A right-wing influencer who left the Trump camp to instead support Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for the GOP presidential nomination has blamed the circle around the former president for supposedly leaking racist and antisemitic messages he sent in private chats.
Far-right site Breitbart reported on Tuesday that in 2019 and 2020, while Donald Trump was president, conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez sent messages in a group chat entitled “Right-Wing Death Squad” as well as to one member of the group individually.
The report was widely shared in right-wing circles and included several direct quotes of the messages, one of which said: “Tfw [that feeling when] when you realize whites are the only hope non-whites have of living civilized lives, but whites themselves are too cucked to preserve their own civilizations.”
A separate message about Black right-wing commentator Candace Owens and Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro referred to them as “the Negress and the Jew”.
“Yeah like not every Jew is problematic, but the sad fact is that most are,” one of the messages said.
Mr Gonzalez serves as the political editor at Chronicles published by the Charlemagne Institute. He’s also a Newsweek contributor.
He didn’t deny that he had written the messages when responding to the allegations on Twitter but still claimed the report was a “smear” with its origins in Trumpworld.
“The only reason my private messages — messages I exchanged with *Trump supporters* from a different, dumb season of my life — are being used against me is that I’ve become the most effective critic of Trump since jumping off the Trump train,” he tweeted.
As Mr DeSantis was preparing to launch his campaign earlier this year, he started connecting with a number of former notable Trump supporters to support his campaign on social media and elsewhere, according to The Daily Beast.
Earlier this month, Mr Gonzalez wrote a piece shared on his Substack, saying that “Ron DeSantis met with 9/11 victims while Donald Trump hosted a Saudi-funded golf tournament”.
The DeSantis-backing Never Back Down PAC has said that the messages are “inexcusable,” Breitbart reported.
The Daily Beast noted that DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw liked a tweet by blogger John William Sherrod saying that the Trump team was stooping to a new low.
“The Trump/DeSantis feud is getting really, really nasty. I don’t think a lot of these people understand the toll this is taking on their own souls. And the group that benefits the most from the nastiness of this fight? The neocon warmongers who want to see populism fizzle out,” he wrote. “And to be clear I’m mostly talking about the Trump side. I’ve seen some comments from people on the DeSantis side I don’t care for too, but it’s consistently the Trump surrogates who seem to have no bottom to how low they’ll sink to support their candidate.”
“I say all that as a truly uncommitted primary voter. I vastly prefer DeSantis on the domestic policy side, but still have concerns about the true nature of his foreign policy views and commitments,” he added. “A lot of the Trump surrogates seek to have a ‘whatever it takes’ attitude. Who knows, that might work for them in the end. But at what cost? If you can’t maintain basic decency, then what are you?”
On Tuesday night, Mr Gonzalez tweeted that he was “blown away by the amount of support I’ve received from every corner amid this smear campaign by Trump’s camp. I cannot express in words how much it means that so many are standing with me — even those who have vehemently disagreed with me in the past”.
“I’m going to address the smear at length, but I’m not going to let the Trump campaign silence me. Thanks again so much to everyone who is defending me and offering grace,” he added.
The Daily Beast also noted that Donald Trump Jr retweeted that Breitbart story three times on Tuesday evening.
