The GOP’s Long Dance With Racism
The leaked Young Republican chat shows a party culture decades in the making
Voiceover up top, additional video for paid subscribers at the end.
“Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
“I love Hitler.”
“[Blacks are] the watermelon people.”
“Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax.” Boom — they’re dead.
“I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkeys play ball.”
“You’re… expecting the Jew to be honest.”
The bigotry and racism exposed when someone leaked transcripts from a chat group of Young Republicans has much of the country rightly outraged. But not Vice President J.D. Vance. These are “jokes,” he says. “Kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. 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 cause to ruin their lives.”
The Vice President makes no sense. First, these young Republicans are not kids. Eight of the eleven in the chat group are between 24 and 35 years old. Not one was under 18. (Vance himself is 41.)
Second, there’s no evidence the racist and anti-Semitic comments (and there are many more than I noted above) were jokes. “I was only kidding” is the refuge of a bigot who just doesn’t want to be held accountable.
Third, there’s something deeply wrong when the Vice President of the United States seems more concerned about racists being “ruined” than the racism itself. This is smoke that tells me there’s a big fire inside the GOP.
As someone who spent most of my life rising in the Republican Party, I always knew there were bigots among us. But I hoped they weren’t more common than in the rest of society. I didn’t hear much from them because they knew I wouldn’t tolerate it. And yes, people on the other side sometimes used racism against me. There are bad apples in every barrel. But as time passed, and I considered the trend inside the party, I recognized that both GOP culture and political strategy have a serious racism problem.
It began in the 1970s, when the party adopted what conservative strategist Kevin Phillips called “the Southern strategy.” The plan used coded language (“dog whistles”) that everyone knew appealed to racism but could be denied. In 1981, Republican campaign adviser Lee Atwater explained this in an interview published after his death in 1991 (pardon the slurs):
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*, n*, n*.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘n*’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing and states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites… Anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”
Sadly, Ronald Reagan, whom I admired, used phrases like “welfare queen” and “strapping young buck” that carried racial undertones. He even began his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town known for the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan. The symbolism wasn’t lost on anyone.
After Reagan came George H. W. Bush and his notorious “Willie Horton” ad. Superficially, it was about crime. But the image of a Black man’s mug shot did the real work. And who was Bush’s campaign manager? Lee Atwater.
Racism receded during the Clinton years and remained largely out of sight under George W. Bush and John McCain, both too decent to exploit it. But the rise of the Tea Party during Barack Obama’s presidency reawakened the old demons. Signs reading “Go back to Kenya” and “Keep the White House white” showed up at rallies. Studies later confirmed that “racial resentment,” not economic anxiety, was the best predictor of Tea Party allegiance.
By 2016, that resentment had a champion in Donald Trump. From his birther crusade to his comments about “shithole countries” and “very fine people” in Charlottesville, Trump mainstreamed racism as political fuel. White nationalism, once fringe, became proud and loud.
Now, in his second term, Trump has institutionalized that prejudice. He’s deporting brown immigrants en masse, shutting down asylum for refugees of color, and creating a new category for “white refugees” from South Africa—people he claims are victims of genocide. His administration is even considering pathways for right-wing Europeans who say they’re “persecuted” for their beliefs.
Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, Paul Ingrassia, was exposed in a text chain bragging about his “Nazi streak” and railing against Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Fortunately, the Senate blocked the nomination—but the fact that it was even attempted speaks volumes.
Prejudice still holds a powerful place in Trump’s Republican Party. And no matter how many times they call it “just a joke,” the damage is real—and so is the hate.
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