Last Friday (October 17), the GOP of New York State’s 62 county chair and elected executive members and voted unaninmously to dissolve the New York State Young Republicans. The vote, held behind closed doors, spurred by the recent discovery of a slew of racist and violent messages in a group chat as well as alleged financial mismanagement totalling $38,000 in missing funds.
“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,” wrote NY GOP Chair Ed Cox in a statement. Cox continued, “Moving forward the New York State Young Republicans shall be suspended and it is the hope of the New York Republican State Committee that it can be reconstituted at a later date.” The move comes after the Kansas Young Republicans dissolved earlier in the week. New York’s group was the oldest of its kind in the nation, first established in 1911.
The 3,000-plus offensive messages contained hateful slurs against Black and Latino people, along with references to slavery, rape being “epic” and suicide as well as praise for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and jokes about forcing people into gas chambers. At least one of the people in the chat (which included members from Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont), according to POLITICO, has a role in the current administration of President Donald Trump.
According to Forbes, five of the individuals involved in the group chat have lost their jobs, which include former head of the NY State Young Republicans, Peter Giunta. The group’s entire online presence has also been scrubbed from the Internet, including their social media, raising concerns about the possible obstruction of the offending members’ links to other notable GOP politicians like New York State Representative Elise Stefanik (who has posed for pictures with the offending members) and New York State Representative Mike Lawler ahead of the midterms in 2026.
It’s apparent that high-profile Republicans are attempting to make the issues a “both sides” situation, as Stefanik (who denounced the comments but didn’t speak on her recently receiving an award from the group) called the POLITICO article a “hit job”, and Vice President JD Vance referred to the messages as similar to a “college group chat”, deflecting by referring to Virginia Democrat Jay Jones’ comments: “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
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Photo: Getty
