Nicholas Rafael has been put on leave by the New York Young Republican Club after he was linked to an X account accused of posting bigoted and antisemitic messages. The club’s suspended treasurer now sits at the center of a case that has put one of New York’s better-known young conservative groups back under scrutiny.
The account linked to Rafael, @basedredford, was reported to have called Texas Senator Ted Cruz an “Israel first goy slave” and to have posted that “your society will thrive when you kick the Jews out of town.” New York Magazine also said members of the club followed the account, and published an image it said showed Rafael giving a sieg heil salute in Nazi paraphernalia. Rafael told the magazine the photo was not real and the account was not his.
The New York Young Republican Club said through an attorney that its internal investigation is still pending. Stefano Forte, the club’s president, said the group has thousands of members and exists so people can express their ideas in an honest and respectful manner, adding that it takes swift corrective action when a member fails to do that. The leave places Rafael in limbo while the club decides whether the allegations warrant a harder response.
That pressure lands at a moment when young conservative groups have been hit by repeated scandals tied to racist and antisemitic behavior. A former president at a major university’s Republican club said young conservatives are less likely to be fans of Ben Shapiro and more likely to follow Nick Fuentes, while a leaked group chat in March showed young Republican club members at Florida International University using the n-word more than 400 times and joking about beheading, dissecting and crucifying black people. In March, a photograph also circulated showing members of the University of Florida Federation of College Republicans throwing something, and Vish Burra was fired in November after posting an AI-generated video depicting Jews as “scheming” cockroaches counting money in a dark room.
The club has tried before to draw a line. It turned away Nick Fuentes from a gala in December, a reminder that the fight inside these circles is no longer just over message discipline but over who gets to define the movement at all. For Rafael, the immediate question is whether the pending investigation clears him or turns a leave into something permanent.
