We’ve all said stupid things in private. In texts, group chats, or emails. Most of us have a moment we’d regret if screenshotted and published. So when I first saw headlines about the Young Republicans’ weird group messages, I didn’t plan to weigh in.
Then I actually read them before joining Chris Hayes last night on MSNBC (above).
These aren’t “edgy” jokes, like the Vice President claimed. They’re a window into the young minds of leading conservatives. Messages like: “I love Hitler.” “Anyone who votes against me is going to the gas chamber.” “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkeys play ball” (in reference to an invitation to watch a basketball game). “Ready to watch people burn.”
Nor was this a fringe group. It was a nationwide ecosystem of conservative operatives, campaign staffers, and state-level officials marinating in racism, antisemitism, and violence. And when the story broke, a man who should have condemned it — Vice President J.D. Vance — came to the defense of the group chat members, saying “that’s what kids do.”
Well, first of all, these weren’t kids. They were political professionals in their twenties and thirties and the next generation of Republican leadership. Second of all, when I came up in the GOP during the Bush years — and later worked in that administration — this kind of thing would have ended your career overnight. One whiff of obvious racism and you were radioactive. If I’d been caught in a chat like that, no Republican office in Washington would have hired me, let alone at the White House.
That was the culture then. Moral policing in the party ranks was real because GOP leaders knew that their foot soldiers were their brand ambassadors. Now? The party’s moral compass is clearly shattered.
To be honest, this kind of rhetoric has always existed on the edges of conservatism (and don’t think the far left doesn’t have its demons and ghouls, too). There once was a shadow world of anonymous forums, militia chatrooms, and far-right blogs that were like magnets for these people. But something remarkable has happened. The rational center of the GOP has become the fringe, and the fringe has become the mainstream of the party — its rotten core.
The Politico story about the leaked group chats holds up a mirror in front of two groups. Obviously it tells you a great deal about the young Republicans who typed those words. But far more importantly, it’s a mirror for their mentors. These young men (and a few women) didn’t invent the rot themselves. They absorbed it from somewhere.
Indeed, they watched their party elders model it. They saw Trump mock the disabled, demean women, and call immigrants “animals.” They saw conservative podcasters make black jokes fashionable again. They saw sniveling presidential aides take to the airwaves and show that decency is for suckers and vengeance wins promotions.
It seems like GOP leaders are grooming their young to be creeps. When I came up as a Bush Republican, our messaging was focused on conservative principles. Now it reads like a digital frat basement that’s dripping with the dance-party sweat of insecurity, cruelty, and performative dominance. Aspiring conservative leaders sound less like politicians-in-training and more like online incels auditioning for power. They’re not crafting the future. They’re ushering in an age of revenge-porn politics.
A party’s culture inevitably shapes its policies, and we’re already seeing the results. When you build a movement that elevates the creeps, you get a government that legislates cruelty and grievance on an almost daily basis. The same young men who laugh about gas chambers are the type who’ve been recruited into the second Trump administration to help write refugee policy, turn ICE into the largest federal law enforcement agency in America, and operationalize their boss’s biases.
But let me pause here for a moment. Because in 2016, I didn’t think Donald Trump was an actual racist. I thought he was a narcissist and a clown, for sure, but not a bigot. A lot of us in the GOP were tired of the left calling every Republican a racist, which had become a cheap way to score political points. I thought it was lazy, cynical, and wrong. Despite all of his idiotic pronouncements, I didn’t think Trump harbored a literal animus toward people with different skin tones.
I was wrong.
In 2017 and 2018, once I was inside the Trump administration, I was tapped to help overhaul the U.S. refugee program. The directive from the White House, on paper, was to prevent terrorists from slipping through the system. That made plenty of sense to me. I’d spent years studying ISIS and al-Qaeda, which had recently exploited European refugee flows to conduct terrorist attacks. We need to prevent that from happening here.
But after a few months, it became clear the White House wanted something… else.
In Oval Office meetings, the President described to us the kind of people he wanted to keep out. Not “terrorists.” In fact, I’m not even sure the word came up in those conversations. Instead he listed the countries whose people he wanted blocked, like Haiti, El Salvador, and Somalia — places that were, in his words, “shithole countries.” And then, almost in the same breath, he told us we should be letting in more people from places like Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. “Beautiful people,” he said.
After that, it was hard to come to any other conclusion. The common denominator was evident. People from dark-skinned countries. Bad. People from white countries. Good. Well, I thought, he’s an obvious bigot.
Of course we refused to implement any criteria for refugee admissions that were dictated by race, at least not during my tenure. But presidents get to pick their own people, and in his second term, Trump found loyalists willing to do pretty much that.
According to The New York Times, the Trump administration is finalizing a plan to overhaul the U.S. refugee system by slashing admissions to their lowest point in modern history (from 125,000 a year to just 7,500) and giving preference to English-speakers, white South Africans, and Europeans who’ve been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online” about immigrants. Translation: we’ll give asylum to shitposters and neo-Nazis looking for safe haven. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of brown and black applicants are being purged from the system.
And here’s where the circle completes.
Donald Trump’s trickle-down bigotry has reached every corner of the modern GOP — from the Oval Office to these foul-mouthed “young conservative” group chats. His movement is cultivating a generation of insecure little creeps who see cruelty as strength, salivate at the idea of a skin-color immigration system, and treat women like the gilded trophies they were never talented enough to win in school. What happens when you put these kinds of people in power? You’re seeing it.
This week, Republican leaders have preemptively mocked protests like NO KINGS as “hate America” rallies. But I think they’re missing the point. People like us love America. We just hate the dumpster fire that Trump is turning it into.
P.S. WHAT’S HAPPENING ON TREASON
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TODAY / Thurs, Oct 16 (12noon ET) - I’ll be back on with
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