Keystone Klansmen

Another day, another bombshell of a leaked private GOP group chat

The hoods are off the “Young Republicans.”

Yesterday, Politico reported another leaked private messaging group, this time on the Telegram app. It’s the kind of story where you have to reread each new line, each new revelation, both because what was said was so horrifying and that such people are in positions of power across the country, and because it’s rather incredible that they would let their fascist freak flags fly so brazenly in this era of electronic receipts.

You’d have thought they’d learn a lesson from the cautionary fail of fellow white nationalist and creepy misogynist Pete Hegseth, who was dragged for his own leaked private Signal chats. But apparently power not only corrupts, but absolute power over the government corrupts judgment absolutely.

Let’s talk a bit about the chat itself, which really is a basket of deplorables: racism, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia and glorification of violence. The Republican reaction to the exposure of the group chat is telling, especially the response by the already widely disliked Vice President. And as a result of that take, we need to set the record straight on a few things.

And if you’ll forgive me a rant, I want to deliver one about the modern GOP in response to what we’ve all just seen for ourselves. This isn’t new or even surprising to those who have watched the worst of the lot rise to the highest positions of authority in their party. But it is something Republicans cannot now run from.

“I love Hitler” and other gems

The chat that leaked went back several months and involved leaders of the Young Republicans from New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. In other words, this was not some isolated group. It was a committee of hate comprising well-known, public figures within the organization. The messages ran approximately 2,900 pages long.

The participants described Blacks as monkeys and “watermelon people,” regularly tossed around the “n” and the “f” words, suggested putting opponents in gas chambers, bantered about raping enemies and driving them to suicide, and praised Republicans whom they believed support slavery.

Nor are the dozen or so members of the group merely campaign volunteers or interns. One member of the chat, Michael Bartels, claims on his LinkedIn profile to work as a senior adviser in the Office of General Counsel within the U.S. Small Business Administration. (He did not participate much in the chat, but did not leave or condemn what was said either.)

Samuel Douglass is a state senator from northern Vermont and a cofounder and state chair (though perhaps not for long) of the Vermont Young Republicans. His election, with the support of Republican governor Phil Scott, broke the Democratic supermajority in the state. In response to someone’s comment that a “very obese Indian woman” was actually “not Indian,” Douglass replied, “She just didn’t bathe often.”

New York, to the state’s disgrace, was overrepresented in the group. Peter Giunta is the chair of the New York State Young Republicans, Bobby Walker is the vice chair, and Joe Maligno is its general counsel.

Giunta is a real piece of work. “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,” Giunta wrote in the chat. He also had choice words for his political rivals within the organization. “Minnesota—f-ggots,” Giunta messaged, continuing: “Arkansas—inbred cow fuckers Nebraska—revolt in our favor….” He continued, “Maryland—fat stinky Jew … Rhode Island—traitorous c-nts who I will eradicate from the face of this planet.”

Walker referred to rape as “epic.” Writing about Giunta’s rival, Hayden Padgett, Walker added, “Adolf Padgette is in the F-ggotbunker as we speak.”

Maligno mused about gassing people in showers in a thread with Giunta, Walker, and Annie Kaykaty, who is New York’s national committee member.

William Hendrix was, at least until Thursday, a communications assistant for Kansas’s Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach. He said that, despite political differences, he’s drawn to Missouri’s Young Republican organization because “Missouri doesn’t like f-gs.” Hendrix has since been fired from Kobach’s office.

Alex Dwyer is the chair of the Kansas Young Republicans. In the chat, he informed Giunta that one of Michigan’s Young Republicans promised him the group “will vote for the most right wing person” to lead the national organization. “Great. I love Hitler,” Giunta responded. Dwyer posted a smiley face emoji in response.

There’s lots more, but you get the general picture.

JD Vance: This was a “college group chat”

While many GOP organizations and leaders have condemned the chat and its participants and fired them from their positions or called upon them to resign, not so the l’enfant terrible of a vice president, JD Vance. Apparently the vice shitposter can’t recognize when he really ought not to defend something this deeply vile and indefensible.

Vance brought up a leaked private text of the Democratic candidate for Attorney General of Virginia, Jay Jones, and called it “far worse” before brushing off the outrage over the Telegram channel as “pearl clutching” over a “college group chat.” For context, here is what he posted—and I’m sorry, this is not “far worse” than what I’ve described above and, though grotesque and cruel, was not a call for “political violence” as Vance claims.

Something else also needs to be made clear. These men were not in college. This was not a “college group chat” by any stretch. The Young Republicans range from age 18 to 40. These participants are grown adults who, rather ironically, see themselves as the master race.

To its credit, or perhaps because its members recognize political quicksand when they’re standing in it, the Young Republican National Federation board of directors called for the Telegram chat group members to resign from all positions within their Young Republican organizations.

It bears noting that the Board of Advisors to the New York Young Republicans Club (a separate entity from the state association), to which several of the chat participants belong, has GOP luminaries among its ranks, including far-right provocateur Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), the Pizzagate peddler and paid Russian shill Jack Posobiec, and the insurrectionist former DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark.

The lack of response from the very top of the party has been telling. As of the time of this writing, neither the White House nor Donald Trump has issued a condemnation of the chat or its members.

My rant

If leaders of GOP groups from across the nation are communicating privately in this manner, it’s because this kind of hate and violence is not only tolerated but actively rewarded by the party. And you can’t spend years dogwhistling to racists and Nazis without expecting racist and Nazi dogs to gather.

Lately, those dogwhistles have become public megaphones. The Department of Homeland Security’s official account on Twitter regularly posts Neo-Nazi and fascist iconography and mottos, including recent demands for people to “remigrate”—a call historically associated with ethnic cleansing. The group chat took its cues from the DHS account, which regularly dehumanizes racial minorities and glorifies in violence.

Nor is this current Telegram chat some isolated incident. It is indicative of a deep rot that began at the edges but is now at the core of the Republican party. The Keystone Klansmen who exchanged these messages are the real face of the modern GOP. They look to Stephen Miller and the late Charlie Kirk for inspiration, both of whom regularly spread hate, and they feel emboldened by the GOP’s clear institutional support for racist policies and abuses.

The Republican Party will not be fixed by their ousters or resignations. Many more just like them exist in the swamps these monsters shuffled out from. The ones now being forced out are merely those who, rather stupidly, put into writing what the majority of the MAGA base now believes.

We have assumed for some time that the Confederacy never really went away; it just switched parties. We should carry no doubts going forward about this difficult truth.

And we should understand that there is simply no working with or accommodating this kind of violence and hate. Once we defeat it—and we will defeat it—we cannot allow it ever to take hold of the levers of power again. If we do not stomp it out, as the Union should have done after the Civil War, what we are seeing now with ICE and its terrorizing of brown-skinned communities will become an all-out assault, a brutal dystopia coast-to-coast of white supremacy and ethnic cleansing. America is not somehow immune among nations from the disease of racial violence and fascist rule.

For in the end, that is what they want. That is what they tell each other in confidence. That is what they will always seek to achieve. And we must never, never let them.