When They Show You Who They Are… Believe Them!

By Rob C.

Art by Kevin Necessary

TL;DR: The “Young Republicans” have traded Lincoln for Hitler. Their leaked racist, antisemitic group chats aren’t outliers—they’re the natural evolution of a party that has spent decades grooming its youth on a steady diet of hate, paranoia, and billionaire propaganda. A leaked 2,900-page Telegram group chat from the Young Republican National Federation and affiliated state chapters laid bare the racist, antisemitic, misogynistic underbelly of what will be tomorrow’s GOP leadership. The rot isn’t buried—it’s thriving. The youth wing of a major political party is festering with fascist ideation, white-supremacist codewords, and jokes about raping and gas-chambering people. Stop pretending this is “just kids joking.” It’s a recruitment operation.

When They Show You Who They Are…

They told us who they were—again. And this time, thanks to Politico’s recent exposé, we have the receipts. Screenshots from group chats among prominent Young Republican leaders show the kind of bile usually confined to the darker corners of Telegram. Slurs about Jews. “Jokes” about Hitler. Fantasies about deporting people of color. Calls for a holy war against democracy itself.

These aren’t anonymous trolls; they’re the rising stars of the GOP. State chairs, campaign operatives, and communications aides—all the “fresh young faces” the Republican Party loves to parade as proof that it has a future. The future, apparently, looks a lot like 1939.

You have a climate where free-market fundamentalism, anti-government sentiment, white-identity agitation, and Christian Nationalist fervor fused together in the Republican party.

And if you’re thinking, “Surely the adults in the room will step in,” let me save you the suspense: there are no adults in the room. The same party that defended Neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as “very fine people on both sides” now calls these kids “patriots.” Because in the modern GOP, hate isn’t a bug—it’s the operating system.

The Billionaire Brainwash

The pipeline of radicalization didn’t appear overnight. It’s been decades in the making, engineered by The Council for National Policy (CNP)—the shadowy cabal of right-wing billionaires and fundamentalists who have been funding extremist propaganda since before the Reagan years. The CNP bankrolls groups like Turning Point USA, The Heritage Foundation, and a dozen others whose mission is to feed young men a toxic cocktail of grievance and glory.

These young men aren’t fringe trolls—they are the future of the party’s activist base, the candidate pipelines, the foot soldiers of campaigns.

They’ve learned the lesson of every authoritarian regime: if you want power that lasts, capture the youth.¹ Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point’s preaches that government is the enemy and billionaires are freedom fighters. And then there’s Jack Posobiec, a frequent Trump whisperer and fascist cosplayer, who proudly declared: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6^th, but…” *² He also stated they would replace our democracy with Christian Nationalism.

He wasn’t joking.

This movement is no accident—it’s a business model. Billionaires fund the outrage. Media echo chambers amplify it. And young, angry men—alienated, indebted, and desperate for meaning—swallow it whole.

The Great American Reprogramming

Professor Scott Galloway has written extensively about the growing crisis among young men who feel disconnected from work, love, and purpose.³ The far right has weaponized that alienation. Instead of offering real opportunity, they offer identity: you’re not failing—the system is rigged against you. And they hand you an enemy list: immigrants, feminists, Jews, professors, the “deep state,” and of course, democracy itself.

The irony is painful. These kids, lured into a movement that claims to “save America,” are the foot soldiers for the same oligarchs who are gutting it. They’re fighting for their own servitude.

And when the next authoritarian says “Attack”, they won’t hesitate. They’ve already been conditioned.

A Serious Warning - Believe Them!

This isn’t fringe behavior—it’s the Republican Party’s secret platform, said out loud by the next generation. The hate isn’t new; it’s just better funded and better branded. What began as dog whistles under Nixon has become a foghorn under Trump.

This isn’t hyperbole or scare-rhetoric. When you have a political organization whose next generation of leaders is openly praising Hitler, planning political violence, making jokes about genocide—you are closer to 1939 than you care to admit. The machinery of democracy is only as strong as the belief in its values, and only as safe as its guardians.

God Help America.

✍️ By Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet – Available at Amazon and booksellers everywhere.

¹ See Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway, “The Big Myth.”
² Jack Posobiec, public speech at “AmericaFest,” December 2024.
³ Scott Galloway, “Adrift: America in 100 Charts,” 2023.