It has happened again.
We learned last week that a cohort of Republican activists and political staffers had shared racist and misogynist messages in a private text chat. It’s a story that repeats itself with depressing regularity, varying only the names of the participants and the depravity of the content.
As Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo reported in Politico, leaders of Young Republican groups from across the nation “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.”
Chats like this are so ubiquitous in right-wing circles that Aaron Sibarium, one of the best reporters in right-wing media, posted this comment in 2023: “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”
Thankfully, the Young Republicans National Federation forcefully condemned the chats, along with a number of other Republican writers and politicians. Several participants in the chat lost their jobs in politics.
But not everyone was outraged. Far from it. The vice president of the United States rallied to their defense. In response to the Politico report, JD Vance posted screenshots of vile text messages from Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general of Virginia, in which Jones wished death on a man named Todd Gilbert, a Republican, who was one of his colleagues in the Virginia House of Delegates.
“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” he wrote. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
The responses to Vance are obvious, or at least they should be. Why can’t we condemn Jones and the Young Republicans? None of those individuals belong in American politics, so why not condemn them all?
Also, this was no “college group chat.” It was, instead, a chat of young Republican staffers and leaders — college graduates who were already well into their professional lives. The story was important in part precisely because they were not in college. They were working deep inside the Republican establishment, doing exactly the kinds of jobs that future leaders do.
There’s a larger story here. When you combine all the elements — yet another Republican racism scandal, death wishes from a Democratic politician, Vance’s decision to excuse the inexcusable — you can see the ways in which 10 years of Trumpism has twisted the American soul.
I know very well that there were corrupt and venal politicians and political staffers before Donald Trump. I know that America has endured periods of more extreme anger and polarization than we’re enduring today (and not just in and around the Civil War). But we’re currently trapped in a dynamic that is tempting many millions of Americans to indulge their worst impulses.
First, when the most powerful and successful politician of the last decade is an immoral man who is dishonest, cruel and illiberal at a fundamental level, it creates a situation — especially in his own party — that rewards all those same vices.
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. There was a telling moment last week when a screenshot circulated online showing that Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson were first, fourth and fifth on Spotify’s trending podcast list.
Fuentes is one of the most notorious white supremacists and antisemites in America. Owens has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories (among many others, including the fantastical notion that the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron, was born a man). Carlson has also dabbled in antisemitic and racist chatter and has long used his immense platform to inflame racial resentment.
In other words, the private conversations in the Young Republicans’ Telegram chat were only marginally more racist and hateful than the language that’s out in the open, common on the most popular podcasts in America.
Second, 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.
You can see this calculation in the Democratic response to Jay Jones. His texts, written to a Republican legislator named Carrie Coyner, were utterly reprehensible and totally indefensible. He said that if he had two bullets and had to choose between using them on Hitler, Pol Pot and Todd Gilbert, he’d use both on Gilbert, his legislative colleague.
That’s an adaptation of an old joke from the television show “The Office,” but Jones didn’t stop with a tasteless joke. In a phone conversation with Coyner, he reportedly said that he hoped that Gilbert’s wife would watch one of their own children die in her arms. In a text message, he also accused the Gilberts of “breeding little fascists.”
Jones has apologized for these comments, saying that he’s “ashamed.” I’m glad he’s apologized (and I’m glad he feels shame), but do we want a man who’s expressed such extreme hatred in high office?
Sadly, there are partisans who say yes — who seem to believe that opposing Trump and the Republican Party is just too important to discard a candidate for a state attorney general’s office. After all, why should we unilaterally disarm? Where are the Republicans calling on Trump to resign after his countless cruel and hateful words, much less his cruel and hateful presidential acts?
In fact, that was exactly Jones’s approach when his texts first surfaced. He said he’d sent “text messages I regret” but he accused his opponent, Jason Miyares, the incumbent attorney general of Virginia, of “dropping smears through Trump-controlled media organizations” and said, “This race is about whether Trump can control Virginia or Virginians control Virginia.”
Conversely, there are Republicans who refuse to police their own ranks because the Democrats are always worse. On Thursday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told Fox News that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.” On X, Matt Walsh, an influential right-wing political commentator, wrote, “Some of you people are talking about a group chat while the other side has killed enough babies to fill a thousand football stadiums.”
If that’s the twisted moral calculation, then are there any moral lines that parts of the right will draw in their political and cultural battles with the left?
We can see the fruit of our political age in the radicalization of America’s younger generations. Younger members of Gen Z don’t remember politics before Trump, and even the oldest members of Gen Z have lived most of their young adult lives during the Trump era.
Is it any wonder that members of a generation that grew up with Jan. 6, the riots of 2020 and the unending vitriol of social media are more likely to tolerate political violence than older Americans? They don’t have a different model. They don’t know that politics — as imperfect as it’s always been — can be much more decent than it is right now.
Every year, more Americans are coming of political age in this dreadful time. By the time Trump leaves office in 2029, he will have been the dominant American political figure for roughly 14 years — since the weeks after he announced his first run for president and surged to the top of Republican primary polls.
That means 14 years of escalating political stakes. That means 14 years of politics that pushes the best people out of public life. That means 14 years of Trump as the model of the most successful politician of the era. At the end of that time, what will remain?
The story of this past week is the story of this past year. It’s the story of this decade. If your political opponents represent ultimate evil, then the only morality left is the morality of victory. The only true sin is the sin of defeat.
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David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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