The GOP's Nazi Youth

Trump has given his followers permission to be the worst and impunity from consequences.

This week, POLITICO broke the story of a Young Republican group chat that was rife with racism, sexism, and antisemitism: calling Black people “monkeys;” calling rape “epic;” fantasizing about sending political opponents to the gas chambers; literally saying “I love Hitler.”

Vice President JD Vance defended them.

“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”

He’s right that a kid’s life shouldn’t be ruined by telling a stupid joke. But the “young boys” in question here are, in fact, adult men, many in positions of power. All members of the Young Republicans are between the ages of 18 and 40. The “I love Hitler” guy (who also called Black people monkeys) is Peter Giunta, a man in his 30s and chief of staff to New York state Assemblymember Mike Reilly. I can’t find the age of Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, but he was recently touted by his organization as “a veteran GOP strategist from Albany.” Samuel Douglass, a Vermont state senator, joined in a conversation in which Walker mocked a friend who “dated this very obese Indian woman for a period of time;” Douglass added, “she just didn’t bathe very often.” When he noted a procedural error made by a Jewish colleague, his wife Brianna Douglass — who sits on the national committee of the Vermont Young Republicans — chimed in to say, “I was about to say you’re giving nationals to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest.”

Many of the participants in this group chat are older than the recent college grads who staffed up DOGE and dismantled the federal government. Many of them are older and certainly in greater positions of power and influence than the random people making rude comments on social media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder — but when it came to those people, Vance and the broader right argued they should face serious consequences, from losing their jobs to being expelled from school to being refused visas to the US to being deported.

There are two issue here. One is that the MAGA right has a legitimate Nazi problem. The second is that the MAGA right believes there are two standards: The ultra-permissive one that applies to them and their followers within which there are zero consequences for even the worst behavior, and the far stricter one that applies to liberals or any other perceived political opponents. And they’re willing to use the full force of government to punish their opponents and create maximal permissiveness for themselves.

This goes beyond speech. The most obvious and egregious example at the moment might be Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar who was under FBI investigation for accepting a bag filled with $50,000 in cash in what seemed to be a bribery scheme… until Trump came into power and his FBI suddenly dropped the investigation. In the meantime, the administration has pursued mortgage fraud and other trumped-up cases against Democratic leaders, calling in unqualified ideologues who have never tried a single criminal case because the evidence is so thin the normal attorneys at DOJ won’t try to prosecute.

Trump has accepted an airplane from the Qataris. His entire crypto scheme is little more than blatant pay-to-play. There aren’t even two different standards when it comes to enforcing laws. There is one side that blatantly flouts the law, and then makes up specious criminal accusations against the other.

The same holds true when it comes to ugly speech and the fomenting of political violence. “Hypocrisy” doesn’t even begin to cut it. It is absolutely true that some people on the left have engaged in acts of political violence, and that those acts are ugly, and that some people on social media cheered. That’s all disgusting and shameful.

But right-wing political violence remains more common than left-wing political violence. Conservatives currently claim that calling them “fascists” or “Nazis” promotes actual violence; they have pledged to crack down on that kind of speech, and to investigate what they claim are networks of left-wing organizations that do things like riot at protests. Ted Cruz just introduced legislation targeting the upcoming No Kings protests, which he claims “may well turn into riots” and says are possibly funded by George Soros, the perpetual bogeyman to authoritarian regimes across the globe. Never mind that the Jan. 6 protests claiming the election was stolen from Trump actually did turn into a riot that injured and killed several people, and those who committed acts of serious violence were pardoned by the president and cheered as heroes by his followers. This is not both sides doing the same thing. This is one side acting far more egregiously, and then bringing the full power of the state down on its opponents for doing far less.

It is had to overstate how much Trump and the MAGA movement have coarsened American discourse, gutted American morality, and generally turned our country into an uglier, less decent place. More than anything else, this is an administration of impunity: Personal impunity for Trump and his family, but also impunity for those who support him to behave in the vilest of ways with no consequences — including seeing no consequences for using their positions to target their political enemies, and to kneecap any political opposition to their cause. Young conservatives who support Trump and the MAGA movement do so because of this culture of impunity, not in spite of it. This is a movement that revels in cruelty and glorifies hurting people — in laughing at children who are sobbing because their parents were taken away by ICE, laughing at people who die thanks to USAID cuts. Online, young conservatives now relish how far they can go. The president, after all, invited one of the country’s most notorious white supremacist Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizers to dinner. He is reportedly considering revamping the refugee resettlement program to give preference to white people.

Being “edgy” by being super racist, misogynist, and antisemitic is standard now among young Republicans. That’s not just because they’re young and dumb. It’s because they’re taking their cues from their elders.

JD Vance seems to think that because identifying as a Nazi is increasingly common among young people in his party, there shouldn’t be consequences for it. A better question might be: Why is the MAGA movement such a draw for people who say they love Nazis and Hitler?

xx Jill