The United States of Amnesia: On the Tedious Predictability of Republican Racism
The Poison in the Pipeline: Inside the Young Republicans Scandal That Exposed the GOP’s Rotting Core
Let’s not pretend to be shocked. When Politico dropped 3,000 pages of Telegram messages showing Young Republican leaders across four states spending seven months trading Hitler tributes, calling Black Americans “monkeys” and “the watermelon people,” and workshopping gas chamber fantasies, the only people genuinely surprised were those who haven’t been paying attention. And in American politics, not paying attention is practically a job requirement.
These weren’t drunken freshmen scrawling slurs on bathroom walls. These were adults in their twenties and thirties—campaign operatives, government staffers, an elected state senator—systematically dehumanizing entire categories of human beings with the casual efficiency of people ordering lunch. Over 28,000 messages. The N-word used dozens of times. References to “1488,” the white supremacist shorthand for “Heil Hitler.” Jokes about rape, slavery, and driving political enemies to suicide. This is the Republican Party’s farm system, and business is booming.
But here’s where it gets truly rich in its awfulness: Vice President JD Vance, that master of perpetual reinvention who has shape-shifted from Appalachian memoirist to Silicon Valley darling to MAGA acolyte with the smooth agility of a seasoned grifter, decided this was his hill to die on. Not to condemn the racism—heaven forbid. No, Vance chose to position himself as the defender of these charming young men, dismissing the entire scandal as “pearl clutching” over “kids” doing what “kids do.”
Let’s pause here. JD Vance attended Yale Law School. He clerked for a federal judge. He’s written extensively about values and community and the American dream. This is not a man lacking in education or sophistication. Which means his response to Nazi nostalgia and systematic racism is not born of ignorance—it’s a calculated political choice, and that makes it infinitely more damning.
Appearing on Charlie Kirk’s podcast—Kirk being the conservative activist recently assassinated, though Vance seemed unbothered by discussing edgy jokes in the immediate aftermath of political violence—our Vice President explained that “the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like, that’s what kids do.” One imagines Vance’s Yale professors weeping into their tenure letters. This is the intellectual framework he’s offering: boys will be boys, even when the boys are thirty and the behavior is indistinguishable from actual Nazi ideology.
The sheer audacity of the position is almost admirable. Vance wants us to believe that a grown man—Alex Dwyer, the Kansas Young Republicans chair, is nearly thirty—using white supremacist codes is equivalent to a teenager experimenting with forbidden language. That Peter Giunta, former chair of the New York Young Republicans who texted “I love Hitler,” was just being provocative in the way young people are. That William Hendrix, who used the N-word more than a dozen times and was working in the Kansas Attorney General’s office until this exploded, was simply engaging in harmless banter.
What Vance is really saying, stripped of its disingenuous packaging, is that racism among Republicans is forgivable if it happens in private. That bigotry doesn’t count if you’re texting among friends. That holding people accountable for dehumanizing entire races is somehow the real problem, not the dehumanization itself. He’s constructed a moral universe where the only crime is being caught.
The truly masterful touch—and one must acknowledge the cynical brilliance even while being revolted by it—was Vance’s immediate pivot to a Democratic candidate in Virginia accused of violent rhetoric in separate leaked messages. As if two wrongs make a right, as if condemning racism requires first achieving perfect moral parity across party lines. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence,” Vance declared, neatly avoiding the question of why he can’t condemn both. The answer, of course, is that his political survival depends on not alienating the base that sees itself in these leaked messages.
This is JD Vance’s Faustian bargain laid bare. He sold his soul for power—that much was clear when he transformed from Trump critic to Trump’s most fervent defender—but we’re now watching him service the debt. Every defense of these Young Republicans, every dismissal of their racism as youthful exuberance, every deflection to Democratic hypocrisy is another payment on the principal. And the interest rate is his own moral bankruptcy.
The rest of the Republican establishment has performed its choreographed response with varying degrees of conviction. Elise Stefanik expressed herself “absolutely appalled”—this from a woman who praised Giunta for his “tremendous leadership” just months before his Hitler fandom became public knowledge. One wonders what aspect of his leadership she found so compelling. His ability to mobilize young voters? His innovative approach to grassroots organizing? His efficient categorization of racial minorities?
Mike Lawler managed to condemn the messages without immediately changing the subject to Democrats, which apparently qualifies as moral courage in today’s GOP. Kansas disbanded its Young Republicans chapter with great fanfare, as if shutting down one state organization addresses a nationwide culture of bigotry. A few people got fired. Vermont’s Republican governor actually called for a state senator to resign from the party entirely, displaying more backbone than anyone in national leadership. These are band-aids on a bullet wound.
Meanwhile, Kansas GOP Chair Danedri Herbert—who happens to be Black—condemned the messages but felt compelled to mention that her own election proves the party isn’t racist. It’s the “I have Black friends” defense scaled up to institutional level, as if the existence of Black Republicans somehow inoculates the party from charges of racism. Representation without power is just tokenism with a business card.
Even better was Kansas GOP Executive Director Rob Fillion’s response to criticism: Democrats “call everything racist and sexist, desensitizing people to those terms.” Translation: we can’t be held accountable for racism because you’ve cried wolf too many times. It’s a neat trick—delegitimize the very vocabulary of civil rights so thoroughly that actual racism becomes linguistically indefensible. When calling Black people monkeys doesn’t qualify as racism in your framework, you’ve achieved a kind of moral escape velocity.
But let’s talk about what this scandal really reveals, because it’s not just about some toxic group chats. These Young Republicans are the product of a very specific breeding program. The Young Republican National Federation exists to identify, train, and elevate the party’s next generation of leaders. These are not random activists—they’re the chosen ones, the rising stars, the future of the party. And this is what that future looks like: Hitler worship, race hatred, and gleeful cruelty, all wrapped in the language of political strategy.
They learned these lessons from somewhere. From a party that built its modern identity on the Southern Strategy. From leaders who described Mexican immigrants as rapists and animals. From a president who told American congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries—countries that happened to be the United States. From a political movement that has made opposition to “critical race theory” and “wokeness” central pillars of its platform while carefully never defining what those terms actually mean beyond “talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable.”
Trump didn’t invent this—he just removed the last vestige of shame about it. And now we have JD Vance, standing at the pulpit of the Vice Presidency, explaining that we shouldn’t ruin these young men’s lives over a few Nazi jokes. As if the problem is our reaction rather than their racism. As if accountability is persecution. As if consequences are the real injustice here.
The most chilling detail in the entire saga? At least one member of these group chats currently works in the Trump administration. He didn’t contribute messages, supposedly, but he never objected either. Just watched months of racial hatred scroll past and said nothing, made his moral calculation that silence was the safer career move. How many others in Republican politics right now are making the same calculation? How many are in meetings where such views are expressed more carefully, with more sophisticated vocabulary, but identical contempt? How many are reading Vance’s defense and feeling relieved that they won’t face consequences for their own private bigotries?
This is the pipeline that produces Republican leadership now. Not the Young Republicans of the Eisenhower era, earnest college kids debating tax policy and foreign affairs. This Young Republicans—the ones joking about gas chambers and using slurs with the frequency that most people use articles. And Vance is telling us this is fine, this is normal, this is what kids do.
In a functional political system, Vance’s response would end his career. A Vice President who cannot unequivocally condemn Hitler worship without deflecting to partisan talking points is morally unfit for office. A man who describes systematic racism as “edgy jokes” has disqualified himself from leadership. Someone who prioritizes political calculation over basic human decency has revealed exactly what he values, and it isn’t decency.
But we don’t live in a functional political system. We live in a country where attention spans are measured in news cycles, where outrage is a renewable resource that regenerates every forty-eight hours, where accountability is what happens to other people. By next week, this scandal will be memory-holed. Vance will still be Vice President. The Young Republicans will rebrand and reorganize. And the culture that produced those messages will continue to metastasize because the party has decided that winning elections matters more than the character of those who win them.
The Republican Party has become a finishing school for right-wing ambition of every variety—racial, plutocratic, authoritarian. This isn’t a secret. This isn’t a revelation. This is simply what we’ve decided to tolerate. And JD Vance’s repulsive defense of these racist messages is just the latest reminder that the party isn’t interested in reform. It’s interested in power, and it will embrace anyone willing to help them get it, including—especially—those whose private messages read like excerpts from a white supremacist manifesto.
The poison is in the pipeline, and it’s flowing exactly where the party wants it to go. Vance knows it. Republican leadership knows it. And now we know it too. The only question is whether we’ll remember long enough to care.
Josh Powell is a healthcare writer, consultant, and former CEO of a leading multidisciplinary surgical center in New York. Most recently, he served as Project Manager for Columbia University’s NIH-funded HEALing Communities Study, addressing the opioid epidemic through evidence-based interventions.
His book, “AIDS and HIV Related Diseases,” published by Hachette Book Group, established him as an authoritative voice in healthcare. Powell’s insights have appeared in prestigious publications including Politico and The New England Journal of Medicine. As a recognized expert, he has been featured on major media outlets including CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS.
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