Pedro L. Gonzalez, a very online polemical paleoconservative writer who has a knack for inspiring nicknames indicative of his jackbooted Latinx style — “Burrito Mussolini,” “Barrio Nazi” and “Taco von Ribbentrop” are just a few — found himself in a dunk tank of hot water this week upon the publication at Breitbart of a hit piece authored by Matt Boyle. Headlined “Exclusive — Rising Conservative Influencer Pedro Gonzalez Regularly Espoused Racist and Anti-Semitic Sentiments in Private Messages,” the piece was really just a stringing together of screencaps from texts purportedly sent by Gonzalez over several years, including a torrent of offensive racist and antisemitic material.
The texts are disgusting and gross, and indefensible as such — even though some comments seem in jest, they’re utterly consistent with his public invocation of terms such as “Rothschild physiognomy,” rightly denounced by our own Douglas Murray. But there’s a wrinkle here that we can’t just dismiss: these were messages sent in private, to a group presumed to be private.
So: who else was in on it? What was the context of these comments? Absent additional information, it is made to appear as if Gonzalez was a lonely racist shouting into the digital aether. Clearly that was not the case.
The motivations are troublesome here as well. Boyle’s piece reads like a gotcha hitjob from The Daily Beast targeted at a mid-tier conservative Twitter personality — exactly the opposite of the type of journalism the site’s eponymous founder favored. The sources are almost certainly driven by the fact that Gonzalez, a longtime Donald Trump supporter, has of late switched sides to the Ron DeSantis camp. Absent that shift, it’s unlikely this outing would have ever happened. So what were the presumably still pro-Trump members of this group saying in response to Gonzalez’s Jew-baiting rhetoric? Who else was in that text chain — and what did they have to say? Unless it was to shout down Gonzalez’s comments as inappropriate, we are inclined to believe there’s more to this story.
Trump influencers have already piled on, with former acting DNI Ric Grenell among many denouncing the comments.
But for his part, Gonzalez seems undeterred, denouncing the report as a smear. “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 tweeted. (His fuller response is here.)
Whether it’s fair to describe texts sent just a few years ago as from a “different, dumb season” or not, the real question is what was left out of the story. We deserve to know the context! We urge Breitbart, in their founders’ spirit of sunlight and raw data: release the full Pedro files!
