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Scandals involving pro-Nazi group chats seem like the only thing more common than sexscandals in MAGA world these days.
The Miami Herald’s new report on appalling text messages exchanged in a group chat for conservative students at a Florida university comes after remarkably similar stories in the past year.
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.
Abel Carvajal, the secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party and a law student at Florida International University, started the group chat. He took responsibility for initiating it but said he hadn’t seen many of the messages.
“My biggest regret is that in doing that, I facilitated this kind of deranged stuff being out there,” Carvajal told the Herald. “I’m at a loss of words.”
The messages paint a clear picture of bigotry — and, one could argue, hypocrisy.
The same MAGA movement that furiously blamed liberals for activist Charlie Kirk’s death, and has suggested that accusations of Nazism put conservatives in danger, sure has plenty of Nazi fanboys and people who sound like members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Just check out some of the group chat examples provided by the Herald, like this one:
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.
The report also includes these exchanges involving Dariel Gonzalez, who was recruitment chairman for FIU’s College Republicans chapter at the time:
“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 check out these exchanges involving Ian Valdes, the president of Turning Point USA’s chapter at FIU, and Gonzalez:
Gonzalez said, “You can f–k all the [k-word] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.” Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA chapter president, responded, “I would def not marry a Jew.”
A few minutes later, Valdes changed the group chat’s name from one that included a slur for people with disabilities, “Uber [r-word] Yapping,” to “Gooning in Agartha.”
Gooning is a slang term for male masturbation. Agartha, a mythical white civilization promoted by the Nazi politician Heinrich Himmler, has been repopularized by the young online right.
Gonzalez described Agartha to the group chat as, “Nazi heaven sort of,” and Valdes explained it, “esoteric nazism essentially.”
Amid some bipartisan backlash over the messages, some Florida Republicans have called on Carvajal to resign from his leadership position in Miami-Dade County’s GOP.
As conservative commentator Tom Nichols recently wrote in an aptly headlined piece for The Atlantic: “The Republican Party has a Nazi problem.” So much so, in fact, that even some of the most bigoted voices in the MAGA movement, like Laura Loomer, have sounded the alarm as of late.
