JTA — Florida GOP leaders, candidates and a university president are denouncing a group chat in which local Young Republican leaders made numerous antisemitic and racist remarks. Some are calling for its orchestrator to be removed from his position in the local Republican Party.

But a prominent Jewish Republican in Florida, Representative Randy Fine, responded to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment without condemning the group chat.

“Given your stories are fabricated, you don’t need me to comment to make them up,” Fine, who is part of the party’s far-right flank, said via a text. Fine has previously objected to JTA coverage of him.

James Fishback, a fringe GOP gubernatorial candidate who has courted the online far right, meanwhile told JTA, “I condemn all forms of hatred.” He also said that one of the chat’s participants, whose social media profile reportedly claimed he was a Fishback campaign staffer, had no association with the Fishback campaign.

The WhatsApp chat’s racist and antisemitic content was first reported this week by the Miami Herald and the Floridian, a local conservative outlet.

The reports mark the second time in months that a Young Republicans group chat was revealed to have featured Nazi jokes and racist comments. The revelations come as the party is experiencing deepening divisions over antisemitism and sentiments about Israel.

Chat participants last fall used the slur “kike” to refer to Jewish women and babies, said they would “definitely not marry a Jew,” renamed the chat in reference to the imagined “Nazi heaven” of Agartha and joked about undergoing “reverse Zionism” to a Nazi paradise. They also used a racist epithet to discuss killing Black people in the manner of mass Jewish extermination during the Holocaust, according to reports about the texts.

Participants included the secretary of the Miami-Dade GOP, who also started the group chat and, according to The Floridian, reportedly sought to recruit racist and antisemitic participants into the party. The president of Florida International University’s chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative group founded by Charlie Kirk, and the school’s........

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