Speech and Consequences

Oct 25, 2025

JD Vance has a point when he says kids do stupid things. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes…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” (Bennett, Young Republicans’ hateful).

True to his nature Vance makes a mockery of the principle by applying it selectively to MAGA pseudo-conservatives whose support he will seek in a run for the presidency when he dismisses bipartisan condemnation of a Telegram conversation between members of the Young Republican National Federation and some of its affiliates in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont as “pearl clutching.” No such consideration is extended to those whose political persuasion runs contrary to his own.

The Young Republican National Federation is the GOP’s political organization for Republicans between the ages of eighteen and forty. The Telegram chatterers are in their twenties and thirties. Their remarks can only charitably be characterized as jokes, even edgy, offensive ones. Snopes rates Vance’s claim that this was “college group chat” false. The fact-check website confirmed that all were adults, most of them employed or college graduates before the texts were leaked (a few did not have any publicly available information), and summed up the article that set off the brouhaha:

On Oct. 14, 2025, a Politico investigation revealed thousands of private text messages between members of Young Republican chapters around the country in which they reportedly made racist and antisemitic remarks. Some 2,900 pages of chats showed conversations among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans from earlier this year, showing their campaign to take control of the national Young Republican organization with a pro-Donald Trump platform. The conversations included jokes about rape, slavery and violence and racial slurs (like the N-word), among other offensive material. (Ibrahim, Key members)

The Young Republican website states the group’s mission is to recruit, train, and elect future Republican leaders. These young Republicans are not individuals of note or distinction. For the most part they are minor functionaries. This does not make them altogether insignificant. They were positioning themselves to be future Republican leaders. One was chief of staff for a member of the New York state assembly and a former chair of the New York State Young Republicans angling to be chair of the national group. Another was vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans and a communication assistant in the office of the Kansas attorney general. A third was chair of the Kansas Young Republicans and a University of Kansas graduate who founded the school’s Turning Point USA chapter in 2016. Still another was a first-term Vermont state senator who holds that “Fox News is only sort of right-leaning,” industrial wind turbines are a major environmental problem, and mask and vaccine mandates were tyranny (Walters, Stealth Conservatives).

Fallout was swift. The offices of New York assembly member Michael Reilly and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach promptly dismissed Peter Giunta and William Hendrix, respectively, from their staffs. Kansas GOP Chair Danedri Herbert disbanded the Kansas Young Republicans. Vermont Governor Phil Scott who had previously endorsed Sam Douglass as a “commonsense” Republican moved quickly to distance himself and demanded the resignation that Douglass announced on October 17 (Walters, I Tried to Tell You).

How seriously should we take a “group chat reads like a bunch of adolescent boys trying to out-gross each other” (Walters)? Giunta appealed for support as “most right wing person” with an “I love Hitler” comment and spoke of sending opponents to the gas chamber. Hendrix went in for racist stereotypes with what one might suppose he thought witty repartee: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?” Watermelon was a favored trope in group comments about black people.

In fairness to adolescent boys, the women among them contributed in kind. Anne KayKaty, New York’s national Young Republican committee member, reported to be Giunta’s girlfriend, said at one point, “I’m ready to watch people burn now.” Perhaps she was speaking figuratively.

After Douglass made another comment about a Jewish colleague potentially making a procedural mistake, his wife, Brianna Douglass, Vermont’s national Young Republicans committee member…responded he was giving the colleague too much credit “and expecting the Jew to be honest.” (Fortinsky, Who are the Young Republicans)

Did they merely get caught up in a kind of mob hysteria trying to out-gross each other? Is this a reflection of character? A reflection of the party to which they gravitated?

Republicans who condemned the chat quickly pivoted to the standard talking point that, yes, this was bad, but Democrats are worse. For them, Jay Jones is a gift. Jones is the Democratic candidate for attorney general in Virginia who in August 2022 sent a series of texts to a Republican colleague in the Virginia House of Delegates in which he wrote, “Three people two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head” (McMillan, Coyner shares more details) and that “it would take Gilbert’s wife ‘holding their dying children in her arms’ for Gilbert to move on gun control” (Manchester, Leaked texts put spotlight). Todd Gilbert was the Republican Speaker of the Virginia House at the time.

Carrie Coyner, the Republican colleague, said the initial text intended for someone named Mark was sent to her by mistake but Jones continued after realizing he was texting her despite requests to stop. How the initial text came to be sent to Coyner by mistake has not been taken up in any report I have seen. The whole affair is weird and creepy.

The Republican line is that Jones was calling for political violence. Vance described Jones as a “person seriously wishing for political violence and political assassination” and termed it “1,000 times worse than what a bunch of young people, a bunch of kids say in a group chat” (Kinnard, JD Vance dismisses). This is nonsense on a par with Vance’s lies about Haitians eating pets. At thirty-six, thirty-three at the time of the texts, Jones is in the same age range as the Young Republicans. His texts are comparable to theirs, tasteless, offensive, and colossally idiotic for anyone harboring political aspirations. They speak to character and judgment, as does his refusal to take the honorable course and drop out of the race after the messages became public on October 3.

Elise Stefanik asserted moral high ground for Republicans, claiming they rightfully condemned the Young Republican group chat while Democrats “doubled down” in support of Jones. This is no more true than Vance’s nonsense or the routine smear that the Democratic base consists of Marxists, Hamas sympathizers, and antifa terrorists. Abigail Spanberger, running for governor in Virginia, denounced the comments from the start, publicly and repeatedly as well as in person with Jones. She has stopped short of calling for him to drop out, saying the decision should be left to the voters. From one side, this is somewhat lame. From another, calling on Jones to resign would be largely a performative gesture given his intransigence. Other Democrats condemned the comments while holding that they are not disqualifying.

The case of Maine oyster farmer, harbormaster, and marine veteran Graham Platner is different. Until about a week ago Platner was a political unknown running as a progressive populist in the Democratic primary for the nomination to take on Susan Collins in next year’s US Senate election. At a town hall on October 13 he told his audience that he did not view himself as a politician and described a difficult personal journey following combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was “not doing very well” when he returned home from the fourth.

I felt unmoored, I felt disillusioned, I felt alone,” Platner explained. “I had no idea where I fit in in this society, and I did what most combat vets do: I drank too much, I got angry. I spent a lot of time being alone and depressed. And it wasn’t until I started getting help that my life began to turn around. (Egan, How Maine Became)

Lauren Egan asked if he had any skeletons in his closet beyond the DUI he got shortly after returning home. He told her, “I don’t have that many. I’ve lived a pretty simple life. I have not been close to money and power.” This answer comes off as disingenuous in light of opposition research that leaked soon after Egan posed the question revealing “Platner’s past online posts that included derogatory and insulting comments about sexual-assault victims, cops, rural voters, and more.” The posts ran from 2013 to 2021. They were deleted shortly before his campaign launch in August.

Platner has apologized for the comments in a video he posted Friday on social media. He said the posts were made after leaving the Army in 2012, adding he “still had the crude humor, the dark, dark feelings, the offensive language that really was a hallmark of the infantry when I was in it.” He also said that he was struggling then with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
“I’m sorry for this. Just know that it’s not reflective at all of who I am. I don’t want you to judge me on the dumbest thing I ever wrote on the internet. I would prefer if people could judge me on the person I am today,” Platner said. (Whittle, Kruesi, Maine US Senate candidate)

Next came revelation of a “terrifying looking skull and crossbones” tattoo on his chest gotten in 2007 during a night of drinking with fellow marines while on leave in Kosovo. Platner says he had no idea the image resembled a Nazi Totenkopf “Death’s Head” symbol until he started hearing it from reporters and DC insiders and “absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that” (Beaumont, et al., Maine Democrat Platner).

Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s political director and a well-respected lobsterman as well as an advocate for Maine’s fishing industry, resigned Friday, saying that Platner’s Reddit posts “are not words or values I can stand behind in a candidate for the United States Senate.” (Egan)

Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna stand by their endorsements of Platner. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin called his comments indefensible, hurtful, and offensive but not disqualifying. Chuck Schumer, more comfortable with gerontocrats, endorsed Gov. Janet Mills, who happens to be seventy-seven. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is also backing Mills.

Platner’s account of his state of mind when he returned home after four combat tours is a plausible extenuating factor that the Young Republicans and Jay Jones cannot claim, as is his explanation that he turned his life around after getting help and meeting the woman he would marry. Against this must be weighed deletion of the online posts and his neglect to mention the posts, much less the tattoo, when Egan asked about skeletons in his closet. One might reasonably wonder if more shoes are waiting to drop.

My Maine source tells me he has not heard much enthusiasm for Platner “or much of anything really” and finds it unlikely Platner could “topple the Collins machine.” He describes a race between Mills and Collins as “the classic blue collar (here that means mostly fishing industry related jobs) versus other (urban, new folks that moved from more urban states, and not dependent on fishing) dynamic.” His hopes rest with Mills. I would feel better if she were ten or fifteen years younger.

Stories of this kind illustrate unsavory features of the social and political landscape. The coarsening of American culture is reflected in the content of comments by Jones, Platner, and people positioning themselves to be future leaders of the Republican Party. There is a bipartisan instinct to cancel with extreme prejudice political foes guilty of offending speech while rationalizing, downplaying, or responding with a lame “yes, but” when it comes to members of one’s own faction. Notions of restraint and propriety seem quaint relics of an idealized past.

The right to freedom of speech does not carry with it exemption from consequences. As was said at the beginning, JD Vance has a point. I should have added, “but only up to a point.” There is room between cancellation and a free pass for reasoned consideration of context and the possibility of redemption, criticism, and consequences.

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