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fascism
Unmasking the Dangerous Extremism in Young Republicans
If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.
Oct 17, 2025
Just this week, Politico exposed private Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders where they didn’t just flirt with Nazi-style extremism, they reveled in it.
In thousands of leaked messages from across the nation, rising GOP stars praised Adolf Hitler, joked about sending political rivals into gas chambers, and mocked the very idea of human dignity.
One message read, “Everyone who votes no is going to the gas chamber… Great, I love Hitler.” Another sneered, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”
These weren’t anonymous trolls lurking on the margins of the internet. They included elected officers of Republican youth organizations, embedded in party structures, cultivating power now.
To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism.
If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.
And if you think that’s alarmist, look around. Nearly 60,000 human beings are currently locked away in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers across the United States. Seven out of ten have never been convicted of a crime.
Many were here legally, waiting for hearings, their status still pending. But under President Donald Trump, they are rounded up by masked agents, hustled into vans, and shipped off to secretive detention centers where families and lawyers can lose track of them for weeks, months, or altogether.
This year, hundreds of Venezuelans were quietly disappeared from ICE custody into El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, a facility known internationally for torture and incommunicado confinement. No charges. No courts. No transparency. That is the textbook definition of enforced disappearance.
And Americans, by and large, are looking away.
History has seen this before. In 1933, long before Hitler launched the extermination camps, the Nazis established hundreds of smaller detention camps scattered across Germany. They called it “protective custody.” It sounded bureaucratic, even benign.
But what it meant was the creation of a parallel system where anyone could be taken, indefinitely, outside the reach of the courts.
At first it was communists and social democrats, then Jews and “asocials,” and eventually anyone who got in the regime’s way. People disappeared into those camps, and good Germans told themselves it wasn’t their business, that “the state must have its reasons.”
By the time they realized what they had normalized, it was too late.
That is the exact pattern we see unfolding here today. Trump’s enforcers don’t call it Schutzhaft. They call it “civil detention.”
And ICE has a $45 billion budget to build hundreds of these “detention centers” all across America. Do you really think they’re just gonna stop at brown people?
They pretend tearing people from their lives without trial is just part of the immigration process.
They pretend spiriting away hundreds of desperate migrants to a foreign dictatorship’s prison is ordinary enforcement.
They pretend masked men grabbing people off American streets are “just following orders.”
But what this really is—and what we must call it without hesitation—is the birth of an unaccountable neofascist American secret police.
This isn’t about whether we want immigration laws enforced; there’s virtually no debate about that. It’s about whether the president can create an authorized, masked secret police force that answers to him rather than the law.
When police are anonymous, when courts are bypassed, when disappearances are tolerated, freedom itself is on the line.
If it can happen to a farmworker in Texas, it can happen to a protester in Portland, a journalist in New York, or a political opponent anywhere in America. It can happen to me, and it can happen to you.
History irrefutably shows us that unaccountable power always expands.
We like to tell ourselves, “It can’t happen here.” But it already is. People are being taken without judicial warrants. Families are left without answers. Courts are being circumvented. Transfers and detentions happen in the dark.
Meanwhile, Americans are being trained to look the other way, just as the “good Germans” did. That is how democracy has died in a nation after nation, from Russia to Egypt to Turkey to Hungary, not with a single dramatic blow, but with the slow normalization of injustice until the unthinkable becomes everyday routine.
And this is why shrugging, shaking our heads, or tweeting our dismay is not enough. History demands more.
The people who stood by in 1930s Germany told themselves it was temporary, or they stayed quiet, or they made excuses. Their silence made tyranny possible.
We must not make the same mistake.
JD Vance brushed off the scandal, telling Americans to “grow up” about the leaked Hitler-loving group chat, calling it “kids doing stupid things.”
As Robert Hubble points out in his excellent Substack newsletter:
The leaders were in their 20s and 30s and held political jobs, including
— Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly member Mike Reilly;
— Staffer for New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt
— Communications Assistant for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach
— Employee at New York State Unified Court System
— Employee at Center for Arizona Policy
— Senior Adviser in the Office of General Counsel, US Small Business Administration (in the Trump administration)
In short, these were not “kids,” nor were they “college students.” They were adults with responsible jobs.
To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism. When elected officials defend calls for racially based mass slaughter as harmless immaturity, they tell the country that hate is acceptable, cruelty is normal, and history no longer matters.
Every act of unaccountable state violence must be called out. Every attempt to sideline the courts must be resisted. Every agency twisted into a political weapon must be exposed and reformed.
The Constitution does not protect itself. Democracy does not run on autopilot. Freedom only survives when citizens refuse to accept the unacceptable.
That means showing up at protests, speaking out at meetings, demanding accountability from lawmakers, and refusing to let media normalize secret police tactics in the United States of America.
There was a time in America when Republicans like my father were the ones warning of the dangers of America becoming an oppressive police state. We must reach out to our Republican elected officials and remind them that Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Barry Goldwater would not tolerate this sort of thing.
America is at a turning point. We can let this slide and hope the system rights itself. Or we can recognize that once the precedent of unaccountable detention and disappearance is accepted, it will never stop at immigrants or refugees. It will spread, as it always does, to silence dissent and crush opposition.
Already Trump is publicly going through a new list of people he wants to prosecute. Even Victor Orban hasn’t gone that far; this is pure Putin stuff.
The masked men who today drag away the undocumented will tomorrow drag away the protester, the critic, the rival. That’s how it worked then. That’s how it works now in Russia, the country is Trump is praising and using it as his model.
So I’m asking you, as forcefully as I know how: stand up. Speak out. Call your elected officials, both federal, state, and local, particularly the Republicans.
Show up this Saturday for No King Day and every day after that. Refuse to live in a country where the president commands his own secret police. Refuse to look away when your government disappears human beings into the shadows. Refuse to be a “good German.”
This is still our republic, but only if we defend it. That time is now.
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'Disgusting': Racist, Homophobic, Antisemitic, and Violent Private Chats of GOP Leaders Exposed
"These are the people who pretend to be offended when called Nazis."
Oct 15, 2025
Is this who they are when not in view of public judgment or recrimination?
That is just one of the questions being widely asked after Politico on Tuesday revealed nearly seven months of grotesque private chats between members of Leaders of Young Republicans, the party's batch of up-and-comers, though already in positions of power within the faction's ranks.
From praising Adolf Hitler to casual use of racial slurs and calls for violence against their opponents, the Telegram chat logs obtained by Politico paint a picture of vile individuals who share a deep loyalty to President Donald Trump and reveled in sadistic contempt for their political enemies, hatred of minorities, and lust for power.
As Politico reports,
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.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
Reaction to the leaked private messages was swift and full of contempt, if not shock.
"Welcome to Trump’s Republican Party," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) in response to the reporting. "Disgusting."
" Racism, rape, homophobia, antisemitism … Are we greater yet?" asked Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "Feel safer?"
According to Politico, "the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely—and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders."
The members themselves seemed to recognize that if their free-flowing conversations were ever revealed to the public, it would be bad. "If we ever had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked," said one member inside one of the chat threads. But as Politico noted, "they kept typing anyway."
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, an advocacy group, said, "These are the people who pretend to be offended when called Nazis. Where’s the GOP leadership outrage?"
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) came under fire in the wake of Politico's reporting, given her vocal support for the New York members of the group, many of whom were identified and named in the reporting. Just this summer, Stefanik called them the "backbone" of the Republican Party and key to its future.
Some of Stefanik's top young allies in the party, noted Addison Dick, a member of the New York Democrats' communication team, "praised Hitler, called to put opponents in gas chambers, and repeatedly used racist and antisemitic hate speech in leaked chats." Dick was among those chiding Stefanik for characterizing the reporting as a "hit piece" as opposed to more harshly condemning the vile behavior it exposed among her party's core of young leaders.
For his part, Vice President JD Vance said he would not join in the "pearl clutching" over the leaked chat logs and refused to condemn the myriad examples of racist, sexist, antisemitic, and calls to violence by the group of party officials.
New York Gov. Katherine Hochul, a Democrat, was asked about the revelations during a Tuesday afternoon press conference, and whether it was a case of a few "bad apples" or a "deeper toxicity" within the entire Republican Party.
Q: Politico reported on a group chat of young Republicans. Does this just reflect some bad apples?
HOCHUL: Some bad apples? These are the future of the Republican Party. This is so vile it's hard to find the words to put into context that these are people who are part of one of… pic.twitter.com/aDjnmcQTaJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 14, 2025
"Some bad apples? These are the future of the Republican Party," Hochul responded. "This was so vile it's hard to find the words to put into context that these are people who are part of one of the two major political parties, and they believe in gas chambers, rape, and discrimination based on the color of people's skin. These are racist, sexist, disgusting remarks."
"And I would say this," Hochul continued, also calling out Stefanik as the highest-ranking elected GOP official in the state for her history of inflammatory and bigoted comments, most notably against New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, whom Stefanik has called a "jihadist" and "terrorist."
Stefanik, said the governor, should do a bit of self-reflection and "reexamination" of her own "inflammatory words" and of her broader role in influencing these young members and "normalizing" such thinking and rhetoric. As for the members exposed in the chats, Hochul said "there's gotta be consequences" for their behavior and that everyone in the party, from Trump on down, should condemn it.
"Kick them out of the party. Take away their official roles. Stop using them as campaign advisers," she advised. "This bullshit has to stop."
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Dems, Don't Fund the Destruction of US Democracy
Democrats need to hold a nationally televised news conference and announce as a unified group that they won’t fund the federal government if Trump is going to use those dollars to invade blue cities.
Oct 07, 2025
It seemed kind of crazy when the hit movie Civil War came out in spring 2024 and the main storyline hinged on a war against the rest of the United States waged by the combined forces of Texas and California, our two most unalike big states in real life. But it must have ignited one of the dim bulbs in the Donald Trump White House.
On Sunday, the 47th president and his raging id, Stephen Miller—blocked by federal judges and political reality from some of their schemes for flooding cities run by their Democratic enemies with armed soldiers—had a new brainstorm for igniting a constitutional crisis.
First, Trump announced on his favorite platform of Truth Social that—rebuffed by Oregon’s governor and a judge that he’d appointed in his first term—he had a new plan for deploying National Guard troops on the streets of Portland. (This is the city Trump thinks is “on fire” after watching b-roll footage of 2020 unrest on Fox News.)
The administration eventually said it would federalize and call up 200 soldiers from the California National Guard—against the will of that state’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, just as the Trump regime had done earlier this year on the streets of Los Angeles. And it didn’t stop there.
How could voters celebrate a deal that claws back some dollars for healthcare yet continues to pay for state terror on the streets of Chicago or Trump’s pirates of the Caribbean?
By Sunday night, the very pro-Trump governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, sought to cement the bizarre alliance between California and the Lone Star State by announcing that, under a presidential order, he was calling up 400 National Guard troops who could also be sent to Portland, or to Chicago, or anywhere else that the White House seeks to invade.
For all the nattering nabobs in the media who still think this is about “fighting crime,” Trump flew to Norfolk, Virginia, and— before a cheering throng of sailors celebrating the Navy’s 250th anniversary—all but declared war on half of the country he was elected to serve. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he declared.
OK, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon more times than an ancient Roman ferry, but this really feels like The Big One in terms of a constitutional crisis. The idea of soldiers from a cornerstone of the old Confederacy rolling up I-55 in BearCat armored personnel carriers to occupy the streets of a northern city really did feel like another Civil War, and this time I’m not talking about the movie.
The president—defying both laws and democratic norms meant to prevent the deployment of American troops on US soil—is sending armed troops to occupy key intersections in the cities that voted heavily for the opposing party, and that’s just the half of it.
As the calendar flipped from summer to fall, the Trump regime has amped up the authoritarianism on every front—a flash-bang dead-of-night warrantless raid on an entire Chicago apartment building, obliterating boats and their passengers off the coast of Venezuela in a campaign that the normally staid New York Bar Association just called “murder,” and pressing prosecutors to indict Trump’s political enemies.
Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, in the crosshairs with masked federal agents already swarming his state’s largest city, has risen to the occasion—at least verbally.
“There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation,” Pritzker wrote on Bluesky Sunday night, adding: “The brave men and women who serve in our national guards must not be used as political props. This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”
While Democrats have more often been finding the right words about America’s rising fascism, action has proved more complicated. Pritzker himself came in for criticism over the role of Illinois State Police at the Broadview Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Chicago, where protesters believed the troopers were curbing their protest rights. Time and time again, a repressive US policing culture seems to trump the ability of even progressive Democrats to rein it in.
American fascism is here, and the battle must be joined.
Even worse, the Democrats have powerful leverage that they’re not using. Some 1,000 miles east of the democracy crisis in Chicago, the 47 Democratic senators—thanks to the filibuster—have been using their power to keep much of the federal government shut down, after missing last week’s deadline for legislation to keep paying the bills.
Led by a duo of milquetoast New Yorkers, Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats and their omnipresent pollsters have said they won’t vote to reopen the government unless Trump and the GOP agree to undo devastating cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
The Dems are right to fight this battle—millions of working-class people face devastating premium hikes, or will lose coverage altogether if nothing is done—and yet it also fails to reflect the gravity of the current threat to the American way of life. How could voters celebrate a deal that claws back some dollars for healthcare yet continues to pay for state terror on the streets of Chicago or Trump’s pirates of the Caribbean?
We heard last week from one prominent Democrat who gets it. “Listen, I don’t think we’re asking for too much in that we are telling the president that if you want us to sign onto a budget, it can’t be a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy,“ Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told the New Republic last week. ”I would be a sucker to agree to a budget that literally funds an operation to hunt me and my allies down—to imprison us, harass us, intimidate us."
A steadily rising number of everyday voters also see the rise of authoritarianism as intolerable. One of the more telling developments of 2025 has been watching regular citizens increasingly defy the government—members of grand juries or trial juries rejecting the Justice Department’s extreme prosecutions, for example—while pampered elites curry favor with the regime. The budget shutdown crisis in Washington is an opportunity for top Democrats to flip the script.
It’s time for the opposition party to take a bold, principled risk. Democrats need to hold a nationally televised news conference and announce as a unified group that they won’t fund the federal government if Trump is going to use those dollars to invade blue cities. They need to declare: No troops, now or in the future, or no deal.
American fascism is here, and the battle must be joined. Democratic leaders need to rally their own “troops”—millions of angry and anxious citizens—to take to the streets in support of the fight to save democracy and to accept the sacrifices that come with making a moral stand against autocracy. They also need to gamble that courage will enhance their political careers, even if that risks losing reelection to a job that their past cowardice has made nearly worthless anyway.
The choice is clear. We can resist Trump’s tyranny at some unknown future date—when his tin soldiers are stationed across the country, when the media has been totally neutered and other institutions like our universities have been humiliated and crushed, and when the odds for success will be extremely difficult. Or we can stage that battle now, mustering all the liberty we have left. Democrats simply cannot pass a budget that pays for the destruction of the American Experiment.
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