GOP Senator Rebukes JD Vance for Defending Racist Young Republicans Chat: ‘I Would Never Let My Kids Joke Like That’

Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) rebuked Vice President JD Vance over his defense of a leaked Young Republicans group chat including racist and otherwise offensive comments on Wednesday evening, telling CNN’s Kasie Hunt that he wouldn’t let his own kids “joke like that.”

After Mullin first observed that those who had made the offensive remarks had been fired and denounced, contrasting conservatives’ treatment of them with Democrats’ failure to disavow Jay Jones, the party’s nominee for attorney general in Virginia, who was caught fantasizing about the deaths of a Republican lawmaker and his kids, Hunt followed up:

HUNT: The vice president said essentially that, you know, these were kids making jokes and they shouldn’t be canceled for it. Do you think that that’s right?

MULLIN: Well, I didn’t hear what the president’s remarks is-, the vice president’s remarks, but I would never let my kids joke like that. That’s zero. There’s a solid no. My grandfather fought in World War II, He went over on Omaha Beach. He saw the despicable things that the Nazis did to not just the Jewish people, but to other countries and other races along the way. He went into a concentration camp. He was a gentleman that you never ate Hershey’s chocolate around because of the story that he tells about going inside a concentration camp. So it’s not room to joke for me, it’s a hard stop that you’re not associated with me whatsoever if you think that’s funny.

Responding to the controversy on X, Vance provided screenshots of Jones’s text messages and wrote, “This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia. I refuse to join the pearl-clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

He later doubled down on his defense of the chat during an appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show.

Watch above via CNN.