'Normalized it': Ex-Trump aide blasts 'dark underbelly' allowing 'racism' in GOP chats

Former Donald Trump communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin attacked the "dark underbelly" of the Republican Party that was exposed in a group chat this week.

Politico reported thousands of pages of chat conversation between members of the Young Republicans across the country in which they expressed racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic ideology while also making rape jokes.

During "The View" on Thursday, Griffin said he thinks that it's part of an overarching problem with lonely, primarily white men who are being radicalized online.

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg showed a video of Vice President JD Vance downplaying the incident as kids on a group chat. Goldberg made it clear these were "men" from 24 to 35 years old.

"I want to speak to this because one of my first jobs out of college, I was the national spokesperson for the College Republican National Committee," Griffin began.

"We were actually just on college campuses, over 2,000 chapters. I traveled all over. I knew all of our campus chairs. I knew hundreds and hundreds of members. I'm friends with many of them to this day. I never heard or saw anything like this. But at that time, Mitt Romney was our north star," she said, recalling the 2012 presidential nominee who became a foe of Trump's over time.

"Had we seen this, we would have fired them, denounced them, and moved on with our lives," Griffin continued. "And I think that speaks to two things. There is a dark underbelly in our politics that has allowed racism. It's allowed hate. It's allowed misogyny and we've just, kind of, normalized it on the right, and there aren't enough folks who are willing to just call it out for what it is."

Her second point, deals specifically with a "crisis of young men."

"This is almost universally young men of a certain age. I don't want to stereotype them, but they don't look like guys who have a lot of friends, who have girlfriends, who have intimate relationships. I don't mean this to be mean. But if you don't have a community and you live online mostly, you can be radicalized to hate people. You don't engage with people. You don't have empathy for people. It's very scary and leaders need to wake up to it," she closed.