The kids are alt-right
Far-right meme culture is shifting from group chats to the GOP mainstream.
Just last week, we found out that the chairman of the Arizona Young Republicans called for the rape of a rival Republican activist.
As members of a leaked group chat grumbled over national Young Republican leader Hayden Padgett, Arizona’s Luke Mosiman chimed in: “RAPE HAYDEN”.
Among hundreds of racist, homophobic and violent messages, Mosiman’s text has been repeatedly cited among some of the most disturbing examples.
In response to the fallout, Vice President JD Vance said, “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”
While most of the “kids” in the leaked chat logs are ages 24-35, he kind of has a point.
This is what kids are doing nowadays, at least, the far-right faction of them.
The internet has molded generations of children, including those who didn’t even grow up with it. While President Donald Trump couldn’t submit a Google search until he was 52, he can now post racist AI videos to millions of followers.
Before they’re even old enough to vote, young people can access an all-you-can-eat buffet of online rage-bait clips, conspiracy streams and influencer political pundits. The descent from scrolling to believing happens fast.
And that’s why a growing far-right movement of hyper-online white nationalists known as the “Groyper Army” has gained mainstream traction. While much of the group’s vitriol happens in encrypted chats and on social media, the movement has repeatedly spilled into real-world harm.
To be clear, mainstream Republicans have repeatedly disavowed both the Groyper movement and the Young Republicans’ leaked group chat. And all the Young Republicans aren’t groypers.
But the rhetoric tying the two together — defiant, conspiratorial and proudly offensive — isn’t as hidden or fringe as it used to be.
Mosiman and Rachel Hope, the Arizona Young Republicans’ events chair, were both active on the group chat, where Mosiman suggested “releasing Nazi edits” as an attack against a candidate, then quipped: “The only problem is we will lose the Kansas delegation.”
Hope responded: “Omg I love this plan.”
Mosiman lost his job at the Center for Arizona Policy, an evangelical lobbying group, over the messages.
But instead of announcing resignations, the Arizona Young Republican group put out a statement calling the backlash a “political witch hunt.”
Extremist online movements often find real political influence in Arizona, and just as often, real impunity.
To figure out how we got here, we called in an expert.
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Far-right fluency
Arizona Mirror reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy has covered online extremist circles since 2019 and has closely tracked the groyper movement’s rise in Arizona.
He’s learned to recognize the coded language and inside jokes that circulate through far-right spaces, where memes can be as politically powerful as campaign ads.
Take Mosiman’s Twitter profile picture, for example.
While he made his page private after the texts surfaced, his profile image is still visible, and it’s edited with a red background and laser eyes.
That comes from the online “Dark Brandon” meme, a right-wing insult for Joe Biden that Biden co-opted as campaign merchandise.
The meme is too mainstream to amount to a far-right dog whistle, but it shows Mosiman’s participation in internet culture, and MacDonald-Evoy is an expert in the language.
In 2022, MacDonald-Evoy documented the groyper movement’s Arizona allies, like U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, who gave a keynote address at an event organized by the groypers’ network. And state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who asked the groypers to go after her foe in a Telegram chat.
MacDonald-Evoy ties his reporting to the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, which he calls a “flash point” for the groypers.
“It showcases one of the reasons why I think people need to pay more attention to this, because it’s not just some kids saying edgy remarks,” he said. “These edgy remarks often can have real-world consequences, because they’re connected to larger movements.”
Many far-right organizations have ties to active neo-Nazi groups involved in paramilitary training and hate-motivated violence, which can turn the ideology into a gateway to even further-right fringes.
“It leads to this emboldening, I think, of people who are even more extreme, that their views are accessible when this further shifting of this extreme ideology becomes more and more normalized, which is kind of the end goal of what the groyper movement wanted,” MacDonald-Evoy told us.
Since he hasn’t verified the chats for himself, MacDonald-Evoy said it’s hard to nail down the specific right-wing flavor of the faction of Young Republicans within the leaked chat. But the Arizona chapter’s leader, Mosiman, has left a trail pointing to his political loyalties.
MacDonald-Evoy did the digging and found that while Mosiman said he doesn’t support Nick Fuentes, the groypers’ white nationalist leader, Mosiman was well aware of Fuentes’ influence.
“Like it or not, Nick Fuentes is becoming a force in the GOP, you all need to understand that,” Mosiman tweeted in March 2021. “Stop acting like it’s a few nut cases, it’s not. Ignoring it isn’t working.”
The Young Republican leader has appeared in content posted by the American Populist Movement, an offshoot of the groyper movement, and follows several groyper-aligned accounts on Twitter.
But what matters more than whether Mosiman would call himself a groyper is that he echoed their unfiltered bigotry, and those views no longer only exist online.
After Charlottesville, MacDonald-Evoy said, the next major “flash point” was the pandemic, when the QAnon movement bombarded a new, chronically online audience. Many QAnon followers — who believe Trump is secretly fighting a cabal of elite, Satan-worshipping child abusers — participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Funetes was subpoenaed by the House select committee for encouraging the riots, where seven people died.
“(2020) further radicalized a lot of people in one way or another, and it led a lot of people further down the far-right rabbit hole,” MacDonald-Evoy said. “…It kind of, I think, kept snowballing from there, and we’ve just been kind of stuck in that and following that in the years since.”
Kids being kids
After the Young Republicans leak, some state-level groups condemned the messages, and some stayed quiet. But Arizona’s Young Republicans took a different approach.
“We express our sincere regret and unequivocally condemn any rhetoric that could be interpreted as sympathetic to Nazi ideology,” the Arizona group’s statement says.
But before that whisper of contrition, the group said it “reject(s) involvement in the ongoing political witch hunt” and won’t stand for “mob-style condemnation driven by political opportunism or personal agendas.”
The consequences for the “witches” in Salem were being burned alive.
As far as we know, Mosiman and Hope, the two Arizona-based group chat members, still hold their positions within the Young Republicans. And we learned the evangelical lobbying group fired Mosiman before the general public knew he worked there.
Plus, the group got a pass from the vice president himself, who chalked it up to “edgy, offensive jokes.”
That normalization, more than the leak itself, is what should worry everyone watching where the next generation of politics is headed.
“There are connections to real-world violence with these white nationalist groups that often get dismissed when I think people just say, ‘This is just kids being kids with edgy talk,’” MacDonald-Evoy said. “But that edgy talk can lead later to further extremism down the line.”
This is almost too sickening to comment on. I guess it would just be edgy, kids (24-35 year old men and women) being kids if “rape” were said about his wife, daughter or himself. How these people live with themselves is beyond me.
I guess this is so dark that we are not laughing at anything today :(