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The current state of Republicans: no words are too repugnant, no violence is beyond the pale, and everything is excusable, as long as you keep the power you need to dismantle democracy.
Well, in case you weren’t keeping track, we’re in the “Nazis are fine” portion of Republican Americans’ moral collapse.
Politico recently broke the story of the discovery of seven months’ worth of disturbing, dehumanizing group texts of Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont.
The extensive threads are an almost unthinkable moral cesspool of unbridled Hitler worship, racial epithets, giddy gas chamber humor, fascist fever dreams, and grim violence porn. People of color are called “monkeys” and “watermelon people.” Antisemitism and homophobia erupt unabated. Bullying, torture, and physical and psychological abuse are celebrated.
The texts are the kind of unmitigated abject filth that any decent American would previously have been denounced without caveat; an open display of bigotry and cruelty that in any other iteration of this nation would have been categorically condemned by every elected official.
But we are no longer living in such days.
We’re in the moral black hole that is the MAGA movement.
Almost on cue, cosplaying Christian Vice President JD Vance, in the kind of gutless cowardice he has become fluent in, took to social media to essentially shrug his shoulders, engage in misdirection, and dismiss it all as “Nazi boys being boys.”
“Grow up! Focus on the real issues,” chided the guy who’s an Adderall-addled heartbeat away from the presidency. “Don’t focus on what kids say in group chats… The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys—they tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”
The last time I checked, being 24-year-olds (which the people in this thread were at minimum) ain’t “kids.” And no, joyfully name-checking Hitler isn’t “edgy” or normal for anyone, including young boys. It’s claiming affinity with one of the biggest mass murderers in history—and it should be unequivocally unacceptable, regardless of one’s political loyalties.
But fascist alignment just isn’t a deal-breaker anymore to the GOP.
JD Vance is the poster child for Republican leadership now: a performative, self-righteous fraud whose sanctimonious sermons about the supposed dangers of the “violent, intolerant Left” are unrelenting. And yet, when faced with voluminous evidence of the cancerous moral sewage within his own party, he develops moral laryngitis and moves the goalpost.
The truth is, Vance is fine with Hitler worship because he is the willing understudy of another monstrous authoritarian whose scalding contempt for diversity is decimating a nation (one he himself compared to the Fuhrer).
And Vance is not an aberration or an outlier on the Right; he is clearly the baseline.
MAGA cultists and Republican politicians have now taken to Twitter in some ass-backwards campaign of whataboutism, posting the phrase, “I don’t care about some group chat,” accompanied by a photo of Charlie Kirk’s crying wife or a victim of violence at the supposed hands of an undocumented person.
This is some grade-A gaslighting garbage, but it’s totally on brand for a group of people who, a decade ago, heard a presidential candidate say he would forcibly kiss a woman and boasted of being able to grab them by the pussy, and two weeks later voted for him to lead our nation. The inexorable slide into the abyss began that day, and now we find ourselves here: where no words are too repugnant, no violence is beyond the pale, and everything is excusable, as long as you keep the power you need to dismantle democracy.
Which leaves the rest of us: decent, compassionate, goodhearted people who refuse to abide the dehumanization of others, who categorically condemn political violence, who will not allow this nation to be dragged into the pit of humanity’s lowest depths.
We need to refuse to normalize the collective sickness unearthed in the Young Republicans’ texts and on full display in the Old Republicans’ policies.
When Hitler enters the chat and Congress, the patriotic Americans here need to drive him the hell out.
John Pavlovitz
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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