(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Vice President JD Vance sparked backlash Tuesday after he dismissed “pearl clutching” over racist, antisemitic and misogynistic messages leaked from a Young Republicans group chat while arguing a Virginia Democrat Jay Jones’s violent texts were “far worse.”
The odd defensive line came after Politico published 2,900 pages of leaked exchanges among a dozen state-level Young Republican leaders from New York to Arizona.
The chats included references to Black people as “monkeys” and “the watermelon people,” praise for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and discussions of rape and gas chambers.
Several of the chat members have since stepped down from their roles.
Rather than condemning the group’s rhetoric, Vance pivoted to a recent scandal involving Jones over leaked 2022 texts calling for violence against then–House Speaker Todd Gilbert.
One of the texts said Gilbert should get “two bullets to the head.”
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.”
The vice president’s remarks drew immediate rebukes from across the aisle. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) responded:
Other liberal commentators followed:
The uproar comes just weeks after the assassination of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last month and renewed concerns about political violence and violent rhetoric.
The post ‘College Group Chat’: JD Vance Dismisses ‘Pearl Clutching’ Over Young Republicans Leak to Attack Jay Jones first appeared on Mediaite.