Pedro Gonzalez, a rising conservative influencer and politics editor of Chronicles magazine, regularly in 2019 and 2020 sent racist and antisemitic messages, Breitbart News can reveal after reviewing months’ worth of his private messages.
More recently, Gonzalez has become perhaps most well-known as one of the most active and strident pro-Florida Gov. Ron Desantis influencers on Twitter.
“Yeah like not every Jew is problematic, but the sad fact is that most are,” Gonzalez wrote in one group chat in 2019, for instance.
“The only tactical considertation [sic] of Jews is screening them for movements,” Gonzalez wrote in another group chat message. “But that is not something for open discussion.”
“I am at the point where I can respect Jews as individuals and like them as individuals, but as a group I see them as problematic,” Gonzalez said in another.
In yet another message, Gonzalez shared a clearly antisemitic cartoon of a man wearing a “Pepe” shirt grabbing the large nose of the Jewish editor-in-chief of a newspaper—“Mr. Heebawitz, Editor-in-Chief” appears on the nameplate on the desk below him—while the man declares: “Getting real tired of this shit.” Gonzalez, when sharing that cartoon, wrote: “LMAO.”
“Minorities like me see America for what it is—a country built by whites, that can only survive if whites survive,” Gonzalez wrote in another message. “And it is my job to make whites wake up. Because if they don’t we are all fucked. Especially people like me.”
“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,” Gonzalez said in another message.
‘THE NEGRESS AND THE JEW: NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET’
About Candace Owens, the black conservative personality who is now at Daily Wire but previously worked for Turning Point USA, Gonzalez referred to her as a “Negress” while referencing a feud between Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and Owens. “The Negress and the Jew,” Gonzalez wrote, adding a comment about how the two were so different they could not coexist: “Never the twain shall meet.”
About Kassy Dillon, now a Fox News reporter but previously a writer for Daily Wire, Gonzalez called her a “chosen people hoe” in one group chat.
In several other messages, Gonzalez constantly defends and praises the white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Gonzalez calls Fuentes “the future,” and says of Fuentes: “you can see him gradually refining himself,” because he says Fuentes is “getting ready for bigger things.” He brags about how he has “three contacts with a line to Fuentes,” including one who he says was putting the two in touch.
“I never thought I would agree with so much of what Fuentes has to say,” Gonzalez says in another message.
In another, he calls Fuentes “intelligent” and laments that his “immaturity does not help him” be taken seriously in American politics.
“Fuentes does one good thing when he trolls Jews: He shows people how subversive they can be,” Gonzalez wrote in another message.
In other messages, Gonzalez expresses solidarity with “Groypers,” a group of far-right individuals including white nationalists — for whom Fuentes claims to be their leader. “I am taking up arms with the Groypers,” Gonzalez writes.
In some messages, he even expresses his hope for an impending “boogaloo,” a concept of a looming civil war in America that some in far-right circles have predicted is coming soon. In one message with a friend, Gonzalez shared a link to an article in The Hill where then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) attacked former President Trump for quoting a pastor warning of a looming civil war over impeachment. Gonzalez reacted to Kinzinger’s remarks to a friend: “You know why the oligarchs hate the boogaloo? Because it means we aren’t afraid of them. The Right needs to embrace this.”
THE ‘RIGHT-WING DEATH SQUAD’ FORMS
These, and countless more like them, are part of a lengthy series of Telegram messages Gonzalez sent throughout mid-to-late 2019 and early 2020 that Breitbart News has obtained. Some were sent in a group chat titled “Right-Wing Death Squad.” Others were one-on-one messages that Gonzalez sent to someone who works in the conservative movement—who is also in the group chat.
At the time, Gonzalez was a writer for the online conservative outlet American Greatness—while he was finishing his college degree. He also wrote for Chronicles, a monthly magazine for which he is now an editor. These people in the group chat with him, and in the one-on-one messages, were people Gonzalez knew from conservative student groups.
At times, in either the one-on-one messages or in the group chat, someone would push back—-and other times some would agree with him. One thing is now clear, however: each of the others has now turned on Gonzalez, as all of them okayed releasing these publicly, according to the source who is on these messages that provided them to Breitbart News.
Race and ethnicity are so pervasive in Gonzalez’s messages that even when others are joking about their significant others, Gonzalez—-who is married to a German immigrant—-found a way to shift the conversation to race by joking about how he likes “German women fam” because they are the “master race.”
“Keep it hwhite [sic] fam,” he joked in another message about who to date.
One thing is abundantly clear after reviewing thousands of Gonzalez’s messages and several hours of video containing them: Gonzalez regularly forces the conversation among his then-friends in the direction of race, ethnicity, and religion. What’s above and what follows are representative — but by no means represent the full comprehensive catalog — of what Gonzalez said in these chats.
A DESANTIS ‘INFLUENCER’ RISES
Gonzalez is particularly newsworthy at this time because he is one of the highest-profile online personalities promoting Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign. The DeSantis campaign and the Super PAC backing DeSantis—called “Never Back Down”—have both been publicly promoting, and sometimes retweeting, Gonzalez and his work.
DeSantis entered the 2024 GOP presidential race on Wednesday, May 24. In the few weeks since then, Gonzalez has seen amplification of his work from people in the Florida governor’s orbit, as high-ranking as DeSantis’s campaign manager Generra Peck, Rapid Response Director Christina Pushaw, campaign adviser Nate Hochman, Never Back Down communications adviser Steve Cortes, and others. The DeSantis War Room official campaign Twitter account has also amplified his work.
Pushaw and Gonzalez regularly interact publicly on social media. Pushaw, since DeSantis entered the race, has written at least a dozen original tweets interacting with Gonzalez, tagging his account—as well as retweeting him many times as well. Dating back to 2021, Pushaw and Gonzalez have interacted dozens and dozens of times on Twitter.
Never Back Down’s official Twitter account recently shared a meme video from Gonzalez’s account, which Cortes also amplified. Cortes has even promoted blog posts with analysis from Gonzalez, praising Gonzalez as someone who “always exposes illogic and hypocrisy of politicians claiming to run or govern from the Right.”
Had enough?
Ready for a leader who fights back against the Leftist cultural Marxists?
It’s time for Ron.!@RonDeSantis https://t.co/zG3vz3exGO
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) June 14, 2023
.@emeriticus always exposes illogic and hypocrisy of politicians claiming to run or govern from the Right.
Here’s his latest evidence-based analysis:https://t.co/dHaGmrSYR1 pic.twitter.com/QJqmg8imMC
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) June 21, 2023
Others in the “DeSantis influencer” orbit — including Dave Rubin, Jenna Ellis, Dave Reaboi, John Cardillo, Buck Sexton, and Karol Markowicz — have all promoted Gonzalez and his work this year. Rubin has even hosted panels on his show with Markowicz and Gonzalez, introducing each as DeSantis supporters promoting the Florida governor’s 2024 presidential campaign.
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There is no evidence that DeSantis or any of his staffers or anyone at Never Back Down were aware of Gonzalez’s private messages when they associated with him publicly. There is scant evidence in the public sphere that Gonzalez held these extremely radical views. But there were some signs of it in public comments he made on Twitter.
WARNING SIGNS YEARS IN THE MAKING
He did send a few tweets a few years back somewhat defending Fuentes from criticism, but those do not mention Fuentes’s views on Jewish people. The British Spectator columnist Douglas Murray also published a piece in early 2022 calling out Gonzalez for tweets he sent about “Rothschild physiognomy.”
“When the right plays with Jew hate,” was the headline of Murray’s piece calling out Gonzalez, published in the Free Press.
Reaboi, a fellow pro-DeSantis influencer, defended Gonzalez at the time in early 2022:
Had you taken a moment to contact @emeriticus before writing the article, I’m sure he’d have clarified it. But let’s be honest, it was payback for Pedro’s reporting on Paul Singer that really fired people up. https://t.co/495T5qaUlm
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) January 6, 2022
So did Newsweek‘s Josh Hammer, who noted that Gonzalez was welcome to keep writing for his publication despite Murray’s concerns about his public commentary on Jewish people:
I would agree with this were it not for the fact that Pedro does this to a lot of people on Twitter (something I personally find unusual and perhaps distasteful, but that’s irrelevant here). There’s a long record.
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) January 19, 2022
As we said at the time, @bungarsargon and I were happy to publish @emeriticus at @NewsweekOpinion after a misguided Substack post sloppily attempted to cancel him: https://t.co/yW8vQehdTM https://t.co/VGtKnZdI0U
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) January 19, 2022
Gonzalez has been regularly writing for Newsweek now for years, including a column published this month. Newsweek‘s Hammer endorsed DeSantis in the GOP primary this week.
While Murray’s column zones in on some public commentary that Gonzalez made, it was nothing compared to these private messages — even if he was onto something big about Gonzalez. Nonetheless, Gonzalez carried on, with no consequences, after that moment.
When former President Donald Trump came under fire for dining with Fuentes last year, a few weeks later in an interview at his Doral golf club in Miami, Breitbart News pressed Trump on the matter and he made clear he believes that “nobody” who has “the wrong and ill will about people” has a place in the America First movement or the modern GOP — which Trump seeks to again lead in 2024. Trump specified too that he does not believe Fuentes, specifically, has a place in the movement or the party.
The DeSantis campaign has not replied to a request for comment from Breitbart News. Pushaw has not replied to a specific comment request, either. Gonzalez has also not replied to a request for comment on these matters.
A spokesperson for Never Back Down, however, said that the PAC has no relationship with Gonzalez and said the statements were “inexcusable” while touting DeSantis’s broader record fighting antisemitism. The statement also aimed to flip the criticism on Trump.
“The PAC has no relationship with this individual or the inexcusable statements he made when he was a Trump supporter, and the PAC has no relationship with Trump’s recent dinner partner Nick Fuentes,” a Never Back Down spokesperson told Breitbart News. “Governor DeSantis has a strong record of combatting anti-Semitism and signed legislation strengthening Holocaust education requirements in Florida public schools.”
For the record, there are also messages that Gonzalez sent in 2019 to his group chat indicating he was moving away from Trump–and toward DeSantis–as far back as back then.
THE ‘JQ,’ ECHOS, AND ‘EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.’
In the leaked group chat messages, Gonzalez regularly flagged articles or social media posts written by Jewish people with comments about how they are Jewish. In one September 2019 message, for instance, he shared a Facebook post by a man named Alexander Kruel and comments: “Jesus Christ. Another Jewish guy. Is Zuc trying to red pill me harder on the JQ!?”
“JQ” is internet slang for the “Jewish Question,” an antisemitic trope that, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, originated with the rise of Nazis in the lead-up to World War II.
Another time, Gonzalez shared a social media post of Democrat activist Nathan H. Rubin calling for more gun control, then added the comment: “(((Rubin))).”
The Anti-Defamation League notes that antisemites will regularly include triple parentheses—called an “echo”—around a Jewish person’s name in communications.
In a one-on-one message, Gonzalez also used the echo symbol to complain about a Jewish author, Dominic Green, of a piece in the Spectator headlined: “The groypers are American fascists.”
“Oh fuck,” Gonzalez wrote. “A Jewish guy just called the Groypers ‘fascists.’ LMFAO the stereotypes. (((green))) fuck him.”
In November 2019, Gonzalez shared with the group a link to a pro-open borders book written by Bryan Caplan and illustrated by Zach Weinersmith. “Both are Jews,” Gonzalez commented. “Caplan is particularly insane.”
That month he also shared a link to a Politico piece headlined: “The Massacre that Spawned the Alt-Right.” With the link in the group chat, Gonzalez also commented: “Surprise! A column in Politico that considers Christians, anti-communists, paleoconservatives, and whites is co-authored by a Jewish guy.”
“Deserves a response,” Gonzalez added, “if only to show them we are not afraid of them.”
Sometimes Gonzalez even got it wrong and thought people who were not Jewish were in fact Jewish, like the time he shared screenshots of tweets from left-wing anti-Trump pastor John Pavlovitz. After the screenshots, Gonzalez put the name “Pavlovitz” in quotes and wrote: “Every. Single. Time.” Pavlovitz, for the record, while a leftist critic of Trump, is not Jewish.
Gonzalez seemed to understand that at least some of these ideas were not publicly palatable and, on multiple occasions, discussed how to mask his criticism of American Jews in public. For instance, in one message where he highlighted a tweet he sent criticizing Shapiro, Bill Kristol, and David French, he told the group: “you have to play it as closely as possible.” He added: “notice that I included one non-Jewish guy who is subversive,” implying that doing so publicly hides his antisemitism.
‘A JEWISH JEW’ AND 9/11 ISRAEL CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Gonzalez’s allegiance to Groypers was apparent throughout the messages. In a one-on-one message, for instance, he sent a link to a Jerusalem Post article about conservatives criticizing columnist Michelle Malkin for aligning with Groypers. “ICYWW [in case you were wondering],” he sent with the link to his friend, “why groypers are skeptical of Jewish identity politics.”
In response, his friend suggested highlighting the Jewish Groypers, pointing to a couple examples, but in response, Gonzalez wrote: “Yeah but notice they don’t identify as Jewish Groypers. Just Groypers. Unlike Ben Shapiro, for example, who identifies as a Jewish Jew who likes Jewish stuff and Israel.”
Gonzalez even suggested to his friend in the one-on-one messages that Israelis were behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “Look up dancing Israelis, etc,” Gonzalez told his friend, who pushed back saying those were conspiracy theories.
“They aren’t,” Gonzalez replied. “Look it up. You can find reports on it in Jewish mags3 [sic].”
Ironically, near the beginning of the group chat’s inception, Gonzalez sent a message warning his friends: “we should consider destroying this chat and remaking it periodically.”
“Bugmen out here, running these social networks,” Gonzalez wrote. “I do the same thing with Signal. Periodically delete chats and remark [sic] them. You cannot be too careful.”
‘SUBVERSIVE JEWS’: PARANOIA SETS IN
Gonzalez, throughout the messages, also repeatedly refers to specific Jewish people as “subversive.” He even defines subversive in one of his one-on-one messages: “A subversive: someone who undermines a movement from within by weakening it, distracting it, and co-opting it.”
In one example, on July 18, 2019, the day that Trump held a rally at which people chanted “Send Her Back” regarding Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)—a Somali-American Democrat with a deep history of antisemitic comments—the Daily Wire’s Shapiro criticized the chant. Shapiro said it was “vile” and, while “Omar is awful” and is a “radical anti-Semite with terrible views,” he thinks “chanting for her deportation based on her exercise of the First Amendment,” since she is “an American citizen,” is “disgusting.”
Gonzalez was particularly perturbed by Shapiro’s comments, sharing in the group chat a now-deleted Tweet he sent in response to Shapiro, in which Gonzalez argues that “denaturalizing and deporting subversives is an American tradition” and in which he attacks Shapiro for calling the chants to do so “disgusting.” Gonzalez said in the tweet that in his view the real thing that is “disgusting” is how a “nasally little chickenhawk”—Shapiro—“always shills for the far-left when it counts.”
But Gonzalez saved what he really thought of Shapiro for his closest friends on this group chat on Telegram. He went much, much further privately, including using antisemitic tropes to attack Shapiro to his friends. He said Shapiro was “being subversive,” then explained his philosophy about “subversive Jews.”
“Notice that subversive Jews will defend Omar, because they know that if we start targeting people with foreign allegiances, people who don’t assimilate, they’ll be next,” Gonzalez wrote. “There are, of course, exceptions, but as a general rule, this is true.”
A few messages later, Gonzalez further explained his view. “I know it’s counterintuitive, but trust me on this,” he wrote. “Basically, it’s safety in numbers. Like Shapiro would rather have Omar in the same country as him, rather than have angry white Christians single him out. After they single out Omar.”
‘JEWS HELPED MUSLIMS ALONG INTO CHRISTIAN LANDS’
That kicked off a deeper historical and intellectual discussion that Gonzalez steered, claiming Jews have historically helped Muslims take over Christian territory. “It’s weird as shit, and I don’t fully understand it, but historically, this has always been the case,” Gonzalez wrote. “It was Jews who facilitated the Muslim invasion of Christian Spain. TL;DR: Jews had been singled out and marginalized by Christians, so when Muslims came knocking, Jews helped Muslims along into Christian lands.”
Gonzalez cited a paper he found online from author Lucian Gubbay about the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and wrote to his friends on the group chat of Jews that, “oddly enough, Muslims treated them better, in their eyes, than Christians.”
Gonzalez cited a source for the link where he found the paper, and noted, “I am not making this up or pulling it out of the Daily Stormer.”
“Last paragraph gives you a specific case,” Gonzalez told the group chat, where he argued that Jews “actively helped Muslims take lands from Christians.”
“I am not saying that literally every single Jew in America is consciously trying to facilitate the Muslim capture of America—I am saying that Jews instinctively fear living under Christian, especially European, rule. It’s on a sociological, sub-aware level.”
It’s here where, like in many other cases throughout these messages, Gonzalez made clear that Paul Gottfried, the Jewish editor to whom he reported at Chronicles Magazine—and to whom he still reports to this day—is not the problem, in his view.
“OBVIOUSLY not all—Gottfried is woke to it,” Gonzalez wrote. “Which is why he fucking hates people like Shapiro.”
‘WE DON’T TALK ABOUT IT… NOT IN THE OPEN’
At that stage, one of Gonzalez’s friends was pushing back on him in the group chat, asking what arguments like that might accomplish and how they might alienate possible political allies with such views.
“Well, first, we don’t talk about it,” Gonzalez replied. “Not in the open.”
That did not satisfy Gonzalez’s friend, who questioned why they should even talk like this in private—to which Gonzalez responded: “acknowledging it among ourselves, and organizing ourselves and our movements in ways that cannot be subverted is critical. In other words, people like Shapiro need to be marginalized and kept out of something like a MAGA movement at all costs. Because once he’s in, he will engage in gatekeeping, like [Yoram] Hazony is doing.”
Hazony, an Israeli-American political theorist, published a book called The Virtue of Nationalism in 2018 that Gonzalez disliked because he pushed for nationalism in an economic, not racial, way. Criticism of Hazony, who is Jewish, is rampant in these messages from Gonzalez, and he regularly accused Hazony of “gatekeeping.” The act of being a gatekeeper, in Gonzalez’s view, is when someone who does not believe in the core objectives of a movement infiltrates it to steer it to a different end–similar to his views about people being “subversive.”
A ‘GOOD JEW’ VERSUS TRUMP ALLY ‘TOTALLY OWNED BY ZIONISTS’
In one-on-one messages discussing Darren Beattie, who now runs Revolver News, Gonzalez referred to Beattie as a “good Jew.” He added he believes his editor Gottfried is one, as well. “Like Gottfried,” he said.
He even said in another message that Gottfried was going to connect him with Fuentes.
“I have a plan,” Gonzalez wrote in another message. “And that is to basically work with Groypers on the low to help make their ideas more mainstream. I am waiting to hear back from Paul [Gottfried] about getting in touch with Fuentes.”
That incident with Shapiro, referring to him as “subversive,” was hardly the only time Gonzalez made such accusations about Jewish people. In one-on-one messages with one of his friends, for instance, Gonzalez bashed Dr. Sebastian Gorka—a former Trump White House official who hosts an America First-focused radio program—for criticizing the John Birch Society, or JBS.
“Members of the JBS were unafraid to call out subversive Jews,” Gonzalez wrote to his friend. “Gorka is totally owned by Zionists. He needs their money. And now he’s actually being an asshole, directing people away from good orgs like JBS to shitty ones like TPUSA.”
Gonzalez had a particular hatred for Gorka, these messages show. “G is fucked,” he wrote in one one-on-one message in December 2019. “Totally in the thrall of his Jewish donors. The problem with being a big con is that you become dependent on the money. Who do you think bankrolls conservatives? Mostly Jewish/Zionist types who, surprise!, are just as opposed to white racial consciousness as the left is.”
‘THE FUTURE’: NICK FUENTES SANITIZER DIGS IN
Constantly defending Fuentes despite his well-documented Holocaust denial and antisemitism is a running theme of the messages Gonzalez sent throughout 2019 and early 2020. In one, for instance, Gonzalez claimed Fuentes was not actually denying the Holocaust but was acting as a “troll” to challenge the “orthodoxy” and compared Fuentes to “Bronze Age Pervert,” or BAP for short. BAP, for the record, is the pseudonym of a far right-wing online personality who wrote a book titled Bronze Age Mindset that paints America in a really dark place. Some reports, per the Daily Beast, have identified BAP as “Costin Vlad Alamariu, a Yale University political science PhD of Romanian extraction,” but Alamariu has never publicly confirmed he is in fact BAP.
BAP, like Fuentes, has regularly criticized Jews– but he also regularly criticized Christians, per the Daily Beast.
“He isn’t a denier,” Gonzalez told his friends in the group chat about Fuentes and the Holocaust. “He’s a troll. Fuentes appeals to Zoomers because he isn’t afraid to mercilessly assault the orthodoxy. He’s the trad Catholic version of BAP. And if you didn’t know, BAP also attacks Jews for being subversive.”
In another message, Gonzalez said he finds a blend between BAP and Fuentes as the “future” of the American right. “Like it or not, somewhere between BAP and Fuentes is the future,” Gonzalez wrote. “It will be open to race realism, it will be anti-Zionism, it will be hostile to LGBTQ, and it will prefer strength over weakness. All of those things were present in America 1950.”
He even said BAP is an example that an explicitly racist person could in fact lead a movement in American politics. “So the idea that people who express views that can be called racist are not capable of leading movements isn’t true, because BAP is doing just that,” Gonzalez wrote.
HATRED OF TURNING POINT USA’S CHARLIE KIRK
A running theme throughout the text groups is a deep hatred for Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, and a belief that Kirk was weakening the right. Gonzalez regularly compared Kirk to Fuentes, claiming Fuentes was, in his view, a far better leader for the movement of young conservatives. “Yea, Kirk is gay,” Gonzalez told the group in one. “And if Fuentes ever becomes a little more mature, therefore a little more palatable, he will be a force to be reckoned with.”
“Kirk thinks and acts like the worst kind of Jew,” Gonzalez wrote in another message. “And he is in fact beholden to Jews.”
For what it’s worth, Gonzalez regularly questioned the very idea of antisemitism—claiming that many had gone “too far” in criticizing it—while also trying to rationalize Fuentes’s Holocaust denial.
“My point is, the antisemitism stuff has gone too far,” Gonzalez said in a message to the group chat.
Americans played no role in it. We fought against the Nazis. And I will not allow Jewish people to hang the holocaust over Shakespeare’s neck. Enough cultural vandalism has happened because Jews want to remind everyone that the holocaust was a thing. I think Holocaust Denial is, in part, a rejection of the myth that Americans need to feel some guilt or responsibility to act because of that event. I don’t deny that Jews were killed by the Nazis, but that Americans should feel any sort of guilt or responsibility for that event. Didn’t we fight the Nazis? I wonder if Fuentes actually thinks it did not happen, or if it is what I am talking about.
In that group chat, Gonzalez seems to acknowledge the Holocaust is real, but in another one-on-one chat he seems to side with Holocaust deniers. He shared a link to a Washington Post story about Sacha Baron Cohen calling on social media companies to crack down on hate speech, particularly Holocaust denialism, and then Gonzalez wrote to his friend: “You want to know why people are fed up [with] the Holocaust plot line? This guy has made a living mocking Americans, Christians, and whites in the most cruel ways, and now he’s calling on FB and Google to make ‘Holocaust deniers’ and ‘Neo Nazis’ disappear. He means us.”
RATIONALIZING HOLOCAUST DENIAL: NOT ‘PARTICULARLY HORRIFYING’
In another one-on-one message, Gonzalez downplayed the significance of the Holocaust. “All I’m saying is, and maybe it’s because I’m a history guy, I don’t see the holocaust as particularly horrifying, when compared to everything else,” he wrote.
That aforementioned Shakespeare message came amid a broader discussion of the Shakespeare play The Merchant of Venice. The play, which contains a Jewish protagonist named Shylock, has been the wellspring of much antisemitism, including some by then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2014. Biden, as Breitbart News’ John Nolte reported at the time, referred to Jews as “Shylocks,” something the Anti-Defamation League considers an antisemitic slur. Biden was forced to apologize for his comments. But during these 2019 group chat messages, Gonzalez complained one of his classmates in school was concerned about the Shakespeare play.
“The other day, a student complained that the Merchant of Venice is antisemitic,” Gonzalez complained to his friends…. “The bad guy, if you haven’t read it, is a Jew named Shylock.”
“My response to his deep concern was: What does it matter?” Gonzalez continued… “Why are we hanging the Mercent [sic] of Venice on whether Shakespeare portrayed Jews unfavorably?”
Gonzalez then explained that he believes the stereotypes about Jews as portrayed by Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice are in fact true.
“First, some of those stereotypes are true,” Gonzalez wrote. “Sorry, but Jews aren’t perfect. They have not exactly been good neighbors to Christians. Second, I refuse to weigh the value of Shakespeare on what Jews think about Shylock.”
THE NAZI SCHOLAR AND THE ‘LEVIATHAN’
Gonzalez also seems to have a fondness for extreme intellectuals, like Nazi-era German polymath Oswald Spengler. Spengler’s early 20th-century works provided Nazis some intellectual firepower to justify their actions. Spengler even voted for Hitler in the 1932 election in Germany over Paul von Hindenburg but later criticized Nazis and expressed sympathy more for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini before dying of a heart attack in 1936. Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a nationalist two-volume tome published in 1918 and 1922 respectively, has served as intellectual backing for many on the far right, including the Nazis and others, since. Gonzalez, these messages reveal, was absolutely fascinated with Spengler.
“Whites are important,” Gonzalez wrote in the group chat. “Whites must remain a majority.”
After some back and forth with two other group chat members, and complaining about some writers at America Greatness — the publication he wrote for at the time — who would “disavow race,” Gonzalez said white people go beyond mere fear of being called racists.
“It’s more than fear,” Gonzalez wrote. “I think it is sometbing [sic] deep seeded [sic] in whites. On a psychic level, whites dont [sic] recognize the imperative of race anymore, or they suppress it.”
In the next message, Gonzalez cites Spengler: “Oswald Spengler probably would have called it the whitney’s [sic] Faustian condition.”
That was not the only time Gonzalez pointed to Spengler. In a September 15, 2019, message to the group, Gonzalez again cited the Nazi philosopher, quoting his critiques of Christianity’s political utility. “’Christian theology,’ wrote Oswald Spengler, ‘is the grandmother of Bolshevism,’” Gonzalez wrote. “Whether you agree with Spengler is not the point; the point is that Spengler was grappling with the fact that Christianity has been emasculated and therefore it is not clear that it can help us in mass politics.”
Gonzalez also revered Samuel T. Francis, an extreme intellectual who was effectively canceled in the 1990s when it was discovered he was pushing racism at a conference hosted by white nationalist Jared Taylor. Dinesh D’Souza, the then-future conservative filmmaker, exposed Francis in the 1990s when he was working on a book about racism.
D’Souza discovered controversial remarks that Francis had made at Taylor’s conference, including the quote: “What we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.”
After that information came out, Francis was expelled from the Washington Times and receded to the extremities of American politics for the remainder of his life. In death, some of his friends and family found unpublished writings of Francis’s and published the book Leviathan and Its Enemies with them—and some on the extremes of U.S. politics have tried to revive Francis as a key intellectual influence since then.
Gonzalez repeatedly talks about Francis in the messages, including one where he shared with the group chat a screenshot of an introduction written for the posthumously published Francis book Leviathan and Its Enemies. This excerpt that Gonzalez shared in the group of the introduction to Francis’s Leviathan crudely explains Francis’s vision for amassing political power, drawing inspiration from the examples of former Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, among others.
“Success was to be found in a political formulation that could ‘synthesize its appeal to group identity (racial or national) through an imagery of ‘us against them’ with a demand for the redress of economic grievances,’” the introduction reads. “Sam argued that a ‘nationalist-socialist program’ was the secret key to political power in the modern era, and was understood by successful politicians from Adolf Hitler to Franklin Roosevelt.” Also highlighted in that excerpt that Gonzalez shared was this direct quote that the introduction made of Francis’s own writing: “If there is to be a successful ‘new nationalism’ in the next decade, its leaders will have to understand the secret of the twentieth century and how to use it, whether the ‘nation’ is that of Jesse Jackson or George Wallace.”
After sharing that highlighted excerpt with the text group, Gonzalez told his friends: “This is where I want the right to go.”
“It cannot be overtly expressed as such, but its fundamental [sic] expressed,” Gonzalez wrote, adding: “The above reference is not to literal Nazism, but rather a movement that rejects the ideologies of socialism and capitalism. An ideology that sees the economy as an instrument of the national; as a means to an end and not an end in itself.”
‘I’LL END UP BEING PURGED’
Gonzalez’s fascination with Francis also mirrors his views about his own possible trajectory in American politics. For now, despite the minimal criticism he has received publicly from things like Murray’s piece about his “Rothschild” tweets, Gonzalez has managed to maintain writing steadily for places like Newsweek and Chronicles–and in the good graces of senior Republicans like those around DeSantis. But Gonzalez, in a one-on-one message with his friend, predicted that he would eventually be “purged” from the right for these views.
“I feel like I’ll end up being purged because I’ll take sides with them and the irony is that it will be like a cycle of events: the neocons disavowed the Claremont people for siding with Trump, the neo neo cons will disavow people like me for picking a side with the new Buchananites (groypers),” Gonzalez wrote.
