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,” as he said last year. 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 announced this month that he was stepping down as the club’s president, and on Friday he revealed that he would be taking a post in the Trump administration as chief of staff and advisor to Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington. 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, according to Politico, “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. (“Elon Musk: The Corporate Arm Of The Deep-State,” was one such 2017 article.)
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. In an email, he told me, “The issues of censorship, content moderation, and platform accountability remain important—not just in the context of individual CEOs, but as broader questions of public policy and civil liberties. We’re also focused on ensuring that licensed broadcasters are truly serving the public interest, as required by law. That includes holding legacy media to account just as much as newer tech platforms, and ensuring that all players in the communications space operate on a level playing field.”
In 2023, Mother Jones identified Wax as one of a number of MAGA influencers who’d been defending the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui with op-eds suggested by Guo’s supporters. Guo was convicted of racketeering and fraud last year. Wax had once been the marketing director for Gettr, a social media site allegedly controlled by Guo. But Wax told me that an important part of the FCC’s work now is “defending against foreign influence in our information ecosystem.”
Wax’s ascension to the FCC was met with cheers in MAGA world from everyone from Steve Bannon to Kari Lake.
Thank you Kari! https://t.co/JXWES8zUR6
— Gavin Mario Wax
(@GavinWax) April 19, 2025
He seems a natural fit for the FCC under its Trump-aligned chairman Brendan Carr. Carr has touted his own MAGA credentials and has taken up Trump’s call for the agency to investigate NPR and PBS over their sponsorship practices, and ABC and NBC over DEI efforts. The FCC also recently reinstated a complaint against CBS over an interview with Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign that Trump has alleged was deceptively edited to influence the election. Trump is suing the network for $20 billion over the interview. Trump’s FCC also revived complaints against NBC for allowing Harris to appear on Saturday Night Live during the campaign.
Last month, several congressional Democrats launched a probe of what they called the FCC’s “sham” investigations designed “to target and intimidate news organizations” that were unpopular with Trump and Musk.
Even at this FCC, however, Wax is likely to be a controversial hire. His ties to the more extreme fringes of the far-right are unusual credentials for a government job, though less so in this administration. For instance, in 2018, Wax penned a column in the American Thinker headlined, “We are all Proud Boys now,” in which he decried “Antifa” and “leftist terrorist” attacks on conservatives like himself.
“Out-of-context quotes from Gavin McInnes are being used to paint him as a right-wing militant leader when he in all actuality he just runs a patriotic fraternal group who like America and beer,” he wrote, defending the founder of the far-right militia group whose members later helped orchestrate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.