The Young Republicans’ Leaked Chat Isn’t the Future—It’s Now

Politico published an article on Tuesday that revealed leaked chats from leaders of Young Republican groups across the country. The messages included extremely racist and antisemitic rhetoric, comparing Black people to monkeys, and one that simply read “I love Hitler.†And if you read some of the political analysis that’s followed, this is just a peek at the future of the Republican Party. But I’ve got some bad news for anyone who didn’t get the memo. The future is now.

Politico’s follow-up article ran with the headline “The leaked Young Republicans’ messages could be the future of politics.†Washington Post went with the headline, “Are these young Republicans the future? If so, the party’s in trouble.†Steve Schmidt, co-founder of the ex-Republican group The Lincoln Project, characterized the texts and what they represent as the “future.â€

“They have been marinated in the stew of a sick society,†Schmidt said this week on his podcast The Warning. And Schmidt is absolutely right about the sick society part. But my concern isn’t that it’s the future of the Republican Party. It’s the reality we’re witnessing every single day here in 2025.

It makes sense that people don’t want to believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes. Billionaire Elon Musk gave two Nazi-style salutes on Jan. 20, the day Trump was inaugurated for the second time, and it was frankly surreal to watch.

How could the richest man in the world be showing his support for the Nazis? Musk would come out much later and finally deny that he was giving a Nazi salute, but we all know what we saw. It wasn’t ambiguous. It wasn’t meant to say “my heart goes out to you,†as he tried to claim. It was a clear message, and he did it twice. There’s no mistaking that.

Not long after Musk’s salutes, two more people at CPAC in February did it, including former top Trump advisor Steve Bannon. They push the limits, see how far they can go, and then do it again.

Part of the reason people are talking about this disgusting racism and antisemitism as “the future†is that the organization with the leaked group chats is called the Young Republicans. But these aren’t teenagers. They’re largely men and women in their 20s and 30s. As Politico notes, the Young Republican National Federation, which has about 15,000 members, is for people 18-40 years old. Just wee children, really.

The Republican Party of today controls all the levers of power. They have a majority on the Supreme Court, they have the White House, and they control both the House and the Senate. What are they doing with that power? Making overtly racist and antisemitic content for public consumption, seemingly getting bolder with each new tweet and official statement.

Just this week, white supremacists on X noticed an Instagram video posted way back in August that included song lyrics like “Jew me†and “kike me.†The video was just 13 seconds long, meaning that use of the obscure version of that Michael Jackson song, along with those particular words, was extremely deliberate.

Border Patrol deleted the video from Instagram and Facebook, sending Gizmodo a petulant statement after the fact: “We deleted the post and will update with different music. End of story. Now focus on the violent criminal illegal aliens.†But that’s not the end of the story. Far from it.

When Vice President JD Vance was asked about the leaked Young Republicans texts, he tried to position them as edgy, trolling behavior.

“They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like, that’s what kids do,†Vance said, according to NBC News. “And 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. And at some point, we’re all going to have to say enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not OK.â€

The Trump regime has previously had no problem ruining the lives of people for much less. Remember Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish student at Tufts University who was abducted by secret police in March and tossed into an ICE facility? She co-wrote an op-ed defending free speech and Palestinian rights on campus. And she spent six weeks in jail for it.

Ironically, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that Öztürk’s visa had been revoked over “antisemitism†and support for terrorism. The Washington Post reported that the State Department had found no evidence internally that she had done any such thing.

Vance’s attitude about the leaked texts is quite telling. In another era, a bunch of political operatives sharing extremely racist messages would’ve been flatly denounced, even by most Republicans. But we live in the Trump era, a time when you need to defend racism as either trolling or perfectly acceptable.

Vance helped spread the racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats during the 2024 presidential campaign—a lie that resulted in endless AI-generated memes on social media platforms like X.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,†Vance said during an interview with CNN in September 2024. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.â€

And that really sums up what we’re dealing with here. It’s all about overt racism that can then be dialed back or rationalized as memes and trolling. But the masked men rounding up people on American streets aren’t just trolling. And everyone should know by now that we’re dealing with a fascist government that will stop at nothing to remake the U.S. as it sees fit.

The guardrails are gone. Not tomorrow, not months or years from now. They’re gone today. The Trump regime is regularly murdering people in the Caribbean from the air, rounding up U.S. citizens who don’t look white enough, and violently arresting protesters along with the immigrants they don’t like. And they feel no shame in lying about all of it, while calling Democrats the party of “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals,†as White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt put it this week.

Decent Americans need to figure out what they’re going to do about it. That part is obviously difficult, given the endless resources of the Trump regime and the president’s willingness to just break the law. But we better figure it out quickly if we want to ever see the other side of this.