Vice President JD Vance is under fire after brushing off public outrage over a leaked group chat among young Republicans that featured racist slurs and admiration for Adolf Hitler. Instead of condemning the content, Vance waved it away, calling the participants “kids” who were just being “edgy” and “offensive.”
But critics aren’t buying it. In a pointed piece published Wednesday, journalist Julianne McShane hit back hard. “We checked. Sorry, JD Vance,” she wrote, cutting straight to the core of Vance’s defense.
“Vice President JD Vance would like you to do anything but pay attention to those abhorrent leaked texts from young Republicans that Politico covered on Tuesday,” McShane wrote. “And if you do read them, he wants you to think they’re just ‘kids’ saying ‘edgy, offensive’ things. Except that they appear to be full-grown adults, according to Mother Jones’ analysis of public records and reports of the participants’ ages.”
Turns out, they’re not kids at all. According to Mother Jones, eight of the 11 individuals in the chat were between 24 and 35 years old, based on public records and media sources. One participant is even a 27-year-old sitting state senator in Vermont. The ages of the remaining three weren’t publicly confirmed, but nothing points to anyone being underage.
That fact guts Vance’s “just kids being kids” defense — and McShane didn’t hold back on the hypocrisy either.
“This is particularly rich coming from one of the top officials representing a party that just mounted a mass cancellation campaign to push for the firing and punishment of anyone who its devotees felt mourned assassinated MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk insufficiently,” she wrote.
So while Vance pleads for leniency, arguing that the fallout from these “jokes” could “ruin their lives,” critics aren’t letting it slide — especially given the double standard his own party applies when the outrage goes the other way.
McShane closed her takedown with a line that captured the whole mess in a few words: “TL;dr: Hitlergate wasn’t about kids, and JD Vance knows it.”
