State GOP Chairman Ed Cox announced the suspension of the New York State Young Republicans.
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The executive committee of New York’s Republican State Committee did right by wasting little time in pulling the plug on its Young Republican Club on Friday, Oct. 17.
The action stems from a report in Politico, a media company that covers politics, which detailed seven months of vile, racist, homophobic and antisemitic text messages from GOP activists 18 to 40 years old in New York, Vermont, Arizona and Kansas.
“Today, the Executive Committee of the New York Republican State Committee unanimously voted to suspend authorization of the New York State Young Republicans following a report of a group chat that included racist and antisemitic language on the part of leadership,” state GOP Chairman Ed Cox said in a statement issued after a virtual meeting of party leaders.
“The Young Republicans was already grossly mismanaged, and vile language of the sort made in the group chat has no place in our party or its subsidiary organizations,” Cox said.
The New York GOP’s action followed Kansas GOP leaders’ decision to shut down its Young Republicans organization and came amid demands by New York Democrats that their Republican counterparts condemn the messages. Nassau Democrats held a press conference calling on Nassau Republicans to respond on Friday, Oct. 17.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman blasted the now-disbanded group, which has previously supported the county Republican Party.
“The so-called Young Republicans who espouse values contrary to our party’s principles and my values are not welcome in my campaign,” Blakeman said Friday.
Joe Cairo, Nassau County GOP chairman and national GOP committeeman, condemned the text messages in comments to Newsday.
“I don’t know many of these people, or if I know any of them or met one or two of them, but their words are repugnant and they have no place in the Republican Party or anywhere else,” said Cairo.
The Young Republicans were particularly vocal and offensive in New York in using Telegram, a social media and instant messaging service to exchange their words of hate. Included were people in New York’s Young Republican leadership, elective office and leadership positions for elective GOP officials.
Peter Giunta, a former chairman of the New York State Young Republicans who was chief of staff to state Assembly Member Mike Reilly (R-Staten Island), posted “I love Hitler,” which Politico found among the text messages.
Politico reported in one exchange that Guinta, when asked if New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, responded: “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkeys play ball.”
At another point, he referred to Black people as “watermelon people.”
Bobby Walker, who was made the state’s Young Republicans chairman in August, called rape “epic” while serving as the group’s vice chairman, Politico found.
Joe Maligno, who previously identified himself as the general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans, wrote back in another exchange “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”
Giunta has been fired from his job with Reilly, the Staten Island Advance reported. Walker will no longer have a role, according to multiple reports, in the congressional campaign of State Sen. Peter Oberacker, who is running for a seat in the Catskills/Hudson Valley region.
The New York executive committee’s prompt action in shutting down the Young Republican Club deserves credit.
We would like to see them go further to determine how many members of the Young Republican Club read and participated in the Telegram exchanges. And why so many in an organization intended to develop the party’s future leadership had embraced the kind of hateful views expressed in the texts.
Politico determined that five members of the private Telegram chat featuring jokes about gas chambers, Adolf Hitler and rape had close ties to the state GOP.
We believe Republican party leaders, officeholders and candidates would want to know if any members of their staffs and campaigns were among those holding those reprehensible views. We hope they would act as decisively as the state executive committee in getting rid of them.
Cox set a good standard for members of both parties to adhere to. We hope they take up his challenge.
