Racist Young Republican Chat Leaves GOP Stumbling to Respond
Split over whether to discipline the offenders or just ignore the whole affair.
IS THERE A PLACE in the Republican operative class for people who “love Hitler”? How about those who like making jokes about black people eating watermelon?
That’s the debate consuming the MAGA movement this week, after Politico published selections from a group chat featuring a faction of the Young Republicans organization using what we will charitably call vile language.
The fallout has morphed into a sort of philosophical debate within the movement: If someone on your own side is caught frolicking in a racist group chat, is it fair to criticize them? Or should you just keep your mouth shut because you agree with them about Trump?
We’ve experienced a version of this debate many times before, often with Republicans choosing to downplay scandals for Trump and his allies. (We still don’t know where “border czar” Tom Homan’s $50,000 ended up, in large part because MAGA personalities have said they don’t give a fuck.)
But this Young Republicans flap is different, precisely because of the low stakes for anyone who wasn’t in the chat. There are no electoral outcomes or Supreme Court appointments hinging on defending the participants here. These mostly wannabe apparatchiks could easily be thrown overboard and replaced in a day. It’s a more or less pain-free way to reclaim some moral high ground—or, at least, to avoid getting covered in the muck.
And at first, that’s what GOP officials and entities tried to do. The Young Republicans national organization called for the chat’s participants to resign and the Kansas GOP suspended its Young Republicans wing, which had members in the chat. Even Roger Stone condemned the content.
But in a sign of the times we’re in, there was an immediate backlash to the backlash. Both the Young Republicans’ and the Kansas GOP’s tweets were quickly inundated with replies calling them gay.
Then Vice President JD Vance logged on to announce that he would give no ground in admitting the chat messages were wrong, and said that anyone who cared about the texts was engaged in “pearl clutching.”
“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said on Wednesday, referencing group chat members who were in their late twenties and early thirties. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes.”
THE RESPONSES PROVIDE yet another distillation of the fault lines that have come to define the modern GOP. In one corner is the aggressive “New Right”—a faction that explicitly doesn’t care about hypocrisy and is eager to use whatever power they have to crush their foes. They are typified by Vance, who just a few weeks ago was calling for people who posted social media tweets criticizing Charlie Kirk to be fired. In the other corner are the shreds of pre-Trump standards that remain in the party along with those who believe it makes moral and political sense to abide by them.
That latter, lonely group has been represented a lot lately by James Lindsay, a conservative pundit whose anti-woke crusade during the Biden administration has morphed into a new war against what he calls the “Woke Right.” His target is essentially the new wave of antisemitism and “groyperism” led by figures like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
“This isn’t about a group chat,” Lindsay wrote on X. “A ton of younger MAGA is actually like that.”
Lindsay is not lacking for material to work with. On Wednesday the Capitol Police launched an investigation into why a staffer for a Republican member of Congress had an American flag with a swastika displayed in his workspace. And though Lindsay may be waging a lonely fight, he’s not waging it entirely alone. Jewish conservatives, in particular, have grown less than thrilled to find their gentile compatriots so comfortable with gas chamber jokes and even ironic Hitler praise.
“Remember when we watched the left get taken over by its worst voices and wondered how they let it happen?” right-wing personality Arynne Wexler tweeted. “Well.”
Among the arguments that Lindsay’s compatriots have made is that the rule that conservatives should not attack one another only seems to go one way—with figures like Owens and Fuentes seeming to relish tearing into their more traditional, moderate rivals.
Still, I think Vance’s “New Right” will carry the argument here. The motivation is obvious: As long as you never criticize anyone on the right for even smaller-stake scandals, you don’t have to do the same when the consequences are much greater and involve someone like Trump himself.
Daily Wire personality Matt Walsh typified this approach when he posted that conservatives needed to stick together no matter what, rather than “throwing each other to the wolves at every opportunity.”
“The Right doesn’t stick together,” Walsh posted on X. “That’s our biggest problem by far. Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dogpiles, disavow, attack their allies.”
THE FRATERNAL DEFENSE of the chatters grew so pronounced on Wednesday that some even argued such forums were needed to ease the male loneliness crisis—that disbanding them would deprive participants of the self-love safe spaces they need.
“The group chat is sacred,” wrote popular right-wing meme account Autism Capital. “It’s the only safe space men have left to call each other retards and homos. You don’t take that from a man. That’s evil.”
Like Autism Capital, many on the online right seemed far more interested in identifying and punishing the chat leaker than in dealing with the chat participants themselves. Much of that intrigue has focused on State New York Young Republican Club chairman Gavin Wax, who is an avowed enemy of at least one of the Young Republican officials exposed in the chat leak.
In an affidavit first reported by Politico, one group chat member—a staffer in the Small Business Administration—claimed Wax “threatened” his “professional standing” and issued other forms of retaliation if he didn’t give up the chat logs. In the affidavit, the chat member added that he folded under the pressure and handed the logs over to a Wax “associate,” though he wasn’t sure how they made their way to Politico.
“Seriously fuck Gavin Wax,” Fuentes tweeted. “[He] should be immediately blacklisted from any political circle. Zero tolerance for friendly fire.”
Unlike many of the previously unknown Young Republicans implicated, Wax is a real man-about-town in the young MAGA movement. His New York conservative club has offered a glitzier, naughtier, generally less predictable take on life as a Republican than more staid Young Republican events. At the group’s gala last year, for example, Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz inexplicably collapsed onstage.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Wax has been serving in the Trump administration. After an abortive and controversial stint at the FCC, he has been the chief of staff to the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the State Department, meaning he potentially did have more power to threaten the group chat member’s career in the Trump administration. But as a sign of how deep the racism goes, Wax’s boss at State, Under Secretary Darren Beattie, was himself fired from the first Trump administration for speaking at a racist conference.
These are not children. Stop dismissing them as such.
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