Text 1: “I love Hitler.”
Text 2: “I wish Hitler had won.”
Text 1 is from a 2025 Telegram conversation featuring members of New York State’s Young Republican group. Text 2 comes from a Discord server created by white nationalists planning for violence in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.
Can you tell the difference? As two of the lawyers who sued the organizers of the Charlottesville rally, neither can we. And that’s not the only similarity. The tactic being used to make excuses for the ugly language in the Young Republicans’ Telegram chats is the same as the one used by the defendants in our case: Calm down; it’s only a joke.
Last week, Vice President JD Vance went on Charlie Kirk’s podcast and tried to explain away this behavior by contending: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”
But these are hardly kids; two of the Young Republicans in the chat group are in their 30s, closer in age to the vice president than to a college freshman, and the rest appear to be in their mid- to late 20s. More important, they clearly have ulterior motives for what Mr. Vance describes as their humor — plausible deniability about their true feelings, pushing the bounds of what is acceptable and desensitizing one another to violence. As one defendant in our case admitted, for white nationalists, “it was the coolest thing in the world to be as edgy as possible, and you know, very juvenile and silly.”
Pete Simi, an academic who spent years doing field work embedded in white supremacist circles, testified at our trial that this type of joking is a kind of doublespeak. People outside the groups can’t tell whether what they are hearing is a joke or not, allowing the speaker to deny accountability. People who agree with the speakers’ views understand their words are meant to be taken seriously. As Dr. Simi explained, “They can talk about violence, they can advocate for violence, and then say, ‘Well, it was just a joke.’”
Once the vile language in their chats was leaked, the New York chapter of Young Republicans was disbanded and prominent officials from both parties denounced the chats. But cutting one head off this hydra ignores the deep roots of the problem.
In the lead up to the Unite the Right rally in 2017, the Charlottesville defendants repeatedly described their desire to gas, burn and torture members of minority groups. On the night of Aug. 11, 2017, they marched in military formation across the University of Virginia campus chanting “Roof” (for the Charleston, S.C., Black church mass murderer Dylann Roof) and “Jews will not replace us.” The next day, James Fields, who marched earlier that day, drove his car into a street of peaceful counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others, including our clients.
Over a four-week trial, we demonstrated that the violence in Charlottesville was no accident — it was part of a deliberate plan to provoke a race war and restore white Christian men as the exclusive ruling class in this country. To prove this conspiracy, we called the defendants to testify and showed the jury dozens of their messages, full of the hateful jokes, catchphrases and secret vocabulary that they used with one another in private.
What we are seeing today in the messages of the Young Republicans is eerily familiar. In discussing an N.B.A. playoff game, one of the Young Republicans told others, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” The Discord messages in our case were similarly dehumanizing, comparing Black people to animals.
For the Charlottesville defendants, like the Young Republicans, few groups — other than straight, white Christian males — were spared their vitriol. A prominent theme in both sets of messages is admiration for Adolf Hitler, along with frequent references to gas chambers, ovens and other images of the Holocaust.
At our trial, several of the defendants glorified Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” said they wanted to gas Jews and used a slur to describe them. The Young Republicans expressed these same sentiments, asking each other: “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”
When asked at trial why such extreme hate was so often articulated this way, a former member of a white nationalist group testified that it not only allows the speaker to say they were “just joking,” but it also normalized the use of violence. She found herself increasingly numb to the language: “Before you know it, you’re scrolling past these jokes as if they’re nothing,” she testified. The Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi site, has a “Style Guide” making it clear that the “unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not” and openly admitting the goal is to “dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths.”
To say that many aspects of our trial were surreal would be an understatement. One defendant, appearing in his own defense, asked our expert, whose job it was to translate the Holocaust references for the jury, for her favorite Holocaust joke.
Such behavior is now pervasive, and not just from members of neo-Nazi groups. In January, in response to criticism he faced for making what appeared to be a Nazi salute at a Trump event, Elon Musk tweeted: “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Göring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming.” He ended his post, of course, with a laughing emoji. While it may have looked to most people like just another one of Mr. Musk’s ill-advised jokes, to others, it was a rallying cry.
Tragically, the white nationalists’ strategy has worked. It has only taken a decade for hateful, violent talk once limited to the extreme fringes of the far right to become mainstream. Our country needs to understand, as it once did, how dangerous it is to recast violent racist hate as “just joking.” We saw for ourselves in Charlottesville where this can end.
Roberta Kaplan represented Edith Windsor in her Supreme Court case about marriage equality and E. Jean Carroll in her two successful jury trials against President Trump. Michael Bloch is a criminal defense and civil rights attorney, and a board member of the Bronx Defenders.
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