← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:01]
Dutch Vet Ad Narrator
Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24,7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.
- [00:30]
Tim Miller
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.
- [00:39]
Will Sommer
Maybe.
- [00:40]
Tim Miller
You never know. The Fingerling Trio, it's Will Sommer 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 expose young Republicans, racist chat. And boy are there some chats. Two of the chats. Before we get to you, I'll just 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 gonna 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.
- [01:26]
Sam Stein
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.
- [01:37]
Tim Miller
Well, it might have been because the gas chamber chat didn't have the Control F Jews didn't kind of COVID the gas chamber chat.
- [01:43]
Sam Stein
Control F 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, 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.
- [02:03]
Tim Miller
Yeah, Dwell before you get some of the chats. And I guess from you maybe to contextualize, it's important to know how much are we cherry picking here, you know what I mean? There are crazy people in every group. This group on this chat is not nothing. 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 of 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.
- [02:36]
Will Sommer
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. @ least one of them is a politician and in his own right. So these aren't sort of just random run of the Republicans Politico found. I mean, these are people with some amount of power who will probably amount amass more power as they get older. And then they're talking to one another about like, oh, I love Hitler, using all these, these racial and, you know, anti gay remarks.
- [03:05]
Sam Stein
Yeah, I mean, where do you think these people go from? 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 telegr talking about how big a hard on you get watching gas chambers. It's fucking crazy.
- [03:29]
Tim Miller
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 think it's important. Bobby Walker is the vice chair of the New York Young Republicans. 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 Ginter 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.
- [04:20]
Will Sommer
Well, these guys must be really good looking, man.
- [04:22]
Tim Miller
Yes, Bobby. Peter. Oh, boy. Yeah, there they are. There, that's bomby. Peter, Samuel and the Farm. They're not. I mean, going after people for being obese. Not a lot. There were the Fingering Trio. This is maybe the Ding Dong Trio. Speaking of the cupcakes, I will say.
- [04:42]
Will Sommer
Though, they did talk at one point about misusing their Young Republican money to buy Ozempic. So maybe they're familiar with this issue. You know, maybe I would add, 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.
- [05:01]
Tim Miller
Maybe that was all fake. There were, like, these pictures of Vanity Fair. There's like a cover picture where they, like, they just found the five hot people at an inauguration party from TP usa 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 and beat.
- [05:36]
Sam Stein
This, to be clear, is the master race that we're looking at here. This is the ideal.
- [05:40]
Tim Miller
No, I want to pull up William Hendrix. Next to pull up the actual master race, here's another character you're holding back.
- [05:47]
Sam Stein
Thank you.
- [05:47]
Tim Miller
That 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 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 the mirror. Painful.
- [06:15]
Sam Stein
Where is this man walking in this image? I need to know.
- [06:18]
Will Sommer
Topeka is the backdrop. Yeah, that's obviously a field.
- [06:23]
Sam Stein
How did you know that? Will.
- [06:28]
Tim Miller
That'S the vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans. He served as a communications assistant for the attorney general to. In Kansas. He used the N word more than a dozen times in the chat. I just. I just read a couple of the non. N word. Non N word ones. You know, he was not alone. There was also one of the fellows, one of the other beef. 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.
- [07:00]
Sam Stein
Classic.
- [07:01]
Tim Miller
Yeah, these guys are.
- [07:03]
Sam Stein
You know, the racism would be better if it was original. Like the shit they're trotting out is just boring.
- [07:08]
Tim Miller
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 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's first woman to appear in the text. She replies, I'm ready to watch people burn now. Joe replies, we gotta 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.
- [07:50]
Will Sommer
Yeah, and I mean, this kind of gets into the origins of this chat. I mean, this is 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 a 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 Young Republicans group run by Peter Ginter. They've had a few 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.
- [08:50]
Tim Miller
We think, yeah. It's interesting when you talk about who is the more trumpy and 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 Ginter 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 little smirk there.
- [09:15]
Sam Stein
They all sort of, didn't they all Sort of have combovers. They kind of add the same.
- [09:19]
Tim Miller
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 fuglies who are dealing with their own issues by lashing out with 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.
- [09:46]
Sam Stein
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, like, 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 skin pilot, for example, echoes one used by slang conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who 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.
- [10:23]
Tim Miller
If I see a black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified.
- [10:26]
Sam Stein
Kirk was discussing how diversity hiring invites, quote, unwholesome thinking. Walker also used the moniker Eyepatch McCain, originally coined by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson in apparent reference to GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw. Crenshaw lost an eye while serving as an ABCL in Afghanistan. Walker also makes the remark, quote, I prefer my war heroes not captured. A repeat of a similar 2015 line from Trump.
- [10:49]
Tim Miller
He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured. Okay, I hate to tell you.
- [10:55]
Sam Stein
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 divide, 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 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 template for what to follow.
- [11:41]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I don't. And. Well, I wonder what you make of this. You've been covering this stuff for a long time. Obviously, I was sort of in this world for a while. I mean, young Republicans doing racist stuff for laughs is not a new story at all. In some senses. This is surely something that I witnessed coming up in Republican politics. The difference to me and the category difference here is that the entire worldview and the type of people that are attracted to this is really centered around you. Kind of this type of culture war battle, the dehumanization, a lot of white nationalist politics. They would frame it, I think, as backlash to woke the EI politics. Right. And I think that the, the like 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 Warrington, 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 we're on.
- [12:59]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, reading these messages, I remembered back in after the Charlottesville 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. 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, you know, 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. And 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?
- [13:42]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [13:42]
Will Sommer
We recall Doge, they're having all of these kind of racism controversies among the young hires, and they stayed at Doge. Yeah. And that's the message. I mean, I think a lot of these people probably will suffer very few consequences for their careers.
- [13:57]
Sam Stein
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 endorse Ginter 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.
- [14:30]
Tim Miller
All right, I'm gonna read one last exchange to take us out because it hits a lot of the key pressure points and I think, is this the.
- [14:37]
Sam Stein
One where they say sex is gay?
- [14:38]
Tim Miller
It is Bobby Walker who says, stay in the close flag. Then Moisman says, the Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman. Alex Dwyer responds, sex is gay. Luke Moisman responds, sex. It wasn't sex, it was rape, referencing the Spanish. Then Bobby Walker replies, epic to r Pe. So there you go. So that you have kind of the two faces of the groiper tpusa Young Republican crowd, which is the one that's like, sex is gay and I'm an incel. And then the other one that's like, rape is cool. Those are kind of like the two faces. Sex is gay.
- [15:17]
Sam Stein
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.
- [15:23]
Will Sommer
This is a big Nick Fuentes groiper thing as well as Tim said, they love saying, you know, you know, sleeping with a woman is gay. And then, you know, they love being incels. I mean, it's self described insults.
- [15:33]
Tim Miller
That's not me. Yeah, you can't be a real man. Here's. I guess I'll try to. Well, let me show this. You can't be a real man in this. In this world, in this mindset. You can't be a real man if you're like bringing flowers to a girl. You don't want to simply door for her. Yeah, you're gonna be a simp. It makes you less. It makes you less of a man.
- [15:54]
Sam Stein
Do they like sex or not like sex? I don't understand.
- [15:57]
Tim Miller
It's complicated. We'll leave it there, everybody.
- [16:01]
Will Sommer
That's the message.
- [16:02]
Sam Stein
I get it.
- [16:03]
Tim Miller
I get that.
- [16:04]
Sam Stein
I'm not going to simp. But I don't understand this bad sex being gay. I just don't get it.
- [16:09]
Tim Miller
You guys are always allowed to simp. The fingering trio. We appreciate it. Fingerling.
- [16:14]
Sam Stein
Fingerling.
- [16:15]
Tim Miller
We'll see you all soon.
- [16:17]
Dutch Vet Ad Narrator
Time is precious. And so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra. Precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24. 7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.