Young Republicans' racist, homophobic and anti-semitic leaked text messages — are not surprising — but as a writer warns, "the texts degrade all of us," and signal a "larger atrocity" behind the MAGA movement.
In a piece Friday by The Atlantic's George Packer, the writer identifies just how this language and vitriol have made their way to the leaders of Young Republican groups, saying "I love Hitler" or joking about rape, gas chambers, and "watermelon people."
"To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us," Packer writes.
This is because President Donald Trump and his administration have set the example, he argues.
"Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency," Packer explains. "With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust denial, and Stephen Miller’s rage-filled threats, the young loyalists who wrote the texts were speaking the language of the people they admire most. Nor was it surprising when, the day after Politico revealed the texts’ existence, the image of an American flag altered into the shape of a swastika appeared on the cubicle wall behind a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of a MAGA congressman. In that culture, the rehabilitation of the man who stands for the worst in humanity was inevitable."
Even Vice President JD Vance — who failed to stand up for his Indian American wife when a DOGE member reportedly made a comment saying “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “Normalize Indian hate" — can't seem to decipher his own "partisan relativism."
When asked about the leaked text exchange, he said this:
“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," Vance said.
The group he's referring to is actually several adults in their 20s and 30s, including one who is already in office, Packer writes.
The writer also identifies another area where "MAGA's moral collapse" hits the most.
"The abandonment of a universal morality isn’t just philosophically wrong—it’s politically stupid. Any successful opposition to Trump has to begin with a lucid understanding of what’s at stake: not just past and present harms done to the marginalized, but everything that Americans once believed they cared about, including the values that were co-opted by the right before MAGA abandoned them—respect for law and custom, patriotism, family ties, common decency," Packer explains.
This loss is major, he explains.
"If the Young Republicans’ texts are seen merely as attacks on the groups they name, then they become the problem of Black and gay people, Jews, and women. But the texts represent a larger atrocity, one that has befallen all of America. Once you base moral judgments on group identity and political convenience, it becomes possible for people on the left to be anti-racist and anti-Semitic, and for people on the right to embrace Muslim haters in Israel and Jew haters in Germany," Packer writes.
"If moral values aren’t simple and universal—if they require a facility with the language of graduate seminars and single-issue activism—they won’t move the immobilized, alienated, numb Americans who still haven’t given up on their country’s promise. The dehumanization of any group dehumanizes everyone. There will never be an end to learning this lesson."