It was 3:31 a.m. Saturday morning when the Houston Young Republicans posted a meme on Facebook promoting guns. It hadn’t even been a week since El Paso Walmart attack, where a white terrorist used an AK-47-style assault rifle to murder 22 people and mame even more.
The Signal wondered what other content the group had posted. We scoured social media over a few months, and here’s what we found.
In July, HYR re-posted a TIME magazine story titled “America Owns 46% of the World’s 1 Billion Guns” and commented, “These are rookie numbers. Gotta pump those numbers up.”
When asked about the gun-hungry posts, HYR didn’t immediately return our request for comment.
In June, the group’s chosen author for its book club was FOX News host Tucker Carlson, who has been linked to white supremacists. Carlson said the motive for the El Paso shooter — white nationalism, as deemed by the FBI — was a hoax. Since then, advertisers have been fleeing the host’s prime time program.
In July on Twitter, HYR wrote, “Keep Russia out of our elections. Pass #VoterID now!” – an affirmation of a similar President Donald Trump tweet. The Russians interfered — and are preparing to again in 2020—in U.S. elections through misinformation campaigns, not physically casting a ballot, ID or no ID. A voter ID bill is hardly the solution to social media meddling from Moscow.
The Houston Young Republicans describe themselves as bringing “together 18-40 year old, like-minded Republicans to work to advance the growth of the GOP by electing Republican nominees to public office.” They also claim to “deliver” on their mission, despite the city of Houston overwhelmingly electing Democrats to public office in 2016 and again in 2018.
