Times have changed and this is disappointing. I remember actually attending a meeting of the Young Republicans back in the 1980’s. Why would I do that? On a dare. Another Democrat said to me, “You won’t get out of there without getting into a fight,” and I said, no, I would be interested in what these people talked about. As it turned out, the keynote speaker was a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge named Susan Bryant-Deeson and she was speaking on the topic of getting kids who were headed into the legal system as juveniles turned around before they totally screwed their lives. She was a brilliant woman and her address was worth hearing. The Young Republicans (and there were people there everywhere from college age to 50 — I was around 40) were rude to this woman and openly put her down. True story, I was there.
One blond rich college bimbo type told the judge she “was a downer.” Her Honor visibly flinched. And nobody apologized to her later that I know about, because she and I ended up walking down to the parking garage together. (Maybe somebody had enough class to phone her the next day. I hope so.) I was pretty shocked at how these “Young Republicans” behaved but not like I’m shocked by this. Politico:
NEW YORK — Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.
“Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued.
Two members of the chat responded.
“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” Joe Maligno, who previously identified himself as the general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans, wrote back.
“I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committee member, said.
The exchange is part of a trove of Telegram chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than seven months of messages among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. The chat offers an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.
The article goes on to say that “Prominent New York Republicans, including Rep. Elise Stefanik and state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt, have denounced the chat.” Thank God for some semblance of sanity in this world. The article also says, “one member of the group chat is no longer employed at their job and another’s job offer was rescinded.” I would hope so. This is sociopathic behavior and it should not be encouraged in the workplace.
I personally worked in the mid-eighties in a law firm in Beverly Hills where one guy, whose parents were born in Germany and who spoke German, openly identified with Nazism and went by the nickname “Mein Fuhrer” or “Crypto Nazi.” He thought it was funny. He saw Nazism as a kind of naughty cult, for lack of a better description. It won’t surprise you when I tell you that this guy was considered a bit weird and didn’t have a lot of friends.
And he was a bully, which won’t surprise you either. He actually had the gall to threaten me and tell me he had some powerful friends at the State Bar of California (a complete laugh, believe me) and “you can forget about taking the Bar,” were his exact words to me. Well, that got my Irish up and I started a screaming match with lots of profanity in the middle of the hallway. You could hear a pin drop. My boss’s 100 lb. Korean girlfriend was physically restraining me because she thought the situation was going to escalate to physical violence. Truth be known, I was a lot more intimidated by her than by the Nazi because she knew karate. The Nazi was a punk who didn’t know anything except how to run his ugly mouth.
And none of the bosses came out of their offices and stopped the fight, either, because (this is my speculation) they enjoyed hearing the creep being dressed down.
I mention this because racism and Nazism is ugly and has been with us always, but in the shadows. It would come out of the shadows in fits of pique between individuals. Now these same sociopaths feel empowered to come out of the shadows and announce themselves openly on social media and that is truly terrifying. And yes, I’m going to tell you that this trouble maker was a registered Republican and that’s gospel truth. I don’t want to publish his name here but if you really want to know it, contact me and I’ll tell it to you and you can go check the public records in California.
And this part you’ll love: when he met people, new hires for example, he told them — not “asked” but told them — that they “would register as Republicans.” I said, “Zero chance of that buddy. I’m a lifelong Democrat, my parents were, and three of my grandparents who got off the boat from Ireland became Democrats and the fourth grandparent was a Southern Democrat whose family went back generations before the Civil War, when the party stood for other things. So if it’s not in my DNA to be a registered Democrat, it might as well be.”
The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.
Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.
“The more the political atmosphere is open and liberating — like it has been with the emergence of Trump and a more right wing GOP even before him — it opens up young people and older people to telling racist jokes, making racist commentaries in private and public,” said Joe Feagin, a Texas A&M sociology professor who has studied racism for the last 60 years. He’s also concerned the words would be applied to public policy. “It’s chilling, of course, because they will act on these views.”
Yes, they will act on these views. They are acting on these views. Check out our recent posts here about ICE agents tormenting young girls, American citizens, veterans, shooting pastors in the head, some combination of the above. This is the world that the likes of Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Donald Trump have made.
One word.
Neonazi.
Emphasis on the Nazi, not the Neo.
In Mr. InBetween, a popular weekly drama that ran for three years in Australia about a hit man that showed his various sides, he was ordered into an anger management group. It was full of men who assaulted wives, girlfriends, and children, which Ray did not as he lived by a code, and had an eight year old daughter. In one scene, two street punks bumped her, made her drop her ice cream, and talked smack. Ray ignored them, but later found them down an alley, kicking one in the balls and causing the other to run like hell. So the therapist, a bit too smug, was trying to get Ray to admit all violence was wrong, a belief Ray did not hold. When asked about an example of good violence, Ray, being a vet, brought up WW2. The therapist asked why he assaulted the young men. Ray said they were being assholes. The therapist smugly stated the world is full of assholes…don’t you know that? Ray said sure and asked you want to know why? Why asked the therapist. Ray stated with a smile…because people let them get away with it.
In a country where 400,000 boys THEIR ages died to stop Hitler…their parents have failed them. If I had gone down that road with five uncles that fought in that war 1941-1945, a father who was a Korean war vet, and an uncle who was a green beret wounded in Vietnam…trouble doesn’t begin to tell the tale. Nazis in the family? No government on earth could have saved me. You get what you tolerate. FACT.