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The Young Republicans were in trouble.
Just a few hours earlier, a news outlet had published private messages from the organization’s encrypted group chat. The messages — shared in a thread containing over 100 conservative activists, allied politicians, local candidates and party officials — were at once hateful and flippant, mixing open bigoty with sophomoric humor. Several included homophobic jokes and slurs. Others alluded to antisemitic conspiracy theories. Some featured passing references to white-supremacist memes.
Now, the release of the messages was unsettling the organization’s allies and drawing condemnation from GOP officials. Amid the mounting blowback, the Young Republicans returned to their group chat to coordinate a response.
It was August of 2022, in North Dakota.
In other words, it was three and a half years before a nearly identical drama played out on the national stage when POLITICO published a new trove of private messages from another Young Republicans group chat, one that included leaders of chapters around the country. Like the North Dakota messages, the exchanges were filled with homophobic and antisemitic rhetoric, with some racism thrown in as well — including callous jokes about Adolf Hitler, gas chambers, slavery and rape. The messages, which came to light as the conservative movement grapples with the rise of far-right figures like the white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes, have prompted a national conversation about the spread of casual bigotry and extremism among the Republican Party’s young and up-and-coming ranks. POLITICO’s reporting led to the resignations of several of the chat’s members and the dissolution of state Young Republicans chapters by party organizations in New York and Kansas.
But the aftermath of the North Dakota scandal also shows how difficult it has become for Republican Party elites to police their right flank, where negative media reports are routinely dismissed as “fake news,” and attempts to hold political actors accountable for offensive statements are written off as “cancel culture.” Today, at least one of the Young Republicans who sent offensive messages holds a formal position with the North Dakota Republican Party. Six people on the group chat — albeit ones who didn’t contribute slurs — went on to the state legislature. And rather than being dissolved like the ones in New York and Kansas, the North Dakota Young Republicans organization remains active in state and local politics.
Still, the reporting about this year’s group chat scandal seems eerily familiar to the North Dakotans who lived through the controversy.
“It was like déjà vu,” said Rob Port, the columnist and blogger who broke the story about the North Dakota Young Republicans’ private messages for the Fargo-based news political-news website InForum in 2022.
Revisited today, the story of the North Dakota texting scandal is more than just a historical curiosity. The episode stands as a window onto the emerging cultural milieu of the Trump-era conservative youth movement — an atmosphere where casually bigoted language is the norm, and where extreme political ideas are not only tolerated but defended. The North Dakota scandal suggests that the offensive language contained in the Young Republicans group chat reported by POLITICO is not an anomaly. Instead, it is an integral part of the private patois of young MAGA conservatives.
In this culture, even the most embarrassing disclosures fail to deter young conservatives’ flirtations with extremism. Earlier this year, Port, a self-described anti-Trump conservative, covered the rollout of the North Dakota Young Republicans’ new logo, a black circle with white block letters surrounded by red and white rings. As his reporting noted, the new emblem is almost identical to the one used by Fuentes.
“I get frustrated sometimes,” said Port. “My articles make a lot of noise, and they get a lot of attention … but ultimately, are there real consequences for the people who behave this way? No.” The North Dakota Young Republicans and the North Dakota Republican Party did not respond to requests for comment.
The controversy began with a standard-fare culture war skirmish.
In April 2022, a group of local officials in Fargo published an open letter encouraging Florida teachers to relocate to North Dakota in response to the Sunshine State’s controversial “Don’t-Say-Gay” bill. The letter didn’t make much of a splash when it was first released, but a few months later, it garnered national media attention after a member of the North Dakota Young Republicans named Ethan Harsell, who was running for a statehouse seat, posted it to social media.
The letter also caught the attention of Harsell’s fellow Young Republicans, who took to their group chat on the encrypted messaging at Telegram to discuss it.
“Josh Boschee is working very hard to advance the LGBT etc agenda in ND,” wrote a member identified by Port as Republican statehouse candidate Carter Eisinger, referring to a Democratic state lawmaker who had signed the letter. (Eisinger could not be reached for comment.)
“yeah I knew Boschee was a degenerate clown,” replied another member named Matt Evans. “Bosche [sic] and [John] Strand” — another of the letter’s authors, who, like Boschee, is gay — “are both alphabet soup creatures.” (Evans, today a district chair within the state Republican Party, declined to comment.)
A few hours later, another of the group’s members — identified by Port as Ben Schirrick, then the president of the North Dakota State University College Republicans — chimed in: “Yeah I just walked through a fag festival,” Schirrick said, apparently referring to a local LGBTQ+ Pride event. “They’ve very loud.” (Schirrick could not be reached for comment. In a comment to Port at the time of the controversy, he did not deny his participation in the chat, saying, “It was a private chat. Hate speech is free speech.”)
Shortly afterwards, an anonymous member of the chat contacted Port, a well-connected political blogger-turned-center-right columnist to share screenshots of the exchange. Port, whose column has a reputation for punching both left at liberal Democrats and right at MAGA conservatives, said he was dismayed — but not necessarily surprised — by the messages. Following the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, the North Dakota GOP, like many other state party organizations, had split between moderate Republicans and their more aggressively MAGA counterparts; the Young Republicans had become an epicenter of the pro-Trump faction. That shift had harmed the Young Republicans’ standing within the state party, which remained under the control of more moderate — if still outwardly pro-Trump — conservatives. In December of 2021, eight months before the messages leaked, state party officials had stripped the Young Republicans of their voting seat on the party’s governing body.
Yet as the private messages provided to Port showed, that move didn’t arrest the Young Republicans’ drift toward the far-right. In addition to the homophobic messages about the letter, Port’s source shared screenshots of an exchange about the 2018 “Sky King” incident, in which an airport baggage handler named Richard Russell stole an empty commercial jet from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and performed an unauthorized takeoff. During an in-air exchange with air traffic controllers before he died crashing the plane into an island off Seattle, Russell had quipped that he could never get a job as a pilot because “I’m a white guy.” The line earned him the admiration of some white nationalist online, who elevated Russell into a kind of meme-ified folk hero.
In the message shared with Port, a member of the group chat had shared a video celebrating the anniversary of the Sky King’s flight with an approving message: “I’ll post this video every year on the same day as long as the jews don’t ban me from the internet.”
On Aug. 22, 2022, Port published his first column about the messages. The report prompted a swift condemnation from the state GOP, which affirmed its commitment to “diversity of thought and respectful discourse,” as well as from the president of the North Dakota State University, where some of the chat participants were students.
But inside the NDYR, the response was more equivocal. Some members, spooked by the media coverage of the messages, quietly left the group chat. But others — including Port’s source — stuck around, preparing to fight back. In one message, a screenshot of which was later published by Port, Evans — who had sent the message calling the Democratic lawmaker “a degenerate clown” — turned his ire on Port. “Rob, and most hostile media people, are professionals at what they do. Which is lying, manipulation, muckraking, and deception,” Evans wrote. “DO NOT TALK TO THEM. EVER.”
In the same message, Evans urged his fellow members to view Port’s story as a badge of honor — a sign that NDYR had become powerful enough that “hostile” factions of the media were trying to take it down. “Do not be dissuaded by this,” Evans wrote. “If your group is infiltrated, REVEL in the fact that you are over the target. YOU ARE A THREAT, and THAT is why you are taking fire.”
Not all of the group’s members shared Evans’ martial attitude, but many came to agree that Port was trying to gin up controversy around what amounted to an off-color joke. “It was a guy making a joke about a Pride parade,” said Harsell, whose original social media post had kicked off the discussion in the group chat. “It’s just free speech. It wasn’t making threats to anybody.”
Two days after Port’s story appeared, the leaders of the North Dakota Young Republicans released a statement of its own. The statement, which did not mention the messages directly, offered a condemnation of “racial, sexual and religious supremacy of any form” before turning its focus to the “libel cancel culture that has been attached to the Young Republicans.”
In the group’s telling, the chat participants were the real victims: “We condemn the political weaponization of labels from the media and government against politically active Americans regardless of their political ideology,” the statement read. “We believe the path to a better North Dakota is not via slander, but through dialogue and the constant pursuit of virtue. Yet we know virtues are cultivated, not canceled.”
The group’s leaders had settled on their response — a muckraker was out to cancel well-meaning conservatives — and its members soon fell in line. Many of the group’s participants simply stayed quiet about the controversy, while Eisinger, who was running for a seat in the North Dakota House of Representatives, followed the group’s lead in publicly casting himself as the victim of “the destructive forces of cancel culture.” (He ultimately lost his race.) The strategy succeeded: By the fall, the group chat had gone quiet, and the brouhaha had blown over.
The members of the chat have stuck around, fanning out across the North Dakota Republican Party. Four members of the chat — none of whom were directly involved in the offensive exchanges — remain in office today. (Three members did not respond to request for comment and one declined to speak.)
Another member, a former vice chair of the Young Republicans, subsequently pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. (The charges were dismissed earlier this year after Trump issued a blanket pardon of all Jan. 6 participants.) This May, Evans was elected as a district chair for the North Dakota GOP, a position that allows him to coordinate official party activity at the district level.
At the same time, the state party that once condemned the chats has shifted in the Young Republicans’ direction. In June, the organization elected a new chairman, Matthew Simon, who has a long record of backing populist challengers in races against Republican incumbents. One of the party’s first actions under Simon’s leaders was to pass a resolution condemning the state’s moderate Republican governor, Kelly Armstrong, for vetoing a controversial bill imposing restriction on libraries in the state. (Simon did not respond to a request for comment.)
In retrospect, Port said, the 2022 scandal and its aftermath show that the conservative youth movement is working exactly as designed: The norms that first develop in Young Republican group chats gradually become the reigning attitudes the GOP. “This is the culture that we’re living though right now,” Port said. “People are so locked into their partisan teams that ‘accountability’ looks like giving in to the other side.”
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