Nazism has entered the group chat

This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's flex path learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu. When was the last time your friend group chat got really rowdy? Earlier this week was the kickoff of the NBA season, you know what I mean? So it was really popping all then. Like everybody just talking trash again. Like, oh, this is what is like the season's back. Here we go. I know for me, I was recently at an airport and Jeremiah from Love Island USA got off the plane. And he was so fine in person. And so obviously I had to light up the group chat with that one. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

Political broker story last week featuring what it said were leaks from a telegram group chat that included leaders for the Young Republican National Federation. It made headlines for racist and pro-Nazi messaging. But what online multiverse do these messages live in? And what is the reaction to them say about how we think about accountability? Kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that's what kids do. We're getting into it with Odette Youssef, domestic extremism correspondent for NPR and Gene Demby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch. Gene, Odette, welcome to the show. What's good with you. Thank you. So, Odette, Gene, I am so sorry to make you repeat some of this, but can you explain some of what was in these leaked group chat messages according to Politico? Politico was reporting on these chats that covered about seven to eight months from earlier this year. And there was content in there that it seemed like people in those chats knew would be problematic for them if it became leaked. So jokes about sending people to gas chambers, jokes about striving for a, quote, Hitler aesthetic. One where somebody wrote, I love Hitler, use of neo-Nazi slogans, racism, misogyny, homophobia, you name it. If it's offensive, seems like it was in there. Yeah, it sounds like also, too, these messages were not subtle. Not a lot of ambiguity in someone writing, I love Hitler. No, these were not dog whistles. This was just over, yes. Yeah. For background, the Young Republican National Federation is a political group with 15,000 members. It's for Republicans who are 18 to 40 years old, and it creates networks for them and recruits and trains them for office. This is a political organization that has members elected to Congress. The group chat these messages came from included high-ranking members of the New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont Young Republicans Chapters. I should note here, these messages have not been independently confirmed by NPR, but the discourse around them is worth discussing. So there's a lot to get into here. First, there are edge lords everywhere. Edge lords, for those who don't know, are people who like being provocative or offensive to get reactions, usually online. The thing is, I feel like this is something that used to just, like, live on 4chan. And obviously, you know, this chat where these messages were leaked, it was a private chat. But... I feel like I see this stuff more often than I used to. I mean, the thing about what we see online and what's allegedly in these chats is a lot of it appears to be kind of joking. So maybe there's some plausible deniability there. But as Politico said, when there are 251 slurs and epithets in the leaked chats, is that still a joke? I don't know. I'm particularly curious. Does this quote unquote joking become a gateway to actual belief? our colleague Lisa Hagan came on the podcast and she called this thing the Nelly method because, you know, in hot and hair, he is in the lines like, yeah, a pole in the basement you can strip on and the woman in the song is like, what? He's like, I'm just kidding unless you go and do it, right? It's like the whole plausible deniability thing. It's like a very big part of this particular strain of politics.

I'm joking unless it goes over well, right? Yeah. So where's that line, though, between humor and hate speech? Where is that? I mean, we can get into like a whole thing about intentionality, but they're trying to create like conceptual space for these things, right? Like more and more sort of conceptual space for these things to be plausibly executed at some point, right? And so it's worth pointing out that like, you know, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter has meant that like a whole bunch of sort of rhetoric that used to like live in these like dark corners of the internet is now just like, you know, if you're on Twitter, I'm sorry, I can't call it Twitter anymore. If you're on X slash Twitter or Zitter, whatever you're calling it, you're much more likely to just come across it in your casual online gallivancing than you would have before. Yeah. I just want to add that like, you know, the whole campaign against cancel culture, you know, that we've seen for so many years, right, is a campaign to take the guardrails off of... discussions, right? But the problem with some of this stuff is that it contributes to like dehumanizing perceptions about the people that they're talking about, right? Like whether or not it's a joke kind of doesn't even really matter because you've put that out there and it's just like the accumulation of it itself has an impact. Kind of zooming out a little bit. I want to point out that some Republican leaders have rightfully condemned the leaked chat messages. Vermont's governor, Republican Phil Scott, called the chats disgusting and unacceptable. The Kansas GOP also denounced the messages. New York State's GOP voted unanimously to revoke the New York Young Republicans Club Charter. But some Republicans have long come under fire for getting cozy with white supremacists. Odette, you've been reporting on this. And these are not the first up-and-coming Republicans to straight up engage in Nazi rhetoric or symbolism. I mean, just this week, Politico published another story about text messages. They said these came from Paul Ingracia, who was President Donald Trump's nominee for head of the Office of Special Counsel. Politico quotes the messages, it says, are from Ingracia as saying, quote, I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time. NPR has not independently confirmed that report either. And Ingracia's lawyer said to Politico, If the texts are authentic, they can be read as a joke, kind of sounding like what we were just discussing. For what it's worth, Ingracia has since withdrawn from consideration. A couple years ago, Rhonda Sanis fired a speechwriter after he allegedly created a video with a Nazi symbol in it. And that speechwriter got rehired by Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmidt this year. Is Nazism showing up more in culture at large right now? Or are we just more attuned to it right now? So I think it is becoming more mainstream. And I think that, like, if we didn't take as a lesson, the story that came out, you know, three years ago about Donald Trump dining at Mara Lago with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West as troubling, then we weren't paying attention to this. Nick Fuentes is sort of a live streamer who is explicitly anti-Semitic and who... has engaged basically in sort of neo-Nazi rhetoric around his ideas of, you know, a white nation. And we know Kanye West has been more overtly and explicitly anti-Semitic. And so that kind of company or that kind of inclusion of folks who use that kind of language and traffic in those ideas coming under the MAGA umbrella.

However, we have to look at the body counts. We have to look at how many people are actually dying because of the rhetoric that people are using. And the body count. overwhelmingly has been a result of far-right violence. And so when we're trying to pinpoint the damage of dehumanizing language, who has actually operationalized that into violence against those people? This has been a pattern for many years in the United States. So this attempt to sort of deflect the blame of this to the left to me seems to be sort of giving a pass to the kind of dehumanizing language that we know has actually led people on the far right to kill others. I want to talk about some of the discourse around these leaked chats. As I mentioned, a lot of Republican leaders condemned the rhetoric in them, but I want to talk about JD Vance's response, Vice President JD Vance said on the Charlie Kirk Show, quote, the reality is that kids do stupid things. Especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that's what kids do. Kids, kids, kids. And to continue this quote. And 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 caused to ruin their lives. End quote. Again, this organization is for adults. Gene, you've written before about how black boys and girls in particular are treated like adults by society from a young age and white people enjoy the presumption of innocence for longer. How does that play into how people are talking about this group chat and its members? I mean, right, the people in the Young Republicans are like between the ages of 18 and 40, right? Like, these are all people who can vote, who can join the military, right? And it's just fascinating the way that... Like childhood gets to be elastic, right? And like in all these different directions. I remember if you can think back to, right, when Michael Brown was killed. There was some conversation in the building in NPR about how to refer to him because he was 18 years old. You could imagine some context in which you would say if he were like in college, like, oh, he's an 18 year old college kid, right? But you could imagine another context in which in a lot of the discourse around him was like, well, he's an adult. He's a grown up. And so like the sort of. parameters of adulthood move around depending on who we're talking about and these very, very sort of interesting ways that tell us a lot about power. And it's sort of shrunk for black kids, right? There's always research around the adultification of black kids and people see black kids as older, like, then they really are. I mean, even this is going a little far afield, but like a lot of Taylor Swift discourse right now is about like the sort of perpetual girlhood that she about. That lady. It's a smooth 35 years old. Yeah, yeah. But she's like a perpetual ingenue. Nobody thinks of Megan Steyan as a child, right? You know what I mean? Ah, yeah. So, like, there is a way that race has always shaped, like, the sort of expansiveness of childhood in a way to, like, for white folks to give them grace into, like, relatively late in life. I mean, JD Vance sort of, it was sort of like the most obvious example, like, oh, these are just kids. Like, these cats are like...

30 years old. There's so many ways in those. This is so normalized in our society, like this sort of like perpetual white innocence, right? There's innocence that white people get to inhabit way later in life. You know, to be clear, I mean, some of the people who political reported were members of this young Republicans telegram group chat. They have faced consequences already. Sam Douglas, a Vermont state senator, resigned, saying in a statement that he was deeply sorry. Peter Jinta, who was chief of staff for New York assemblyman, Michael Riley, was fired. As I said, the New York group of the young Republicans was disbanded, and the Kansas GOP says the Kansas chapter is now inactive. But... What does accountability mean? Or who deserves grace when race and age play so heavily into our culture's ideas of who's done wrong? Odette, I'd love to hear from you on this first. I don't really know what the answer is to that from a political context. I don't know what it means for an aspiring political operative to face accountability. I will say I did a podcast five years ago in conjunction with a former neo-Nazi leader of a neo-Nazi skinhead crew that was based here in Chicago. You know, he was responsible for a lot of harm for many years when he was involved with that group. And, you know, he over time came to disaffiliate from that group. Accountability meant trying to correct those harms. And so he spoke publicly about white supremacist extremism. He did a lot of like one-on-one. like mentoring and coaching of people that were trying to disaffiliate from white supremacist groups. It wasn't just sort of saying sorry. And, you know, the environment right now is so different with the internet. The public shaming is so fast and so severe now that... people don't have the time to really sit with what they were shamed for. And so instead of people like sitting with the discomfort of having been called out for something that they did or said, the punishment is quick and severe. And then people sort of react to having been punished rather than reflect on like why. Like why was it offensive what they said? Like who did it hurt and in what ways? And in like, what ways did that contribute to sort of a larger systemic issue of

discrimination or dehumanization or whatever. So in an ideal world, like accountability would sort of give people space to work that out and figure out how they can fix it. But now it's just a completely different thing because there's a whole reward structure now, it seems, for people who are offensive. And I don't know really how you navigate around that. Maybe the call out. a call in, whatever you want to call it, has to come from people that you trust. Like, there's, like, value in calling out your uncle or your aunt at the Thanksgiving dinner table and they say something out of pocket because, like, you might be the only person, right, who was going to call them out, who they will listen to, you know? What I will say is that, and this is something somebody said to us a long time ago, his name's Philip Solomon, but he said to us that, like, even if you don't change anybody's mind, what you do is create in that space the expectation of friction. And so a lot of people might still be on some nonsense, but they will say, I'm not going to say this here because I know I don't want to hear this person's mouth. Jean Odette, I have learned so much here. Thank you both so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. And to thank you, do you think that you all could stick around to play a game with me? Sure. Absolutely. Wonderful. All right, y'all, when we get back, we're going to play a little game. Stick around.

You know this feeling. You see a news story during a busy workday and think, I'll catch up later. Make Consider This from NPR part of your daily news diet. This week, we break down the new Pentagon request for war funding, the U.S. nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, and the case against the Tate Brothers. Short episodes, clear takeaways, every afternoon. Consider this. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Planet Money Summer School, we go to China, one of the world's biggest economy. And what we learned is Americans are crazy, Chinese are crazy, these are two countries full of these crazy hustlers. The U.S. and China are more alike than you might think. On Planet Money Summer School, a strange lesson about success, how to handle the downsides of progress. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's me, Peter Sagal, host of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. It's summer, and if you want to turn your pool party into a nerd fest, check out our news quiz. We've got comedians, we got celebrities, we got games to help you laugh about the week's news. Yeah, that news. It'll be just like we're all hanging out at your backyard barbecue. Listen every week to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

We are going to play a little game I like to call. Wait, what? Wait, what? We're going to run through some pop culture moments of the week, and you're going to guess who did what. But don't worry, it's all multiple choice, and the person with most points at the end wins bragging rights. Okay. Oh, I'm cooked. No, I mean, listen, there's a shot in here for everybody. Okay. If you're ready, please shout into the microphone and let me know. Give me a yeah. Okay, yeah. Yeah, let's go. All right. Okay, round one. Who said, quote, Diva up? Always on X after they were released from prison last week. Was it A, former congressman George Santos, B, Jen Shaw of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, or C, Karen Hugar of the Real Housewives of Potomac. I want to say A, yeah. A. Well, the answer actually is A, George Santos. Nice. President Trump commuted his sentence and Santos is out and free again. In the same ex post, he plugged his cameo link saying, I'm back to put a smile on all your faces. George is a wild boy. I mean, you were both correct, but Jean, you were first, so you get the point. I got my husband a Giselle Bryant. Cameo from the Real Housewives of Potomac because he always thought she was so funny and so gossipy. She gave me my money's worth of the cameo. I mean, to this day, it's actually the best cameo that I've seen that anybody I know personally has sent or received. That's amazing. So shout to Giselle. She did the cameo down. Absolutely. Yes. All right. Well, on to number two. Two people recently confirmed they've been in a years-long relationship that has long been speculated about. Who are they? A, YouTubers, Dan and Phil. B, actors and singers, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Arrivo. Or C, actors, Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson. I guess B, because I am so out of it, I don't know who the A people are. I would say B, too. I don't know who the A people are too. Well, the answer is A, Dan and Phil. And I'll say, I also did not know these people at all, but I know them now. They have millions of subscribers on YouTube, and they have been making videos together a long time. And lots of their fans have shipped them. And they released a video recently revealing they've been in a relationship this whole time, 16 years. Have either of you ever been in a secret relationship? Just laying it out on the table. Have we done that? I ain't going to reveal that on. It's been a minute. Come on. Oh. All my relationships are secret, yeah.

I have never been in a secret relationship, but I have backslid with an X. And I kept that a secret. And I kept my dignity. There we go. That's how you do it. That's how you do it. Who amongst us has not spun the blood? Who amongst us, exactly? All right. Last round. How did the jewel thieves that broke into the Louvre this past week get inside? Was it? A. Repelling into the museum from a skylight in the roof. B, posing a staff and sneaking into a surface entrance, or C, using a basket lift and cutting through a window. I pick C. I'm going to say posing a staff. The answer is C, using a basket lift and cutting through a window. Four suspects showed up at 9.30 a.m. in broad daylight and lifted their way to a balcony in the gallery of Apollo. They threatened guards, grab their jewels, and got away. Oh, no. We actually have reached a tie. Oh, rude. So that is it for wait what for this week. But I think I'm going to have to have you all back for a rematch. Let's do it. All right. All right. And Odette, Jean, thank you both so much for joining me today. Thanks for having us. Appreciate you. Thank you, Brittany. And you all know, I love hearing from you. And I just want to shout out one comment I read this week on our episode on Brandon Taylor's new book, Minor Black Figures. Spotify user, Tara or Tara, sorry, M. Nestor wrote, quote, I found this to be an incredibly poignant and moving discussion about creation and its ties to our intrinsic sense of self-purpose. I just want to say, I am so happy to hear that. I also got a lot out of having this conversation. It gave me a lot of perspective on how easy it is to get stuck in yourself instead of, you know, welcoming the beauty of the world. And to everybody else, I love hearing what you all connect with in these episodes. So wherever you're listening, drop a comment or review. And you might just hear me shout you out right here on the show. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam Nick Bain. This episode was edited by Nina Patuck. Our supervising producer is Barton Gurdwood. Our executive producer is Varyland Williams. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sanguiney. All right. That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.

This message comes from Thumbtack. Recommendations can be great. Maybe someone recommended this podcast, and here you are. But home projects are different. If a podcast isn't your thing, you lose a few minutes. If you hire your cousin's neighbor to mount your TV, you might end up with a lopsided screen and wall damage. That's why Thumbtack works. It matches people with top-rated local pros, with photos, reviews, and credentials all in one place. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today.