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.”