Bulwark Takes - Leaked Texts Show GOP Operatives Using Slurs and Praising Hitler

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Tim, Sam and Will reunite to take on the disturbing reporting from Politico exposing leaked messages among Young Republicans joking about gas chambers, racial slurs, slavery, sexual assault, and many other problematic topics.

Hey, everybody. Tim Miller from the bulwark here with the Fingerling Trio. I heard it's got some feedback that maybe the ladies were into it because they thought it was Fingerling Potato Trio. Maybe. You never know. The Fingerling Trio, it's Will Summer who writes the newsletter called False Flag and Sam Stein, who's our managing editor. There's an article out from Politico that we had to get the gang together for. The headline tells you all you need to know, basically. I love Hitler. Leaked messages exposed young Republican's racist chat, and boy, are there some chats. Two of the chats before you are to say to highlight, to give you some context. One said, if we ever had a leak of this chat, we would be

cooked for real, for real. Indeed. The N-word, I'm going to choose to call it flag it so we don't get demonetized here. The N-word, flag it, and retarded appear more than 251 times in the chat. Before I get into some of the chats in particular, I want some top impressions from you, Samuel, first. Well, I immediately did Control F Jews, and I was bracing. But we only came in towards the top and at the very end, so I felt pretty good, a little unscathed. Well, might have been because the gas chamber chat didn't have the Control F Jews didn't kind of cover the gas chamber chat. So I did control of Jews, and I was feeling okay. And then I did Control F. Hitler.

And then I started, my stomach really started to sink a little bit. Saw seven results, including in the, obviously in the headline and the main art, which was great. I love Hitler. And then I got to thinking, this is the worst article I've ever read, and I'm really scared for our nation's future. Yeah, Dwell, what's in some of the chats? And I guess from you, maybe, to contextualize, it's important to know, like, how much are we cherry-picking here?

You know what I mean? Like, there are crazy people in every group. This group on this chat is not nothing. And there's a Vermont state senator, the chair and vice chair of a lot of the young Republicans organizations out there in the country, a senior advisor to the office. general counsel within the Trump administration's SBA, chair of the Arizona young Republicans. So, you know, I mean, it's not just random guys on an anonymous telegram. Yeah, I mean, these chats are emerging from a faction of the young Republicans who are

trying to sort of stage a takeover or win an election to run the young Republicans. These are people who are kind of like the future of the GOP's operative class, at least one of them is a politician in his own right. So these aren't sort of just random run-of-the-mill Republicans, political. found. I mean, these are people with some amount of power who will probably amass more power as they get older. And then they're talking to one another about like, oh, I love Hitler using all these racial and, you know, anti-gay remarks. Yeah, I mean, where do you think these people go up from them? And this is like the breeding ground for the future of the Republican Party, which is really what

scared me. It's like, it's one thing if these were like, you know, random college kids at TPUSA gatherings, which I'm sure they are at TPUSA gatherings. But it's like another thing if you're seating major Republican offices and then you're on telegram talking how big heart on you get watching gas chambers. It's fucking crazy. It is crazy. So let's go through a couple of the exchanges. This one is not the most outrageous, but I think it's a good place to start because it's kind of three of the main characters of the chat. I want to read this exchange and then we'll pull up the pictures of these guys. Bobby Walker. I just think it's important. Bobby Walker is the vice chair of the New York Young Republican.

We got Peter Ginta, who is then a state chair of the New York Young Republicans, and then you got Samuel Douglas on here as well. He's a Vermont state senator. So this is an elected official. Bobby Walker first says a mutual friend dated this very obese Indian woman for a period of time. Peter Ginta replies she was not Indian. Samuel Douglas, the elected official, said she just didn't bathe often. I'd like to take a picture of this three.

Oh, yeah, really good, really good stuff. Classic. If we could just pull up. Well, these guys must be really good. looking, then. Yeah, Bobby, Peter. Oh, boy. Yeah, there they are there.

That's Samuel on the far right there. Not, I mean, going after people for being obese, not a lot there. We're the fingering trio. This is maybe the ding-dong trio. Speaking of the cupcakes. I will say, though, they did talk at one point about misusing their young Republican money to buy Ozempic. So maybe they're familiar with this issue. Or maybe not.

Or maybe not. After Charlie Kirk's death, there was a lot of talk about how he was kind of a new breed of young Republican, cool to some extent. And when I'm reading this article, I kind of thought that these guys are kind of the old model, like weird. That was all fake. They were like these pictures of Vanity Fair. There's like a cover picture where they're like, they just found the five hot people at an inauguration party from TPUSA. And they tried to glamorize it. And like, you know, you can do camera work.

Hey, look, I know about this. We've done camera work that's made me look prettier than I am, and uglier, by the way. You know, sometimes the camera can play tricks, all right. And so this is, I think, a pretty good representation of the people texting young Republican group chats about fat Indian media. This, to be clear, is the master race that we're looking at here? This is the ideal? No, I want to pull up William Hendricks next to pull up the actual master race. So here's another character.

You're holding back. Thank you. is William Hendricks. I want to tell you what he thinks about black people. Bro, is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food? Would he like some watermelon and Kool-Aid with that? He says he likes being in Missouri because Missouri doesn't have flags. Are we sure?

I don't know. I mean, I might not have looked in a mirror in a while, but he might see one. I don't know, something to think about. It's hard to look in a mirror, painful. Where is this man walking in this image? I need to know. Topeka, Kansas. Yeah.

That's obviously. A field. How did you know that, Will? It's the council. I know that background. That's the vice chair of the Kansas young Republicans. He served as a communications assistant for the attorney general in Kansas. He used the N-word more than a dozen times in the chat.

I just read a couple of the non-N-word once. You know, he was not alone. there was also one of the fellows, one of the other beef eaters from the other picture there said of the NBA I'd go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkeys play ball

Another good one Classic. Yeah, these guys are You know, the racism would be better if it was original, like the shit they're trotting out's just boring Yeah, it's a lot of boring ones Maybe this would be the one, I don't know if this is original I guess since it goes back to the Holocaust but I mentioned the gas chamber comment from earlier.

I do want to read this. It's an exchange between members of the New York State Young Republicans again. Joe Maligno, he says, can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don't fit the Hitler aesthetic. Annie, it's first woman to appear in the text. She replies, I'm ready to watch people burn now. Joe replies, we've got to pretend like we like them and say, hey, come on in, take a nice shower and relax. Boom, they're dead.

I guess, Will, maybe they're talking here about a rival faction within the young Republicans. Yeah, and I mean, this kind of gets into the origins of this chat. I mean, these young Republican feuds, we've had decades of bitter and often very boring young Republican college Republican feuds. The origins of this chat, why they're becoming public, you know, it appears that the gentleman named Gavin Wax, who's the head of the New York Young Republican Club, and it's key to understand that despite their very similar names, they hate the New York young Republican. group run by Peter Ginta. They've had a feud for at least several months over, kind of a back and forth who's more Trumpy. And in the Politico article, someone who's in the chat has a signed affidavit saying Gavin Wax, who by the way is now in the State Department working for someone who was fired from the first Trump administration for appearing

at a racist conference. So there's a lot of racism going on here. This guy says Gavin was threatening my career. He said, I better hand over the chat. I better make it public. So the hand of Gavin Wax is sort of visible here potentially. But that's how we found out about this, potentially, you know, possible. We think. Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about who is the more Trumpian, how they're fighting it, you mentioned this fellow, Peter Ginta.

He talked about loving Hitler. Another word that they're using often is based to mean like very cool. Peter Ginta here, they support slavery and all that shit, mega-based. Peter was one of the fellows from the first picture that had kind of the comb over. like a little smirk there. They all sort of, didn't they all sort of have combovers? They kind of had the same. Peter had the most prominent one, I would say.

Sam, before we get on here, you were saying this is one of the most alarming articles you've read in a while. And I think there's a way to look at that where you point and laugh at these fugglies who are dealing with their own issues by lashing out with, like, racist, you know, text messages about, you know,

watermelons or whatever. There's another way to look at it, which is, I think, a little bit more serious about our trajectory, and I guess that's what you were probably getting to. Well, as you know, and as we've discussed, because you qualify as my therapist as well as my collaborator on YouTube, I laugh because I have no other coping mechanism. And so I'm laughing now. But also, yeah, there's something deeply serious.

For instance, and this one is kind of buried in here, but just reading like two graphs to get you a sense of why it freaks me out. It says Ginta's line on dark-skinned pilot, for example. Echoes one used by slaying conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who we referenced, last year. When Kirk said, quote, if I see a black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified. If I see a black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified. Kirk was discussing how diversity hiring invites, quote, unwholesome thinking. Walker also used the moniker I patch McCain, originally coined by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson,

in apparent reference to GOP, Dan Crenshaw. Our credential lost an eye while serving as an ABCL in Afghanistan. Walker also makes their remark, quote, I prefer my war heroes not captured, a repeat of a similar 2015 line from Trump. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you. So why does that make me, like, anxious?

It's because everything is downstream from the top. And when you elect bad people and when you elevate people who, you know, dabble in racist or misogynistic, or, you know, insidious rhetoric that's just meant to divide and anger people. Like, the younger generation is going to pick it up and realize that that's the key to success. And so this is, you know, yeah, this is a bunch of telegraph exchanges

and it's disgusting and grotesque and racist and the anti-Semitic and Jesus Christ, like every awful thing you could possibly imagine. But also, you know, it's probably not limited to this one batch of telegram exchanges. This has been rooted by the people from up top because Trump has given them a telegram. for what to follow.

Yeah, I don't know. Well, I wonder what you make of this. You've been covering the stuff for a long time. Obviously, I was sort of in this world for a while. I mean, like, young Republicans doing, like, racist stuff for laughs is, like, not a new story at all, right, in some senses. Like, this is, uh, surely, you know, something that I witnessed, um, coming up in Republican politics. The difference to me, and, like, the category difference here is that, like, the entire

worldview and the type of people that are attracted to this is really centered around this type of culture war battle, the dehumanization, a lot of white nationalist politics. They would frame it, I think, is backlash to woke DEI politics, right? And I think that the scale of this and the types of people that are being drawn to Republican campaigns and leadership roles now is much more along the lines of like culture warring, race-baiting, white nationalists versus in past eras where there was like a little bit of that, but there was a lot more of like, I'm a fiscal conservative with a briefcase and I'm a little socially liberal, right? Like, you know, I just think the balance has shifted much more to these types of characters.

And I think that tells you kind of about the trajectory world. Yeah, I mean, reading these messages, I remembered back in, after the Charlotte's March when the writer Alex Perrine said, you know, these people might seem like outliers, but this is sort of the next generation of the Republican Party. Because the people who are being drawn in this young generation to the GOP are not, as you said, focused on fiscal conservatism, not for the most part wanting just to cut taxes. That's not why they're getting into Republican politics. It's because of the racism.

It's the deportations, the cruelty. And I think that's what we're seeing here. And, I mean, again, this is not just some random group of people. I mean, these are people who are embedded in the Trump administration. we've seen other examples of this, too. How many racism problems has Turning Point USA had in its chapters with similar chat logs being leaked? We recall Doge people there having all of these kind of racism controversies among the young hires. And they stayed at Doge. And that's the message. I mean, I think a lot of these people probably will suffer very few consequences for their

careers. Let me just say that the most insane thing in this article, which gets to Tim's point, is that Roger Stone, who is the ultimate, like, godfather of rat fucking in Republican politics, who endorsed Ginta for his position or whatever he was along the way to, like, lead the new young Republican National Federation. He's quoted condemning the statements. It's like, this shit's too hot for Roger Stone. If you're too hot for Roger Stone, we've gone way past, you know, being in the realm of sanity here.

All right. I'm going to read one last exchange to take. us out, because it hits a lot of the key pressure points. And I think... Is this the one where they say sex is gay? It is. Bobby Walker, who says, stay in the closet flag. Then Moistman says, the Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman. Alex Dwyer responds, sex is gay.

Luke Moiseman responds sex. It wasn't sex. It was rape, referencing the Spanish. Then Bobby Walker replies, Epic to RIP. So there you go. So you have kind of the two faces. of the Groyper, T.B. USA, young Republican crowd, which is the one that's like, sex is gay, and I'm an in-sell,

and then the other one that's like, rick is cool. I don't get it. Those are kind of like the two faces. Sex is gay or rape is cool. I don't understand this. What if you, what is, I don't get this world. What is sex is gay? Like, what if you like gay sex?

This is a big Nick Fuentes-Groifer thing as well, as Tim said. They love saying, you know, sleeping with a woman is gay. And then, you know, they love being insoles. I mean, it's self-describe. insults does not me. You can't be a real man. I guess I'll try to explain this. You can't like sex?

I don't understand. You can't be a real man in this, in this mindset, you can't be a real man if you're like bringing flowers to a girl. You don't want a simp is, it's opening the door for her. Yeah, you're going to be a simp. It makes you less, it makes you less of a man. Do they like sex or not like sex? I don't understand. It's complicated.

We'll leave it there. Don't sit, Sam. That's the message. of the video. I get it. I get that. I'm not going to simp, but I don't understand this about sex being gay. I just don't get it. You guys are always allowed to simp the fingering trio. We appreciate it. Fingerling. Fingerling. We'll see you all soon.