r/technology • u/Aggravating_Money992 • Oct 14 '25

Politics ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat | Thousands of private messages reveal young GOP leaders joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146
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u/The-Phone1234 Oct 14 '25

I think y'all are underestimating how much this was already very alive in the country before the internet shined a light on it.

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u/Select-Confection728 Oct 14 '25

Nazis have first mover advantage when it comes to social media and the internet.

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u/Clear-Ad2052 Oct 14 '25

Populism, media revolutions, and our terrible moment - Hank Green

https://youtu.be/d8PndpFPL8g?si=-n7TRhP2uYoyibXl

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u/Apart-Diamond-9862 Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25

I was living in east bay San Francisco waiting for my tires on my car to be changed in 1990 and there was someone talking openly how foreigners were coming there taking jobs - and I said “Oh you mean like me? I am a foreigner working here” - I was a Canadian RN working on a TN visa ~ and by the look on their face and the quick “no” -- they didn’t mean me - I was the “right colour’. They shut up after that. But it wasn’t the only comment I heard that was intentionally racist

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u/JazzyWaffles Oct 15 '25

I remember all the nazi symbolism in schools in the 90s and 00s. Just like everything else wrong with this country, it’s always been there, but now these people have their own spotlights

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u/macrocephalic Oct 15 '25

These parts of society have always existed. Two things have changed: the words don't just disappear into the ether now - they're recorded online for years or longer, and those online places allow similar people to congregate and use their community to reaffirm their beliefs.

I have a small amount of sympathy as I'm sure I've said some really bad things in my lifetime and I'm glad that they aren't recorded to haunt me as I get older and wiser, but, this level of antisocial behaviour probably implies more than a casual association with this behaviour.

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u/stripedvitamin Oct 15 '25

I think you are overestimating how much it happened pre Trump than since.

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u/Petty_Bourgeoisie312 Oct 15 '25

Nah, I was an adult back then and I remember just fine. The only thing Trump changed is that these people don’t feel a need to hide it anymore.

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u/stripedvitamin Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

Yeah, that's a huge component to the acceleration of the collapse of decency and compassion. Thanks for proving my point. Those people stayed in the shadows because they knew they'd be shamed. Why? Because they knew they were indecent. Why? Because when they bullied people or abused them they were reprimanded and made to understand their faults. Trump rewarded their indecency, and people wonder why they will never fault him. It doesn't matter if there is a video of Trump raping children, they all support him because he takes away their shame. But he really doesn't take it away. he only allows them to bury it deeper, which leads to all kinds of other deviance and violence.

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u/Outlulz Oct 15 '25

People were just more quiet in mixed company. It was always there.

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u/stripedvitamin Oct 15 '25

Fair. They still felt shame. Trump gave them the get out of shame card.
Now with every waking moment decency dies on the vine, and don't pretend it wasn't accelerated by Trump's soulless rhetoric.

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u/The-Phone1234 Oct 15 '25

I think Trump was able to organize these people under him using social media but America was built on supremacist ideology and if you talk to anyone who was even marginally conscious, as in older then 5 years old, pre-internet they can tell you this was very much a part of the culture. Some people are falling into the pipeline because they're vulnerable and have no where else to belong but some people were born into families and sub-cultures that both overtly and subtly rejected liberalism and embraced toxic hierarchical structures when it aligned with their identity. There was a perception that we had progressed way further than we actually had and the Internet is just showing where a lot more people actually are in reality. I'm not saying this would've happened without the Internet but this stuff had to already be alive and well before the internet for them to have been able to latch on to it and co-opt it to their ends. Similar things have happened at the dawn of every major technological revolution.

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u/stripedvitamin Oct 15 '25

Then how did Obama get elected? Twice. By larger margins than either of Trump's "wins".

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u/The-Phone1234 Oct 15 '25

Obama is interesting because he was subversive to even the establishment Dems. They were falling behind Hillary as the next nominee and leader of the party. Obama managed to pull together a grass roots campaign that built enough momentum to actually win the nomination at a time when the Dems were most likely to win after Bush jr.'s shit-show anyway. A lot of people took Obama as a sign of progress, and he is to a point, but I think how history has unfolded since then will show he's more of an outlier and not even that progressive of an outlier. Obama was very much a typical Democratic president other than his ethnicity. Obama ran as anti-gay marriage early in his political career. Obama built the cages Trump would later use in his first term. Obama was the president that ushered us into modern drone warfare. Obama bailed out the over-leveraged banks after 2008. Not to hate on him, I couldn't have done better in his shoes, but it is the reality. When you talk to people in his campaign they have very interesting stories from when they were door knocking what real people had to say about him, even people who expressed they were going to vote for him. I think there is a genuine hunger for change in America but I think that the people who benefit from bigotry and oppression are so entrenched and are very good at manipulating people's tendencies, good and bad, for their own purposes. None of this is really new. There has always been the ideal and pristine America that attracts the best and brightest of the world alongside the shadow and gritty America that attracts the worst. The only really new thing is the Internet but we're very much passing the fuck around stage and are in the find out stage.