The political fallout is continuing from the leak of the Young Republicans group chat. A Politico investigation found revealed that young GOP leaders from Arizona, Kansas, New York, and Vermont sent each other thousands of Telegram messages that included racist, antisemitic, and violent rhetoric.
The authors of the messages repeatedly used slurs and epithets to describe Black people and other people of color, said “I love Hitler,” joked about putting their political opponents in gas chambers, and threatened rape and violence.
First reported last week, the Politico story instigated a conversation among conservatives about whether blatantly bigoted language had become too normalized among young people on the right.
Some members of the chat have been fired or resigned from their positions in the party. Democrats were quick to condemn the messages, but the response from Republican pundits and politicians has been divided, with some denouncing the statements and others minimizing and excusing them, or pointing to violent messages coming from the left.
Vice President JD Vance, notably, said he refused to “join the pearl clutching” and referred to the chat participants as “kids” and “young boys,” even though the participants are in their 20s and 30s.
The leaked Young Republicans chat was followed by another leaked chat in which Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, told a group of Republicans that he has “a Nazi streak,” that Martin Luther King Jr. Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell,” and used an Italian slur for Black people. On Tuesday, Ingrassia withdrew his nomination in the wake of these reports and after it became clear he wouldn’t have the backing of several GOP senators.
Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with Jamie Cohen, an associate professor of media studies at Queens College CUNY in New York who researches visual culture and online extremism, about why Republicans keep getting caught saying offensive things to each other when they think no one else is listening.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Why do you think those Young Republicans were saying what they were saying?
I think they’ve normalized this speech in their communities. It’s sort of the way that we code switch into our group chats. We each have our own type of language when we talk to each other, and the sites and places that they communicate or find themselves around online are speaking like this. They’re just dragging that type of language into their group chats.
That brings us to the question of — if you think that talking this way is normal — whether you really mean it. And we’re not inside their heads; we don’t know if they really mean it. But one way of determining whether they really mean it is to ask: Is this exclusive to young people on the right?
There is a space where people test the people around them while using speech. The Overton window is the overall borderlands of acceptable speech. But I think each person who holds their ideologies — whether they’re left ideologies or right ideologies — tests people by using language that is pretty specific to their space and ideology. And so in these cases, you often hear these words to see if somebody pushes back or not. And if nobody pushes back, you know that that’s an acceptable form of speech inside those communities.
So it isn’t always ideologically [exclusive] to the right; it is ideologically [exclusive] to what is an in-group or what you find as a sense of belonging. So it’s the way that we test each other to figure it out.
Jay Jones, a Democrat who’s running for attorney general in Virginia, said in some texts that he seemed to think were private, that a former House speaker in Virginia, a Republican, should get two bullets to the head. He talked about his rivals’ kids being killed by gun violence. What do we take from the example of Jay Jones?
So this example is interesting, because the difference here is the Young Republicans aren’t running for office. [Editor’s note: One member of the group chat is a Vermont state senator.] They might hold positions in their state, but when you’re running for attorney general, you really are the person who’s responsible for that type of justice. There’s that sentence of “wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.” When you’re running for that position, being inconsequential about that is irresponsible. [Jones] said he was embarrassed and sorry for what he said. But that is also abhorrent speech and it falls under what would be considered threat, and that isn’t protected by our First Amendment rights.
What I’m hearing from you is that everybody is behaving badly in the chats. And by everybody, I don’t obviously literally mean everybody, but I myself have said things in private group chats — nothing along these lines, I assure you and our listeners — that I would not want anyone to see.
This makes me, Jamie, open to the idea that a group chat is essentially harmless. We talk this way in private, but we don’t act on this. And we live in 2025. Everyone has the group chat, and everybody is trying to impress their friends with the clever or salty or spicy things that they say. But we need to remember that it’s not real life. What do you think about that?
In the past several years and probably the last decade, we’ve replaced community into these digital spaces. We’re allowed to be more free inside of them. And I think, to be clear, if we lose that freedom, then we’ve lost connectivity. We do need an ability to express ourselves freer with our group chats, in terms of private spaces, in terms of what we would consider in-group — and I mean small in-group. What we would consider [our] community should have the ability to have a flexibility of language that is acceptable among friends. That is how it is.
Those gray areas are part of how we moderate space in general. It isn’t a danger that translates from text directly to action. That is completely different. Text to action takes many, many years. I think where I feel this happens is when you normalize any type of slow violence — meaning these are just jokes at this point, when you normalize that amongst a group of friends.
[But] sometimes the borders of your group chat spill out into real life. You forget who you’re talking to. You’ve normalized it so much in your head that your filters have been worn down. And I think that’s where the borderlands become soft. And I worry about that with internet culture in general, because so many people that consider themselves extremely online or very online since the pandemic have lost the idea of what the filter is between their online friends and how they communicate to their parents, to their friends offline, or in classes, to be honest. I’ve heard things that come out of [my students’] mouths which result in a little bit of a red face. So I think sometimes that normalcy creates an accidental okayness that isn’t with the right ingroup.
These were young Republicans who were chairs of the Young Republicans in Kansas City and New York. You look at their online profiles, and these are not particularly charismatic people. They don’t seem as if they’re bound for greatness. And so maybe — and we’ve heard conservatives make this argument — they are people at the lower echelon who weren’t really headed anywhere, and therefore it’s not so much to worry about. What do you think about that?
I would ask where JD Vance was in the echelon 10 years ago. If you assume that he was in the lower echelons of politics a decade ago — coming off of a book deal and telling his story, and 10 years ago today being fairly anti-Trump — and then figuring his way into a point where today he uses Twitter and his accounts quite aggressively, with his language. And in [his] defense of these text messages, it just tells you that yes, at this point they may be lower echelon in their speech, but there’s a likely trajectory of them moving up to potentially the vice presidency or the presidency itself.
Vance is a fascinating case because he is young. He’s a millennial. He’s a member of the emo community. He almost certainly will run for president in 2028, and he’s defending this. This man who’s very ambitious, who would probably like to be president someday, is the loudest voice saying, this is no big deal. That’s really striking. What do we take from that?
I guess it surprised me the most when the vice president replied in a quote tweet to the Krassensteins: “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” when the Krassensteins called the Trump administration’s bombing of a Venezuelan boat a “war crime.” The vice president is a very online character, but the Krassensteins are well known as reply guys on X, and they clap back. That’s their main goal. They speak directly back to politicians and try to get that type of attention. So they’re popular figures.
I thought to myself, in what part of history, at least modern history, would you hear a vice president saying that to a citizen? That would be considered something that would be a gaffe or something that would be so problematic. I mean, I grew up when Dan Quayle misspelled potato. So I was fascinated by that level of aggressive mockery of somebody just saying something on Twitter, or on X, and how much that type of speech has become normalized, not just by politics, but by culture and media as well.
I do believe that Vance is speaking, when he talks about this or covers for these Young Republicans — I feel in many ways he’s speaking towards the future of the party that he is likely to or imagines himself to inherit. And in that way, we’re kind of seeing what the new baseline at the bottom is, the normalcy of that lower level as it’s going to become something more aggressive in the future. People still see the internet as another place. But JD Vance and this chat group shows that the internet is everywhere. Internet culture is running our politics and our culture at this point. And we have to really pay very close attention to how JD Vance speaks, because he may be speaking to his echo chamber, but he is expecting that chamber to get much larger and encompass everything around us.
