JD Vance Tells Critics of 30+ Year Old ‘Young Boys’ in Racist Chat to ‘Grow Up!’
Vice President JD Vance doubled down on his defense of the Young Republican group chat reported on by Politico in which members made a number of racist and otherwise offensive comments on Wednesday’s edition of The Charlie Kirk Show.
From a Tuesday Mediaite write-up about the chat:
The messages published by Politico on Tuesday span seven months (between January and August) and include chats from Young Republican leaders in New York, Arizona, and Vermont. According to the outlet, William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used racial slurs, and Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the organization, said people who did not vote for him to become chair of the Young Republican National Federation needed to “go to the gas chamber.”
“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” Joe Maligno, general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans, wrote.
“I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committeewoman, added.
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According to the outlet, epithets like “f****t,” “retarded” and “n**ga” appeared more than 250 times in the chat logs.
Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked in one chat whether others were watching an NBA game, and Giunta responded that he’d “go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.”
Vance raised eyebrows on Tuesday when he leapt to the defense of the group chat’s inhabitants by erroneously referring to it as a “college group chat” and invoking Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general in Virginia, who is under fire for wishing death upon a Republican legislator and his children.
Notably, the Young Republicans organization allows anyone between the ages of 18 and 40 to join, as a number of other social media users pointed out on X. Vance is currently 41 years old.
On Wednesday’s edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Vance addressed the controversy and again characterized the group chat’s members as “kids” and “young boys”:
Yeah, I mean, look, I’ll let the tweet speak for itself. I’ll say a couple of additional things. First of all, a person who is very politically powerful, who is about to become one of the most powerful law enforcement officers in the country, that person seriously wishing for political violence and political assassination is 1,000 times worse than what a bunch of young people, a bunch kids say in a group chat, however offensive it might be. That’s just the reality.
And if you allow yourself to be distracted by this person’s incredible endorsement, disgusting endorsement of political assassination by focusing on what kids are saying in a group chat, grow up! I’m sorry, focus on the real issues, don’t focus on what kids say in group chats. But there’s another angle to this that I just have to be honest about. I mean, I’m like an old guy at this point. I’m 41 years old, I have three kids. I grew up in a different world, right? Where most of the stupid things that I did when I was a teenager and a young adult, they’re not on the internet. But I’m going to tell my kids, especially my boys, don’t put things on the internet. Like, be careful with what you post. If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.
But the reality is that kids do stupid things. Especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes, like that’s what kids do. 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 live. And at some point we’re all all gonna have to say enough of this BS we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not okay. Like, we live in a digital world, this stuff is now etched in stone online. We’re all going to have to say, you know what? No, no, no. We’re not doing this. We’re not canceling kids because they do something stupid in the group chat. And if I have to be the person who carries that message forward, I’m fine with it.
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