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By George Packer:

When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love Hitler”; that joke about gas chambers and rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” and monkeys in zoos, and throw around words like faggot and retarded, they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us.

And they’re hardly surprising. Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust denial, and Stephen Miller’s rage-filled threats, the young loyalists who wrote the texts were speaking the language of the people they admire most. Nor was it surprising when, the day after Politico revealed the texts’ existence, the image of an American flag altered into the shape of a swastika appeared on the cubicle wall behind a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of a MAGA congressman. In that culture, the rehabilitation of the man who stands for the worst in humanity was inevitable.

Having been given permission from the country’s most powerful person, the Young Republicans received forgiveness from its second-most-powerful. Vice President J. D. Vance refused to condemn their words, explaining: “I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke—telling a very offensive, stupid joke—is cause to ruin their lives.” But the authors of the texts have already grown up—they’re men in their 20s and 30s, climbing the rungs of Republican Party ladders in Kansas, Arizona, Vermont, and New York, firm in the belief that the viler their language, the higher they’ll go. One is already an officeholder.

For Vance, ethical judgment has become a pure matter of partisanship, to the point of overcoming his most personal bonds. When a DOGE member was revealed to have posted “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “Normalize Indian hate,” Vance—married to an Indian American—scoffed at the ensuing outrage and demanded that the offender be rehired. But when private citizens anywhere said something ugly about Charlie Kirk, the vice president went after their livelihood. Once morality is rotted out by partisan relativism, the floor gives way and the fall into nihilism is swift.

The abandonment of a universal morality isn’t just philosophically wrong—it’s politically stupid. Any successful opposition to Trump has to begin with a lucid understanding of what’s at stake: not just past and present harms done to the marginalized, but everything that Americans once believed they cared about, including the values that were co-opted by the right before MAGA abandoned them—respect for law and custom, patriotism, family ties, common decency. To some liberals and progressives these values came to sound old-fashioned, corny, even dangerous. But anyone frightened by the country’s downward spiral has to believe that our society still shares them, and can still respond to them if someone makes the appeal.

If the Young Republicans’ texts are seen merely as attacks on the groups they name, then they become the problem of Black and gay people, Jews, and women. But the texts represent a larger atrocity, one that has befallen all of America. Once you base moral judgments on group identity and political convenience, it becomes possible for people on the left to be anti-racist and anti-Semitic, and for people on the right to embrace Muslim haters in Israel and Jew haters in Germany. If moral values aren’t simple and universal—if they require a facility with the language of graduate seminars and single-issue activism—they won’t move the immobilized, alienated, numb Americans who still haven’t given up on their country’s promise. The dehumanization of any group dehumanizes everyone. There will never be an end to learning this lesson.