POLITICO’s Story Reminds Us Who’s Really Losing It

There’s a story from POLITICO making the rounds and creating an enormous amount of dyspepsia on the Right. The story is titled, “’I Love Hitler.’ Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat.”

It is questionable whether the actual line “I love Hitler” was said in jest or whether it was said authentically.

All those quotes from the chat have been released by POLITICO. They reported:

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.”

Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old. “Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued. Two members of the chat responded. 

 A lot of this is edgelord-ism. It has existed on the Right, particularly among young right-wingers, for a very long time.

Back in 2015 or 2016, I was speaking at a college campus in California, and some kid came over and started using some Groyper memes in jest. I said to him, “Listen, I understand that you’re just being edgelord right now. If you actually, authentically think that stuff, you’re wrong. But second of all, if you put that stuff online, there are social consequences to saying and believing truly terrible things.”

I’m not talking here about whether we should ban people from Facebook. Obviously, the answer is no. Whether you ban people from YouTube or X, I’ve argued in favor of the restoration of people’s accounts on these platforms because they are platforms. They are not publications.

However, there are social consequences to people who say things that you believe are terrible. They don’t get to come over to dinner at your house. They don’t get to marry your kids. You don’t date them.

We all have social lines we draw all the time, and the question is where to draw those lines and how those lines ought to be drawn. There’s no question that the shutting tight of the Overton Window by the Left means that the explosion of the Overton Window in response has let in an enormous amount of garbage.

That is reality. This sort of language is routinely used now among a segment, not all, not even a majority, but among some fragmented segment of the right-wing ecosystem among young people.

So here is what I hope will represent an honest rubric for dealing with issues like this one.

1. Obviously, it is very cynical for POLITICO to target young GOP group chats while leaving left-wing chats untouched. I would promise you those same left-wing chats exist and are just as bad, if not worse. There are university chats among professors that are just as bad, if not worse.

All of that is true.

2. The Right does not have an obligation to go totally insane over such chats. What the Left and the media love to do is to take stuff like this and say to every member of the Republican Party, “You must personally condemn all of this.” The answer should be, “I’m happy to condemn the crap in there, but why? Why am I responsible for it? I’m not responsible for that.” You claim that everyone on the Right is responsible for a group of young Republicans who say terrible things in private to one another, that what they did somehow implicates the entire Republican Party. Meanwhile, the attorney general candidate in Virginia publicly says horrible things and that doesn’t implicate the entire Democratic Party? Zoran Mamdani, who likely will be New York mayor, is openly pro-terrorism, and that doesn’t implicate the entire Democratic Party?

This POLITICO story, which is gaining all sorts of traction, is not comparable to actual people running for high office in Virginia or in New York City or the Democratic Party at high levels engaging with this sort of nonsense.

3. When you’re asked about somebody saying a bad thing, whether you’re Right or Left, of course you ought to condemn the bad thing that is being said. I don’t even understand the logic of not doing that. Are you obligated to defend the bad thing being said, because the person who is questioning you is “on the other side?” Because that’s precisely how you get to a Left that defends Jay Jones. That’s how you get there. That’s how you get to a Left that openly defends Zoran Mamdani.

Forgiveness ought to be easily obtained, as I’ve said.

But — if you want forgiveness, you ought to ask for it. You ought to disassociate from the things that you say, and admit, “I was saying stuff that was dumb. I got caught up in the edgelord moment online.”

You only get out of jail free if you ask to do so. You don’t get it preemptively. If you say something terrible or you do something terrible and people preemptively forgive you, doesn’t that incentivize you to do more of that thing?

4. Finally, it is not sufficient to publicly proclaim that you’re not going to condemn these people, say nothing about their comments, and instead just project to the other side. That’s because on a strategic level, this is how your party ends up being taken over by the ambulatory psychotics.

With the Left, that’s what happened. They decided they would not, under any circumstance, condemn their own ambulatory psychotics because those people were part of their coalition, and they couldn’t do it or they would lose.

You know what ended up happening? The alligator ate them first, not last. They ended up being taken over by the crazy wing. That’s because if you lose your systemic immunity, the crazy tends to be really, really, really infectious.

There’s this weird idea on the Right that the Left wins because they’re totally unified and they completely side with one another.

But here’s the central point: The Left is not winning.

I think we on the Right have somehow become depressive, even possibly gotten addicted to the depressive. The Left is not winning.

Donald Trump has been president twice.

Republicans are in control of the Senate.

Republicans are in control of the House.

Republicans are in control of the majority of governors’ mansions.

Republicans are in control of a majority of state legislatures.

The Left is not winning because of their unity. They are being destroyed because they decided that the nutjobs and the radicals in their own party could not be condemned under any circumstances. They decided to feature Ilhan Omar on the cover of magazines and unite around the crazy college protesters, the BLM rioters, and the transgender radicals.

And guess what? They got their asses kicked because of it. Yes, they didn’t expel people from their party, but moderates walked away. The non-crazy walked away.

This is the dirty little secret of how Donald Trump won the election of 2024. He ran as a moderate. People were moderate and picked him above the unified Left that was siding with and defending and massaging all of the radicals.

This is a very big country with an awful lot of people, and the vast majority of them are not loon bags, and the vast majority of them don’t like the lunacy.

And we need to be real about the agenda of the people who are continuing to rely on the kindness of the “traditional Republicans” who “don’t want to attack.”