NEW YORK — Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
I’d love to say this surprises me, but it does not in the slightest.
100%. These assholes have been trained to gaslight and trot out nonsense about Robert Byrd being in the Klan like 100 years ago, or that Democrats were the real racists because of shit that happened before the 1960s, and completely ignoring (or lying about) things like the Southern Strategy and how the parties completely re-aligned since the Civil Rights era.
Thing is, I’m a white guy and I know how these motherfuckers talk when they think they are in a safe space. I grew up in an area that was overwhelmingly Republican, deeply racist and nearly 100% white.
They ain’t fooling me, I can tell you that much. This ain’t my first rodeo, I’ve heard all this shit before, and I’ve seen these mofos in action online since the BBS days, and shortly after that, the USENET days. I don’t care what kind of rhetoric they try to dress their “movement” up with and it doesn’t matter what protocol or platform they are on…their methods and tactics like employing the Gish Gallop should not fool anyone, either.
I want to like this comment 10 times. I feel like I’m reading my clones thoughts.
“Completely” is wrong. The economically progressive policy on one side and crony-capitalist on the other have not shifted places.
One can rather describe it in the “Nazi bar” terms, racists jumped from the Democrat “bar” to the Republican “bar” and changed it for their ideas, but only where the racist categories were not orthogonal.