The Watermelon People: A Racism Problem Republicans Must Confront

It is time for Republicans to confront the faction within: the Racist Right

Politico has recently posted the leaked texts among “leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country.”

The texts are not pretty:

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.

After writing a post about the rise of Nick Fuentes and the Groypers (Fuentes followers) which necessitated my watching countless videos and reading endless commentary about that cabal, the leaked Young Republican texts revealed by Politico seem very familiar to me.

It is pure Groyper language. It is the vocabulary of the Racist Right. It is generally what you’ll hear if you watch a Fuentes livestream or if you read through Groyper tweets. As I wrote in the aforementioned blog post, “If one reads Groyper posts, one will see the acronyms RKD and TND mentioned frequently. “RKD” means “rape, kill, die” — as in the loyalty pledge ‘I will RKD for Nick Fuentes.” “TND” simply means “Total Nigger Death.”

It is also the language of other representatives of the Racist Right, such as podcaster Myron Gaines. Gaines is a co-host of the Fresh and Fit podcast, which has over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers. It’s my personal opinion that he is a grifter who entertains his audience with misogyny, antisemitism, and anti-Black remarks despite being Sudanese himself.

Recent tweets from the Myron Gaines Updates X account feature clips of him calling an Hispanic woman a “taco slut,” complaining that Jews “control every infrastructure within the United States,” and telling a young Black male that “if you get with a woman who makes more money than you, it’s a matter of time before she starts sleeping with niggers.”

Gaines also responded to one of my tweets which compared him to Fuentes with “No i [sic] hate you dumb niggas even more. You primates should be at the zoo.”

Clearly, the faction of the Racist Right does not lack for leadership.

To be clear, the element I am calling the Racist Right did not begin with Fuentes, Gaines, or the white supremacist voices. When I was a youngster, for example, I happily joined the College Republicans, thinking they were a good group of guys and gals who -- to my amazement, being an African American living in the blue state of New Jersey -- agreed with my conservative political takes. Sure enough, the very next day someone pointed out to me an ad in the school newspaper from that very same group that I was so proud to join, asking for new members. Everyone was invited except for people who were (I won’t use the language they used) gay, Jewish, or African American.

Yet, though not new, this Racist Right rhetoric is problematic, especially nowadays when bigotry can be so easily amplified. Besides “private” group chats among peers, there are also Instagram, TikTok, X, and other such venues that make it too easy to type vile things on a keyboard.

Because of the group chat leak, the Young Republicans were forced to disband in New York and other Young Republican members have been rightly disciplined:

The Young Republican National Federation board told all of the chat participants to “immediately resign” from the organization. Vermont Republicans urged state Sen. Samuel Douglass (R) to step down for his contributions to what Gov. Phil Scott (R) called the “vile, racist, bigoted and antisemitic dialogue,” The Kansas GOP said its Young Republicans chapter was now “inactive.”

Still, it is disappointing that more Republican leaders continue to seem unwilling to condemn the Racist Right -- even when it infiltrates a group as associated with the Republican Party as the Young Republicans.

JD Vance would be a logical choice to address the malignant tumor of racism in the GOP. He is the Vice President, a young Republican himself, the favorite to be the GOP’s next presidential nominee, and someone who, as the husband of a brown-skinned wife and father to mixed-race children, is uniquely well-suited to oppose the Racist Right cabal.

Yet he continues to decline to do so. He calls the group chat remarks “edgy jokes” told by “young boys,” forgetting that many of these young boys are men nearly his age.

On X, Vance deflects to the controversy surrounding the Democrats’ candidate for Attorney General for Virginia.

This is sadly in keeping of Vance’s unwillingness, or perhaps strategy, of avoiding confrontation with the Racist Right elements.

In response to Fuentes’ well-known racist traded against his wife — including referring to her as a “jeet” — Vance said “I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is. Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just, I love Usha. She’s such a good mom.”

That’s not quite the punch in the nose Fuentes deserved, is it?

It is not as if Vance is incapable of expressing anger. When it was revealed that a DOGE employee was also a member of the Racist Right clique, evident by his posting such things as “Normalize Indian hate” and “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Vance became irate, not at the DOGE employee, but at Ro Khanna, an Indian-American congressman who had asked Vance to tell that employee to apologize.

To underscore this point, Vance felt “disgust” not for the DOGE guy advocating for Indian hate but for the Indian-American who wanted to hear an apology.

It was not long ago when this Racist Right faction was shunned by the GOP. No matter how much some may have agreed with him in private, David Duke was disavowed by every prominent Republican willing to comment about him, whether it was Ronald Reagan in 1991, Donald Trump in 2016, or anyone in-between.

Today, however, a David Duke-type influencer might be found as a frequent guest on a number of right-leaning podcasts, much the way Nick Fuentes and Myron Gaines are.

It’s a shame, too. In 2024, Donald Trump received more support from Black voters than any Republican presidential nominee had since 1980. Trump also secured the highest percentage of the Jewish vote for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. These upticks in the Black and Jewish vote helped him get elected.

How sad would it be to lose some of that support over a group chat full of “edgy” gas-chamber jokes and references to African Americans as “the Watermelon people?”

—DK