And then that's him saying, hey, this is for real.
This is the facts because I'll go to court over this.
This is the truth.
So, like, what I get from all this, and I'll pull up Gavin Wax here.
I'll go ahead and pull that up right now.
What I get from this is it's the same political, like, muck-rak, wheel-and-dealing stuff that's always been done, but it's done in the modern context, right?
And if you're in one of these political groups, you're in a group chat with like the other heads of the young Republicans, yeah, like it seems a bit foolish, but at the same time, you know, here's my thing: the chat's bad, whatever.
Ultimately, there's going to be more hate on the people that released them and tried to make a bone off of it than the people that made the chats.
And that's the world we live in now because everyone's starting to understand the internet.
But here's the thing: like, I'm looking at people coming out as Republicans, and you see like a bunch of these congressmen like condemning because they have to publicly say, like, this isn't the face.
But don't you think this makes the Republican Party look bad in the eyes of like not only just Democrats, but independent people?
I can understand the perspective of people who would be like, okay, this pisses me off.
Like, this is the face of the Republicans.
These people, this is how they grew up.
Like, this is a small subset.
There's no way that the entire Republican demographic all talks this way in certain aspects.
Like, you're looking at a bunch of basically college kids in a group chat.
I mean, when I was in high school, I don't know about you, but like me and my friends used to say some wild shit in group chats, just like as a joking matter.
And like they would say, here's the thing.
They would say things that people would consider racist as towards to me, but like you can take lighthearted and joking because then you fire back and call them a cracker or something like that.
It's not that deep at the end of the day, but the watermelon people.
Yeah, like I'm not sitting here saying like, oh, that's the right thing to do from like a very like front-standing person.
I believe people have a chance in free society to ultimately goof around.
If you're in politics, probably not a good idea at the end of the day, but to come after these people, like they're treated like they committed a crime.
They get a giant hit piece written about them, you know.
And like, look, here's the thing: people are profiting off of it.
They're getting career advancement that these people aren't getting because of what happened.
So, like, what I see it ultimately as you have people that are aligned.
You have like this Gavin guy in the city group, and then you have the kind of like county or country young Republican groups.
And the people in the city group who pretend that they're part of like the same club as these guys, they take this opportunity to get ahead on their own people at the cost of their own organization.
But I also, the other thing I see as a problem is let's take the macro level argument and you just think about like the frame of mind or like the whole encompassing like idea of like what these people represent.
Let's say these people do eventually get into positions of power.
There is a certain level of like maybe they grow out of it, but there's also a baseline of like biases that they could be creating for themselves that lets them dictate their policies, right?
We're having, we're having a, we're having a constructive argument here.
It's good.
It's good.
VP vice president JD Vance defended the young Republicans against the political hit piece against them supplied by Gavin Wax, calling the public outcry pearl clutching.
Vance pointed to the Democrat Jay Jones leaked text in which he fantasized about murdering his political opponents as far worse.
Yeah, I mean, like, look at this.
Here's the difference between like the real tone difference, right?
Where you got people kind of like trying to be silly, even if the content is fucked up.
And then you've got someone here that's like really like deep and dark.
Yeah, actually, I wanted to understand this text a little bit more.
So this is just JD Vance trying to provide a counter argument, just saying like the Dems are just as bad and this person's in a position of power.
But the person who's sent this text message that JD Vance is referring to, his name is Jay Jones.
He's like the former Virginia state delegate who ran, who once ran for attorney general.
And he's part of like the Democratic side.
And so these messages were sent back in like 2022 by somebody called Carrie Coiner.
And they were a Republican delegate in the Virginia House.
And then she's basically calling him out on these texts.
And so in like this exchange, Jones just made a shocking comment about like Todd Gilbert, who was the Republican speaker of the Virginia House and his wife, Jennifer Gilbert, who is being mentioned here.
And essentially, he's just implying that Jennifer Gilbert's children should die, trying to make like a political point that like.
Yeah, it's like if a white person says the N-word when singing a song, they get basically the same level of reprimanding as if the person who actually meant to say it as a derogatory frame of reference.
I don't, here's the, not to get off the weeds, but like, you know, I know there's a large population of like African Americans and black people that like really get offended by, you know, other demographics saying the N-word in a song and they're like, that's our word.
But look, at the end of the day, we've entered into an age where I talk about this a lot on various broadcasts.
I also talk about it on the gray area.
When you had the advent of Trump coming into the political scene in 2015, everything changed because before that, all the campaigns, all the elections, all the parties before, it was establishment Democrat and then establishment Republican.
And Republican was like cut taxes and then war.
And the Democrats were like higher taxes, but maybe we don't like the war so much.
And that was the dialectic.
And it's a uniparty.
They were the same.
When Trump came in, you asked everyone first, second, and third time he ran, why are you voting for Trump or why are you interested in Trump?
They would tell you, I want a wrecking ball for the system.
I just want someone that's going to go in there and break everything because he's different.
He's quote unquote not a politician.
He's certainly a politician.
Now, 100%.
I agree with you there.
But that was the thinking that really fueled his rise to power because it wasn't a Democrat or Republican thing.
It was a populist thing.
And now we've really returned after a decade of Trump.
We have returned to the age of the uniparty of the establishment Democrat and the establishment Republican.
And that is what these young Republican people represent anyway.
It's the Dick Cheneys.
It's the John McCain's.
It's the Mitt Romney.
It's that spirit that's come back, right?
And these kids, they didn't fit that spirit, so they had to go.
Well, it's that, but then also you're conditioning the environment for how you want these people to behave in the system itself.
It's crazy because if you think about it, like there's there are former, there's, there's a bunch of people that are in positions of power and Congress and state legislation that have gone through like these organizations like the Young Republican Party.
And you just look at it like a mini club where there's expectations and a certain linear pathway that you have to follow in order to get into that position of power.
And it's almost like you're curating the political system from such an early age to where that's how it's.
It's like a cell culture that you're going to have.
It's a pantry dish, right?
And that's, that's what it all seems like.
And, you know, the Democrats, on the high level, you know, it's, it's very inorganic and it's manicured as well.
But like these grassroots event, it's just a bunch of like libtards crashing out at the end of the day.
And kind of rises to the top as he rises to the top.
And that's why, you know, you see like the Zorhan Mamdani stuff, that's why they have more success on that state and local level is because it is, at the end of the day, it is more original.
No, so you're, the event that I went to was like, this is when I, when I say like literal boomers, I mean, there's people that were like walking with canes in there.
Like, it's just like all the people that vote on like your local issues and have like their own like system in which they're like they they're they represent each district.
Let's say Travis County and Austin has a bunch of little cells.
Like, you know, how, you know, when you have like the House of Republicans or how like the Congress is made up of, you've got districts.
That's kind of how the system works.
But like, I didn't get the elitist perspective.
It was like, it was a bunch of stuff that like you and I being young people don't really give a shit about, but they are actually macro level issues that affect that city.
And these people are kind of like steering because they're the only ones voting on that stuff.
And, but the thing in general is like most black people are Democratic because they were raised in the Northeast and a lot of these bigger populations.
And so like, you'll notice like the Republicans are more made up of like these boomers because they're in the more rural areas.
They've got like, they're not urbanized like the rest of it.
So it was just weird.
The where the thing that you're talking about, the elitist thing came in was that one guy who tried to recruit me and be like, hey, young man, you should, you should definitely join our club.
We've got mixers.
You can find yourself a little conservative, pretty lady and dance on with her.
Like it was just like, that was where I got like the elitist.
And he had like this business card that was like black metal.
Well, I mean, that's salesmanship, you know, and like whenever someone's working you, you want to get away from them generally.
Like, unless there's like mutual benefit or like symbiosis, whenever whenever someone comes up to you in a suit trying to sell you something, you're like, eh, maybe, maybe, maybe not.
Maybe calm down, especially like not necessarily selling you like a product, but selling you a service.
Like, hey, I can help you out.
Just come help me, you know, because they're trying to get something out of you.
And I do want to give love to the other guy who like was starting his own chapter.
He happened to be there and I did go to some of his meetings.
Like not all of these chapters, like I said, it's like a fraternity, right?
You've got the larger overarching organization.
And then each cell runs its own thing.
So like you can start a new chapter.
And this guy and a group of his buddies had real intentions to start like a real grassroots, like do it proper because they knew what the existing Travis County young Republicans and how it was, just like a big old frat party with a bunch of like young people and just cesspool of people just trying to like get on each other and just like the melting pot of, you know, all that.
But they were trying to do like real grassroots perspective of trying to grow a branch for like the perspective of like creating real change without the slop that these other organizations were doing.
So I can't just say it's all bad.
There are good parts in it.
It's just that I don't, I haven't been deep enough to really understand how the whole thing.
If you try to do it the right way, you hit a wall at a certain point because you step on somebody's toes who is making or benefiting from doing the wrong thing.