THE WORST THING ABOUT HATE SPEECH IS THE HATE PART

I'm back. Thank you, Yas, for smart posting while I was away (and I hope my comment on your second post wasn't too harsh).

The biggest story in politics right now concerns a Telegram chat in which Young Republicans said vile things about Jews, Blacks, Indians, and other groups.

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

... When Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta elsewhere refers to Black people as “the watermelon people.”

Hendrix made a similar remark in July: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”

Hendrix was a communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach until Thursday. He also said in the chat that, despite political differences, he’s drawn to Missouri’s Young Republican organization because “Missouri doesn’t like f--s.”

This isn't a problem just because the words used are indelicate or prohibited in polite society. This is a problem because of how easily these young Republicans dehumanize individuals and groups they don't like. Dehumanization enables hate -- real hate, the kind of hate that leads those in power to deprive those out of power of basic human and civic rights.

The man all these young people look up to, Donald Trump, certainly doesn't believe his enemies deserve to be treated as full citizens. We see this in Trump's handling of the shutdown:

Two weeks into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has frozen or canceled nearly $28 billion that had been reserved for more than 200 projects primarily located in Democratic-led cities, congressional districts and states, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

But this goes beyond funding. The Bulwark's Andrew Egger responds to a Truth Social post in which Trump claimed that Joe Biden (who wasn't president at the time) "PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6":

The post is the core of how Trump sees the world: Trump people and Biden people, heroes and villains, patriots and terrorists, angels and demons. All political actors are sorted into two great camps, and what matters aren’t any of the actual relevant facts about their behavior, or their motivations, or their leadership. All that matters is whether Trump perceives them as loyal allies or outside agitators. He may have been president on January 6th. But an FBI that wasn’t jumping to do his will at that given moment was a Biden FBI, in his brain.

It isn’t just the tweets—Trump now runs the whole government this way. It’s the belief that underlies freezing half-finished green energy infrastructure projects, or purging law enforcement agents because they happened to work on January 6th cases, or carrying out firings at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency because he’s still mad at Chris Krebs. These people are the demons—they’re Biden-coded—so all you can do is root them out. On the flip side, there’s the pledges he has made to police officers not to prosecute abusive behavior, his firings of a host of internal government watchdogs, his dead-lettering of the Hatch Act and of corruption laws. All these things only exist to constrain him and his allies—the good guys.

Trump told us at Charlie Kirk's memorial that he hates his opponents. He wasn't kidding.

And as a recent Economist poll notes, Republican voters -- not just young Republicans brain-poisoned by internet chat, but Republicans of all ages -- hate their opponents and want Trump to take revenge on them.

Trump doesn't deserve all (or even most) the blame for this. I blame the right-wing media, particularly Fox News, which over the last few decades has used simplistic tales of conservative purity and liberal evil to teach Republican voters -- including Trump -- that some Americans are worthy and others are subhuman.

And yet in recent years it's been liberals and progressives who've been chided for intolerance. They're more likely to end friendships based on ideology! They won't date right-wingers! Is it possible that conventional wisdom has this all wrong? Is it possible that liberals and progressives avoid right-wingers not because we're more intolerant, but because we know how much right-wingers hate us and how evil they think we are?

At Bluesky, Annette Gordon-Reed responds to the story about the Telegram chat:

You may remember the articles criticizing liberal students for their hesitancy to make friends with conservative students—alleging that they were less open-minded than their conservative counterparts.

... consider this story when we think of those previous articles.

Many students don’t want to associate with students who easily express hostility towards Black people & Jewish people. That’s completely understandable.

Are we the intolerant ones if what we're unwilling to tolerate is deep, dehumanizing hate?