Nothing much to disagree with here

Trump Is Dragging Us Down to His Level 

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.”

Thankfully, the Young Republicans National Federation forcefully condemned the chats, along with a number of other Republican writers and politicians. Several participants in the chat lost their jobs in politics.

 But not everyone was outraged. Far from it. The vice president of the United States rallied to their defense. In response to the Politico report, JD Vance posted screenshots of vile text messages from Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general of Virginia, in which Jones wished death on a man named Todd Gilbert, a Republican, who was one of his colleagues in the Virginia House of Delegates.

“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” he wrote. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

The responses to Vance are obvious, or at least they should be. Why can’t we condemn Jones and the Young Republicans? None of those individuals belong in American politics, so why not condemn them all?....

 

First, when the most powerful and successful politician of the past decade is an immoral man who is dishonest, cruel and illiberal at a fundamental level, it creates a situation — especially in his own party — that rewards all the same vices.

The result is a push-pull dynamic that pushes people of good character out of the party and pulls in new leaders and new people who share the leader’s ethos. Every year, this cultural trend reinforces itself. Decency becomes rarer, and decent people feel more isolated.

Meanwhile, the trolls multiply until the radicals become the mainstream and the previous mainstream becomes the fringe.  

The rest of it is worth reading, but it ends on this point for which the Republicans are much, much worse culprits:

The story of this past week is the story of this past year. It’s the story of this decade. If your political opponents represent ultimate evil, then the only morality left is the morality of victory. The only true sin is the sin of defeat. 

I've been saying that for years.  And it is Republicans who are far more likely to believe Democrats are literally evil.  Democrats are more likely to think Republicans are primarily dumb, as well as malicious.