All good and true ommentary. I am waiting for people to wake up and realize that (obviously) all the people in our party are not for good governance. And some of the people who identify as Democrats are not our enemies but our natural partners. There is a subset of each party that is mature, open-minded and reasonable, not party fanatics but understanding of the fact we need to work together or we will all fail as the ship of state sinks. These are a minority, maybe 10%, but these people in each party need to find each other.
We don’t need to wake up. None of those kids have a shot at election going forward. No one will stomach them. At best, if they show remorse and proactively change, they can continue to work in politics under the leadership of more qualified people.
This was a well-written and well-thought out article. As a black, female conservative, I am straddling both sides.
While the messages were despicable, I can’t help but think that even though they are mainly 20-somethings, and even some 30-somethings, many of them were still brought up in the social media era where speech like this is pretty acceptable amongst friend groups. My youngest daughter, who is 20 years old, has told me how her friend group makes racial statements about each other, joking around. Unfortunately, it’s just what they do and they don’t even think twice about it.
As a high school counselor in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve had non-black students use the word “ni**a in front of me in describing a situation or calling someone that name—with zero awareness that they shouldn’t use it in front of me. But it was so normal to them, because kids of all races use the word; they hear it on videos, they see it everywhere. Honestly, it didn’t phase me, but I did remind them they should be careful when using the word.
I would like to see the full context of all of the texts, and I would also like to know how they were released. I heard that Gavin Wax released them, because he was having a beef with one of the other young Republicans. Makes no sense.
I would’ve liked to have seen Vance be a little more condemnatory of the texts BUT, he was right to mention that there wasn’t similar outrage on the Left when Jay Jones joked in texts about killing his Republican adversary.
Honestly, I’ve seen far more outrageous language coming from the eft that doesn’t get called out: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Jasmine Crockett…these folks are so antisemitic and anti-white, and nothing happens to them.
I hate where we are today.
I really think this is going to dampen the enthusiasm of many people of color who gravitated to the Republican party in recent years, but hopefully many more will realize that it’s not the entire party but some bad apples. I’ve been a part of the Republican party for 40 years, and while I am disliking big parties more and more, I’ve always felt welcomed in it.
As a center-left liberal, I do salute this bright conservative thinker, for he is in step with my reasoning of us on the left “policing our fringes” too. I see some so-called leftist ideology so far out that it should be called illiberal.
However, if he thinks that his party is “devolving into a party of no principles” he must understand that the dark energy of the young GOP party members, that he mentioned, is not newly evolved thought. It has been there for some time.
The MAGA element in the Republican Party is an extension of the neo-Confederate ideology. This migrated from the Democratic to the Republican Party during the Civil Rights Movement, when the party went south to pad it depleting ranks. We all know what the Confederacy was about, and the South, in way did “rise again” within Republican ranks.
From my liberal perspective, though, we on the left must also confront our own uncomfortable truths. Until we acknowledge the toxic elements within segments of black culture that create barriers to progress—barriers not always caused by racism—we will continue to stall our own advancement.
I suggest that the northern Democrats abandoned their southern wing after the Great Migration changed the demographics in the northern cities, threatening the hegemony of the party machines there.
The southern conservatives, after losing the government enforced segregation fight, found that otherwise they had more in common with the Republicans, who were for once alert enough to seize the opportunity.
The diehard racists in the south fit in wherever they can. The diehard racists in the north remained in control of the Democratic Party. The latter group made common cause with the racial grievance grifters to lock in their support.
That fluff at the beginning is insulting once we get to your point. Those young jerks don’t represent MAGA, and you came here to pin us all down. MAGA is bigger than them, and it’s bigger than you.
Compare attacks on federal police and senseless murders between any individual riot during the “Summer of Love” and J6. Our worst moment pales in comparison. Your side can’t even report accurate news on its fringes, because the truth is too inconvenient, the notion that any of you have ever challenged them is just laughable.
Your side gets away with attacking any minority who flips conservative…..because your side is racist as all hell. Your party thinks they own every minority. Your mainstream politicians spend all their time categorizing everyone by their immutable traits. Your entire movement IS EXTREMIST.
I guess I see it a litlte differently: MOST Republicans quickly, unquestioningly condemned the contents of the leaked communications. The vice president did himself no favors with his equivocations, and he'll have to answer for that (not least at home over dinner!).
When we compare the Republican / conservative response to the students - dissolving the New York state branch of the student organization, dismissing the others from their posts - to the Democratic response to the Maine candidate with an actual Nazi tattoo, or the racist invective hurled at the GOP candidate for governor of Virginia - it's pretty clear to me which party actually is aiming to live up to its ideals of equality and mutual respect.
Hopefully the idiot kids expressing racist sentiments learn from this.
If not, I guess they can always switch party registration to Democrat and run for office with Bernie Sanders' full blessing ...
What should the Democratic response to the Maine candidate be, and have Democratic officials been hurling racist inventive at Earle-Sears? The Young Republicans aren't the base's rank-and-file.
lol - that's all just great, dude, but it's got nothing to do with what I wrote. Bernie was defending the guy before any of the background explanation came out.
Note that I didn't say he was a Nazi - I said he had a Nazi tattoo.
I also like how you skated around the racial invective hurled by progressives at numerous campaign rallies for the Jamaican-born GOP gubernatorial candidate in Virginia.
The point, which I stand by, is that Republican Party leaders moved quickly and decisively to remote the youth leaders at question - while Democratic Party leaders have repeatedly found themselves incapable of doing the same when faced with similar predicaments, from the vilest anti-Semitism in their ranks to the outright racism hurled at black Republicans.
I'm guessing your name-calling in the above response gave you a nice endorphin high - sanctimony is the ultimate high, after all - but next time maybe try responding to what was actually written instead of responding to some made-up nonsense that only exists in your head.
I feel for you. It sounds like you really believed that the GOP isn’t like this. As a liberal that comes off as hopelessly naive, this is who the right has always been and will always be because bigotry will always be with us and always find its home among reactionaries. Good luck purging it, it’s more likely you’ll find yourself purged.
Excellent article. (I was just a bit disheartened by "If we don’t, the right’s biggest enemy won’t be the left; it’ll be the mirror". I wish we could stop seeing the opposing party in the same country as the enemy).
“The 2024 victory was a mandate for inclusive conservatism (jobs, security, and freedom for all Americans).”
Amen!
I feel unsure as to the extent the present coalition is constituted by bigots or those who are drawn by the bigotry. It is definitely eye-popping that bigots feel welcome here and feel they can be outspoken in their bigotry. In any case, there is at least a festering sore, if not a cancer within the movement that must be recognized.
I like the parallel you draw with the left failing to police their radical extremists and how that weakened the Democrat party. That should serve as a cautionary tale to us all, and I agree that you are sounding an alarm that we must heed going forward.
I think highlighting JD Vance’s dismissive response is instructive. In the Marine Corps there’s a saying about leadership: The fish rots at the head. That is to say, ultimately, leadership must take responsibility for problems, rather than paper over or deny them if there’s to be any hope of moving forward constructively.
It is shocking to read such ugly venting from the so called republican side and it raises questions and calls for investigation. It certainly calls for loud and outraged condemnation. Having said that, it does feel like the kid who just learned the F word and goes around shouting it for the shock value. To compile so many verbal assaults in one place seems highly performative and infantile. And it should reap the reality of the adult confrontation it deserves. But, to assume that the fringe wackos exposed by these texts is the equivalent of AOC and her band of socialist extremism that has, in fact, become the Left's mainstream, is ludicrous. And distracting.
Republican leaders are hardly calling for an overthrow of our legitimate and respected minorities; they are working hard to elevate and embrace them. For sure there's a fringe on the Right, but it's nowhere near the Capitol, shutting the government down and calling for an overthrow of capitalism. The hallmark of the Right is still to build, create, and use optimism for the future, yes even a ballroom!, not to destroy and spread envy and hate. May it continue to do so, despite useful idiots who crave the spotlight. Don't give it to them.
Our response is…..we come together when it matters and show them our many determined faces. We don’t give up. We don’t worry ourselves through sleepless nights. We show them who we are.
I believe you're over generalizing when using terms like right's complacency.
Think of the whole fiasco with the Milgram experiment in mind.
One perceived authority can influence ordinary people to conform to actions that conflict with their conscience.
The reality is that the culture has become very tribal. No-one is just an "American" anymore. Intersectionality has forced people to identify with their "intersectional" tribe over the more general American tribe. The left and right are pushing this to happen.
BLM blames "white people" for being the problem. The Black tribe rallies around that extreme view. Conservatives blame "woke" for the problem. Black people created woke so they are the problem. No-one is a just an American anymore. They are defined by others judging which "tribe" they are aligned with.
My primary "tribe" is clear given how I publicly identify on Substack. That tribe is more important to me than other tribes like LGBTQ+, male, entrepreneur, American, and my Danish ancestry.
Black people (especially when I was commenting on Medium) wanted to make my primary tribe "white people". I refused that label which just made them put me in the "racist" tribe.
You identify with the "Black" tribe. You are being exactly like Black people who want to force me to acknowledge I was in the "white" tribe. You're forcing people who just are looking for a tribe to be "racists".
I doubt that a majority of the Republicans who were in the chat group are "racists". They are just seeking a "tribe" to self identify with and adopting the culture of the authorities of the tribe. Even though it really goes against their internal morality.
Bottom line, Republicans and Democrats are two cheeks of the same ass both shitting on we the people. Their divisive politics is trying to force people into tribes.
The reality is that most people are no longer identifying with the Republican or Democratic tribes. Their political tribal identity is now independent. They may lean left or right but they refuse to be part of the "ass shitting on we the people".
This is timely and important advice for the Republican Party. While not a Black Republican myself—although I have voted for individual candidates in the past—the party has a unique opportunity to forge a durable , multi,-racial, multi-class majority for itself, the kind the Democratic Party enjoyed for decades. (Patrick Ruffini has written a fine book about this prospect, "Party of the People.") What stands in the way? The party's failure to not only call out this execrable behavior but to embrace it--covertly, obliquely, of course. We are a two-party nation with a history of racial antagonism. One party or the other apparently has to be the party that the minority of racists and other bigots call home. (Hey! Many races are won or lost at the margins, so who can afford to lose potential voters, right?) Historically, that party has been whichever one the majority of Black people were not in: from Reconstruction through the New Deal it was the Democratic Party, and from the 1970s to the present it has been the Republican Party. Beginning in the 1960s, the bigoted element began to migrate into the Republican Party, aided by the rapid enfranchisement of Blacks in the Democratic Party and Nixon's "Southern Strategy." The Result: the solid Democratic South is now the solid Republican South, with racism and bigotry as critical elements in that solidarity. As is well known, Blacks are among the most religious and socially conservative groups in the country, and yet most will not come within a country mile of the Republican Party because of episodes like the one described in this article. I consider myself a classical liberal so key elements of traditional conservative ideology appeal to me, but—like most of my racial fellows—I cannot support a party that either traffics in, or turns a blind eye to, racism and bigotry for political advantage and power. And while there have been powerful non-Whites n the Republican Party for decades (think Colin Powell, Condolezza Rice, Michael Steele, Tim Scott, and Nikki Haley) they have had absolutely zero effect when it comes to purging the dark elements from their party. For them that's a real shame because non-Whites far outnumber racist bigots in the country—which makes one wonder what is going on in the minds of Republican leaders and strategists. (Someone less charitable my say that Occam's Razor being what it is, the answer is simple: they, too, are racist bigots...) So, those of us who cannot abide bigotry are stuck with the Hobson's Choice of voting for a feckless and ineffective Democratic Party that is clueless about how to connect to the majority of voters who are not college-educated—but that's another story.
All good and true ommentary. I am waiting for people to wake up and realize that (obviously) all the people in our party are not for good governance. And some of the people who identify as Democrats are not our enemies but our natural partners. There is a subset of each party that is mature, open-minded and reasonable, not party fanatics but understanding of the fact we need to work together or we will all fail as the ship of state sinks. These are a minority, maybe 10%, but these people in each party need to find each other.
We don’t need to wake up. None of those kids have a shot at election going forward. No one will stomach them. At best, if they show remorse and proactively change, they can continue to work in politics under the leadership of more qualified people.
This was a well-written and well-thought out article. As a black, female conservative, I am straddling both sides.
While the messages were despicable, I can’t help but think that even though they are mainly 20-somethings, and even some 30-somethings, many of them were still brought up in the social media era where speech like this is pretty acceptable amongst friend groups. My youngest daughter, who is 20 years old, has told me how her friend group makes racial statements about each other, joking around. Unfortunately, it’s just what they do and they don’t even think twice about it.
As a high school counselor in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve had non-black students use the word “ni**a in front of me in describing a situation or calling someone that name—with zero awareness that they shouldn’t use it in front of me. But it was so normal to them, because kids of all races use the word; they hear it on videos, they see it everywhere. Honestly, it didn’t phase me, but I did remind them they should be careful when using the word.
I would like to see the full context of all of the texts, and I would also like to know how they were released. I heard that Gavin Wax released them, because he was having a beef with one of the other young Republicans. Makes no sense.
I would’ve liked to have seen Vance be a little more condemnatory of the texts BUT, he was right to mention that there wasn’t similar outrage on the Left when Jay Jones joked in texts about killing his Republican adversary.
Honestly, I’ve seen far more outrageous language coming from the eft that doesn’t get called out: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Jasmine Crockett…these folks are so antisemitic and anti-white, and nothing happens to them.
I hate where we are today.
I really think this is going to dampen the enthusiasm of many people of color who gravitated to the Republican party in recent years, but hopefully many more will realize that it’s not the entire party but some bad apples. I’ve been a part of the Republican party for 40 years, and while I am disliking big parties more and more, I’ve always felt welcomed in it.
I hate where we are today too.😥
🫶🏾🙏🏾
Please don't tell me your daughter and her friends speak warmly of Hitler too.
And what has Jasmine Crockett said that was more outrageous than the content of that group chat?
As a center-left liberal, I do salute this bright conservative thinker, for he is in step with my reasoning of us on the left “policing our fringes” too. I see some so-called leftist ideology so far out that it should be called illiberal.
However, if he thinks that his party is “devolving into a party of no principles” he must understand that the dark energy of the young GOP party members, that he mentioned, is not newly evolved thought. It has been there for some time.
The MAGA element in the Republican Party is an extension of the neo-Confederate ideology. This migrated from the Democratic to the Republican Party during the Civil Rights Movement, when the party went south to pad it depleting ranks. We all know what the Confederacy was about, and the South, in way did “rise again” within Republican ranks.
From my liberal perspective, though, we on the left must also confront our own uncomfortable truths. Until we acknowledge the toxic elements within segments of black culture that create barriers to progress—barriers not always caused by racism—we will continue to stall our own advancement.
I suggest that the northern Democrats abandoned their southern wing after the Great Migration changed the demographics in the northern cities, threatening the hegemony of the party machines there.
The southern conservatives, after losing the government enforced segregation fight, found that otherwise they had more in common with the Republicans, who were for once alert enough to seize the opportunity.
The diehard racists in the south fit in wherever they can. The diehard racists in the north remained in control of the Democratic Party. The latter group made common cause with the racial grievance grifters to lock in their support.
That fluff at the beginning is insulting once we get to your point. Those young jerks don’t represent MAGA, and you came here to pin us all down. MAGA is bigger than them, and it’s bigger than you.
Compare attacks on federal police and senseless murders between any individual riot during the “Summer of Love” and J6. Our worst moment pales in comparison. Your side can’t even report accurate news on its fringes, because the truth is too inconvenient, the notion that any of you have ever challenged them is just laughable.
Your side gets away with attacking any minority who flips conservative…..because your side is racist as all hell. Your party thinks they own every minority. Your mainstream politicians spend all their time categorizing everyone by their immutable traits. Your entire movement IS EXTREMIST.
I guess I see it a litlte differently: MOST Republicans quickly, unquestioningly condemned the contents of the leaked communications. The vice president did himself no favors with his equivocations, and he'll have to answer for that (not least at home over dinner!).
When we compare the Republican / conservative response to the students - dissolving the New York state branch of the student organization, dismissing the others from their posts - to the Democratic response to the Maine candidate with an actual Nazi tattoo, or the racist invective hurled at the GOP candidate for governor of Virginia - it's pretty clear to me which party actually is aiming to live up to its ideals of equality and mutual respect.
Hopefully the idiot kids expressing racist sentiments learn from this.
If not, I guess they can always switch party registration to Democrat and run for office with Bernie Sanders' full blessing ...
What should the Democratic response to the Maine candidate be, and have Democratic officials been hurling racist inventive at Earle-Sears? The Young Republicans aren't the base's rank-and-file.
lol - that's all just great, dude, but it's got nothing to do with what I wrote. Bernie was defending the guy before any of the background explanation came out.
Note that I didn't say he was a Nazi - I said he had a Nazi tattoo.
I also like how you skated around the racial invective hurled by progressives at numerous campaign rallies for the Jamaican-born GOP gubernatorial candidate in Virginia.
The point, which I stand by, is that Republican Party leaders moved quickly and decisively to remote the youth leaders at question - while Democratic Party leaders have repeatedly found themselves incapable of doing the same when faced with similar predicaments, from the vilest anti-Semitism in their ranks to the outright racism hurled at black Republicans.
I'm guessing your name-calling in the above response gave you a nice endorphin high - sanctimony is the ultimate high, after all - but next time maybe try responding to what was actually written instead of responding to some made-up nonsense that only exists in your head.
I feel for you. It sounds like you really believed that the GOP isn’t like this. As a liberal that comes off as hopelessly naive, this is who the right has always been and will always be because bigotry will always be with us and always find its home among reactionaries. Good luck purging it, it’s more likely you’ll find yourself purged.
Excellent article. (I was just a bit disheartened by "If we don’t, the right’s biggest enemy won’t be the left; it’ll be the mirror". I wish we could stop seeing the opposing party in the same country as the enemy).
“The 2024 victory was a mandate for inclusive conservatism (jobs, security, and freedom for all Americans).”
Amen!
I feel unsure as to the extent the present coalition is constituted by bigots or those who are drawn by the bigotry. It is definitely eye-popping that bigots feel welcome here and feel they can be outspoken in their bigotry. In any case, there is at least a festering sore, if not a cancer within the movement that must be recognized.
I like the parallel you draw with the left failing to police their radical extremists and how that weakened the Democrat party. That should serve as a cautionary tale to us all, and I agree that you are sounding an alarm that we must heed going forward.
I think highlighting JD Vance’s dismissive response is instructive. In the Marine Corps there’s a saying about leadership: The fish rots at the head. That is to say, ultimately, leadership must take responsibility for problems, rather than paper over or deny them if there’s to be any hope of moving forward constructively.
It is shocking to read such ugly venting from the so called republican side and it raises questions and calls for investigation. It certainly calls for loud and outraged condemnation. Having said that, it does feel like the kid who just learned the F word and goes around shouting it for the shock value. To compile so many verbal assaults in one place seems highly performative and infantile. And it should reap the reality of the adult confrontation it deserves. But, to assume that the fringe wackos exposed by these texts is the equivalent of AOC and her band of socialist extremism that has, in fact, become the Left's mainstream, is ludicrous. And distracting.
Republican leaders are hardly calling for an overthrow of our legitimate and respected minorities; they are working hard to elevate and embrace them. For sure there's a fringe on the Right, but it's nowhere near the Capitol, shutting the government down and calling for an overthrow of capitalism. The hallmark of the Right is still to build, create, and use optimism for the future, yes even a ballroom!, not to destroy and spread envy and hate. May it continue to do so, despite useful idiots who crave the spotlight. Don't give it to them.
Our response is…..we come together when it matters and show them our many determined faces. We don’t give up. We don’t worry ourselves through sleepless nights. We show them who we are.
It’s in the White House. Of course it will be widely tolerated in the party. Bigotry, including against women, was the story of 2016. Wake up.
I believe you're over generalizing when using terms like right's complacency.
Think of the whole fiasco with the Milgram experiment in mind.
One perceived authority can influence ordinary people to conform to actions that conflict with their conscience.
The reality is that the culture has become very tribal. No-one is just an "American" anymore. Intersectionality has forced people to identify with their "intersectional" tribe over the more general American tribe. The left and right are pushing this to happen.
BLM blames "white people" for being the problem. The Black tribe rallies around that extreme view. Conservatives blame "woke" for the problem. Black people created woke so they are the problem. No-one is a just an American anymore. They are defined by others judging which "tribe" they are aligned with.
My primary "tribe" is clear given how I publicly identify on Substack. That tribe is more important to me than other tribes like LGBTQ+, male, entrepreneur, American, and my Danish ancestry.
Black people (especially when I was commenting on Medium) wanted to make my primary tribe "white people". I refused that label which just made them put me in the "racist" tribe.
You identify with the "Black" tribe. You are being exactly like Black people who want to force me to acknowledge I was in the "white" tribe. You're forcing people who just are looking for a tribe to be "racists".
I doubt that a majority of the Republicans who were in the chat group are "racists". They are just seeking a "tribe" to self identify with and adopting the culture of the authorities of the tribe. Even though it really goes against their internal morality.
Bottom line, Republicans and Democrats are two cheeks of the same ass both shitting on we the people. Their divisive politics is trying to force people into tribes.
The reality is that most people are no longer identifying with the Republican or Democratic tribes. Their political tribal identity is now independent. They may lean left or right but they refuse to be part of the "ass shitting on we the people".
Well spoken
Hear, hear!
this is who they've always been, and always will be. their political platform is built on hiding it, and making it digestible to dummies
Brilliant. Thank you.
This is timely and important advice for the Republican Party. While not a Black Republican myself—although I have voted for individual candidates in the past—the party has a unique opportunity to forge a durable , multi,-racial, multi-class majority for itself, the kind the Democratic Party enjoyed for decades. (Patrick Ruffini has written a fine book about this prospect, "Party of the People.") What stands in the way? The party's failure to not only call out this execrable behavior but to embrace it--covertly, obliquely, of course. We are a two-party nation with a history of racial antagonism. One party or the other apparently has to be the party that the minority of racists and other bigots call home. (Hey! Many races are won or lost at the margins, so who can afford to lose potential voters, right?) Historically, that party has been whichever one the majority of Black people were not in: from Reconstruction through the New Deal it was the Democratic Party, and from the 1970s to the present it has been the Republican Party. Beginning in the 1960s, the bigoted element began to migrate into the Republican Party, aided by the rapid enfranchisement of Blacks in the Democratic Party and Nixon's "Southern Strategy." The Result: the solid Democratic South is now the solid Republican South, with racism and bigotry as critical elements in that solidarity. As is well known, Blacks are among the most religious and socially conservative groups in the country, and yet most will not come within a country mile of the Republican Party because of episodes like the one described in this article. I consider myself a classical liberal so key elements of traditional conservative ideology appeal to me, but—like most of my racial fellows—I cannot support a party that either traffics in, or turns a blind eye to, racism and bigotry for political advantage and power. And while there have been powerful non-Whites n the Republican Party for decades (think Colin Powell, Condolezza Rice, Michael Steele, Tim Scott, and Nikki Haley) they have had absolutely zero effect when it comes to purging the dark elements from their party. For them that's a real shame because non-Whites far outnumber racist bigots in the country—which makes one wonder what is going on in the minds of Republican leaders and strategists. (Someone less charitable my say that Occam's Razor being what it is, the answer is simple: they, too, are racist bigots...) So, those of us who cannot abide bigotry are stuck with the Hobson's Choice of voting for a feckless and ineffective Democratic Party that is clueless about how to connect to the majority of voters who are not college-educated—but that's another story.