They thought their chat was private. It was not. The leaked Telegram messages, obtained by POLITICO, running to thousands of pages, show a cohort of Young Republican operatives sharing jokes and threats that are nothing short of horrific. The material is misogynistic, racist, antisemitic and violent. It is also a handmirror held up to a political movement that has spent nearly 10 years undoing decades of norms about what is acceptable in public and private speech.

The messages read like basic training for radicalisation of fiends. Leaders of state Young Republican groups used the n-word repeatedly in their Telegram chat areas. They mock Black people as "watermelon people" and trade fantasies about gas chambers and showers. They praise slavery and celebrate Adolf Hitler. They joke about rape and urge colleagues to drive rivals and political enemies to suicide.

Some of the participants work in government. One is a state senator. One worked in the Small Business Administration. Several held or sought leadership in the national Young Republican federation, the organization that claims 15,000 members between the ages of 18 and 40.

When those messages became public, some consequences followed, but not enough so far. A communications aide lost his job. A job offer was rescinded. Prominent Republicans in New York and Kansas condemned the remarks and called for resignations. Some who were in on the chat have denied authenticity or alleged doctored logs. Some apologised.

A scholar of white racial extremism told POLITICO that these messages echo forums where neo Nazis and white supremacists normalize their views by repetition. Repetition, he warned, erodes the boundary between a joke and a plan, between talk of violence and actual violence.

There are at least two problems here. The first is cultural. Young activists are echoing a national media ecology where racially charged tropes and violent metaphors are treated as partisan scoring. The other is institutional. The Republican old guard has, in too many cases, not mounted a sufficient effort to push back.

Political parties are not mere aggregations of opinion. They are institutions that gatekeep power, acceptable careers and norms. When leaders fail to set standards, those norms collapse and younger operatives are receptive to corrupt ideas. If senior figures tolerate open praise of Hitler, virulent racism, overt antisemitism and calls for mass violence without decisive consequences, they signal permission. Permission becomes recruitment, and recruitment becomes policy when the recruits come to office or influence decision making.

This danger is not hypothetical. When opponents are framed as vermin, or as a threat to survival, the barriers to violence lower. That is classic social science dating back to studies of genocide and communal violence in Nazi Germany and other places. Normalised hate can turn into licensed action if institutions don't intervene or at least discourage that hate.

There is also an electoral calculation at work. The Young Republicans involved in the chat were maneuvering for control of a national federation. They sought Trump's endorsement and the right flank's approval. They aimed to shift a membership base toward an ideologically extreme posture.

One fact will not be popular in some quarters. The normalisation of extreme rhetoric did not occur in a vacuum. It took place in a wider ecosystem where abrasive and often dehumanising language is rewarded with attention. A certain strain of legacy media and commentary amplifies extremes and turns them into ratings. Others just look the other way. That phenomenon has helped to produce a generation of activists who confuse outrage with THE central message of MAGA Republicans.

So a party that tolerates praise for Hitler within its rising generation has a problem that can't be fixed by mere denunciations. And it's a symptom of how broken Republicans are, and how awful MAGA is becoming.

I was born to a generation that used to look at Nazi Germany and say to itself, "That can never happen here." I no longer believe it. It can happen in America, and it will happen in America if we permit it.