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- Losing My Perspicacity, October 15, 2025
Losing My Perspicacity, October 15, 2025
The truth about young right-wing men in America
Julie DiCaro
October 15, 2025
Good morning and Happy Wednesday! Thanks for starting your day with me.
I debated whether I should share this story today, not because I feel it’s not important or because I want to protect the young people involved, but because we’re under such a deluge of horrible news right now that I worry curating it all into one place (like this newsletter) will cause people to tune out.
But! I firmly believe that it’s crucial for us to face our darkest, ugliest tendencies if we want to survive as a nation and as a people. So with that in mind, here’s what Politico reported yesterday.
NEW YORK — 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 lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” 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.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
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The dynamic of easy racism and casual cruelty played out in often dark, vivid fashion inside the chats, where campaign talk and party gossip blurred into streams of slurs and violent fantasies.
It’s instructive that this story came out on the same day that Donald Trump posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, once reserved for American icons like Marian Anderson, Neil Armstrong, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, and Billie Jean King, to Charlie Kirk, a man who went from college campus to college campus demeaning women and the Black and trans communities. It appears that, contrary to the popular slogan, hate very much has a place in America.
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