JD Vance’s Defense of Racist Republican Chat Exposes Moral Rot of the MAGA Right
(Alex Wroblewski/Pool via AP)
When Vice President JD Vance called outrage over a leaked Young Republicans chat filled with racist slurs “pearl clutching,” he wasn’t minimizing hate speech—he was codifying the MAGA Right’s new moral standard: decency is weakness, and principle is a con.
The leaked chat—thousands of pages of bigotry masquerading as irony published by Politico—was indefensible. And yet Vance’s reflex was to deflect, pointing to a Democratic rival’s years-old violent and disqualifying text messages as if whataboutism were wisdom.
Vance posted on X that Jones’s comments were “far worse than anything said in a college group chat,” and dismissed the Young Republicans’ messages as nothing more than a “college group chat.” This was swiftly derided for what it was: gross partisan bullshit that prioritized scoring political points over a principled position.
“Because a politician on the other team said something indefensible, I shall refuse to condemn something indefensible said by my team,” wrote Jonah Goldberg, translating the vice president’s words accurately, and with much-deserved disgust. That, Goldberg argued, is moral cowardice. It’s tribalism dressed up as principle. And it’s fast becoming the ruling ethic of the post-Trump right: the belief that politics isn’t about what’s right, but who wins.
It’s a neat trick of modern populism: recast moral clarity as elitism, empathy as weakness, and outrage as hypocrisy. In this inverted value system, the only virtue left is loyalty, and the only sin is shame. That’s the ethic Vance was signaling to — not the defense of speech, but the defense of the tribe.
Matt Walsh, one of the movement’s louder populists, summed up the logic perfectly. Conservatives, he lamented, “don’t stick together.” For Walsh, the sin isn’t racism or cruelty—it’s disunity. Goldberg and fellow principled conservative Charles C.W. Cooke pushed back, reminding him that principle isn’t betrayal.
“Why would I want to ‘stick together’ with those guys?” Cooke asked. “They don’t believe what I believe.”
That question exposes the lie at the heart of populist “unity.” The rot here isn’t just moral—it’s philosophical. The populist right has traded belief for belonging. Once, conservatism claimed to stand for virtue, restraint, and personal responsibility. Now its loudest avatars defend hate speech as “ironic” and mock shame as weakness.
They’ve inverted the moral hierarchy: loyalty to the tribe now trumps loyalty to truth and decency.
Vance’s “college group chat” defense is emblematic. He doesn’t even bother pretending the words were good—only that they shouldn’t be disqualifying, because the “other side” is worse. It’s nihilism with a campaign slogan.
To be clear, Democrats have their own moral blind spots. The private texts of Virginia Democrat Jay Jones — violent, personal, and indefensible — should have drawn louder condemnation from his own party. That they didn’t speaks to a shared sickness in our politics: the instinct to go mute when it’s your side’s turn in the dock. But there’s still a difference between silence and sanction. Jones is a local candidate. Vance is the sitting Vice President. His words don’t just reflect rot — they model it.
Meanwhile, the same Young Republicans Vance refused to criticize have been fired or forced out, thankfully revealing that other conservatives still possess a conscience. They recognized that being on the right doesn’t require defending the wrong.
Their swift accountability — firings, resignations, genuine condemnation — was proof that the old moral reflex isn’t entirely dead on the right. It still flickers in people who remember that conservatism once meant conserving character, not just power.
Vance, a onetime moralist who wrote about the decay of his own community, now embodies the decay of his movement. He calls it loyalty. It’s really surrender.
Because when calling shame “pearl clutching” passes for strength, you’re not showing courage—you’re confessing rot. And when the loudest voices on the right treat conscience as a liability, they’re not conserving anything. They’re cremating it.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
