When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love Hitler”; that joke about gas chambers and rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” and monkeys in zoos, and throw around words like faggot and retarded, they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us.
And they’re hardly surprising. Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust denial, and Stephen Miller’s rage-filled threats, the young loyalists who wrote the texts were speaking the language of the people they admire most. Nor was it surprising when, the day after Politico revealed the texts’ existence, the image of an American flag altered into the shape of a swastika appeared on the cubicle wall behind a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of a MAGA congressman. In that culture, the rehabilitation of the man who stands for the worst in humanity was inevitable.
[Jonathan Chait: Why is Vance defending that racist group chat?]
Having been given permission from the country’s most powerful person, the Young Republicans received forgiveness from its second-most-powerful. Vice President J. D. Vance refused to condemn their words, explaining: “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.” But the authors of the texts have already grown up—they’re men in their 20s and 30s, climbing the rungs of Republican Party ladders in Kansas, Arizona, Vermont, and New York, firm in the belief that the viler their language, the higher they’ll go. One is already an officeholder.
For Vance, ethical judgment has become a pure matter of partisanship, to the point of overcoming his most personal bonds. When a DOGE member was revealed to have posted “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “Normalize Indian hate,” Vance—married to an Indian American—scoffed at the ensuing outrage and demanded that the offender be rehired. But when private citizens anywhere said something ugly about Charlie Kirk, the vice president went after their livelihood. Once morality is rotted out by partisan relativism, the floor gives way and the fall into nihilism is swift.
The abandonment of a universal morality isn’t just philosophically wrong—it’s politically stupid. Any successful opposition to Trump has to begin with a lucid understanding of what’s at stake: not just past and present harms done to the marginalized, but everything that Americans once believed they cared about, including the values that were co-opted by the right before MAGA abandoned them—respect for law and custom, patriotism, family ties, common decency. To some liberals and progressives these values came to sound old-fashioned, corny, even dangerous. But anyone frightened by the country’s downward spiral has to believe that our society still shares them, and can still respond to them if someone makes the appeal.
[David A. Graham: It’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it]
If the Young Republicans’ texts are seen merely as attacks on the groups they name, then they become the problem of Black and gay people, Jews, and women. But the texts represent a larger atrocity, one that has befallen all of America. Once you base moral judgments on group identity and political convenience, it becomes possible for people on the left to be anti-racist and anti-Semitic, and for people on the right to embrace Muslim haters in Israel and Jew haters in Germany. If moral values aren’t simple and universal—if they require a facility with the language of graduate seminars and single-issue activism—they won’t move the immobilized, alienated, numb Americans who still haven’t given up on their country’s promise. The dehumanization of any group dehumanizes everyone. There will never be an end to learning this lesson.
In Other News
Trump touts slavery icon as Vance whitewashes racist texts. These guys aren’t saying quiet part out loud — they’re shouting
Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are leaning back into an issue that even many of his own supporters argue derailed his first term in the White House after just a few short months: racism.
Even with his party fighting a messaging war over a government shutdown and the president on a victory lap over his Israel-Hamas peace plan, Trumpworld fell back this week into several conversations about the Republican Party’s issues with racism and the expressions of support for violence that MAGA seeks to pin entirely on the left.
Donald Trump himself delivered a one-two punch to hammer that negative image of the GOP into place on Wednesday when he highlighted the extreme anti-immigrant views of one of his closest advisers while tossing out praise for a Confederate leader. The latter moment was viewed as a Charlottesville-esque dogwhistle to the far right in the eyes of many of Trump’s critics.
For Vice President Vance, it meant a whataboutism defense of the pro-Nazi rhetoric, anti-Black verbiage and explicit calls for violence and death in leaked Young Republican chat logs that hit Washington and Capitol Hill this week like a sewage spill.
Responding to a Politico article which uncovered hundreds of examples of usage of racist slurs for Black people, homophobic slurs for LGBTQ+ people and a bottomless pit of misery, violence and rage that apparently dominates the conversation among some prominent young conservative activists, Vance at first claimed that a messages sent by a Democrat running for attorney general in Virginia expressing a cold acceptance of violence towards Republicans and their families was much worse.
“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia. I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence,” Vance wrote in response to the Young Republicans’ chat outrage.
By comparison, in the group chat, members of some of the most prominent Young Republicans groups in the country — organizations which funnel operatives to Republican campaigns, congressional offices and state legislators (and who’s ages run from 18 to 40) — stated repeatedly that they wanted to see mass murder of their political enemies and remarked about putting people in gas chambers.
Unlike Vance, other prominent Republicans — like House Speaker Mike Johnson — condemned the texts unequivocally. But they still came as unforced-error distractions at a time when the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are trying to refocus the narrative.
And it’s the sort of “ironic” racism that has long permeated circles of the younger conservative right, most famously exemplified by Nick Fuentes and his “Groyper” faction. Long considered persona non grata at CPAC and Turning Point USA conferences, young conservatives in College Republican and Young Republican circles have increasingly been warning about the growing influence of this kind of extreme online shock-value racism and sexism in such groups for years.
This week it looked like that wing of the far right has been gaining real purchase in Washington.
As if that weren’t enough, Trump, at a White House event on Wednesday, appeared to joke that his senior aide Stephen Miller harbored views that weren’t exactly palatable for most Americans.
“I want to thank Stephen Miller, who is right back in the audience right there. I’d love to have him [come up]. I love watching him on television. I’d love to have him come up and explain his true feelings. Maybe not his truest feelings. That might be going a little too far,” Trump quipped.
On the same day that he joked about his mass deportation architect’s “truest feelings,” Trump gave a completely unprovoked shout-out to a figure of absolute racial resentment in American society: Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Declaring that a room full of some of the nation’s biggest business leaders “would’ve been OK” with a statue of Lee in Washington, the president added that “it would have been OK with me” to honor a man who led a war against the American government and sought to break up the Union to defend the seceding states’ presumed right to continue the institution of human slavery of Black people.
Meanwhile, at the State Department, officials continue to use the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a cudgel against visa holders and posted a thread on X this week celebrating the revocation of status for several foreign nationals, not identified by name, who posted messages on social media decrying Kirk as a racist and a misogynist after his death. Not for threatening violence against him — merely for having the audacity to criticize his works.
Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was shot dead by a sniper as he spoke at Utah Valley University last month in an attack that sparked a furious effort by the right to enforce recriminations against Americans, public officials and private citizens alike, who denounced Kirk and his views after his murder.
Congress can’t even escape this cloud.
Johnson, on Thursday, held a press conference to mark Day 16 of a federal government shutdown that has now endangered pay for members of the armed services and resulted in thousands of federal workers being furloughed. Thousands more were targeted in retribution by the White House and Office of Management and Budget in reduction-in-force (layoff) initiatives.
Instead, several questions Johnson took Thursday morning were focused not only on the Nazi-loving texts uncovered by Politico but the discovery of an image depicting an American flag with the stripes rearranged to form a swastika in a Republican congressman’s office.
The image, seen on a staffer’s cubicle wall during a virtual meeting, was found inside the office of Rep. Dave Taylor, a congressman from Ohio. Taylor called Capitol Police “immediately,” he told Politico, upon learning about the image. But responsibility for the image being pinned to a cubicle wall in his office has not been established.
“I am aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office,” Taylor said. “The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff, or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms.”
Though it’s never given many inside Trump’s inner circle much pause, these kinds of conversations have always given congressional Republicans migraines. During Trump’s first term, Republicans on the Hill were known for dodging reporters in hallways and elevators, and generally to refuse answering questions about issues like Charlottesville and the president’s comments about “s***hole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean.
Johnson and Thune do not have that luxury. They are trapped in front of the cameras, both by virtue of being in the majority and due to their ongoing efforts to “win” the messaging war over Democrats on the government shutdown.
And they are inextricably tied to Trump — and to his rhetoric.
White House Shrugs Off Young Republicans Praising Hitler
The messages, obtained by POLITICO, were sent by leaders of Young Republican groups across the country. Credit - Jacques Julien—Getty Images
Vice President J.D. Vance is downplaying a leak of thousands of leaked messages from Young Republican leaders that contained racist and offensive language.
The messages, obtained by POLITICO, were sent by leaders of various Young Republican National Federation groups—the political organization for Republicans between the ages of 18 and 40. They show that the leaders of those groups praised Adolf Hitler and joked about gas chambers, slavery, and rape.
The leaks sparked immediate backlash from several lawmakers across the political aisle. But the Vice President brushed off the messages, turning instead to criticize Democratic Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, who recently came under fire for messages he sent in 2022, in which he proposed a hypothetical scenario where he would shoot Todd Gilbert, then the Republican Speaker of the House, and wished that Gilbert’s children would be harmed.
Read more: Top Trump Officials Defend Signal Chat in Testimony to Congress
“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” Vance said in his social media post, referring to Jones. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
Jones has apologized for the messages he sent in 2022.
Other Republican politicians, such as Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, have condemned the leaked messages from Young Republican groups. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican, denounced the chat, but also called POLITICO's article a "hit piece" and, like Vance, turned to criticize Jones's remarks.
When asked if he was worried about "extremist pro-Hitler sentiment among the Party's young Republicans," Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson replied, "No. Obviously we roundly condemn any of that nonsense," then went on to say that he didn't know "who any of these people are."
Here’s what to know about the messages.
What do the messages reveal?
POLITICO’s reporting reveals that Young Republican leaders exchanged racist and offensive messages in Telegram chats between early January and mid-August. In the messages obtained by POLITICO, chat members referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people.” When a member asked if others in the chat were watching an NBA game, one member replied, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.”
Chat members joked about putting their political enemies in gas chambers. They joked about rape—one member referred to it as “epic.” Some praised Hitler, with one saying, “Great. I love Hitler.”
Members of the chats also used slurs—including “f-----,” “r-------, and “n----”—a total of more than 251 times, POLITICO found.
One member sent a message about how a mutual friend “dated this very obese Indian woman for a period of time.” When one person replied that the woman “was not Indian,” another responded by saying, “She just didn’t bathe often.”
Who are the Young Republicans?
The Young Republican National Federation, often called the Young Republicans, has groups across the country and includes roughly 15,000 members. The chats obtained by POLITICO included messages from leaders of those groups, including in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont.
Who was in the chat?
Some members of the chat worked in politics. Peter Giunta, who at the time that the messages were sent was chair of the New York State Young Republicans, was chief of staff for New York state Assemblymember Mike Reilly. In the aftermath of POLITICO’s reporting, he lost his position. Vermont state Sen. Samuel Douglass was also in the chat; Republican lawmakers have since called for his resignation.
Some have apologized for the messages. But others declined to comment or suggested that the messages “may have been altered, taken out of context, or otherwise manipulated.”
What has the backlash been?
New York Rep. Michael Lawler, a Republican, posted on X that “the deeply offensive and hateful comments reportedly made in a private chat among members of the New York State Young Republicans are disgusting,” calling on them to “resign from any leadership position immediately and reflect on how far they have strayed from basic human respect and decency.”
The Kansas Young Republicans was disbanded on Tuesday, after POLITICO’s reporting connected two of the group’s members to racist messages. Several members of the chats lost their jobs in the aftermath of POLITICO’s reporting.
Speaking to POLITICO, a White House spokesperson dismissed the idea that President Donald Trump’s rhetoric was at all related to the offensive messages in the trove of Telegram chats.
“Only an activist, left-wing reporter would desperately try to tie President Trump into a story about a random groupchat he has no affiliation with, while failing to mention the dangerous smears coming from Democrat politicians who have fantasized about murdering their opponent and called Republicans Nazis and Fascists,” the spokesperson said. “No one has been subjected to more vicious rhetoric and violence than President Trump and his supporters.”
The White House has not responded to TIME’s request for comment.
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