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A few days ago, Donald Trump called a 30-year-old White House staffer into the Oval Office and offered him a new job as a top lawyer at the agency responsible for managing all the federal government’s buildings, purchases, and technology.
So, who cares, right? Why is this a story?
Well, the 30-year-old in question is a former right-wing podcaster named Paul Ingrassia who admitted to some Republican colleagues last year that he has a “Nazi streak.” He also said that every holiday celebrating Black Americans “needs to be eviscerated,” that you should “never trust a chinaman or an Indian,” that “we need competent white men in positions of leadership,” and that “the founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal…we need to reject that part of our heritage.”
Ingrassia made the comments in a group chat that one of the Republican operatives on the chain leaked to Politico, but it’s not as if his views were all that secret. In 2023, he tweeted that the purpose of education should be “elevating the high IQ section of your demographics, so you know, basically young men, straight white men.” A few months later, he tweeted “exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage.”
All of this was ultimately enough to sink Ingrassia’s Senate confirmation after several Republicans took the rare step of opposing a Trump nominee – but it wasn’t enough for Stephen Miller or JD Vance or Trump himself, who granted Ingrassia a personal audience in the Oval to reward him with the new role. It goes without saying that the President of the United States doesn’t typically do this kind of thing for most mid-level personnel matters.
Ingrassia isn’t the only Republican official who’s been letting his Reich flag fly in a group chat. You might remember the state party leaders who texted about loving Hitler, lying Jews, and sending their opponents to the gas chamber – another leaked chat that led to multiple apologies, resignations, and condemnations from other Republicans. Except for JD Vance, of course, who dismissed people’s concerns as “pearl-clutching” and said that “kids do stupid things.”
But the kids in question – most of whom are actually professionals in their 30s – don’t seem to think what they’re saying and doing is stupid. And their openly racist, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, anti-American worldview is a virus that seems to be spreading throughout this generation of Republican staffers and media figures who’ve come of age in the Trump Era.
One writer has made news over the last week by saying that he believes that 30-40% of the Gen Z Republicans who work in Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes – a white nationalist streamer with half a million subscribers who’s said that women “want to be raped,” “Blacks need to be imprisoned,” and Jews are warmongers who “must be absolutely annihilated when we take power.” The writer who made this claim wasn’t some lib or NeverTrumper, but Rod Dreher – an Orthodox Christian so conservative that he lives in Hungary as a big fan of authoritarian Viktor Orban. Dreher made his observation after a trip to DC where he spent the weekend talking to as many Gen Z Republican staffers as he could – a trip where he also stopped by the Vice President’s home and sat down with Orban and his friend JD Vance, who he said he warned about the threat Fuentes and his worldview pose to the country, the Republican Party, and Vance’s own political future.
Dreher didn’t say how Vance responded, but he went on to write about how the young Christians and traditional Catholics in Republican politics are now “neck-deep” in anti-Semitism. He asked one Gen Z conservative why so many are fans of a white nationalist like Fuentes, and the person told him that even if they don’t agree with everything he says or the way he says it, they like his “rage” and “willingness to violate taboos,” because “they just want to tear everything down.” The reason for this – according to what Dreher heard from a lot of the young Republicans he spoke to – is… ...
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