“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr,” wrote Bobby Walker, former vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, in the group chat he shared with leaders of other state Young Republican groups across the country. Walker had good reason to be afraid. On Tuesday, Politico reported on the leaked group chat, which was brimming with racism, antisemitism, and violent, authoritarian musings.
Members of the group chat referred to black Americans as “monkeys” and “watermelon people.” They warned each other against trusting Jews. They fantasized about raping their political enemies and putting them in gas chambers. They celebrated Republicans they believed supported slavery. I won’t list all of the racial, ethnic, and homophobic slurs they threw around, but I’m sure you can imagine what they might be.
The Young Republicans are the GOP’s official youth wing, although they define youth rather loosely: Membership is open to members between the ages of 18 and 40. Many people in the group chat exposed by Politico already work in politics or government bureaucracies. They include Michael Bartels, a senior adviser in the office of general counsel within the U.S. Small Business Administration, and Vermont state senator Samuel Douglass, among others. All that is to say that these people are not children. Nor are they random trolls on the internet. They are the future leaders of the Republican Party, and they’re declaring things like “I love Hitler” in a group chat filled with fellow GOP apparatchiks.
How did we get here?
