Kamal Ghorui
A group of young Republicans ran a WhatsApp group chat in which they repeatedly used racial slurs and discussed dozens of ways to murder Black Americans, according to reports by the Miami Herald and The Floridian.The WhatsApp group was created last September by Abel Alexander Carvajal, the Republican Party’s Miami-Dade County secretary, a 23-year-old second-year law student at Florida International University and co-founder of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, the reports said. The group was initially called “Uber Ret—s Yapping Inc.”Using the chat administrator name MaoTze Abel, a reference to Chinese communist despot Mae Zedong, Carvajal oversaw exchanges in which he and other members used the N-word and other variations of the slur more than 400 times. Users also hurled antisemitic and deeply misogynistic insults at Jewish women and joked about pleasuring themselves to Nazi propaganda. Some of the users were later recruited by Carvajal to local party leadership, The Daily Beast reported.“Total Negro Death!” Dariel Gonzalez, a former board member at Florida International University’s College Republicans, reportedly wrote. On another occasion, he claimed that a Black American student had left the organisation after another user called her the N-word. He has since applied to become a committeeman with the GOP’s city chapter.Another group member, identified by the Miami Herald as William Bejerano, a student at Miami Dade College who last year attempted to set up an anti-abortion rights organisation at the school, also appeared to have posted a tirade in which he fantasised about killing Black people.Sometime toward the beginning of October, the president of the college’s Turning Point USA chapter, Ian Valdes, renamed the group chat “Gooning in Agartha.” The terms refer to masturbating in a trance-like state, and a mythic civilisation regarded by members of the Nazi regime as the homeland of the Aryan race.Following the change in the group name, Valdes joked he would be “going full goy,” while Gonzalez described Agartha as “Heaven inside the earth.” Valdes further wrote he would “def not marry a Jew,” and Gonzalez suggested it was best to “keep your c–k away from them” for fear of having “a little k–e running around.”Florida International University confirmed to the Miami Herald that the group chat was now the subject of a criminal investigation.A local Republican Party source told The Floridian that Carvajal’s role as local party secretary “is not symbolic; it carries a responsibility to represent all members of the organization,” including the district’s 170,000 African Americans who are registered Republican voters, “with professionalism and respect.”The Daily Beast contacted the Miami-Dade GOP for comment. Carvajal told the Miami Herald that he generally ignored messages sent to the group, but that “I guess to an extent, I bear some responsibility.”He also told The Floridian he had no knowledge of the racist comments as they were being posted to his WhatsApp group, and which he at times appeared to have responded to. “No,” he said when asked whether he would be stepping down over the slurs. “Of course not, for you know, for a chat where the messages that were stated were not mine.”Kevin Cooper, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party, told the Miami Herald that “anyone associated with this chat should resign immediately.”“I am shocked and appalled at these statements. Racism and antisemitism have no place in the Republican Party,” he said. “I am proud to be the first Jewish chairman of the Miami Dade Republican Party, which is comprised of a diverse group of members from every race and background.”The reports marked the second time a leaked group chat exposed violent and racist language by young members of the GOP.In October, Politico obtained thousands of messages from a private group run by a senior member of the New York State Young Republicans, in which users wrote “I love Hitler” and referred to Black Americans as “the watermelon people.”In one exchange in logs from the Florida group, Valdes wrote that “if this chat gets leaked we’re so cooked lmao.” Gonzalez responded that “this isn’t even my worst one,” to which Valdes replied: “I’m in a few on telegram that are definitely worse.”
