MIAMI — The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”

In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the N-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.

Interspersed throughout were discussions about events promoting the Republican Party at Florida International University. The school told the Herald the chat logs are part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair.

The group chat — verified by two people in the group — reveals the extent of racism and extremism within the highest ranks of campus Republican Party leadership in Miami at a time Florida’s Republicans are reckoning with an increasingly emboldened far right.

Another member of the chat, William Bejerano — who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College — was the primary user of the N-word in the group. At one point, he posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the N-word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people. Bejerano hung up the phone when reached by the Herald.

Dariel Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time, responded in the chat: “How edgy.”

“Ew you had colored professors?!” Gonzalez wrote at another point. “I reguse (sic) to be indoctrinated by the coloreds.” He told the group he used the term “colored” because, “I was told we cant say black anymore.” A couple days later, he added: “Avoid the coloreds like the plague.” He did not respond to a request for comment.

The group chat members — which included some women — also frequently discussed sex, sometimes describing women as “whores” and at one point using the K-word, a slur for Jewish people, to describe women they avoid.

Gonzalez said, “You can f–k all the [K-word] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.” Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA chapter president, responded, “I would def not marry a Jew.”

A few minutes later, Valdes changed the group chat’s name from “Uber Retards Yapping” to “Gooning in Agartha.”

Gooning is a slang term for male masturbation. Agartha, a mythical white civilization promoted by the Nazi politician Heinrich Himmler, has been repopularized by the young online right.

Gonzalez described Agartha to the group chat as, “Nazi heaven sort of,” and Valdes explained it, “esoteric nazism essentially.”

“This is not something you would know about unless you had spent a considerable amount of time in white supremacist circles,” said Heidi Beirich, who researches extremism and co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

“It was something Himmler was obsessed about and it’s basically a mythical white homeland in the center of the Earth. If you’re using the term Agartha, you have spent some time reading about white supremacy and Nazis, there’s just no way around it,” she said. “You’re embedded in the culture.”

Frequently, chat members discussed Republican politics and race.

Valdes wrote at one point, “We need to have a moratorium on immigration temporarily unless it’s someone from a first world country.” He then clarified: “Yeah I obviously mean whites.”

Throughout the two and a half weeks of chat logs between September and October obtained by the Herald, the secretary of the county’s Republican Party, Abel Carvajal, participated occasionally and deleted some messages, but didn’t shut the chat down.

Republican Party divisions

The messages among the party’s top campus leaders last fall reveal the extent to which the party is splintered by its extremist online right and concerned about their growing political power in Florida.

Leading Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, who is Black, denounced what he called the “woke right” during a speech in Miami last fall, a phenomenon he said has risen in the wake of the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Donalds seemed to be using the term as a stand-in for the far right, describing it as those that oppose all immigration and espouse “soft bigotry” on social media.

His opponent James Fishback — a relative political unknown who has used racist and white nationalist rhetoric throughout his campaign — is highlighting the generational divide around extremism on the right in Florida.

One University of North Florida poll found that while only 6% of likely GOP primary voters supported Fishback, he had the support of 32% of 18- to 34-year-olds, four times what Byron Donalds got among that age group.

“One thing I know is the conservative movement has always been steeped in respect for other people, respect for religious liberty, respect for economic liberty,” Donalds told reporters during a campaign stop in Miami this week.

The Turning Point USA chapter president, however, described his conservative politics differently to the group chat.

“I’m more authoritarian than you buddy, I think the church should run the government,” Valdes wrote at one point. During another conversation, Valdes said, “fiscally conservative all the way is so gay” and “Hitler himself wasn’t a fiscal conservative.”

Valdes previously described himself as a “campaign employee” on Fishback’s Miami team on Instagram. He has since removed that title. He did not respond to texts or phone calls from the Herald.

In response to questions about the group chats, Miami-Dade County Republican Party Chairman Kevin Cooper said “anyone associated with this chat should resign immediately.”

He added, “I am shocked and appalled at these statements. Racism and antisemitism have no place in the Republican Party. I am proud to be the first Jewish chairman of the Miami Dade Republican Party, which is comprised of a diverse group of members from every race and background.”

The messages between campus conservative leaders come in the wake of Florida barring certain conversations about race and racism in university classrooms, including the 2022 so-called “Stop WOKE Act.”

“With the legislation that’s being passed in different states, including here in Florida — and you could argue even with some of them Trump executive orders about race he signed immediately after being sworn into office — I think it’s sending a signal that you don’t have to hide your racism anymore,” said University of Florida political scientist Sharon Austin.

The result, she said, is the emboldening of the Florida students who hold discriminatory views and a silencing of those teaching against them at Florida’s public schools.

Beirich, the extremism researcher, said the signals from the highest ranks of the Republican party from the White House — including social media posts echoing white supremacists' messages — are being heard across the party.

“Clearly the Trump administration doesn’t have any problem with these extremist views, so we shouldn’t be surprised that young Republicans would be trading in this stuff,” Beirich said. “It’s being sanctioned by the highest office, it’s not disqualifying anymore in the GOP.”

Creator of the chat responds

Carvajal — the county party secretary who started the chat and is a third year law student at FIU — said that he had not seen much of the content in the group chat until he was contacted by the Herald about the logs last week.

When he opened WhatsApp on his phone and scrolled up to the conversations last fall while on a call with a Herald reporter, Carvajal said he was shocked by the gruesome calls for violence against Black people.

“It’s been five months since this was sent and this is the first time I’ve seen this message,” Carvajal said. “I guess to an extent, I bear some responsibility, cause I created a chat. But if I had seen this at the moment, I would have removed (Bejerano)] from the chat. I probably would have even blocked his number.”

He said he generally ignored the thousands of messages in the group, and logs show he did not participate as much as others. But the county party official, who was the most senior Republican political leader in the chat, was not entirely absent either.

The WhatsApp logs show Carvajal deleted a total 14 messages sent by other participants in the chat and 42 of his own messages before the Herald obtained the logs, so the full extent of his participation is not clear. He said many of the messages he deleted were flashy stickers and he was “decluttering the chat.”

Carvajal said he created the group after Kirk was killed and the campus’ Turning Point USA chat was limited to administrators only.

“My biggest regret is that in doing that, I facilitated this kind of deranged stuff being out there,” Carvajal said. “I’m at a loss of words.”

Not the first time

When the Herald asked the school’s police department for any records related to the new group chats, a private law firm contracted by the school said they are unavailable because they “constitute Criminal Investigative Information.”

In a statement about the chat logs, media relations director Madeline Baró said, “The university takes very seriously any allegation of discriminatory conduct. The alleged conduct is under review and will be addressed in accordance with the university’s policies and applicable law.”

FIU and its Turning Point chapter have had a group chat problem before. In 2018, chat logs obtained by the Miami New Times in a group called “TPUSA FIU Fun” included messages joking about rape, liking cartoon pornography featuring drawings of underaged girls and reminding members to not be racist and anti-Semitic.

At the time, 75 faculty signed on to a letter calling on the school’s administration to revoke the organizational status of the campus’ Turning Point USA chapter.

“This is an appalling set of practices that go well beyond any reasonable interpretation of ‘free speech,’” faculty wrote. The school’s Student Government Association overwhelmingly passed a resolution asking for the removal of any “recognition, presence, funding and privileges” for Turning Point USA.

The campus still has an active TPUSA chapter.

At one point in the group chats last fall, various members debated how to describe a woman, with Gonzalez, the former recruitment chair, using terms like “half breed” and “mongrel,” to which Valdes, the Turning Point chapter president, responded, “If this chat gets leaked we’re so cooked lmao.”

“This isnt even my worst one,” Gonzalez responded.

Valdes said: “I’m in a few on telegram that are definitely worse.”

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