When I began writing opinion pieces earlier this year, I never planned to address the elephant in the room. The fact that it has taken me nearly 12 months to speak publicly about what happened is probably evidence enough of that.
But later this month, on October 14th, is the first anniversary of the day that my life - at least the only version of it I thought was possible at the time - would end.
That sounds morbid, and maybe it is. But it’s the truth. And if I’m going to tell this story, the truth is the only way I can do it.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me save you the Google search.
I didn’t just belong to the group. I created it.
The group was private and had no more than a dozen members, most of them my close friends and political allies. The messages spanned roughly seven months during my campaign to lead the Young Republican National Federation, the Republican Party’s national youth auxiliary.
Many of the messages were exactly what you’d expect from a private chat between young political operatives: daily life, family, politics, memes, jokes, and the kind of nonsense people say when they believe nobody is watching.
Admittedly, some messages shouldn’t have been sent. According to POLITICO, among those tens of thousands of messages were more than 200 uses of epithets and slurs. Many of the phrases used were no different than those you’d hear in an edgy Instagram reel or read on X.
That didn’t stop people from being offended.
Now, this is the part where I could tell you it was a political hit job. I could call it the work of the liberal fake news media. I could tell you that we were set up.
In some ways, that is all the truth. But I don’t see a benefit in relitigating the past.
The bottom line is that I made stupid jokes that offended people. I am not racist. I do not “love” Hitler. I am not antisemitic. I am, however, a guy with a dark sense of humor who sometimes finds himself funnier than he actually is.
And for that, I, along with nearly a dozen other young leaders, paid a heavy price.
For me, it was the painful end of a career I had spent 13 years building, and the people I once considered friends and colleagues who disappeared overnight. It was the thousands of hateful messages I received online, the anonymous voicemails left in the middle of the night, and actual letters in the mail warning me to “sleep with one eye open.”
I was doxxed. My personal information had been posted publicly on Reddit and other online message boards. And it didn’t stop there. People with way too much time on their hands didn’t just come after me - they went after my family and friends too.
There are still people obsessed with me, even a year later.
In hindsight, the public fallout lasted only a few weeks. But those few weeks felt endless.
Every morning I woke to the same thing all over again: another headline, another reporter asking for comment, more text messages and voicemails, more people asking what happened, and more people I thought I could trust suddenly gone.
It was like Groundhog Day - except it was October, I wasn’t the fictional weatherman Phil Connors, and there was absolutely nothing funny about it.
To ordinary people - those living outside the bubble that is political life - what was actually happening went much deeper than what the headlines or talking heads would tell you.
Because of the people involved with the leak, as well as the professional network surrounding me and those in the chat, the story triggered a panicked reaction throughout the Republican political world. Party officials at the state and national levels held emergency meetings. Even at the White House, the President and Cabinet officials were briefed to prepare for the fallout.
What began as a private group chat among a handful of young political operatives became, for a moment, a national political scandal and institutional crisis that reached the highest levels of party leadership and our government. That is the real measure of how thoroughly this story was weaponized.
And it also exposed a larger problem inside the Republican Party that has become increasingly difficult to ignore: we have, in many ways, become the party of pearl-clutching.
When a crisis or scandal hits, too many of those in elected office jump to react - sometimes issuing the strongest condemnation, demanding resignations, and, in this case, treating stupid jokes as if they were a formal policy platform.
Ordinary people do this too, but elected officials and those holding positions of leadership have a special responsibility not to feed the frenzy.
The media plays a role in this as well, obviously. Headlines today are engineered for clicks, not context. The incentive structure rewards the most dramatic possible framing because outrage travels faster than nuance.
But the decision to amplify that framing still belongs to the people who hold power, and for many of them, overreaction has become the default setting in today’s political environment.
The absurdity peaked, however, when the story jumped from political news into pure entertainment. Those of us in the group chat became a part of every opening monologue on late-night television. Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and even Saturday Night Live all took cheap shots at the group chat and its members.
Then there were the grandstanding politicians, like Gavin Newsom, who called for a federal investigation and congressional hearings into the group chat. It highlights, once again, just how thoroughly this scandal had been weaponized. It was never about accountability - it was purely performative.
Truthfully, though, the public humiliation and professional destruction were not even the hardest parts.
The hardest was what came after, when everyone finally moved on.
The past 12 months have felt like a prison sentence.
I know that sounds dramatic, and I don’t really care.
Being publicly humiliated is one thing. Losing your career is another. But being suddenly cut off from the world you spent your entire adult life building is something else entirely.
I was depressed. There were days I felt too anxious and too hopeless to be around my own family, days I didn’t leave my bed, and days I barely ate. I felt as if I had lost control over my entire life.
Maybe that’s difficult for people to understand if they didn’t know me before all of this - before I lost almost everything.
I’ve spent most of my adult life always on the go. I was always working, always thinking, and always talking to someone on the phone to plan what came next. I was comfortable living at a pace that most people would probably find exhausting.
To go from that to near-complete isolation - almost overnight - is difficult to comprehend, let alone accept.
I don’t say any of this to elicit your sympathy. I don’t want it, and I certainly don’t need it.
But by now you’re probably wondering: Peter, how did POLITICO get access to your private messages?
Friendships in politics can be a double-edged sword. Your ally on Monday can become your enemy by Friday. I learned that lesson the hard way.
What began as a gesture of goodwill intended to build trust between another leader in the Young Republicans and me backfired. I later found out that a member of our group was being extorted by that same leader for a complete transcript of our messages. And it would later come to light that the same leader had been colluding with a POLITICO reporter to fabricate several hit pieces on me.
Those of you who know me know that I am obsessed with Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. There’s a line in that movie that has shaped the way I’ve operated in the political arena for many years. It’s the scene where Jimmy Conway tells a young Henry Hill that he just learned the two greatest things in life: never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.
I guess some people aren’t a fan of the classics.
But, seriously, this is all a shining example of one of the dirtiest parts of the business that most people, including my own parents, had no idea existed.
The individual who engineered that effort has, by multiple accounts, been shielded by the president himself despite recommendations from senior aides and cabinet officials who wanted him dismissed from his role within the administration. He has continued to receive that protection despite a string of incidents that have, quite frankly, put the administration in a bad light.
I won’t name him or any of the operatives who supported his nefarious actions. Those individuals all know who they are. They know what they did. And they will be labeled as dishonest and untrustworthy for the remainder of their professional careers.
The point, however, is simply this: the same system that moved with remarkable speed to isolate and discard me somehow found a way to protect the person most responsible for putting the entire episode in motion.
That isn’t a grievance. It is an observation, and it is one I will leave there.
Sometimes justice isn’t expedient. Sometimes it is not obvious. And sometimes the only way to move forward is to leave the past where it belongs.
Hate and vengeance do not get me out of bed in the morning. They never did, and they never will. What gets me out of bed is the burning desire to do something incredible with the time I have on this earth.
It’s why I excelled in a career in public service. It’s why I got involved in politics. It’s why I poured so much of myself into transforming my state’s young Republican organization into a political powerhouse that raised more money, elected more young candidates, and grew its membership further than at any point in its more than 90-year history.
And with all that success came the opportunity - and, I believed, the responsibility - to speak my mind.
As a rising leader in the party, I became an outspoken critic of Republican leadership at every level. I was not afraid to say when Republicans were failing to connect with voters, failing to mobilize them, or simply failing to do their jobs. There were even times when I supported candidates the party establishment did not.
I did not ask permission. I did not kiss rings. I made decisions based on what I believed to be right.
And in a political system that often rewards blind loyalty and fealty, that can make you dangerous.
It was never a secret that some people did not like me. It was never a secret that some felt threatened by me. And it was certainly never a secret that some wanted to stand where I stood.
But truly, what made the experience increasingly stomach-churning was the selective outrage following the exposé’s publication - and no, I’m not talking about Democrats. In today’s political environment, that is simply par for the course.
I’m talking about fellow Republicans - the people I once considered close colleagues, friends, and political allies. At the time, I tried to justify their reactions as the nature of our business. In politics, sometimes you have to sacrifice one to save the herd.
But the media’s treatment of these messages was something else entirely. Take, for example, the message that became the headline and, ultimately, my permanent brand: “I love Hitler.”
In the actual exchange, someone reported that a Young Republican group had promised to vote for “the most right-wing person” in the national leadership race.
My response was a sarcastic, deliberately over-the-top joke: “Great. I love Hitler.”
There was even a smiley-face emoji.
It was the same kind of dark, exaggerated humor that has become commonplace among young people in online political spaces. It was not a manifesto. It was not a declaration of ideology. It was, simply, a stupid joke about supporting the furthest-right candidate in an internal election for a youth political organization that most Americans don’t even know exists.
Yet that single sentence, stripped of everything surrounding it, was transformed into evidence that I was an antisemitic monster.
The context was always irrelevant because the narrative needed a villain, and I was convenient.
The double standard became even harder to ignore when, at the same time, Democratic Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones faced scrutiny over text messages in which he fantasized about putting two bullets into the head of a Republican House speaker and ranked that person ahead of Hitler and Pol Pot as the person who should die.
Those messages involved explicit political violence and the family of a sitting lawmaker.
The media coverage and institutional reaction were noticeably softer, more temporary, and far less career-ending for the man involved. Jay Jones now serves as the Commonwealth of Virginia’s 49th attorney general.
The pattern, however, didn’t stop there.
In the year since my situation became public, there have been several other leaks involving group chats of young political operatives, and the reaction from both sides of the aisle, as well as the media, seemed overwhelmingly muted.
For Democrats, the silence is hardly surprising.
But for Republicans - including many of the same people who publicly condemned me - the response has ranged from total silence to a far softer version of the outrage they once performed.
It’s frustrating because, if the principle were really about the content of private messages, the reaction would be consistent.
It wasn’t. The outrage was selective.
It makes you wonder whether the original response was actually about principle or politics.
Examples of this exist on both sides of the aisle. The point isn’t to celebrate anyone’s private messages, but rather that the rules of cancellation are applied selectively, and the application almost always tracks with who is useful to destroy and who is useful to protect.
That realization has forced me to answer another question I have been asked repeatedly over the past year: Why remain loyal to a president and political party that did not stand with you when it mattered?
The answer, again, is not that simple.
Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment - “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican” - no longer exists in any meaningful form.
And maybe it never really did.
But I was raised in this business by mentors who taught me something slightly more important: Republicans should still try to work together even when they disagree. The foundation of any relationship is trust and loyalty.
Outside of simply being good at what you do, loyalty is one of the most valuable qualities anyone can possess. That is true in politics as it is in life.
The problem, however, is that too many people in politics today treat trust and loyalty as one-way streets. They demand it from everyone around them while feeling perfectly comfortable abandoning it the moment it becomes inconvenient.
I was taught differently. And even if some of the people who taught me those lessons ultimately failed to live by them when the pressure arrived, it is my choice to stay loyal to the broader mission of the Republican Party - to the institution and people that, for the most part, still defend and advance the values I believe in.
That’s also why, despite everything that happened, I would never become a Democrat.
I’m not going to trade one set of problems for another simply because people on my own side disappointed me. I still support the Republican Party. I support President Trump. And I believe in many of the policies that are outlined in our party’s platform.
The fact that I am still willing to fight for them is evidence enough that I still care.
Now, if you’re wondering whether I have any remorse, that answer is also complicated.
I regret the pain that this episode caused my family and loved ones.
I regret the stupidity of putting certain jokes in writing.
But I do not regret who I am. I do not regret the work I did. And I do not regret refusing to pretend that a private group chat of young political operatives trading memes, barbs, and dark humor was the equivalent of a neo-Nazi manifesto.
And, probably more importantly, I don’t regret standing up for myself.
Cancellation is not a single event. It is a process.
First comes the leak. Then the headlines. Then the ritual condemnation from people who once sought your help. Then the quiet professional blacklisting. Then the isolation that follows once the cameras move on.
Eventually, you’re left with knowledge that something you said privately can be weaponized by anyone who gains access to it and has an agenda.
And you learn that the same people who demand accountability rarely apply it evenly.
I’ve spent the past year writing, thinking, and rebuilding on my own terms.
The desire that got me into politics in the first place - to do something incredible - has not gone away. If anything, it’s become sharper.
And perhaps that’s the greatest thing this experience took from me: the illusion that success, friendships, or years of hard work somehow make you immune from being discarded. They don’t.
But it also gave me something I didn’t have before: perspective.
I know now that my career was never the total of my life. I know that political power is temporary. I know that people who seem indispensable today can disappear tomorrow.
And I know that the only thing I ultimately control is what I choose to do with the time I have.
So, to all my critics and the many rivals who hoped this episode would end me: I am not going anywhere.
I plan to remain an active voice in politics, in New York and across the country, whether they like it or not.
The people who thought a single leak could permanently silence someone who spent 13 years building something real are about to learn just how wrong they were.