A top aide to a vulnerable Pennsylvania Republican was in a college group chat that traded racist and antisemitic memes, a report says.
Arnaud Armstrong, who serves as communications director for Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA), was a member of a GroupMe chat while at the University of Pittsburgh where members swapped Nazi memes, jokes about the Holocaust and racist stereotypes, Judge Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The report lands at a bad time for Mackenzie, a first-term Republican who is locked in a tight reelection fight for a closely watched swing seat.
Armstrong joined Mackenzie's team in 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile. Years earlier, in 2018, he was a senior at the University of Pittsburgh and was active in the College Republicans. He ran a student outlet called Polis Media as its editor-in-chief, and the outlet's coverage ranged from hockey to paleoconservatism, a brand of right-wing politics popularized by Pat Buchanan, who has a long record of antisemitic remarks, according to Judge Street Journal.
The chat had more than 80 members. After an X account posted screenshots of it, Armstrong claimed the chat's whole purpose was to gather the most offensive memes on the internet.
One of the memes, sent by Julia Henke, a member of Armstrong's editorial staff at Polis Media, showed a photo of Black children excited over cotton candy alongside the caption "You mean I don't have to pick it and I can eat it?!"
Henke also shared an image of Hitler's face pasted over a black-and-white concentration camp photo, with a made-up quote reading "You can't hate Jews when there is no Jews." She followed up with another Hitler image captioned "You can't be racist if there is no other race."
According to the report, Henke once said she hoped to someday land a "federal judge position."
Other memes in the chat made light of statutory rape, mocked Black people over absent fathers and pushed the stereotype that Asian children eat puppies, the report said.