Sick Young Republican group-chat is part of the right’s new ‘vice signaling’ bonding ritual

Vice signaling is the new virtue signaling.

It was revealed this week that, in a private group chat, leaders of Young Republicans groups — including the then chair and vice-chair of the New York organization, as well as a vice-chair from Kansas — called black people monkeys, praised Hitler, and discussed raping their enemies and driving them to suicide.

It’s all apparently supposed to be funny — you guys are in on the joke, right? — and meant to prove loyalty. If you’re one of us, they’re implying, you’d never rat.

But it’s abhorrent and fits right into a concerning mounting trend on the right.

Vice signaling is a backlash response to the left’s smug virtue signaling, the performative and exclusionary trend of going to fashionable protests (pics or it didn’t happen), using overly genuflecting lingo (person of color, systemic oppression, birthing person, micro-aggression, etc.) — and shaming anyone to the right of far-left.

It was stifling.

Now that conservatives have some cultural ascendancy, some are developing their own initiation rituals and insider language. It’s suddenly all about one-upping each other in a contest to prove you’re not of them — an uptight scold.

It’s not just a matter of rejecting political correctness. It’s about being actively and aggressively politically incorrect.

Exposed to the light of day, the The Telegram group chat in question isn’t funny at all. It’s shameful and embarrassing.

Yes, it’s all free speech. But there’s also an expectation of civility and basic respect for others, especially from up and coming political leaders. There’s humor — and there’s taking a joke so far that it’s vile.

One white participant in the chat used the N-word more than a dozen times. Another described rape as “epic.” A third “joked” that people who didn’t vote for him to become the chair of the Young Republicans’ National Federation would be “going to the gas chamber.”

The same guy said of an NBA play-off game, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.”

This is all really no surprise if you have an account on X, where there’s been an explosion in overt racism and sexism, with often faceless accounts jockeying to be more offensive than one another.

It started with the exuberant resurgence of using “gay” and “retarded” as prejoratives, embraced by Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, among many others, after starting with Internet “edgelords” like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, who achieved viral success by being as provocative and nasty as possible. The tradition goes back to Howard Stern and the shock jocks of the ’90s.

But an envelope can always be pushed further. Younger Zoomers have, unfortunately, risen to the occasion.

On Thursday it was revealed that four New Jersey girls, all students at Manalapan High School, put on a sickening performance on Snapchat, where they flippantly joked about dressing up as Hitler and Holocaust victims for Halloween and killing Jews.

“I’m actually pissing myself,” one girl wrote about the exchange.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance has dismissed the Young Republicans chat, saying on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” “Don’t focus on what kids say in group chats.” But these aren’t college kids. The “kids” implicated in this chat are 24 to 35 years old. The Young Republicans chapter in question will now be disbanded, it was announced Thursday.

Many conservatives were rightfully sick and tired of being called racist — or accused of whatever other -ism — without any basis. They’re expressing a collective explosion of spiteful vengeance after years of feeling repressed by “wokeness” and “political correctness.”

But the right has to rethink whether being anti-PC is really the best glue to hold together a community. Tasteless and rude isn’t a flex. And performatively standing against something isn’t a coherent ideology.