The Great Moral Inversion

When “I Love Hitler” Becomes Youthful Indiscretion and Apologies Become Extremism

The Vice President of the United States just told America that professional political operatives saying “I love Hitler” is what kids do.

Adults aged 24 to 35—people who run Republican campaigns, serve as chiefs of staff to state legislators, work as communications directors for attorneys general, sit in state senates—exchanged hundreds of racist messages over seven months. They joked about gas chambers. They called rape “epic.” They used white supremacist codes like “1488.” They celebrated that Orange County Teenage Republicans “support slavery and all that shit. Mega based.”

When this became public, JD Vance dismissed it as “stupid jokes” by “young boys” making “edgy, offensive” remarks that shouldn’t “ruin their lives.”

Meanwhile, Virginia AG candidate Jay Jones made one offensive joke, immediately took full responsibility, and offered public apology. Vance condemned this as “incredible endorsement of political violence” requiring sustained attention.

This isn’t merely hypocrisy. It is, in fact, the complete inversion of moral reasoning itself—where Nazi sympathies become less serious than apologies, where expressing vile ideology becomes more defensible than acknowledging error, where consequence-free extremism becomes the baseline while moral accountability becomes deviation requiring correction.

When the Vice President defends “I love Hitler” as normal while condemning apologies as dangerous, he’s establishing doctrine: truth is what power says it is, and power has decided that Republican Nazi sympathies are acceptable as long as they’re framed as jokes.

What Actually Happened

Politico obtained 2,900 pages of Telegram chats spanning seven months between leaders of Young Republican organizations across New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. Peter Giunta, chair of New York State Young Republicans and chief of staff to state Assemblymember Mike Reilly. Bobby Walker, vice chair and staffer for state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt. William Hendrix, vice chair of Kansas Young Republicans and communications assistant for Attorney General Kris Kobach. Samuel Douglass, Vermont state senator and chair of Vermont Young Republicans.

Public records show eight of eleven participants range from 24 to 35. Some are barely younger than Vance himself at 41. These are adults holding political power.

When discussing an upcoming leadership vote, Giunta wrote: “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber. And everyone that endorsed but then votes for us is going to the gas chamber.” Joe Maligno responded: “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.” Annie Kaykaty added: “I’m ready to watch people burn now.” Another elaborated: “We gotta pretend that we like them. ‘Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax.’ Boom—they’re dead.”

When a Michigan Republican promised to support “the most right wing person,” Giunta responded: “Great. I love Hitler.” Dwyer, the Kansas chair, reacted with a smiley face emoji.

Discussing an NBA game: “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Black people called “the watermelon people.” When discussing Spanish colonization and sexual violence: “Sex? It was rape.” Walker: “Epic.” When asked to guess a hotel room number: “1488”—white supremacist code for “Heil Hitler.”

Slurs appeared more than 251 times combined. For seven months. Not one person objected. Not one person left. Not one person reported it. The only concern? Walker writing: “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr.” The problem wasn’t the content—it was exposure.

The Infantilization

Vance’s defense: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.” Notice what he’s doing. He can’t defend “I love Hitler” directly, so he reframes who said it and why.

They’re not kids. They’re adults aged 24-35. Professional political operatives. State legislators. Campaign managers. Some barely younger than Vance at 41. Calling them “kids” transforms adult moral responsibility into developmental immaturity. It converts ideological commitment into youthful experimentation deserving understanding.

And they’re not telling jokes. They’re building ideology. When someone writes “I love Hitler” and gets smiley faces, they’re testing boundaries. When this continues seven months without objection, the test succeeds. When participants use white supremacist codes, elaborate gas chamber fantasies, and celebrate slavery support, they’re constructing shared belief under humor’s plausible deniability.

University of Dayton professor Art Jipson, who specializes in white racial extremism, reviewed the chats: “You say it once or twice, it’s a joke, but you say it 251 times, it’s no longer a joke. The more we repeat certain ideas, the more real they become to us.”

Vance’s advice to his children reveals everything: “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.” The concern isn’t saying “I love Hitler”—it’s being caught. The “scumbag” isn’t the person expressing Nazi sympathies. It’s the person who exposed it.

The Standards Asymmetry

Vance doesn’t just defend Young Republicans. He pivots immediately to attack Jay Jones, who made one offensive joke about choosing to kill Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert over Hitler or Pol Pot. When exposed, Jones immediately took full responsibility, offered public apology, apologized directly to Gilbert, and acknowledged wrongdoing. Gilbert accepted.

Vance declared this “incredible endorsement of political violence” distracting from “real issues.” Meanwhile, hundreds of Young Republican messages over seven months—”I love Hitler,” rape as “epic,” gas chambers, Nazi codes, slavery celebration—represent “what kids say” that adults should ignore.

One Democrat makes one joke, immediately apologizes, takes full responsibility—incredible endorsement of violence requiring condemnation. Republicans exchange hundreds of Nazi messages over seven months, no apologies, no responsibility—what kids do requiring understanding.

Vance tells concerned Americans to “grow up” and focus on real issues. The inversion completes. Traditionally, apologizing demonstrates moral seriousness while refusing demonstrates bankruptcy. Vance inverts this: Democrats who apologize admit serious wrongdoing. Republicans who refuse are kids whose behavior shouldn’t matter. The Democrat taking responsibility is the problem. Republicans defending Nazi sympathies are just boys being boys.

The Propaganda Infrastructure

The inversion requires sophisticated cover—voices making it seem reasonable to treat Nazi sympathies as less serious than Democratic apologies. Consider

Blake Dodge

and

Katherine Dee

’s recent attack on historian

Heather Cox Richardson

in PirateWires, run by Mike Solana, VP of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

The tell: “Presumably, Trump could have reasons for doing what he’s doing. But Richardson always assigns the darkest possible intent.” Presumably. What a magnificent word to carry such fraud.

On what basis should historians presume benevolent intent from someone who incited insurrection, pardoned attackers, conducts warrantless mass detentions, and has advisers calling judicial review “insurrection”? The authors never say. They simply assert that not presuming good faith reveals bias—as if objectivity requires charitable interpretation of extraordinary power exercises by someone who already demonstrated authoritarian intent.

The piece obsesses over Richardson’s small errors while ignoring whether her core thesis—that Trump exhibits recognizable authoritarian patterns—is correct. They never ask if Miller calling judicial review “insurrection” represents authoritarian rejection of constitutional governance. They don’t examine whether warrantless mass detentions violate the Fourth Amendment. They fault Richardson for insufficient charity while the burden properly falls on executives to justify extraordinary power under constitutional constraints.

This is the propaganda enabling Vance’s inversion. Sophisticated critique makes democratic alarm seem hysterical. Intellectual cover treats pattern recognition as bias. Concern trolling positions worry about authoritarianism as the real problem. Richardson’s crime is recognizing patterns that Thiel-adjacent intellectuals need obscured. She’s helping 2.7 million Americans understand authoritarian danger—making her dangerous to people building authoritarian infrastructure.

The propaganda demands we presume virtue where evidence shows vice. Presume Trump has benevolent reasons for military deployment. Presume Young Republicans don’t mean “I love Hitler.” Presume Vance isn’t serious about “extra-constitutional” action. All while treating Democratic accountability as extremism requiring condemnation. This manufactures the epistemic environment where defending “I love Hitler” as normal seems plausible to people who should know better.

The Man Who Advocated Coup

What makes Vance’s defense grotesque: at 38, he explicitly advocated constitutional overthrow. James Pogue’s 2022 Vanity Fair profile documented Vance on podcast explaining his vision. Pogue’s assessment: “This is a description, essentially, of a coup.”

Vance: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say—the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Andrew Jackson’s defiance of judicial review—explicit rejection of constitutional constraints on executive power. Vance continued: “We are in a late republican period,” invoking Rome awaiting Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Murphy: “Indeed. Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”

This wasn’t youthful indiscretion. This was an adult Senate candidate advocating to purge civil servants, replace them with loyalists, defy judicial review, treat constitutional constraints as obstacles, go “extra-constitutional,” and model governance on Rome’s transition to dictatorship.

Now the framework reveals itself. Making light of Kirk’s assassination equals extremism. Advocating constitutional overthrow at 38 equals sophisticated thought. “I love Hitler” by adults 24-35 equals youthful indiscretion. The Holocaust isn’t serious. Constitutional overthrow isn’t serious. But Kimmel’s errors—that’s the crisis.

Vance can’t allow a framework where Nazi sympathies disqualify people because he’s guilty by his standards. If “I love Hitler” is serious, so is advocating to ignore judicial review. If gas chamber jokes disqualify, so does calling for Caesar. If authoritarian ideology is problematic, so is Vance. So he inverts everything: Nazi sympathies become trivial, constitutional overthrow becomes sophisticated, accountability becomes extremism, refusing accountability becomes normal.

The man who advocated coup now arbitrates extremism. And he’s decided “I love Hitler” is less serious than apologizing.

The Generational Collapse

Jonathan V. Last

at The Bulwark identifies something crucial: “We are a decade into Trumpism. These Young Republicans have never known any other type of Republicanism... By 2032 we’re talking about a full generation of Republicans who only understand politics in the context of an authoritarian project.”

This isn’t individual failure—it’s systematic socialization where Nazi sympathies are baseline rather than disqualifying. These operatives watched Trump mock disabled reporters, POWs, Gold Star families—without consequence. Watched Republican leaders condemn then endorse Trump—learning principles are performative. Watched January 6th attackers get pardoned—learning tribal violence is acceptable. Watched constitutional conservatives either lose everything or accommodate—learning power matters more than principle.

For seven months, Nazi sympathies, Holocaust jokes, white supremacist codes, slavery celebration. Not one objection. Why? Because objecting marks you outside the tribe. As weak. As politically correct. As someone who hasn’t learned that politics is power, domination, winning by any means. The person who says “this is wrong” isn’t displaying courage—they’re displaying tribal disloyalty, failing to understand that public values are performance and what matters is loyalty when cameras are off.

Last captures it: “Normalized isn’t even the word. For them, Trumpism won’t be some exotic political mode that was made acceptable. It won’t be a ‘fever’ that breaks. It will have been their mother’s milk.” They weren’t corrupted into this—they were raised in it. This is what they think politics is.

Truth Is What Power Says It Is

This is post-truth governance perfected. Not “alternative facts”—those are amateur versions. This is the sophisticated understanding that moral frameworks are weapons deployed against enemies and suspended for allies.

In Vance’s world—learned from Yarvin, articulated in that Vanity Fair profile—there is no objective truth, no universal standards, no principles constraining power regardless of who wields it. Only the regime and resisters. The Cathedral and those red-pilled to see through it. Elite consensus and those willing to overthrow it.

Nazi sympathies aren’t evaluated against universal standards—they’re evaluated against tribal utility. Do they serve purposes? Signal loyalty? Demonstrate willingness to transgress liberal norms? Then they’re acceptable. Frame as jokes and move on. Apologies aren’t recognized as accountability—they’re interpreted as tribal weakness. Democrats who apologize admit guilt, reveal vulnerability, confirm they’re trapped in frameworks where universal standards constrain behavior. Constitutional constraints aren’t respected as necessary limits—they’re dismissed as obstacles. When courts block illegal actions, you defy: “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is the monarchist-CEO vision Yarvin articulates and Vance implements: power determines truth, not truth constraining power. When Vance defends “I love Hitler” as normal while condemning apologies as dangerous, he’s not hypocritical by his standards—he’s perfectly consistent. He’s applying the framework where truth serves power, where moral standards are weapons against enemies, where the only actual principle is tribal loyalty.

The Choice Before Us

Last asks: “Is liberal democracy sustainable if the Republican party is illiberal?” His answer is honest despair: “I don’t know, man.” He’s right that Democrats can’t win every election, that sustainable democracy requires both parties supporting constitutional governance, that we can’t simply make Republican voters stop wanting authoritarianism.

But Last struggles because he treats this as voter preference—as if Republicans organically developed authoritarian desires. They didn’t. They were systematically cultivated through information ecosystems fragmenting reality, attention extraction destroying sustained reasoning, tribal structures punishing moral accountability, and elite modeling demonstrating consequence-free extremism as sophistication.

When Vance defends “I love Hitler” as youthful indiscretion, the response cannot be “both sides have problems.” The response must be: Nazi sympathies are disqualifying. Adults expressing them for seven months without objection reveals moral collapse. The Vice President defending this as normal reveals the Republican Party has abandoned constitutional democracy. Not as partisan attack but as moral fact applying regardless of affiliation.

This requires holding standards even when only one side is held to them. Democrats maintaining accountability while Republicans refuse it. Accepting asymmetric vulnerability because the alternative validates that standards don’t matter. And rendering moral witness—documenting what’s happening, analyzing what it reveals, refusing to let sophisticated defenses obscure actual content.

Last rightly argues Democrats should demand Jones drop out or resign if elected. Not because Virginia’s AG office isn’t important, but because stopping Trumpism’s infection of Democratic bloodstream matters more. When “I love Hitler” becomes defensible and apologies become damning, you’ve lost the ability to evaluate behavior by standards applying regardless of tribe. Without that ability, democracy becomes impossible—it requires shared frameworks for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable conduct.

If Democrats accommodate to compete, they don’t become effective—they become complicit in destroying conditions making democratic competition meaningful.

The Sufferable Evil

Jefferson warned in the Declaration of Independence, writing that humans accommodate tyranny—that we “are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves.” Vance bets Americans will accommodate this: adults holding power saying “I love Hitler” for seven months is just what kids do.

He bets we’ll accept the inversion. Nazi sympathies less serious than apologies. Ideology without accountability more defensible than mistakes with responsibility. Refusing standards is strength while maintaining them is weakness. He bets we’ll accommodate our way into a Republican Party where Nazi sympathies are baseline, where the only problem with “I love Hitler” is exposure, where power protects any ideology as long as you’re loyal.

The question is whether this evil is sufferable. Whether Americans decide defending “I love Hitler” as normal is the line we won’t cross. Whether we’ll accommodate moral inversion or resist it as breakdown.

Because Vance knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s not confused. He’s deliberately establishing that truth is what power says, that moral standards are weapons against enemies and suspended for allies, that the only principle is tribal loyalty to power.

When he calls 24-35 year old professionals “kids,” he’s strategically infantilizing adult responsibility. When he treats seven months of Nazi sympathies as “jokes,” he’s providing ideological cover under plausible deniability. When he condemns Democrats who apologize while defending Republicans who don’t, he’s inverting moral reasoning itself.

And when he does this as Vice President—someone who advocated constitutional overthrow, cited Yarvin as influence, explicitly called for defying courts and going “extra-constitutional”—he’s demonstrating the Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of operating within shared moral frameworks.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And “I love Hitler” is not youthful indiscretion—it’s ideological commitment the Vice President just told Americans to accept as normal.

The great moral inversion is complete. Truth is what power says it is. Power has decided Republican Nazi sympathies are less serious than Democratic apologies. The question is whether we’ll accommodate this or render it insufferable through maintaining that some standards apply to everyone—including those who claim power exempts them from accountability.

They told you who they are. They told you what they believe. They told you what they’ll defend. Now choose: accommodate the inversion, or hold the line making democratic coexistence possible.

Because when “I love Hitler” becomes acceptable and apologies become damning, you’re not witnessing political disagreement—you’re witnessing systematic destruction of moral frameworks making democracy function. Vance defended Nazi sympathies as normal. He advocated constitutional overthrow as sophisticated. He inverted moral reasoning so completely that accountability becomes guilt and refusing accountability becomes innocence.

Believe him. He’s telling you exactly what the Republican Party has become—and what it’s building for America’s future. The great moral inversion is not metaphor. It’s Republican Party doctrine, articulated by the Vice President, applied to protect Nazi sympathizers in party leadership.

And it cannot be accommodated without surrendering everything that makes constitutional democracy worth defending.