This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 14 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
We are getting a window into how a new generation of Republican activists talk when they think no one is listening — and it is ugly.
On Tuesday, Politico published a report on more than seven months of Telegram chat messages exchanged by about a dozen Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. MSNBC has not independently reviewed those messages, but what Politico published shows the conservatives openly praising Adolf Hitler and making celebratory jokes about gas chambers, slavery and rape.
One exchange included in the report involves a message from Luke Mosiman, chair of the Arizona Young Republicans. According to Politico, Mosiman “asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, [New York State Young Republicans Chair Peter] Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.”
When Politico asked for comment, Mosiman declined and Giunta claimed the release of the chat is part of “a highly-coordinated year-long character assassination” led by a fellow conservative opponent.
Out of more than 28,000 messages obtained, Politico identified 251 bigoted epithets in the chat and countless outrageous examples of racism, sexism, antisemitism and homophobia. These aren’t fringe figures. Many members of the chat work inside government or party politics. One is a state senator, and another serves as a senior adviser in the Office of General Counsel within the Small Business Administration. Politico reports that since it began making inquiries, at least four people involved in the chat have lost their jobs or had job offers rescinded. This kind of virulent hatred has become all too familiar in Donald Trump’s very online Republican Party. It seems like all you have to do to find it is open a website called X that’s run by the president’s biggest political donor. There — or on Trump’s own Truth Social — you can see administration officials and U.S. government accounts exulting in sadistic edgelord cruelty, celebrating hatred and prejudice. But now it’s also becoming clear that people who are running the Republican Party at the ground level are also immersed in this cesspit of bigotry, and they are beginning to act on it. This is happening at the staff level during a Republican administration that has been waging a full-scale war on civil rights law from the first day in office.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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