Newsweek is refusing to say whether it plans to keep publishing columns from a conservative influencer who admits he made racist and antisemitic comments in group chat messages with Trump supporters.
A spokesperson for the magazine told The Daily Beast on Thursday that Pedro L. Gonzalez—who has written 19 columns, most recently this month—was a freelancer, not an employee. The spokesperson could not say whether he was paid for his work and declined to comment on whether Newsweek would continue to accept pitches from him.
Gonzalez did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Earlier this week, the far-right outlet Breitbart published a story that revealed vile messages Gonzalez wrote in a group chat titled “Right-Wing Death Squad”—before he morphed from a Trump backer to a prominent supporter of Ron DeSantis.
The messages reported by Breitbart, sent between 2019 and 2020, included racist allusions to Black and Jewish people—calling the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro “the Negress and the Jew” and calling most Jewish people “problematic”–and praise for both white nationalism and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
“Fuentes is the future,” he wrote in one message. In a separate one, he praised Fuentes’ group of white nationalists, the Groypers: “I am taking up arms with the Groypers.”
Gonzalez, who is also the politics editor of the conservative Chronicles magazine, complained in a tweet on Tuesday that the leak of the messages was a smear by the Trump campaign designed to diminish DeSantis.
“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 wrote.
He added in a lengthy tweet on Thursday that he has changed since he wrote the messages, but still portrayed himself as the victim of a smear campaign.
“My views and attitude have rapidly and dramatically changed in a short period of time, but I have always been very stubborn, and I generally do not respond well to anyone trying to silence me—certainly not by people who are guilty of much worse than I am and feel no remorse,” he wrote. “When Trump is gone, they will have nowhere to go and will end up like Crassus, into whose mouth the Parthians poured molten gold in mockery of his hubris and avarice.”
