Politico has a detailed investigation of the “Young Republicans” in America, based on leaked chat messages like these.
Current reporting of a secret Republican platform (e.g. “invisible empire”) sounds very familiar to me, as a disinformation historian.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
How familiar? I present the canonical Ronald Reagan example.
The Young Republicans knew exactly what they were doing:
“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr” heart emoji
They understood the content was genuinely extreme, not actually funny.
The “joke” framing was explicitly strategic cover using information warfare tactics, camouflage.
The dangerous tell:
When something appears over 251 times in chats, with specific known violent hate symbols (1488), and includes detailed policy discussions interwoven with the “jokes,” it stops being humor and becomes domestic terrorist ideology with a thin comedic veneer.
The jester’s protection only works when everyone knows it’s performance. What happens when the jester starts believing their own act, and then acting on their beliefs?
When Giunta writes “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber” while actually running a political campaign, that’s an articulated threat wrapped in historical genocide imagery, used as an organizing tool.
JD Vance, the Vice President known as a “disciple” of the reknown ACTS 17 extremist preacher Peter Thiel who put him into power, has waded into the topic by deflected and minimized Republican love of Hitler.
When the second-highest elected official provides cover for “I love Hitler” and gas chamber jokes as mere “college” banter, the performance has become policy position.
What’s the historical outcome when leadership actively protects rather than condemns organized imminent extremist violence in discourse?
- Weimar Germany (1920s-30s): Leadership initially dismissed Nazi rhetoric as fringe or protected it as “free speech”
- Rwanda (early 1990s): Radio stations normalized dehumanizing language; political leadership either participated or stayed silent
- Former Yugoslavia (1980s-90s): Nationalist leaders used historical grievances and ethnic dehumanization in “joking” contexts before ethnic cleansing
The American courts have long recognized that in the Young Republican contexts, the speech IS the violence and it doesn’t need to wait for physical action to cause harm or constitute a threat (e.g. Brandenburg v. Ohio, Virginia v. Black, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire).