Via Politico: ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat.
Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
The whole piece deserves a full read, but before getting any further, it should be noted that “Young Republicans” is a group for 18-40 year olds (as per their own “About” page on their website). So this is not the case of a bunch of kids, not that that would excuse any of this.
From the same linked page, here is ther group’s mission:
The Young Republicans are fighting for the future of the Republican Party. Together, our mission is to recruit new Young Republicans and engage young voters with the Republican Party, train the future leaders of the United States, and elect Republican candidates from the top to the bottom of the ballot across the country.
The people on the Telegram chat are professionals seeking leadership within the group (or are linked to those seeking such positions). The Hill has a run-down of the professional bios of the participants: Who are the Young Republicans in explosive group chat? Most were active in state-level party leadership in various states, including a state senator from Vermont (Samuel Douglass). One was a member of the Trump administration, Michael Bartels, a senior adviser in the office of general counsel in the U.S. Small Business Administration.
I invite readers to read the entire list.
The combination of extremely racist language aimed at an array of targets (Jews, Blacks, Indians) as well as homophobic and misogynistic language, is pretty raw and stunning. It is all very casual, as are multiple Holocaust “jokes.”
On the one hand, I understand that tarring an entire political party with a revelation like this is not entirely fair (but also, not out of bounds); how the leadership of the broader party reacts does tell a tale.
Vice President Vance downplayed it all and was rather dismissive, as Politico noted: Vance downplays group chat messages: ‘Kids do stupid things, especially young boys.’
“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said on “The Charlie Kirk Show.” “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”
[…]
“I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence,” Vance wrote in the X post, which was reposted by several White House allies and official White House accounts.
That last reference is about Vance engaging in some whataboutism concerning a tweet from a Democrat that he does, apparently, wish to clutch pearls about.
But, of course, these were not a bunch of 17-year-old boys on 4chan trying to sound “edgy.” And even if they were, this is not behavior that should be dismissed as “boys being boys.” As the father of three, I know a whole lot about boys and their beings, but this kind of chatter would not be dismissed as harmless had I encountered it from them.
Here’s the clip of Vance, which is worth a listen.
In the clip, he says, “I’m like an old guy. I’m 41 years old…most of what the stupid things that I did when I was a teenager and a young adult they’re they’re not on Internet.”
The are multiple problems with this. First and foremost, the participants in this chat are not kids. They are adults, again in positions of leadership and influence, and many of them are essentially in Vance’s peer group.
Mother Jones reports on some of the ages:
Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans vice chair, and Luke Mosiman, chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, were, at 24, the youngest participants in the chat whose ages Mother Jones could determine through public reporting and records. Politico reported Hendrix used variations of a racial slur more than a dozen times in the chat.
[…]
The oldest appears to be Joe Maligno, who public records suggest is 35.
So, my youngest son is 24 years of age. That is old enough to know better, and it would be patronizing of me to suggest that he is just some “kid” who wouldn’t be able to comprehend what he was doing. There are almost certainly people of that age who work for (or at least near) Vance. And if 41 makes Vance an “old guy,” then 35 is old adjacent. I was in the process of applying for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor when I was 35.
It should be noted that these people all appear to be suffering professional consequences for this situation, as multiple outlets have reported job losses, which demonstrates that there is still a lot of social disapproval for this kind of talk, which is comforting to a point. But Vance is not condemning this stuff the way we should want a national party leader to do. Dismissing this all as kids being kids is simply a lie.
Also, this from the clip above is worth noting, as it shifts the blame from those writing horrible, racist, and Naziesque rhetoric to the reporter who reported it.
I’m gonna tell my kids, especially my boys, don’t put things on the internet. Like be careful with what you post if you put something in a group chat assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.
See! The real villains here aren’t the people making jokes about sending people to the showers to be executed. Oh, no! The real “scumbag” is the person who reported on adults who seek to be leaders within one of our two political parties engaging in highly offensive, racist banter.
While it is not bad advice to tell kids that anything they type into a device could become public, the real lesson here should be: racist and Nazi adjacent language is the real problem.
By the way, the focus on “don’t do stupid things on the internet” dodges the reality that what we really have here is a bunch of people communicating this way in their private lives, and just happened to write it down.
I would like to think this is an isolated set of people, but this seems unlikely.
And it is less than encouraging that Vance sees the need to lie about it all and downplay it, rather than fully condemning it and calling it out.
