Online chats and social media posts leaked to the Phoenix New Times show that the leaders of the College Republicans United (CRU) club at Arizona State University are pretty much some of the worst human beings out there.
According to the newspaper, which received a dossier of the comments from former members of the club, leaders of the group—an offshoot of the university’s College Republicans chapter—often liked to share anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racist views, including “joking” about the 2017 killing of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia.
One of those leaders is the group’s founder, ASU senior Richard Thomas, an avid Trump supporter. In one photo shared with the Phoenix New Times, Thomas is seen standing by a white Dodge Challenger wearing a CRU T-shirt and holding a gallon of milk in one hand and a tiki torch in the other. Another CRU member posed for the same photo, according to the report.
In other chats, Thomas called Childish Gambino “degenerate monkey filth,” and he repeatedly used anti-Semitic symbols in chats about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and in comments about an Alex Jones video.
He also wrote, according to the report: “I don’t believe homosexuality or this level of degeneracy is biological it’s a choice the ancient Spartans were all fucking each other because it was in the culture same thing for feudal Japan a lot of them were bisexual.”
Another CRU leader involved is Kevin Decuyper, who graduated from ASU in 2017. Decuyper posted a photo in which he posed with right-wing commentator Candace Owens, who is black. Someone named Austin Wilcox asked, “What’s with the n****r in your profile picture.”
Decuyper responded by stating, “I work in state politics and co-founded a right wing organization that’s already called Nazis/alt-right regularly so it helps me a lot to be camouflaged and low key on my public profile because it helps to have the support of the right wing community who thankfully don’t know my more extreme views.”
Republicans United responded to the New Times story with a statement on its website alleging “blackmail attempts” by former members of the group.
“Recently, an article showed up on a small tabloid about blackmail attempts on our student organization by people removed from CRU. This is nothing but a hit piece and not worthy to reply to directly,” the statement said. “These former members cherry-picked excerpts out of context from our old Facebook Messenger CRU chat and released them to the State Press around November of 2018, and again with the Phoenix New Times late in March of 2019. It’s a shame that we have so-called fellow ‘Republicans’ who are stooping so low to use leftist rags to attack other Republicans, when the same could be done on their own words just as easily.”
The statement also addressed an event the group hosted at ASU with right-wing online activist and Trump supporter Ashton Blaise Whitty and Tim Gionet, aka “Baked Alaska.”
“We were pleased to hear Baked Alaska renounce ethno-nationalism and white supremacy,” the group’s statement said. It added: “We believe in Christian values of forgiveness and believe that people can change and redeem themselves over time, opinions are not set in stone. Unlike liberals, we understand you are not going to change minds without any attempt towards reconciliation or constructive dialogue.”
For his part, Thomas told the New Times in a text message, “You have a political narrative that you’re trying to push that a college club at ASU which supports free speech and moderate conservatism is actually far right.”
It’s the same type of response Thomas gave to The State Press last October when that publication called him out for his extremist statements, including diatribes about “white genocide” and claims that transgender people have a “mental illness.”
“Is there an actual genocide of white people going on? No, there isn’t.” Thomas told the Press at the time. “But there is definitely a kind of racism toward white people that I think is kind of new in recent decades.”
See a pattern here?