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. {snip}
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.”
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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.”
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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 {snip}
Government agencies under the Trump administration have also demonstrated their fluency in this kind of radical, online humor and provocation. {snip}
{snip} Hanania says it may be a matter of time until we start to see it among elected leaders.
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