Trump has dragged our discourse down to his level [View all]

By David French / The New York Times

It has happened again.

We learned last week that a cohort of Republican activists and political staff members had shared racist and misogynist messages in a private text chat. It’s a story that repeats itself with depressing regularity, varying only the names of the participants and the depravity of the content.

As Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo reported in Politico, leaders of Young Republican groups from across the nation “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.”

Chats like this are so widespread in right-wing circles that Aaron Sibarium, one of the best reporters in right-wing media, posted this comment in 2023: “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/french-trump-has-dragged-our-discourse-down-to-his-level/