Oct 20
2025
The Niagara County angle to national scandal
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You may have read about the private chats among Young Republican operatives in four states, including New York, that went public via a report by Politico, which summarized the content as follows:
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
Then there was the quote “I love Hitler.”
The response from MAGA types varied. The New York Republican Party disbanded the state chapter of the Young Republicans. Vice President JD Vance, on the other hand, downplayed the matter.
“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”
Never mind that most of the “kids” are in their mid-20s to mid-30s.
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who is weighing a race for governor against Kathy Hochul, both denounced the chats and called the Politico story a “hit job.”
What you may not know is that one of “kids” in the chat room was Bobby Walker, who at the time was vice president of the New York chapter of the state Young Republicans and digital communications coordinator on the staff of state Sen. Rob Ortt, who represents Niagara County.
Walker worked for Ortt from 2022 through early 2024, then began a role as communications coordinator for the Senate Republican Administration Office, which Ortt presumably had something to do with as Senate minority leader. Walker earned $55,000 in 2024.
Walker has been described in press reports as a frequent participant in the chats and using racist, misogynistic, and homophobic language, including a description of rape as “epic.”
Ortt condemned Walker’s behavior in the wake of the Politico report. That said, I’ve received a lot of press releases from a lot of politicians over the years and those issued by Ortt’s office are among the most inflammatory, hyper-partisan statements I’ve come across. Not once in a while, but frequently.
Walker may have crossed the line in his choice of words, even for a MAGA Republican, but his tone is much in keeping with his former boss.
The headline in The Atlantic says it all: America is sliding toward illiteracy.
“The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.”
Investigative Post has done a fair amount of reporting on the topic. Most telling is a story from last year that found a majority of students read at grade level in only 19 of 99 school districts in Western New York.
Articles generated by artificial intelligence now account for a little more than half of what’s posted on the Internet. Not at all a good thing.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomICE, flush with cash, is building an intelligence arsenal that seeks to target immigrants, dissidents and, no doubt, anyone who opposes Donald Trump’s rule.
Democratic lawmakers, civil rights watchdogs and former officials have expressed concern that ICE now has a green light not only to monitor immigrant communities, but also to carry out broad surveillance of Americans exercising their First Amendment right to oppose government action.
Meanwhile, David Brooks, of all people, says it’s time for Americans to take to the streets the way proponents of democracy did in countries like Poland, Ukraine and the Philippines.
Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here? The second Trump administration has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations.
Adam Zyglis, editorial cartoonist for The Buffalo News, is really good. Scroll to your heart’s content to see his recent work.
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