Young Republicans: Does the GOP have a Nazi problem?

Terms like “Nazi” and “fascist” get thrown around too freely these days, said River Page in The Free Press. But “when a Republican says ‘I love Hitler’ in a group chat, what the hell are we supposed to call him?” Politico reported on an almost eight-month trove of Telegram messages sent between a dozen prominent members of the Young Republican National Federation—the “GOP’s official youth wing”— “which was brimming with racism, antisemitism, and violent, authoritarian musings.” Politico counted 251 separate uses of “faggot,” “retarded,” and the N-word, along with references to Black people as “monkeys” and “watermelon people.” There were jokes about sending opponents “to the gas chamber” and of being “ready to watch people burn.” Some top Republicans condemned the comments and demanded those involved leave the party; the YRNF state chapters in New York and Kansas were disbanded. But JD Vance didn’t see a problem. Pointing to Jay Jones—the Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general who sent texts wishing death on a Republican colleague—the vice president dismissed the outrage as “pearl clutching” over a few “kids” telling “edgy” jokes. “Kids?” Those involved are in their 20s and 30s, and included Vermont state Sen. Samuel Douglass, who has since resigned. And why can’t we denounce hate from both Democrats and Republicans?

These are Vance’s people, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. A product of the “alt-right,” he understands that “racists and philo-Nazis”— once a noisy fringe of conservatism—are now “the future of the GOP,” a party Vance intends to lead into the 2028 presidential election. “Hate is not a deal breaker” for this administration, said Katie Rogers in The New York Times. This week also saw the leak of texts by Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to head a federal watchdog agency, in which he admitted to having “a Nazi streak” and, using an Italian slur for Black people, called for all “moulignon holidays,” from Martin Luther King Jr. Day to Juneteenth, to be “eviscerated.” Ingrassia, 30, withdrew his nomination in the face of resistance from Senate Republicans, but he remains employed by the White House as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

Vance was wrong to dismiss the Young Republicans’ hideous remarks as mere jokes, said Katherine Dee in Politico. But we should also not mistake them for “genuine expressions of belief.” Among the Very Online Right, the “ironic” embrace of cruelty and bigotry is a way of “signaling group membership” as well as one’s disdain for the “moral surveillance and censoriousness” of liberals. Or at least that’s how it begins. But through repetition, “what begins as mockery can harden into conviction,” and someone whose original goal was to “own the libs” by performing a caricature of right-wing extremism can end up adopting “the worldview they once parodied.”

I fear there’s a simpler explanation, said George Packer in The Atlantic: ambition. These young Republicans wanted to rise in a political party that now prizes “contempt for everything decent” as a core value. After Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s dabbling in Holocaust denial, and Stephen Miller’s embrace of white supremacism, these aspiring politicians understandably thought “the viler their language, the higher they’ll go.” That remains a safe bet, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Trump and Vance have a policy of leaving no Nazi-curious “chud” behind. Ingrassia and the Young Republicans may have had their career plans disrupted, but trust me: They’ll all “be directing ICE raids in no time.”