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Notes -
Big leak of the Young Republicans groupchat, spanning multiple high level members across the nation's "premier Republican youth organization" (as it calls itself), including staffers for GOP representatives, at least one Trump admin employee, at least one elected official, and other high ranking conservatives. "Young" in this case is 18-40, adults working in a professional capacity.
The leaks showcase praise for Hitler, jokes about gas chambers, comments on Jewish dishonesty and other antisemitic messages. Also comments supporting slavery. Along with it is generic racism and bigotry such as widespread usage of slurs.
It also shows an interesting insight into what ordinary republican activists are thinking behind close doors.
One interesting thing is their fear that tying a political opponent within the party to white supremacists and Nazis might hurt them in the general election, but make them more popular among the base.
The response has been mixed.
Elected state senator Rob Ortt says
Adviser for Elise Stefanik says
And Roger Stone says
However, some Republicans in high places don't seem to view it as a major deal. Such as JD Vance, whose only comment is to call it "pearl clutching"
Now I have to disagree with our vice president here, I don't think it is pearl clutching to oppose support of Hitler. I also have to wonder how sincere it is to deflect away the topic and talk about "powerful people call for political violence." when it seems calls for violence happened in the chat given the many jokes about gassing and even bombing political opposition. Is it not possible to be against neonazism such as "I love Hitler" and talk about sending opposition to the gas chambers your opponents and Jay Jones's awful comments? Stefanik, Ortt and others seem to manage. Plenty of others also seem capable of this feat and have criticized both.
Richard Hanania, author of The Origins of Woke, suggests that these sorts of group chats are actually really common among the right wingers he interacted with. In fact his response to this seems to indicate agreement this chat is tame compared to many conversations he has seen.
Some beginner questions for discussion.
is neonazism, support of slavery, and unabashed bigotry such as this actually common among young conservatives as Hanania and the group chat themselves seem to believe?
In that same vein which response is better, someone like Ortt and Stefanik or Vance? And should the Republican party be concerned about the rise of neonazis and support of slavery if question 1 is yes?
Often what we see now is people "hiding their power level" with extremism, and it's often not revealed till they get to the point no one seems denouce them much. This is happening with Jay Jones now, and has happened before in cases like Mark Robinson "black Nazi". Even now Vance can't bring himself to denouce this. Is this tribalist loyalty helping to empower extremism and violence?
A common complaint among the right is "they called us Nazis". But often, we see some right wingers calling themselves Nazis. The aforementioned "black Nazi" Mark Robinson, candidate for LT Gov John Reid in Virginia, etc. As Hanania himself pointed out, the only major national politicians to refer to Trump as Hitler was JD Vance (and RFK per community note, but that might not have counted under his usage of "national politician"). Even the leaked group chat expressed this belief about the Kansas delegation. Now I've been a strong believer in individual responsibilities and have fought for it consistently, so I do the same here and believe that the only people who should be called Nazis are the individuals who praise Hitler/want gas chambers/call themselves nazi/etc. But question 4 is, why do so many of these self identifying Nazis seem to feel at home in the GOP, and why do they seem to believe they might have decent levels of support? How many others are "hiding their power level" too as suggested?
This is in fact lame
I know discord chats. I know signal chatrooms. I know locker room joking. I can't help but roll my eyes at this, and I probably agree with Vance the most that it is Pearl Clutching. I'd also agree with Hanania that for a private group chat this is tame (and I'd go further and say that it is in fact kind of lame for how tame it is).
There are public spaces and there are private spaces. In public spaces you should expect hostile audiences and for people to take your words seriously. You better say what you mean and mean what you say, because you be held to account. In private spaces ... well we aren't actually robots capable of perfect emotional control all the time. Sometimes you want to blow off steam, or say ridiculous things you don't mean, or exaggerate for a joke. Or god forbid, the worst of all, have a friendly audience reading and interpreting your thoughts.
I understand trying to use whatever ammo you get against your political opponents. I just can't imagine any scenario where I'd condemn my political allies for this kind of leaked chat group. Especially one with younger professionals. God forbid I ever get judged for the things I have said in private spaces.
Making friends 101
I've had a mostly tame internet life because around 2009 I started considering everything I typed and wrote online to be public, even when written under a pseudonym. I try to write things that I am willing to attach to my name and identity. I do not have the same rules for spoken conversation or private group messaging. If you have not said things in private conversations that would get you pilloried and lampooned in public then I would submit that you have no real friends. Its a trust exercise. Say heinous crap, get a laugh, then they say heinous crap back. Or if its not funny, you still say heinous crap back because its a sign of trust in a society where certain opinions can get you "cancelled". Even if its your real opinion and your real opinion sucks and I hate it and think its evil, I can signal that I'm a real friend by being like "ok im not gonna hold that shit opinion against you".
And why the hell am I explaining all of this? Is everyone else just pretending this is not how the world works while we put on a public facade of 'oh yes this is so terrible, how could anyone ever say this'? Or is it genuinely secret knowledge to people about how to make friends and socialize? If its the former, drop it, we don't need to lie about the world here. If its the latter ... I'm sorry I don't mean to be harsh. But try something for me ... go nurse some beers at a bar. Try and find a lonely guy to talk with. One hour into the conversation start making it clear that you are something absolutely reprehensible. A nazi, a closet racist, a former criminal, etc. As long as it is not something directly antagonistic to the guy you are speaking with (can't be a racist to a black guy, that is hard mode and you can try it next time) they will mostly shrug it off and proceed to tell you something equally reprehensible about themselves. It can sometimes accidentally turn into a one-upmanship of "im the worst human ever". I was drunk enough to type up an example of what me and one of my friends do in the "worst human ever" one-upmanship game. But that violates my other rule of treating this like a public space.
As always I can test my acceptance of this by how I'd respond to people of different viewpoints saying this shit. And I remember "oh yeah I lived with a guy who was kinda communist". He definitely joked that me and my libertarian self would be one of the first ones up against the wall when the revolution came. I have another person I knew that is now a mayor in a small Pennsylvania town. I have video of him petting an endangered species (manatee), and saying the n-word just to get a rise out of another person on the trip we were on (I might have that on video as well). I like him more for having done those things. But I actually strongly dislike the guy. If he had not done those things in front of me, but I had evidence of him doing it, I'd probably happilly release those things.
Someone failed the trust test, or just didn't want to be a part of it all anyways. All the people that got caught saying heinous shit should resign, but mostly because they failed in the judgement test between a private and public space. Probably one of the most important social skills to have if you are a politician. This whole incident says little else.
Thank God you are here, it feels like I woke up yesterday and suddenly everyone I previously trusted was claiming the sky was green and had always been green.
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To be clear, is support of Hitler acceptable from politicians and staffers or is it not? If supporting Hitler is acceptable when done in private conversations, then what behavior if any is unacceptable to you?
Like I can hardly imagine something more awful than that. Jay Jones comments were nasty, but even that is about just a few kids instead of millions and millions of people.
Should the standards we have of politicians and their staffers be "random lonely guy getting drunk at the bar"? Sounds like we're selecting for losers if our baseline is losers.
Idk, maybe you've talked about your love of Hitler in a bar before. But I've never said that I love Hitler, and I'm sure tons of other people never have so clearly it's not required to have a friendship or a private chat. Considering some of the Republican response here like Gov Scott, it seems many of them don't consider loving Hitler as normal chat topics either.
What is the difference between a person who says they love Hitler and a person like me who doesn't say it?
Are you familiar with the concept of sarcasm? Personally, I've never believed in it.
I love Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot btw.
Ah but it wouldn't advance your argument soldier to obtusely pretend to not understand jokes like an inhuman robot in this circumstance, so I'm sure you understand the non-literal subtext perfectly.
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I think you are confusing someone saying "I support Hitler" in a private, friendly conversation with actually supporting Hitler. Of course everyone who supports Hitler would say they support him, but not everyone who says they support him actually supports him. That is part of the point @cjet79 is getting at, I think.
For example, I have cracked jokes in the presence of friends to the effect of "slavery was great, we need to go back to that". But I do not actually want slavery to be practiced, it is just an edgy joke. One I would probably get turbo canceled for if I were a public figure, no doubt, but still just a joke.
I get the sense that with these Republican messages, you're taking them completely at face value (because they are your outgroup and it's just human nature to believe bad things about your outgroup). But you can't just assume that at the start, and then ask pointed "wait so supporting Hitler is ok?" questions. First we need to come to an agreement whether these dudes actually support Hitler, or if they were making edgy jokes. Only then can we have a well-founded discussion about "is that ok for them to do".
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What is the difference between a person who says they love terrorism and a person like me who doesn't say it?
A degree from Cambridge? A job at Harvard? The presidency? Man, loving terrorists must be good for your career... as long as they're left-wing terrorists, of course.
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It is absolutely unacceptable and abhorrent behavior to leak private group chats. See, I have standards!
In my opinion there is literally nothing that can be said between two consenting adults in a private conversation that I would consider unacceptable behavior.
When I was in middle school and highschool kids around me would make dead baby jokes, Holocaust / gas chamber jokes, they'd say all racial slurs, and they'd talk about fucking each other's mothers and sisters.
I think you missed the part above where I said this is lame because of how tame it is. These people are nerds. And the only thing I find lamer is pretending that this is horrible as a way to score political points.
Of course some Republican dude condemned them. As I said above they should resign for failing to distinguish between a private and public space.
You seem really stuck on the Hitler thing. But I clearly was talking in general terms about many different ways we can be terrible human beings.
My assumptions for someone that says they have not experienced this kind of bonding:
It's fine if you are 1-3. You'll just have to trust me when I say that these conversations take place all the time. I'm 100% certain that you know a man who has had a "say horrible things" conversation within the last month. I'm decently certain (80%) based on your comments that none of these men would be stupid enough to admit it to you, so you'll never know who they are.
So two adults coordinating a child porn ring is acceptable as long as it's done in private? Might need to walk back your literally nothing claim here.
I'm sorry, but if you're in such a world where you genuinely believe that every man jokes this way and anyone who doesn't is just a liar, it says a lot more about you and the people you hang out with in your dark matter world than about men in general.
This type of defense is truly incredible just as a concept though. Like it's literally "Yes all men!" but as an endorsement, it comes off as a lack of imagination and theory of mind.
The world that looks more like the dark matter world from my perspective is the bubble that has formed adjacent the Western progressive ideology, where the healthy and fun trust exercise of saying outlandish things in private company, knowing that all present trust you to not really mean it, is taken deathly seriously.
If the men you know never make offensive jokes and can't even fathom why making offensive jokes is fun, I think they have poorer lives for it.
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I italicized "said" for a very specific reason. Plenty of things you can do that are unacceptable behavior. But the doing is the bad part not the saying. And ya you can larp being pedos in your own private time. As long as you don't do it why should I care?
This "world" I'm living in is also called TheMotte. Every other comment here is agreeing with me. I don't think it is literally every man, but it's close. Similar to the percentage of men that jerk off to porn. Sorry if that is also a revelation to you.
I don't think I'm the one lacking in theory of mind. Everyone here is telling you this is a common experience and your response has basically been 'no way!' how many people would you need to hear it from to believe us? I can find you clips of famous people talking about it, but unless you pre-commit to some threshold that would change your mind I'm sure you'll just find new reasons to dismiss that evidence.
That's crazy, the place you choose to associate with has similar opinions to you? Incredible! That totally disproves the idea that other people exist with different views.
Also "every other comment" except for the ones like me who are disagreeing with you.
If you think the amount of men who joke about their love for Hitler and say Jews are dishonest is the same as men who like porn, you seem to have a very pessimistic and sad view of men. There are lots of fantastic guys. Even lots of fantastic conservative guys who are actively condemning this behavior like Governor Scott, or some of the guys at the Babylon bee or some of the National Review reporters.
And there are also lots of men who say "No, I don't talk about how Jews are dishonest all the time". Sure maybe they're pretty much all lying, but it's also possible that you are stuck in a Hitler Bubble where you associate with others in the hitler bubble and you can't fathom that there are tons of great and fine men not in the Hitler Bubble.
AKA "guys who know and accept the work rules."
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What is your threshold for being convinced? If you don't have one that's fine, that saves me even more time.
I believe you'll find the threshold is "just the other side of whatever is on offer".
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Literally "Yes [practically] all men!" That's correct. "Locker room talk" is real.
There's a Chappell Show sketch about a woman who develops psychic powers and hears men's thoughts. She is comedically horrified at every man she meets including a middle school boy. You are resembling that character a bit.
I think you have a very sad and hateful view of what men are like if you believe they're all joking about how Jews are dishonest and gas chambers.
I think you have a very sad and hateful view of humor if you believe that someone joking about how Jews are dishonest and gas chambers is something that reflects badly on them.
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Yes. Why wouldn't it be? They'd still obviously be liable for creation/distribution/possession of the child porn itself so there's no need to crack down on mere "coordination" other than an authoritarian desire to sneak in more control over private speech in general.
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I am happy for my female friends, for they are enriched: they have heard the most horrible things I have ever said out loud.
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Or they're putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay!
Sometimes I am shocked at how poorly the female mind grapples with things like this. Like, I've heard my wife have abhorrent conversations with her best friend on the phone that she absolutely does not mean. And yet when confronted with someone else having had a similar conversation, she cannot relate. How horrible. Clutch the pearls!
I remember when Trump's Hollywood Access tape leaked, and she really was in the grips of the "My father would never say something like that" propaganda that was going around. I had to gently remind her that her father served in the military. No effect. I went further, that he's told the same joke a dozen times about telling a waitress she "gave good head" and offending her when she served him a beer with the perfect amount of head on it. That had some slight effect. Still, those pearls were clutched, if slightly less hard.
Ha, ya the military is often the Pinnacle of male bonding rituals. I'm sure any given barracks regularly has the most heinous shit said in it.
The military is the most racist and sexist and homophobic culture that is also the gayest race blind society in practice (except the USN which is race segregated by shop). Still sexist as fuck but thats the reality of kinetic capality being inviolate.
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To be fair, I don't think many left-wingers have these spaces. Just toxic longhouse cesspits where no irreverence is permitted because that would release tension and distract from the seething Twenty-Four Hour Hates. That's why places like Chapo and CumTown were so important.
I knew more leftists growing up than righties. They absolutely had these places. One of the most leftist people I knew in highschool was a Jewish guy and he had all of the best Holocaust jokes.
I know fewer super lefties today. But the moderate democrat dads I know are still willing to sling around the wild stuff in private conversations.
Back when SBF was in the news for massive fraud etc. I made some random comment about him having a Jew-fro. My sister was quite offended by this and said it was a rude thing to say, even though I first learned the term from a Jewish friend in high school who rocked a pretty awesome Jew-fro (unlike SBF's nasty greasy rat's nest).
Heck, the very term "Jew" was declared offensive in some blue tribe circles 5+ years ago! There was even a This American Life episode featuring the Jewish host Ira Glass asking one of his younger interns or recent hires to describe what person he is in terms of his religion, and she insisted on calling him a "Jewish person" or something of the sort, while explicitly refusing to call him a "Jew," despite the fact that he self-identified as a "Jew."
I don't think it caught on, but then again, the blue tribe environments in which I reside don't have that many Jews and don't talk about Jews much, so it could be one of those things that just quietly passed under my radar and is actually dominant in the blue tribe.
Jew is a slur or the proper terminology depending on how much stank is put on it. So it's one of those things that's a lot easier to parse the meaning of when spoken, less so over text. I'm completely unsurprised young people who primarily communicate via text rather than speech would be uncomfortable with Jew as a term
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Yeah, as with a lot of things Jewish, there's two kinds of people who use the noun "Jew" to refer to a Jewish person -- neo-Nazis and Jews.
(OK maybe boomers too)
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I am so profoundly glad I had my teens and 20-somethings before the age of, whatever this is. We had ICQ, AOL IM, irc, and to the best of my knowledge none of this was really permanent? Logs were all stored locally, if you missed something in irc, you just missed it. It was all far more ephemeral by nature.
I'm especially glad there are no recording of what went on at LAN parties even into our 20's. Or the insane conversations we had at college. Or the things we said drunk post college. Or the chauvinistic things we joked about when we started having some success with women.
Side note: Didn't we just get done watching liberals melt down over "comedy being illegal" because Jimmy Kimmel almost lost his job? Isn't Jay Jones still running in my state on a platform of making me suffer because I'm evil, I'm breeding little fascist, and I need to feel the boot until I change my politics? And not a single Democrat has called for him to drop out, or even withdrawn their endorsement?
JD has the right of this.
Same. I said a lot of things as a teen and in my early 20s that I would deeply regret if they had been made permanent online. Thank goodness social media, and more importantly Twitter, wasn't a thing when I was most stupid.
My observation of young, confident males is that they are often disagreeable by their nature. The most hilarious thing in the world to me when I was young was watching one of my friends do or say something absurd that either straddled or blatantly crossed the line of what was considered acceptable to decent people. CKY (and then Jackass) had some of the funniest things I'd ever seen on video. I wasn't nearly as wild as some of the people I was acquainted with, but I would laugh very hard at the wild things they did. The incentive to be edgy in young male social circles is pretty high. All that being said, when you're running a political organization in the current era you cannot say the things they said and expect those logs not to be leaked. I think having some cooth goes a long way, even in today's world.
Why? This was probably the first all male inclusive space (or so they thought) that they'd ever experienced. They'd been denied any third space to be boys their entire lives.
I mean, you aren't wrong, but also, what you expect is impossible in context.
Because politics and bed fellows, and because it has gradually become common knowledge that this is a "do so at your own risk" type situation where the risk appears to be increasing almost daily.
It is no longer smart to exchange jokes of that nature in text groups with your name attached to them while being a public figure of any kind, especially if you are a political figure.
If the context is, Young males should never make obscene jokes no matter the place or setting, then yes, that is impossible. If the context is, Young males who work with the public in a political role should never make obscene jokes in text chats that could be used against them later, then I think that is possible and it will work itself out naturally. Young, smart, politically active males looking to fill these roles will either take this story as a cautionary tale or they won't.
Or you could just work to remove the stigma against making obscene jokes in private chats. Vance's comment works toward this goal. The left has already done this for their people, there's no reason for the right to keep punishing their own.
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See, but you skipped the part where I pointed out, how?! They have no third spaces to do so. None. Zero. Zilch. There is zero third space for male bonding. So of course the moment they find themselves in a remotely male third space, they begin doing the repressed male bonding rituals that are their nature. It's unfortunate that the first third space they found that fits the bill is a Young Republicans Group. But society failed them first, by denying them any other third space before that one.
Yeah, I see the predicament and agree it is a major problem for young males. To answer your "how?" question, I honestly don't know for the general population of young males, and it is a fair point. It currently serves as a natural filter to weed out those prone to edgy remarks and the occasional anti-social behavior (that is actually pro-social in context), but if the filter is applied to almost everything a young male does digitally, then the weeding out isn't just limited to bad weeds.
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I googled myself in 2009 when I was a senior in highschool and the fourth result that came up was me on a Facebook post saying that a movie was stupid. In a group that I thought was private.
That was when I scrubbed what I could of old posts from Facebook and elsewhere that had my name attached. I started using reddit more instead to comment. But even on reddit I had it in the back of my mind that my username might be linked to my real name at some point.
Something in society has been damaged from everyone living in the panopticon. I don't even know what it is, because it has been this way my entire adult life. I do know that the way most people cope is by making the private spaces as different as they can.
Anyone leaking private space conversations is always the asshole. I try not to change my opinion of the victim of the leak, but that's not always doable.
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'Did JD have anything to say about the comments on Charlie Kirk's shooting' is the pertinent question here, I think.
Don't care, and this is also a false equivalence. To the best of my knowledge, nobody was fired because of things they said about Charlie Kirk in leaked private messages. They were fired because they were in positions of trust (teacher, doctor, etc), and they posted horrific things endorsing his assassination publicly and proudly under their full name. These are not the same thing, don't pretend they are, I'm not playing along.
But that's how these arguments always go. Jay Jones wasn't directly telling his political opponents over SMS and then a phone call that they deserve to die, something which if I'd done would have been a terroristic threat, it was a "leaked private conversation" and a "joke". No, it fucking wasn't, and also, that's exactly what these Young Republicans are getting fired for.
I said before, when teachers were getting fired because nobody wants psychos like that teaching their children, that the left wasn't upset that the right were hypocrites, they were upset that the rules they thought were meant only for them were being used by others. Then Jimmy Kimmel was back on TV after blood libeling his political opponents, and people pretended cancel culture had been defeated.
I don't know how many times this needs to happen before people stop pretending the defectbots will never stop smashing defect.
They are the same thing. Both of these situations reflect the same interior motivations, and insofar as feeling joy at Charlie Kirk's death is horrific, all of these people ought to have been punished. It makes sense from a practical perspective to punish only the highest profile cases as a warning to the rest, but the point was not to punish people for "saying things".
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You waste time typing anything after "and" if you've already admitted you don't care. Anyway, pivoting from pearl-clutching over the other side being publicly edgy towards you to calling out pearl-clutching when it is directed at you, for any reason, is a whiplash hazard.
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Not "did people who are freaking out about this have anything to say about the comments on Charlie Kirk"?
The principle of "who whom" has been, to my understanding, established to broadly apply to both sides. So the most new information that can be gained is whether it applies specifically to JD Vance.
The question is whether you are particupating in the "who whom" yourself.
Naturally.
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Top level comment is filtered.
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