It appears the battle between Trumpworld and Ron DeSantis’ camp over right-wing influencers is getting down and dirty.
On Tuesday, the far-right website Breitbart published a story reporting that in 2019 and 2020, a conservative writer named Pedro Gonzalez—who was once a Trump backer and is now supporting DeSantis—sent antisemitic and racist messages.
The article, which went viral in conservative circles, included a raft of direct quotes from the messages sent in a group chat called “Right-Wing Death Squad” and to a single member of that group chat.
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The content of the messages was vile.
“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,” one read.
Another referred to Black conservative commentator Candace Owens and Daily Wire boss Ben Shapiro as “the Negress and the Jew.”
Yet another read: “Yeah like not every Jew is problematic, but the sad fact is that most are.”
Gonzalez—who is the politics editor of Chronicles, published by the right-wing Charlemagne Institute, and a contributor to Newsweek—did not deny the messages were his but nevertheless claimed the article was a “smear” job engineered by the Trump camp.
“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 on Twitter.
As The Daily Beast reported in January, when DeSantis geared up for his run for the GOP nomination for president, he began recruiting some former high-profile Trump supporters to spread love for him on social media and the airwaves.
Gonzalez has been a prolific keyboard and cable TV warrior for the Florida governor. For example, earlier this month, he published a piece on his Substack that pointedly noted the previous weekend “Ron DeSantis met with 9/11 victims while Donald Trump hosted a Saudi-funded golf tournament.”
DeSantis has not publicly commented on the story about Gonzalez’s messages, but Breitbart noted that the Never Back Down PAC, which backs DeSantis, called the messages “inexcusable.” Meanwhile, DeSantis’ campaign mouthpiece, Christina Pushaw, liked a tweet about how “nasty” the Trump-DeSantis feud has become.
“And to be clear I’m mostly talking about the Trump side,” the tweet read. “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.”
Chronicles also had not commented publicly on the Breitbart revelations, but it’s worth noting that when Gonzalez was accused last year of antisemitism—after he made crude comments about the “physiognomy” of two prominent Jews—magazine executive editor Edward Welsch wrote a defense of him titled, “That Old Anti-Semitism Smear.”
On Tuesday, Gonzalez tweeted that he was grateful for the support he was getting, including from some Trump supporters. One backer of the ex-president, however, was not in that category: Donald Trump Jr. retweeted the Breitbart story three times Tuesday night.
