I’ve been in plenty of left-wing group chats over the years where people have said rude, offensive, or regrettable things. I’m sure lots of participants in these chats would be embarrassed if the crass jokes or unkind assessments of other leftists they made in those conversations were plastered all over the internet. I have to say, though, that I can’t remember one where anyone endorsed genocide or said that someone we disliked should be raped.

Last week, Politico exposed leaked messages from a group chat of dozens of Young Republican operatives. Vermont State senator Samuel Douglass made a disparaging comment about a Jewish colleague who may have made a procedural error in calculating the number of delegates at the Young Republican National Convention. His wife, Brianna Douglass (also Vermont’s representative on the Young Republicans’ National Committee), responded that he was “giving the nationals too much credit” by “expecting the Jew to be honest.” Peter Giunta, then chair of the New York State Young Republicans (NYSYR), described another operative as a “fat stinky Jew.”

Describing a meeting with the Orange County Teenage Republicans, Giunta praised the teens for their “based” politics, saying approvingly that “they support slavery and all that shit.” In a conversation about Hayden Padgett, who beat Giunta and took his position as NYSYR chair, the advice from Luke Mosiman, chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, was “RAPE HAYDEN.” In another exchange, Giunta and NYSYR general counsel Joe Maligno fantasize about killing Republicans they regarded as soft and untrustworthy in gas chambers. Perhaps the most memorable sentence of the leaked chats was Giunta’s blunt and simple “I love Hitler.”

J. D. Vance downplayed the episode, describing the participants as “a bunch of kids” who were just making edgy jokes. The Young Republicans’ age cutoff is forty, and the authors of the leaked messages ranged from their mid-twenties to their mid-thirties, but perhaps the vice president has an unusually expansive definition of childhood.

If so, he could apply the same defense to thirty-year-old Paul Ingrassia, Donald Trump’s nominee to head up the Office of Special Counsel, who told fellow Republicans in a text that Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell.” In another private message, Ingrassia wrote, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.”

It’s also striking that, for Vance and other Republicans, the “bunch of kids” defense applies to the blatant antisemitism of their side’s group chats, but not to the campus pro-Palestinian protesters the Trump administration has repeatedly accused of antisemitism and demanded universities clamp down on. Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts graduate student whom the Trump administration arrested and detained for coauthoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed, is thirty, the same age as Ingrassia and around the same age as many participants in the Young Republicans group chat.

Beyond the “kids” dodge, the problem with Vance’s defense is that these seem very unlike bog-standard online edgy jokes that trade on apparent absurdity. The joke doesn’t seem to be, “Of course I don’t like Hitler.” It seems instead to be, “Maybe I do. What of it?”

When young GOP operatives are jockeying to prove how “based” they are, ambiguity about how much of all this they might mean actually seems to be part of the point. The person sending one of these messages is, to a certain extent, joking, but the message of the joke is, “Look at how far I’m willing to go. Even if I’m half-joking or three-quarters joking, I’m definitely not some weak, untrustworthy cuck.”

Irony can serve many purposes. Someone saying something it would be absurd to think that they really meant might be going for shock value alone. Someone going back to the same well again and again starts to look more like they’re “ironically” test-driving positions they aren’t quite ready to come out and own.

The Trump administration is currently trying to take away the citizenship of the American-born children of unauthorized immigrants, which would be a long step in formally moving the United States away from a liberal universalist notion of citizenship toward one based on blood ties. The official X account of the Department of Homeland Security promotes signing up to join Immigration and Customs Enforcement with the blatantly ethnonationalist exhortation, “Defend your culture.” And this turn away from liberal civic nationalism has been accompanied by a shocking degree of authoritarianism, from arresting Öztürk over an op-ed to transferring suspected criminal migrants without trial to what could be life in a brutal, dungeon-like prison in El Salvador.

You don’t have to think that there’s a serious possibility of the Trump administration’s authoritarian ethnonationalism taking the United States all the way to the genocidal totalitarianism of Nazi Germany to be disturbed by edgy young Republican operatives praising Adolf Hitler and disparaging “the Jews.”

The historical circumstances we’re in are profoundly different than those that led to Nazi Germany, and the authoritarian dangers we face, though all too real, have a very different shape. If anything, there’s a real danger that overstating the comparison can lead to self-fulfilling defeatism and excessive pessimism at a time when Trumpism is still quite vulnerable to being defeated by conventional political means.

Even so, the fact remains that rising-star Republican operatives seem to be in the business of reassuring themselves that they aren’t attached to silly ideas about human rights and equality, and reassuring each other that they’re on board with whatever comes next. That should set off some very loud alarm bells.