The Young Republicans’ Leaked Chat Is a Sign of Where We Could Be Headed

On Tuesday, POLITICO published a series of racist and antisemitic messages from a group chat filled with Young Republicans leaders. They included references to putting their opponents in gas chambers and raping them. They called Black people monkeys and “the watermelon people.” One message stated simply, “I love Hitler.”

As offensive as many of the messages were, the language and shock-value humor in them has become commonplace in many of the online communities that young, far-right people frequent. The so-called “edgelords” that populate these spaces are often just a vocal minority on the right. Insofar as they have a coherent political ideology, it’s often about saying whatever is the most shocking to impress their online friends. Still, they significantly shape the message boards, YouTube channels and corners of X they belong to, making them hotspots for racial slurs and offensive jokes.

“That group chat was tame,” wrote Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right social network Gab, on X. “They have no idea what’s coming.”

As the leaked Young Republicans chat reveals, the hateful, troll-like way in which these people communicate has also found its way into the mainstream GOP. It’s a trend that could become more visible as a generation of chronically online young people on the right age into higher positions of power and are embraced by the party.

Already, while a number of elected Republicans swiftly condemned the contents of the leaked group chat, some high-profile figures like Vice President JD Vance have downplayed concerns about it. Vance posted a screenshot of a text invoking violence from Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for state attorney general in Virginia: “This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat,” Vance wrote on X. The following day, Vance brushed off the texts during an appearance on “The Charlie Kirk Show, saying, “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys.” Multiple members of the group chat are in their late 20s and early 30s.

Others, though, found the group chats emblematic of larger trends among young people on the right.

“This is kind of the next generation of conservative elites,” says Richard Hanania, a political scientist and writer who had been a part of these far-right circles in the past and now disavows the beliefs he held at the time. “If there's an intellectual core to [these people], it's basically white ethnonationalism: hard on immigration, just very anti-left.”

It’s not hard to see the parallels between the rhetoric in the leaked group chat and hard-right online spaces. Replies to another Torba post from August include “Adolf Hitler was legitimately a moderate,” and “my Zoomerwaffen will not show mercy” — a reference to the Waffen-SS, the combat branch of the Nazis’ paramilitary organization and an insistence that Gen Z is much more radically right than older conservatives. Many in these far-right online spaces refer to Gen Z as “Generation Zyklon,” a reference to Zyklon B, the pesticide Nazis used to murder people in gas chambers. A fancam praising the messages posted to X, with videos of Nazi parades set to Kanye West (Ye)’s song “Heil Hitler,” has over 7,000 likes and 80,000 views on the platform.

Many of these X users identify as “groypers,” or white nationalists who are ardent followers of the 27-year-old content creator Nick Fuentes. On a livestream, Fuentes addressed the article, arguing, “Everyone’s a groyper now. … This is the mood of my generation. This is the zeitgeist of the under 25, under 30 crowd. It’s just where they are.”

The desire to test boundaries explains why conversations can turn so offensive in anonymous or private spaces, such as in the Young Republicans group chat, according to Jamie Cohen, an associate professor at CUNY Queens College who studies internet culture. People in these far-right spaces, Cohen says, are driven by “an odd belief [about] freedom and the existential threat of losing that freedom” because they believe their freedom of speech has been oppressed by those on the left.

“It’s very similar to the way a racist will drop dog-whistles, hoping for permission to continue,” he continues. “They’re trying to see what the upper limit of edgelord is. So what they're doing is testing each other to see where the limit or the line is. They have their own Overton window.”

Jeremiah Johnson, author of the substack Infinite Scroll, where he writes about the politics of posting and the social internet, guesses that many of the participants in the leaked group chat or similar ones online are not ultra-committed to Nazi ideology. Rather, he says, they are practicing tests of loyalty — seeing how members of their group react to increasingly offensive statements.

“What’s happening is tribalism, where the single most important thing is the group,” Johnson, who is also co-founder of the center-left think tank Center for New Liberalism, says. “And how do you enforce loyalty to the group? … It’s all about testing, and it’s a form of what I call vice-signaling. Liberals virtue-signal. But what conservatives do is they vice-signal.” With their radical language, members of the group are trying to sniff out any rats.

The line between online and IRL is thin, particularly for young people, and what begins in far-right corners of the internet seeps into right-leaning spaces offline — even within Republican politics. Several members of the Young Republicans group chat are in official positions in the party. One works for the Trump administration (some of the members of the chat have been fired from their positions since it leaked). In 2023, a similar incident played out when a staffer for the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign reposted a video of Nazi imagery superimposed over DeSantis’ face (he was fired by the campaign).

Government agencies under the Trump administration have also demonstrated their fluency in this kind of radical, online humor and provocation. The public X accounts of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security are now sharing content that would be at home on groyper message boards — though without explicit Nazi references. In one DHS video posted on X, the agency stitches videos of ICE arrests together with clips from Pokémon, as the cartoon’s theme song, “Gotta catch ‘em all,” plays in the background. The transgressive nature of these kinds of posts is likely the point; it’s supposed to make the poster’s enemies mad and push the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

Hanania says he’s been seeing such offensive rhetoric circulating among young conservative elites in Washington for a while now — and, given the leaked messages, it seems to be trickling down to state politics. Hanania says it may be a matter of time until we start to see it among elected leaders.

“I think the immediate future is politicians kind of playing footsie with them and dog-whistling to them,” Hanania says. “These people [becoming] old enough to be politicians — maybe that’s what we’ll see.”