Violent threats and racist chats reveal toxic political culture nationwide

The group chat was racist as hell.

Black folks were called “monkeys” and “the watermelon people.”

The group chat was also utterly anti-Semitic.

“I love Hitler.” Kill them in gas chambers. “I’m ready to watch people burn now.”

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Oh, and there were jokes about rape (“epic”). And a slur against gay people, involving actions by cows.

That reporting by Politico – based on 2,900 pages of leaked chats by the Young Republicans organization – has caused a national uproar.

But JD Vance dismissed it as a “college group chat” and says “kids do stupid things, especially young boys.” 

In fact, these were young adults under the age of 40 (according to the rules), working as political strategists and government staffers.

Vermont state Sen. Sam Douglass apologized and resigned, saying he had to protect his family in the face of death threats. His wife, Brianna, posted that “you’re giving nationals to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest.”

William Hendrix, working for the Kansas attorney general’s office, has been fired.

Bobby Walker, chair of the New York State Young Republicans, lost his planned spot on a campaign. Peter Giunta has been ousted by a New York assemblyman. 

The whole thing is sickening, disgusting and stomach-turning. 

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Don’t take my word for it. The Young Republican National Federation says it’s  “appalled by the vile and inexcusable language revealed … such behavior is disgraceful, unbecoming of any Republican, and stands in direct opposition to the values our movement represents.”

New York GOP leaders have now voted unanimously to disband the state’s Young Republicans chapter.

But with some brave and prominent exceptions, most Republicans don’t want to talk about the chat fiasco. They have been pivoting to an awful scandal involving, naturally, a Democratic candidate.

Jay Jones, running for attorney general in Virginia, was revealed by National Review to have had a violent exchange about a colleague in 2022, when both were in the House of Delegates. 

Jones was fantasizing about going after Todd Gilbert, then the House speaker.

Gilbert gets “two bullets to the head,” then Jones said he wanted the speaker’s children to “die in their mother’s arms.”

JD Vance said Jones “has been fantasizing about murdering his political opponents, “I’m sure the people hyperventilating about sombrero memes will join me in calling for this very deranged person to drop out of the race. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has done just that.”

President Trump weighed in, saying “the Radical Left Lunatic Jay Jones” had made “SICK and DEMENTED jokes, if they were jokes at all,” about “the murdering of a Republican Legislator, his wife and their children.” The president called Jones an “animal” and that “anybody would be put in prison for what he said.”

Now all this is horrible and nauseating – and it gets worse.

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Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat running for Virginia governor, said she was “disgusted” by Jones’s remarks and issued a statement: “I made clear to Jay that he must fully take responsibility for his words. What I have also made clear is that as a candidate – and as the next Governor of our Commonwealth, I will always condemn violent language in our politics.”

What she definitely did not do was pull her support for the man behind the “violent language.” She still backs Jay “two bullets” Jones. So do most Democrats, with some prominent exceptions.

So each side is engaging in classic whataboutism – insisting that we train our gaze on the other side’s misconduct.

And you know full well if the situations were reversed, Democrats would be denouncing the “two bullets” candidate and Republicans would be slamming the racist and anti-Semitic group chat.

In an ideal world, both would be equally condemned regardless of party.

David French, the conservative, anti-Trump columnist for the New York Times, says there’s a “twisted moral calculation” that he blames in part on Trumpism but admits the trend began well before DJT got into politics.  

“The result is a push-pull dynamic that pushes people of good character out of the party and pulls in new leaders and new people who share the leader’s ethos. Every year, this cultural trend reinforces itself. Decency becomes rarer, and decent people feel more isolated…

“Meanwhile, the trolls multiply until the radicals become the mainstream and the previous mainstream becomes the fringe.” Even compassionate conservative George W. Bush would be deemed too liberal for the Trump GOP. So would Ronald Reagan, who was pro-immigration, and Richard Nixon, who created the EPA.

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And then there’s the question of real violence, in the wake of the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk, not to mention the two attempts to muder Trump last year.

“Rising vitriol and escalating illiberalism raise the perceived stakes of elections to such an extent that virtually every partisan American is all too willing to overlook almost any lesser evil to avoid the greater evil of an electoral loss,” says French.

It’s the ultimate means-justify-the-ends argument. It’s really about seizing and holding power. Nothing else matters. And that’s revolting.

It’s chilling to read that the fringe is now the mainstream, that nothing is more important than defending your side, your team, your ideology, details be damned.  But that’s the world in which we now live.