Transcription
JD Vance comments on the racist text threads from Republicans by saying, "Hey, come on. Those adults are just kids being kids. This is just another day. Remember back in the old days where if you wanted a record of what someone said, you had to record their call?"
Well, I don't because I'm not 80, but I hear it's true. And I also hear that some other people still wish it was true today. Thousands of messages shared in a group chat of young Republicans is revealing rather some racist thoughts that they even worried about being leaked. Well, those exchanges have been leaked, obtained by Politico, and are part of a Telegram chat among young Republican leaders in the following states: New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. Legitimately unbelievable. I mean, Republicans in Vermont. I guess those are the people with patriotic hacky sacks and who only spell fish the way God intended. But back to the more important part of the story.
Over the course of these seven months, they exchanged messages with, you know, extremely anti-semitic and racist comments. They um referred to black people as monkeys or the watermelon people. They called rape epic. They talked about the love of Hitler with uh factions of their party or even supporting slavery. That is truly horrific. But as disgusting and offensive as these text messages are, maybe we should give these young Republicans some slack. I mean, they're young. How can we expect them to know the difference between right and wrong when they're also what? Going through puberty, periods, body hair, acne. It's Oh, man. It's the Matt Gates alarm. Yeah, it it goes off anytime I use language that might trigger him getting an erection. I I got to watch that. The point is, shouldn't we cut these troubled young Republicans some slack?
Now, it's kind of a misnomer, "young Republicans," because it's called the Young Republicans, but these are, you know, full-grown adults, 18 to 40 years old. This was a chat um with members uh elected to lead their states within a prominent Republican youth political organization that numbers 15,000 people. And they were in a campaign to lead this organization nationally. Oh, so these aren't a bunch of eager high school student council members. They're legal adults old enough to vote, buy alcohol, and rent a car. Sorry, Matt. And they are the next generation of the Republican party.
Well, today, Vice President JD Vance awoke early from his hibernation deep inside the protective warmth of Donald Trump's colon to address these newly reported text messages. So, Politico has a story where somehow they got their hands on something like 28,000 messages in some group chat, group chat of, I think, 12 people that nobody's ever heard of, but they decided to just publish every single thing in this chat, whatever they found that they thought was the most salacious. And I think 10 years ago, there would have been a very different response to it. But people are starting to learn from this. And the vice president is one of the reasons why.
Hey, come on, man. Before you give JD Vance all the credit, you don't want to sell yourself short. Now, I'll get back to Vance in just a moment, but many of you may not know who this guy is, who is downplaying the importance of all this racist garbage people typed up, but his name is Blake Neff. And as luck would have it, he's got a little experience in the typing up of racist garbage. The top writer for Fox News host Tucker Carlson has resigned from the network after a CNN investigation uncovered his racist and sexist comments on an online message board.
His name is Blake Neff. Tucker Carlson's top writer, we found, had been posting on a message board under a pseudonym, uh, racist comments, sexist comments. One of the comments that you uncovered in your investigation on the post from this past June. Okay. He wrote, "Black dudes staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down." Blake Neff thinks that all this racism is one big nothing burger. And who better to trust than a guy who knows it's not a big deal, which is why he wrote all of his racist messages under a pseudonym. By the way, Blake Neff was so racist even Fox News wouldn't employ him, saying back in 2020, "Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our workforce."
Well, good news for Neff, Real America's Voice doesn't have the same standards. And by the way, when Neff says that 10 years ago people would have had a very different response from this and that people on the right are starting to learn from this, he's correct. The right is learning, and the lesson they're learning is clear: Never again will they punish, criticize, or exile anyone for saying anything even remotely problematic. And for proof of that, let's continue with this conversation about how unimportant racism is with the sitting vice president of the United States of America.
So what you did is, instead of reacting to the story itself, you just posted what uh Jay Jones, our friend in Virginia who's running for AG as the Democrat, had said where he wanted his political opponents to die. Person who is very politically powerful, who is about to become one of the most powerful law enforcement officers in the country. That person seriously wishing for political violence and political assassination is 1,000 times worse than what a bunch of young people, a bunch of kids say in a group chat.
Once again, not kids. I'm not sure if everybody on the text thread dresses like Adam Sandler and that's why JD is confused, but these are grown-ass adults in positions of power, like 27-year-old Vermont state senator Samuel Douglas, Trump administration employee Michael Bartles, and Bobby Walker, who once worked for New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ort. But let's keep hearing from JD. And if you allow yourself to be distracted by this person's incredible endorsement, disgusting endorsement of political assassination by focusing on what kids are saying in a group chat, grow up. I'm sorry. Focus on the real issues. Don't focus on what kids say in group chats.
Look, the texts that JD keeps referencing in his Whataboutism 101 class are from Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for attorney general in Virginia. And I think they're abhorrent, too. But Jones is also the same age as some of these kids on this text thread. I find it pretty interesting that anytime young Republicans, who are not young at all, do anything that deserves criticism or scorn, all of a sudden they start Benjamin Buttoning and become kids again.
She included the Trump kids, which even Bill Barr, no fan of Trump these days, called a gross overstep. And these kids did nothing wrong. They should not be in this case. Ivanka's already out of the case. The boys should not be in the case. It was a day where your family was impacted directly. Your children, who I know all of them really well and I've known them for a lot of years. Uh, anytime I went to interview you before you ever thought about really running for president, you always introduced me. They're all nice. They're all great kids.
They're just kids, you know? They like to ride bikes, play Minecraft, trade on their father's name to launch a crypto company worth 1.5 billion. You know, kid stuff. But let's keep hearing from the man who doesn't see age, which is probably why he thought he was only sucking the life out of this spry teenager. I grew up in a different world, right? Where not most of what I, the stupid things that I did when I was a teenager and a young adult, they're they're not on the internet. Like, I'm going to tell my kids, especially my boys, don't put things on the internet. Like, be careful with what you post. If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm. But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, 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. Or even worse, getting to host an insanely profitable show where they get to interview the vice president of the United States. I mean, my god.
All Vance has to do is denounce these messages and say that the people who sent them have no place in his party, and he just can't do it. You don't have to have an Indian wife and mixed-race kids to be able to say this is up. But Vance does happen to have an Indian wife and mixed-race kids. And so, it should be that much more obvious for him to be able to do so. Instead, he used his time to wax poetic about how we all just move on from this.
You know, a cliché at this point. You have to acknowledge the problem before you could actually solve it. Exactly. But the challenge lies in people agreeing on what the problem is. I think all political violence is a problem. But I also find it to be a huge problem that large swaths of young Republicans across the country are learning from you and the leader of their party that racism, covert or overt, are completely acceptable.
Sure, Donald Trump may not say the N-word. There are two N-words, and you can't use either of them. A point he bemoans all too often. But that doesn't make his rhetoric or his policies any less racist. When you single out the cities of Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago as crime-ridden. When you sign executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and rebrand them as anti-American. When you ban books and withhold federal funds from any schools around the country that dare teach kids about the black experience in America, or as Trump calls it, ending racial indoctrination. When you say immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation, and when you're the commander-in-chief and decide to focus your efforts thusly.
President Trump targeted the Smithsonian museums, saying they are "out of control where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been." When you do all of that, is it not a mystery as to why these young Republicans feel emboldened to not simply text these things, but to believe them?
Look, I could sit here and wonder why the vice president of the United States won't simply acknowledge that members of his own party throwing around racist language is a bad thing. Or why we don't show a modicum of decency and say this type of language and outlook on society has no place in our Republican party, nor should it exist in our society as a whole. I could sit here and wonder that, but I already know the answer, which is: You don't contradict your boss if you're hoping for a promotion down the line. Even kids know that. Damn it. I did it again.
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