NEW: Rep. Ryan Mackenzie’s Senior Aide Was Member of Group Chat Rife With Jokes About Child Rape, Antisemitism, Racism, and Hitler

“Mackenzie is an outspoken proponent of Israel… Meanwhile, he employs a senior aide who was a member of a GroupMe chat rife with Nazi memes.”

Washington, D.C. – Shocking new reporting from Timmy Facciola at Judge Street Journal reveals that GOP Rep. Ryan Mackenzie’s (PA-07) longtime senior aide, Arnaud Armstrong, was part of a group chat where participants shared disturbing jokes and memes about child rape, antisemitism, racism, the Holocaust, and Adolf Hitler.

According to the report, the group chat included jokes about statutory rape, Asian children eating puppies, Black children picking cotton, Black people not knowing their fathers, and Adolf Hitler achieving the “total extermination” of the Jewish people.

Read more below:

Judge Street Journal: Comms Director for Embattled PA Congressman Belonged to Bigoted Group Chat in College
By Timmy Facciola
October 6, 2026

• Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie’s communications director belonged to a college group chat where members joked about statutory rape, Asian children eating puppies, Black people not knowing their fathers, and Adolf Hitler achieving total extermination of the Jewish people.
  
• Mackenzie is an outspoken proponent of Israel, and he’s running in a tight re-election race in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley with support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated super PAC, the United Democracy Project. Meanwhile, he employs a senior aide who was a member of a GroupMe chat rife with Nazi memes.

• Long before he began working with Mackenzie in 2024, Arnaud Armstrong was a senior at the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, where he was active in the College Republicans and served as editor-in-chief of a student outlet called Polis Media. It covered everything from the NHL to paleoconservatism—the nationalist strain of conservative thought championed by antisemite Pat Buchanan.

• All the while, Armstrong was in a group chat whose express purpose, he claimed after getting exposed, was to collect the most offensive memes on the internet. It had more than 80 members.
  
• “You mean I don’t have to pick it and I can eat it?!” says the caption of a photo showing Black children excited about cotton candy. One of Armstrong’s editorial staffers, Julia Henke, who once expressed a desire to run for a “federal judge position” someday, sent the meme.

• “You can’t hate Jews when there is [sic] no Jews” reads one of Henke’s other submissions, attributing the fabricated quote to Hitler, whose face she pasted over a black-and-white photo of a concentration camp. She took a second crack at the joke with a different photo of the Nazi leader and captioned it “You can’t be racist if there is no other race.”
  
• Henke also sent a photo of a baby with a puppy in her mouth, captioned “NO LITTLE ASIAN DON’T EAT THEM RAW.”
  
• College Republican Kirk Breiner’s taste was dark. He sent a cartoon of a cat speeding in a convertible after it received a text stating, “I haven’t hit puberty yet.” And an image of SpongeBob Squarepants with a caption about masturbating to a documentary about the Rwandan genocide. And another depicting a Jimmy Neutron character expressing gratitude after “you drop the soap in prison but the other guy let you pick it up without ramming an entire Nigerian tribe up your ass.”
  
• Another member of the College Republicans sent a meme with the caption “You’ve heard of Elf on the Shelf, Now get ready for,” above a cutout of the Winnie-the-Pooh character Piglet on the head of a Black child. Armstrong told the Pitt News that he joined the College Republicans his freshman year.
  
• A student named Devon Valinsky sent a meme with the caption “I’M SICK OF THESE HOLOCAUST JOKES ANNE FRANKLY, THEY NEED TO STOP,” pasted around an image of the teenage girl who died in a concentration camp.
  
• After Valinsky sent a meme that said white guys can’t say the n-word and Black guys can’t say “hello Dad!” Henke tagged Armstrong in a subsequent message—indicating he was a member of the chat.

• When his membership was revealed in 2018 by a group of campus activists, Armstrong called the memes “distasteful” and described the people who exposed him as “radicals.” He said the chat did not reflect “the character, vision, and principles of Polis Media,” which shuttered soon after. Both the Nation and Pitt News covered the scandal extensively at the time.

• “While we thoroughly denounce racially insensitive images, regardless of their reason for being posted to a private chat, we also denounce this kind of abusive and targeted assassination of character,” Armstrong said in a statement at the time.

• He told the Pitt News that he did not participate in the chat. The screenshots reviewed by the Judge Street Journal do not show Armstrong sending any memes. The full history of messages remains unavailable.

• “There’s nothing funny about the Holocaust or the presence of this rhetoric in the GOP,” said Jacob Spiegel, communications director for the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “These latest revelations confirm just how embedded racism and antisemitism are in Republican politics.”

• Matt Moret, a local journalist who worked at the Pitt News at the time, did not believe Armstrong’s explanation.

• “Arnaud Armstrong, Polis EIC, once pitched me a Pitt News column arguing that minority communities could solve many of the social issues facing them if black fathers just stopped ‘abandoning’ families. So please spare me the ‘these memes are research’ line,” Moret wrote in January 2018 in a since-deleted tweet reviewed by the Judge Street Journal.

• Discussion connecting Armstrong’s previous group chat membership to his boss’s House race began last week on a Reddit thread.

• Armstrong did not respond to a request for comment. Last month’s polling had Mackenzie trailing by five points against Democratic challenger Bob Brooks.

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