Gavin Wax, the Far-Right Activist Who Vowed “Retribution,” Lands Role at the FCC

For the past six years, Gavin Wax has held court as the president of the New York Young Republican Club, a group he helped turn from a small, stodgy establishment outfit into “a vanguard of the Trump movement.” Under his leadership, the club has moved far to the right. It’s hosted events attended by white nationalists, budding foreign authoritarians, and, of course, George Santos, whose congressional campaign it endorsed before he became a convicted felon. Wax recently announced that he was stepping down as the club’s president, and now he has revealed that he will be taking a post in the Trump administration as chief of staff and advisor to Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington. Wax, the 31-year-old former day trader, has long been a die-hard Trump loyalist. “Once President Trump is back in office,” Wax said at the 2023 NYYRC annual dinner, “we won’t be playing nice anymore. It will be a time for retribution. All those responsible for destroying our once-great country will be held to account after baseless years of investigations and government lies and media lies against this man.” Like Trump, Wax was once a staunch opponent of media censorship and “Big Tech,” and had called for an end to legal protections for social media companies. An online libertarian magazine Wax founded, Liberty Conservative, once devoted quite a bit of ink to trolling Trump’s new benefactor, Elon Musk. Much of that rhetoric seems to have vanished since Musk bought Twitter and most of the tech world has gotten on board in support of Trump. Now, Wax’s focus at the FCC, like Trump’s, appears to be mainstream media outlets.