JD Vance wants you to believe the Young Republicans telegram scandal is just harmless banter from a college group chat. That would be a neat trick if these people were actually in college.
Peter Giunta – the ringleader who joked about loving Hitler and sending people to gas chambers – wasn’t some 19-year-old kid shotgunning beers between classes. He was the chair of the New York State Young Republicans. He sat on the Executive Committee of the New York Republican State Committee. He worked as chief of staff to a New York State Assembly member. He had over a decade of experience in Republican politics and state government. In 2019, City & State Magazine named him one of their “40 Under 40” Rising Stars.
When these messages leaked, he was running to chair the Young Republican National Federation – an organization with 15,000 members aged 18 to 40. Not exactly your typical college sophomore.
The other participants in this digital cesspool were equally established. Bobby Walker was vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans. Samuel Douglass is a Vermont state senator. William Hendrix was vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans and worked as a communications assistant for the Kansas Attorney General’s Office. Joe Maligno served as general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans.
These aren’t kids. They are adults in positions of power – positions where their racism, antisemitism and violent fantasies could actually shape policy and influence elections.
The messages themselves read like a white supremacist fever dream. Over seven months and 28,000 messages, they referred to Black people as monkeys and “watermelon people.” They threw around variations of the n-word. They joked about gas chambers fitting Hitler’s aesthetic. They praised Republicans who support slavery. They talked about rape being “epic” and fantasized about making their enemies commit suicide.
Giunta wrote that if you see a Black female pilot, you should “scream the no no word.” He said Minnesota Young Republicans were “f—-ts” and Maryland’s were run by a “fat stinky Jew.” He promised to “eradicate” Rhode Island Young Republicans “from the face of this planet” and planned to make a rival “unalive himself on the convention floor.”
This is the future of Republican leadership speaking freely among themselves – and their rhetoric mirrors what conservative podcasters and commentators have normalized as “dark humor.”
Remember when Charlie Kirk said he hopes Black pilots are qualified and not just DEI hires?
When confronted with this scandal, JD Vance didn’t condemn it. He didn’t express shock or disappointment. He dismissed the whole thing as pearl clutching over a college group chat and pivoted to attacking Jay Jones – the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general who sent violent texts in 2022 about hoping a Republican’s children would die.
Jones’s texts were indefensible. But Vance’s whataboutism misses the point entirely. These aren’t equivalent scandals. Jones is one person. The Young Republicans chat exposed systemic rot throughout multiple state chapters – New York, Kansas, Arizona, Vermont – all trading in the same racist, violent language.
And here’s what makes Vance’s deflection especially galling: these were his people. Elise Stefanik endorsed Giunta for national chair and called him and Walker “the backbone of our party.” RNC Chair Michael Whatley praised Giunta for “transforming” the RNC. These weren’t fringe actors – they were connected, endorsed, and positioned to lead.
The fallout has been swift. Giunta got fired. Kansas disbanded its entire Young Republicans chapter. The national Young Republicans board demanded resignations. But Vance – the sitting vice president – couldn’t bring himself to condemn any of it. Instead, he trivialized it and changed the subject.
This wasn’t locker room talk or edgy humor between college kids testing boundaries. This was seasoned political operatives who believed they could say anything in private because their ideology had been normalized enough that consequences seemed unlikely. They were right up until the moment Politico obtained 2,900 pages of their messages.
The really terrifying part is how comfortable they were. They knew they should worry about leaks – they even joked about it – but they kept typing anyway. The Trump era loosened political norms to the point where this talk felt safe among people positioning themselves as the party’s next generation of leaders.
Vance once called Trump “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s defending people who literally write “I love Hitler” in group chats. That transformation tells you everything about what the Republican Party has become – and what ambitious men are willing to swallow to stay in power.
So no, JD. This wasn’t a college group chat. It was a preview of Republican leadership for the next decade – unless voters decide that praise for Hitler, gas chamber jokes, and violent racism might be disqualifying after all.