In the past month, foreign nationals within the US have seen their visas cancelled because they criticized Charlie Kirk. People have been fired from their jobs for merely quoting Kirk’s own words in a critical manner. Two teenage girls were likely murdered because they mocked Charlie Kirk. These are examples of actual censorship and attacks on the First Amendment, and all of it has been cosigned by Donald Trump and JD Vance. This week, Politico got their hands on a cache of Telegram messages from dozens of “Young Republicans” across the country. The messages reveal widespread racism, bigotry, homophobia, antisemitism and violent misogyny. Here’s how JD Vance reacted to the story:
JD Vance dismisses Young Republicans who in a group chat said "I love Hitler" and joked about slavery and rape as "a bunch of kids" who "told stupid jokes" and adds that "most of the stupid things I did when I was a teenager and young adult, they're not on the internet." pic.twitter.com/AhZTEf3lhj
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 15, 2025
Vance on public outrage over the "I love Hitler" group chat: "Grow up! Focus on the real issues. Don't focus on what kids say in group chats… The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys — they tell edgy, offensive jokes. That's what kids do." pic.twitter.com/POLAnldP2P
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) October 15, 2025
Just so we’re clear, “accurately quoting Charlie Kirk” will get people fired and deported, and their visas will be revoked. But Republican operatives sending gleeful messages about gas chambers and rape are just kid stuff and no one should face any consequences for any of it! Nevermind that many of the most heinous and offensive messages are actually from men in their late 20s and 30s. These are not “teens” – they are actual Republican operatives working for the party at various levels of local, state and federal government.
These are some of the leaked messages Young Republicans were sending in group chats. https://t.co/Y5DSbf14or pic.twitter.com/GZVuYBsHQ1
— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) October 15, 2025
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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- United States Vice President JD Vance speaks on the “One Big Beautiful Bill” at Don’s Machine Shop in West Pittston, Pennsylvania Featuring: JD Vance Where: West Pittston, Pennsylvania, United States When: 16 Jul 2025 Credit: Kyle Mazza/UNF News/CNP/INSTARimages
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- Foreign Secretary David Lammy fishes with US vice president JD Vance at Chevening House in Kent, during his visit to the UK Featuring: Foreign Secretary David Lammy fishes with US vice president JD Vance Where: Chevening, United Kingdom When: 08 Aug 2025 Credit: Suzanne Plunkett/PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Foreign Secretary David Lammy welcomes US vice president JD Vance to Chevening House in Kent, during his visit to the UK Featuring: Vice President JD Vance, David Lammy Where: Chevening, United Kingdom When: 08 Aug 2025 Credit: Suzanne Plunkett/PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Foreign Secretary David Lammy welcomes US vice president JD Vance to Chevening House in Kent, during his visit to the UK Featuring: Vice President JD Vance Where: Chevening, United Kingdom When: 08 Aug 2025 Credit: Suzanne Plunkett/PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Pete Hegseth, JD Vance and Stephen Miller visit National Guard troops in Union Station. Vice President JD Vance and top White House adviser Stephen Miller ridiculed “old” and “white” protesters who hurled verbal abuse at them during a visit with National Guard members deployed as part of President Trump’s crime crackdown. Vance, Miller and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth treated the Guardsmen to a meal of Shake Shack burgers in the Union Station DC train hub as demonstrators made themselves heard in the concourse. Miller blasted the protesters as “elderly white hippies.” Featuring: Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Stephen Miller Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 20 Aug 2025 Credit: Natascha Tahabsem/Cover Images
Vance is getting slammed by many conservatives in the media now. And deservedly so
Tell me more @tessa! I would love to hear about this.
Some of his admirers and followers on radio shows and TV have turned on Vance. And condemned him and these are conservatives!! I doubt Vance will “apologize”.
What a vile person he is! I can’t wait till whatever they are saying about his wife and children is leaked! I bet he defends it in the same way. Zero scruples. Moral compass for sale. Usha gets zero sympathy from me staying in that – she obviously agrees with him.
Right?? There were bigoted comments about Indians in those texts, too. He can’t even be bothered to defend his own wife and family. He’s such a vile piece of trash. “Trump is America’s Hitler” oh no, Vance, that’s YOUR title now.
There was a horrible comment about what his house must smell like. Vance needs to remember that he can condemn more than one hateful comment.
Wonder how he will distance himself from all this when Trump dies, sooner or later.
Plus someday he will have a reckoning to face when his kids are grown. Nothing like a parent disappointing their child.
how to admit you also “joke” about herding your political opponents into gas chambers and loving Hitler and wanting to set people on fire without actually admitting you all say all this shit all the time too.
I haven’t heard any noise from Republicans decrying this. This is who they are. Always have been, but they feel confident enough now to say it.
This is truly horrific and disgusting. See you all at one of the No Kings marches this weekend.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/unearthed-photo-shows-teen-jd-171718811.html This is teenagers making jokes and being too young to understand why it’s weird, but mostly harmless (unless you come after Trans / Gay kids later for even being humans and have pics on the internet of dressing in women’s clothing and wigs). Praising Hitler, getting excited about burning people, and using racial slurs at any age is unforgivable….doing it in a position of power after you’re well past hitting puberty (with the awareness that you shouldn’t be doing it “fr fr”) is…what you think it is.
It would still be reprehensible if they were teens. My parents wouldn’t have been like oh she’s just being edgy if I would have said things like this my junior year of high school. I had been to Mount Vernon and toured slave quarters by the time I was in 7th grade. Being a teen/ young doesn’t make you ignorant.
History exists, we started learning about World war II, the Holocaust, Fascism and Nazis in second grade. There’s no excuse for saying things like this other than you are a bigot. You were a bigot at 16 and you’re a bigot at 30.
Yeah, but you’re female and therefore expected to behave like you’re civilized. Their gender and race would get them off even if they were teenagers. Being “edgy” is the 21st century version of “boys will be boys”.
This! I’m not a fan of Katie Porter, the woman running for governor in CA, but she is getting slammed left and right right by those good Christian Conservatives for the exact same type of behavior praised, or at least condoned, when it’s done by Trump and his merry band of sycophants.
She is absolutely the wrong gender to be behaving like an alpha male.
To repugnants, privileged, 30 year old white men are “just kids” while horribly abused and even intellectually disabled 14 year old kids of color are “adults” and eligible for the death penalty.
These people are all adults. And trash.
For white men, adolescence lasts for eternity.
If they’re too young and stoopid to behave properly, then why are they behind lecterns and microphones at Republican events? Why are they anyone’s chief of staff? Why are they running for office!?!?
Honest to god, I want to hear from Usha Vance. There is no way she supports this moron, and her silence is making her complicit.
Love that they included photos. The Master Race, everybody!
Supremacists are always quite a sight, aren’t they? Delusional.
What gets me is how often white supremacists look like they’re mixed race. White supremacy is reprehensible no matter what, but people who cheer on violence and white supremacy when they look like they’d be a possible victim add confusion to my disgust.
One of them is 40 actually–so just a year younger than Vance. These racist bigots have always been a part of the GOP but they used to be the fringe. Now they’re the core of the party and the handful of rational Republicans left have been relegated to the fringe. It’s all part of the authoritarian playbook.
They’re determined to prove that Hillary was always right–they’re deplorable and proud of it.
Thankfully I was raised in a household that taught us that EVERYONE is equal no matter the color of their skin, religion or nationality. That being said…if any of those words had ever fallen out of my mouth I would have had to eat an entire bar of soap…
Same, I grew up in a small town in southern Michigan which was 99% white and my parents taught us equality from a young age. My siblings and I would have been in big trouble if we spoke in that manner.
My sons are young men at this point but if I ever heard either of them talking like that AT ANY AGE, I would have set them straight. Real fast. No question.
The way things are going these are our future leaders of America. FML.
The worst thing is he didn’t say he would teach his kids not to think or say such things. He said he would “teach them to be careful what they say in chat bc some scumbag might leak it.” That’s his thinking.
what does his wife think I wonder. Is she brainwashed.
Even if these were 13-17 year olds, its still inappropriate, wrong, and extremely problematic. It’s not just “edgy.” It tells us that somewhere along the way these kids learned that these things were okay to say and no one ever corrected them – not a parent, not a teacher, not a friend. They probably started out with less “extreme” phrasing and bc no one ever called them out on it, they kept going.
But they’re not 13-17 year olds. These are grown ass adults joking about putting people into gas showers. It’s horrifying.
And also to point out – these are a “bunch of kids” but the Rs consider a Black boy over the age of…..8 maybe….to be an adult.
They’re a bunch of “young boys” who shouldn’t be held responsible for anything they said in a chat but the GOP sought to deport an actual college student, Rumeysa Ozturk, for simply signing her name to a pro-Palestinian Op-Ed.
They want to criminalize criticism of the President but God forbid grown-ass adults experience the predictable consequences of their abhorrent behavior.
The perpetual victimhood complex is not alpha, bros, not alpha at all……
Facts! @Becks1
Black boys are often perceived as being MUCH older. Even school teachers have been credibly accused of thinking of them as older to ostensibly dole out harsher punishments than are given to white boys of the same ages.
White men are often infantilized well into their forties. Prince William is an example.
In other horrifying news, a staffer in Republican congressman Dave Taylor’s office hung a swastika in his cube. Was this “adviser on legislative affairs” just a dumb kid too, JD Vance?
Dave Taylor (OH) is MAGA, yes. The staffer was stupid enough to leave it hanging while on a zoom call.
He didn’t just blow it off, he also engaged in classic GOP whataboutism, bringing up something a Dem said 3 years ago. It wasn’t even a comparable statement. If Trump is really hosting a UFC match at the White House I would love to see Vance model his toxic masculinity in the ring.
It’s the constant gaslighting and treating us like we are all morons that really pisses me off. We know these are not “kids”. We can all see they are grown ass men.
I guess white men get to be kids with no accountability until they are collecting their pensions. Meanwhile black boys are men at 10 and girls are old enough to have babies as soon as they hit puberty.
I’ve worked in politics since my late teens. I’m now 40. I have NEVER had any inclination amongst a group of professional colleagues to privately text, email, or verbally say any racist, sexist, classist, or any -ist stuff — EVER!! I never even did that in high school.
And one more thing – right wing extremism runs off of jokes and memes. That’s how it all starts. With racism jokes. With Pepe the frog memes. And over time one becomes very desensitized to these jokes and finds themselves believing the core messages underpinning the jokes. We hear all the time about how these mass shooters and right wing nuts got radicalized on 4chan or discord. And when you go to those sites, the people there aren’t sharing academic theses on the correlation between IQ and race. They’re sharing offensive memes, gory pictures (usually of women) and “your mom” style racist and antisemitic jokes.
Meanwhile, ICE arrested a seventh grader claiming he had a gun (local police said he didn’t) and they’re treating him like an adult, sending him to a detention center far from his family.
One set of rules for white people, another set of rules for people of color.
That happened a town over from me here in MA. You know, when I was in middle school if a kid was caught with a knife (allegedly, originally ICE said he had a gun) he would be suspended for a week–MAYBE expelled if it was a second or third offense. Punishment would be dictated by school officials and maybe a school resource officer with the involvement of the parents. Federal law enforcement wouldn’t be allowed to come in and detain the kid only to ship him off to another state without his mother’s knowledge.
It’s fucking insane how far we’ve fallen. Every single member of ICE needs to be held accountable for terrorizing families, communities, schools, CHILDREN. Whole families will need years of therapy to deal with the trauma they’re inflicting. It’s beyond despicable.
I looked up the three biggest offenders, and I’ll just say it…they are fat. Had to laugh that at that as now they can’t even join the military as Hegseth won’t approve.
I have a 6-year-old grandson, and even he knows not to use words that hurt other people. This type of crap is not something ‘a bunch of kids’ do. It is something a bunch of racist, xenophobic losers do and it is horrific. If the RNC had even one shred of integrity, it would ban these individuals from their party.