Politico reported Tuesday on a series of vile messages shared by prominent members of Young Republican groups that included racist, antisemitic and violent comments and praise of Adolf Hitler.
And in the hours that followed, the GOP response was mostly critical.
Key GOP leaders, including the national Young Republicans organization itself, denounced the Telegram messages and called for those who sent the messages to be removed from their posts in local Young Republican groups. Some officials were reportedly relieved of their duties, and Politico reported at least two apologized. Even Roger Stone, a bare-knuckle political operator if there ever was one, said he denounced such comments “in the strongest possible terms.”
But then along came Vice President JD Vance. He argued for a far different approach.
Pointing to recently disclosed violent messages from Democratic Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones, Vance basically argued Republicans should hold their tongues.
“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” Vance wrote on X. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
It’s hard to find a better epitome of the MAGA movement’s evolution on hateful rhetoric. The moral high ground is out; whataboutism is very much in.
And perhaps nobody exemplifies that shift like Vance.
The first thing to note is that the vice president is taking liberties in minimizing these messages. This wasn’t a “college group chat”; members of the Young Republicans group range in age from 18 to 40. One of the people involved is a state legislator (like Jones was in Virginia when he sent his messages), according to Politico. Another serves in the Trump administration. Others are in their 30s and well-established in Republican politics.
Despite this, Vance during a Wednesday appearance on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” repeatedly referred to the participants as “kids.”
“I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke telling a very offensive stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives,” Vance said.
The messages revealed by Politico included things like saying, “I love Hitler”; talking about raping political foes and putting them in gas chambers; labeling Black basketball players “monkeys” and “watermelon people”; and many slurs for Black and gay people.
The second thing to note is that Vance is indeed pointing to some very real and ugly text messages from Jones, in which he spoke of giving a GOP leader “two bullets to the head.” Jones responded to a colleague who said Jones had hoped the GOP leader’s children died by saying, “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy,” according to the National Review, which broke the story.
But while Republicans have faulted Democrats for not abandoning Jones and pushing him out of the race, many Virginia Democrats at least denounced his words.
Virginia gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger said she spoke with Jones about her “disgust.” Virginia’s two Democratic senators called the comments “indefensible,” “appalling” and “unacceptable.” Democratic state lawmakers called them “deeply disturbing.” Lieutenant governor nominee Ghazala Hashmi cited “the pain that his words have caused,” and said, “We must demand better of our leaders and of each other.”
Vance is basically arguing Republicans shouldn’t even offer such denunciations of the Young Republicans chat.
It’s a remarkable entry in the GOP’s long-running shift toward a no-apologies approach to politics. The attitude seems to be that as long as the other side is perceived as worse, the GOP shouldn’t bother with policing its own.
That’s a far cry from the brand of politics Vance himself once advocated.
After a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulted in a self-described neo-Nazi murdering a counter-protester, President Donald Trump drew widespread condemnation for declining to more forcefully repudiate the white supremacists. He equivocated and claimed there were “very fine people on both sides,” despite the rally being focused on the white supremacist cause.
Vance at the time said that wasn’t good enough. He urged Trump to call out racism in no uncertain terms and to establish moral leadership.
“We have a president of the United States who isn’t just a political leader; they’re also a moral leader in some ways,” he said on CBS News. “And people want to know who is the enemy, what are they about, and what are we really fighting for.”
In fact, Vance expressly rejected the kind of approach he now advocates.
He was asked on CNN at the time about Trump allies who pointed to supposed extremism on the left, and he said that was “no defense.”
“Unfortunately, in this country, we’re suffering from a real problem of whataboutism,” Vance said, “which is, whenever something bad happens, people automatically try to point the finger at somebody else, so that the finger doesn’t get pointed at themselves.”
He added: “I think we need to be able to talk about that – to point the finger at that evil and name it without trying to point the finger at somebody else.”
Vance is now putting forward a very different proposition.
He’s giving the MAGA movement license to avert its eyes from some very ugly tendencies in its underbelly – tendencies for which there was plenty of evidence even before Politico’s report on Tuesday.
The content of the Young Republicans’ messages recalls the ugly online activities of a number of prominent young GOP activists and even some Trump administration officials and nominees in recent years, as CNN’s KFILE has reported. Conservative New York Times columnist David French in 2023 argued the extremism in the ranks of young conservatives was a sleeping giant of an issue. He labeled them the “lost boys of the American right” and said they “corrupt our culture” and “poison our politics.”
Whether you think the Young Republicans texts or Jones’ are worse, Vance is suggesting that Republicans are unilaterally disarming if they denounce these comments by people on their side.
To the extent the party adopts this sensibility, our politics are bound to get quite a bit uglier.