That question, rhetorical of course, is prompted by the story about the leaked texts by members of the group known as Young Republicans that reveal them saying the most awful things, a story that keeps gaining steam.
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.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
Is there anyone in this day and age, especially young people, who does not know that there is no such thing as confidentiality on the internet? That anything you put out there has the potential to be unearthed and exposed? The mind boggles that anyone could be that stupid.
While some leaders of the Republican party have tried to distance themselves from the group, JD Vance has tried to excuse their ugly words as “stupid jokes”. This shows that he has decided that to get the next Republican nomination for the presidency, he cannot afford to alienate any group within the party, however extreme and hateful they are, and that there are no depths to which he will not sink.
These are people who aspired to be future leaders of the party so you would have expected them to be at least a little circumspect about what they put out.
Members of the chat held or sought real political power. They knew the stakes. They also knew that the chat could be exposed, and that exposure would be catastrophic for their reputations and perhaps for the reputation of the GOP. Yet that knowledge did not penetrate deeply enough to change their behavior.
The latest fallout is that Trump’s nomination of Paul Ingrassia to head the White House office of special counsel (that is supposed to protect federal employees from retaliation for whistleblowing) is faltering because of his texts.
Paul Ingrassia, currently a White House liaison at the Department of Homeland Security, previously advocated for making 6 January a national holiday and publicly questioned whether the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack was a “psyop”. But the fans were flamed again on Monday after Politico reported text messages in which Ingrassia allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.
When reporters asked whether the administration should pull Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the office of special counsel, John Thune, the Senate majority leader, responded on Monday: “I think so. He’s not going to pass”.
At least three GOP senators on the homeland security committee indicated they will vote against Ingrassia when his confirmation hearing proceeds on Thursday: Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and James Lankford of Oklahoma.
“I don’t plan on voting for him,” Scott told reporters. “I can’t imagine how anybody can be antisemitic in this country”.
That is an utterly disingenuous statement by Scott. Antisemitism is rife in this country, as is racism, misogyny, and homophobia, all cultivated over decades by right-wingers and Republicans and Trump. In the current climate, these people feel so comfortable having these views that they feel no need to hide them.
Now there are the inevitable articles that try to understand how they could be stupid.
Valerie McDonnell, the youngest state legislator in New Hampshire who stepped down as a Young Republican national committeewoman in August, said she was appalled by the “repeated terrible language about other members.”
“It wasn’t just a one-off comment. It was, I believe, over a span of six months, just repeated terrible language about other members,” she said. “This just was beyond belief to see the extent of this.”
Still, the second state chair worried that ongoing divisions in the organization following the August leadership election could hamper the organization’s value to the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections.
“These are the meanest people I have ever met in my life,” the person said of their Young Republicans colleagues. “I love this organization so much, and it meant so much to me in my early- and mid-20s, and it is just different. These kids are not the same. I think they’ve grown up in politics only seeing how Trump treats people and they think that’s how you treat people.”
Sorry, that excuse does not work. Plenty of young people have grown up in the Trump era of politics and do not behave this way, gleefully spewing racist, misogynist, antisemitic, and homophobic sentiments. The soil has to be fertile for the seeds of bigotry to take root and grow like this, and the Republican party has been preparing this soil for a long time.
It is probably not simple stupidity. These people are intoxicated by power, by the feeling that Trump and his cult are in control and that thus they are untouchable and will suffer no repercussions if they let their hate flags fly.
This is the second attempt to confirm him. When it fails again, rest assured that President Diarrhea will find a job in the admin for him, probably in Gulnar Miller’s office.
At least this is culturally consistent. Cursing in German often refers to excrement. JD Vance once called Trump America’s Hitler. Trump has a thing about excrement (he complains about the flushing and now he forwarded the poop video). And the Young Republicans are into Hitler big time.
Considering my pre-Trump experience with Republicans, I assumed they would pay homeless people to fight each other with knives, or maybe pay strippers to perform at their meetings … during which rich quantities of a white powder would be consumed.
This Hitler chat business just seems lazy.
Given that they will face almost no consequences -- perhaps someone doesn’t get confirmed but he’ll find a place in the party somewhere -- whats stupid about it ? The Overton window keeps moving -- i think i read some article about how Marjorie Taylor Green is supposedly now the face of resistance.
These kids are not the same.
Kids?
I have read that the Young Republican membership is witin the ages of 18 and 40. Paul Ingrassia is 30.
These are not a mob of cub scouts .
New York and Kansas(?) have both disbanded their local young rethuglicans group over their disgusting group chat.
Five members have been fired or resigned from their jobs since the Politico article broke.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/10/18/at-least-5-in-racist-young-republicans-group-chat-out-of-jobs-amid-gop-backlash/
Going off on a tangent; the incompetence and stupidity of the administration has also contributed to Americas’ European allies no longer sharing intelligence about Ukraine.
The risk that USA might leak to Russia -- deliberately or by incompetent security measures -- is seen as too great.
At the same time the allies must pretend they respect Trump to protect his ego.
-And now the next generation of MAGA (I am not using ‘GOP’ , it has been consumed by the cult) are comfy with literal nazism.
We are witnessing the drawn-out death spiral of the party. I wonder if it will remain a big regressive party or if a splinter group of big-money republicans will leave and start over while MAGA shrinks to a regional populist xenophobe party.
I’m not sure it’s even that. These are the sort of people who have lived their whole lives entirely free of consequences for anything. The idea that their actions might have consequences is simply alien to them.
That’s a very telling quote -- note that she’s not objecting to the various bigotries on display per se, but only that such language is being directed at other members i.e. members of the in-group.
Of course they’re “young” in some relative sense, relative to their demented leader and his doddering cadre, but they’re hardly kids, and I find the apologetics of people like Vance utterly appalling even though quite in character.
I’m quite sure that in the heat of argument and impulse one can say immoderate things, and even hurtfully utter epithets and stereotypes that one later regrets. But this was not a street brawl or an argument in a bar. It was an internet chat, with plenty of time to think about what one was saying, and even to understand the difference between our regrettable repressed prejudices and what is right. And I’m quite convinced that nobody, even in extreme circumstances, would say “I love Hitler” who did not actually mean it, Letting loose a regrettable epithet or a nasty comment is not the same thing as sitting down at the computer and advocating extermination.
I keep hoping that this is indeed the death spiral of MAGA and its variants -- I’m always reminded of those old Currier and Ives prints (I used as a kid to collect Travelers’ Insurance calendars religiously!) of “The sperm whale in his flurry.” The whale would go on a destructive rampage, smashing boats and sailors, at the point when its death was inevitable, not before. But I don’t know. We keep hoping but it keeps not happening.
By the way, last I heard, Sam Douglas though he said he would resign on Monday, now whining about nasty things that have been said to him and his family (his wife was among the chatters in question too, it seems), had not actually done so.
It’s dark, and I hear whistling…
What is utterly mind boggling is that these people’s go-to criticism of the left is antisemitism despite them being shown to be antisemitic over and over and over again.
@Matt G:
Long ago I realised the difference between the anti-semitism of the Left, and the anti-Semitism of the Right.
The anti-semitism of the Left places Jews at the front of the queue -- because hey, they’re the rich people who own the media that’s all against the Left, Israel is a Jewish apartheid state that oppresses a minority and commits war crimes with impunity, and Jews run all the banks and corporations that oppress the poor. They’re the first people who need to be fought against, because they have power. This is the anti-semitism of Corbynites, and it’s stupid not least because it’s self-sabotaging. (The Left? Sabotaging themselves? SAY IT AIN’T SO!)
The Right, on the other hand, are anti-semitic for older reasons, and because they recognise which side their bread is buttered, they have Jews on their list, but they’re at the bottom of the list. The Right want to use the media and financial power that Jews do incontrovertibly have disproportionate access to for their (the Right’s) benefit, so they can see off black people, brown people, poor people, and the Left. But the non-Jewish Right* never forget that once all that has been accomplished, they’ll deal with the Jews. Until then, most of them have the good sense to keep a lid on it. But in 2025, it seems, people are losing the ability to moderate their behaviour. Actions are being decoupled from consequences. FA is increasingly disconnected from FO.
(The Jewish population of the UK is less than 0.4% of the country. They overwhelmingly vote for the Right. The only Jewish PM the UK has ever had was a Conservative. They’ve had a Jewish leader since -- Michael Howard. Labour has been led by a Jew only once -- Ed Milliband. The current leader of the Greens is Jewish. 2.2% of MPs are Jewish, but all but one of them are Labour. Ain’t life complicated?)
sonofrojblake, this is about Republicans in the US. In this country Jews regularly support the Democratic party at a very high ratio. (Though I expect this to shift in a couple of generations as Haredi Jews become more dominant numerically.)