NEW YORK — Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
I’d love to say this surprises me, but it does not in the slightest.
tbh I don’t especially care if people want to make politically incorrect jokes in their private chats. Obviously, not wise for a politician to do so. But my friends and I have made politically incorrect jokes in private that obviously don’t reflect our actual beliefs. For instance, I am queer, and I make queer jokes all the fucking time for example, but never with strangers.
people are being disappeared by government agents in plain clothes and masks. This isn’t a joke. they aren’t joking. they aren’t having fun. they are laughing about the horror they visit on their neighbors for not being white. I’m sure the KKK had a lot of off color jokes in private while they were building the bombs that killed black children too. You don’t need be worried if they have enough free speech and personal lee way to make off colored jokes while they build the machine to kill YOU with. You’re VERY high on the list, or are you insane and think this stops at Hispanic and African American people so your OK with it? OR ARE YOU SIMPLY LYING.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. For these particular people, since they’re my political opponents, I am glad that we can pounce on this slip-up that they made and get them cancelled. I just don’t think there’s anything objectively wrong with making politically incorrect jokes, and it’d be a double standard for me to think it’d permissible only if they were politicians I liked.
Of course, in 2025, we don’t really have the luxury of trying to apply a consistent standard to our opponents. These days it seems like we have to take what we can get when it comes to political warfare. (/genuine, in case there was doubt.)
BTW, stop it with the all-caps or I’ll block you.
Yeah, but do you joke about mass murdering people via gas chamber? There’s a line somewhere, and this 100% crosses it.
Even a joke about murdering people in a gas chamber can be funny in the right context. Arrested Development had jokes about this, and it aired on prime tv and got extremely high ratings. What’s not funny is, ado of nothing, “let’s just murder x demographic in a gas chamber.” That’s not really a joke at all.
So you didn’t read a single fucking thing about what they we’re saying and you’re in the comments defending it?
No, they are debunking that one statement that says it is never funny.
Everything can be funny in the right context with the right nuance.
Sure…but thats not what is happening in these text threads. Ive made lots of egregiously politically incorrect jokes among friends before but we are always careful to stay on this side of the line of maniacally endorsing genocide via gas chamber.
I don’t think it’s possible, within the context of a private chat, to take any particular string of words and declare them verboten. What matters is the context and meaning. If it’s ironic or sarcastic? I don’t really find it especially problematic personally.
My larger concern is more with the gradual erosion of irony which happens in some groups. I think this happens more on public forums and in large groups, say 4chan, than in private chats, but I don’t have access to large numbers of private chats, so I can’t know.
I appreciate your capacity for giving people the benefit of the doubt. It is an honorable quality…but you have some context - these are the private chats of conservative staffers communicating in private. I can tell you, as someone who has been in private work chats, that there is room for irony but these chats are not using gas chamber imagery because they really believe in the intrinsic dignity of minority groups.