Vice President JD Vance’s comment about the outrageous 29,000 text messages sent by the New York Young Republicans being about “kids” acting foolishly does not hold up under thoughtfulness.
First, many of those involved are at least 20 years old. This age group no longer can claim being childhood pranksters as an explanation for their vile, racist, dehumanizing, antisemitic, Hitler-affirming messages.
Catherine Meeks
Some of their messages commented about realizing if anyone detected their messages, they would be in trouble. So, they are clearly old enough to know better, and by their own admission, they did know better.
The vice president would have done well to take a lesson from his boss and remain silent, because his explanation for their behavior simply makes him appear complicit with the spirit of what they did.
I am so weary from watching this newly energized wave of racist rhetoric and dehumanization, which is heavily supported by Donald Trump, by his irreverence for decent behavior. The place these new expressions of racism goes back to the old playbook of talking about African Americans in terms of “monkeys” and “watermelons”— which is sickening and infuriating.
Along with this, these same young adults dared to talk about their love for Adolf Hitler and having gas chambers to kill their enemies. They described how they would lure innocent folks into their gas chambers and use showers to gas them.
“What kind of people are we allowing ourselves to become?”
After you get past being horrified, enraged and disheartened, there is a deep sense of grief that even in 2025 we still go back to those 18th, 19th and 20th-century projections regarding people of African descent who in most cases are the descendants of enslaved people. And to talk about Hitler in positive terms while imagining gas chambers is as equally maddening as sad. What kind of people are we allowing ourselves to become?
When I wonder about the level of outrage and where to find it about this matter, I realize the more than 7 million folks who hit the streets last Saturday were expressing their outrage in a very important manner.
Of course, our outrage cannot be confined to just one issue because we have so many outrageous and disrespectful acts happening each day. Take your pick about which one gets the most attention from you. Will it be people being killed in the Caribbean without any careful methods to determine who they are and how this is causing us to appear guilty of murder, or is it hooded folks snatching people off the street and throwing them into vans and shipping them to wherever they see fit, or is it bailing out farmers and others in Argentina when American farmers are losing billions of dollars this year because of tariffs? Or perhaps it’s the weaponization of the justice system, or taking health care and food assistance from those who need it so the rich can become richer, or maybe it’s using the office of the presidency as a vehicle to enhance the wealth of the president and his family.
The list could continue.
However, it is important not to miss out on the level of psychological and spiritual depravity that is permeating our land. While not all this is the fault of the Trump regime, he has helped to make depravity more common and thus helped to make it more widespread.
“Those loud religious voices that were so interested in morality during the Clinton/Lewinsky era seem to have vanished.”
Those loud religious voices that were so interested in morality during the Clinton/Lewinsky era seem to have vanished. Do they not see and hear what is happening in this moment? It is hard to tell since many from the Religious Right seem to believe Trump is sent by God to us for this time. Perhaps it is because they are getting the kind of white supremacy politics that pleases them. It is hard to understand their reasoning.
But this absurd thought can barely be entertained by anyone who has a view of God as a being who cares about all the people on the earth and not just white male billionaires and their families. The caring God is not all right with cutting USAID and allowing people to die of starvation and from diseases that medicine is available to manage. Neither is the caring God interested in revenge to the point of mistreating Latinx folks as we are doing and working hard to erase the contributions of African Americans and to control women.
Thus, a message to Trump, Vance, Stephen Miller and all the framers of Project 2025: We are aware of your agenda. Seven million of us told you on Saturday that we are not having it, and there are many more of us who were not in the streets but agree with the ones who were marching. We are not having you and your agenda as the last word for this country.
We have much to work on, but we are not standing silently by and watching depraved, mean-spirited, violent dehumanization become the rule in this land. Those Young Republicans have been disbanded as a group, but we have to work harder than we might imagine to disband the hatred in their hearts and minds.
That task is going to take time. And an important step in the process is to speak up and speak out. We can be a half shade braver.
Catherine Meeks was given the President Joseph R. Biden Lifetime Achievement and Service Award in August 2022; was listed by Georgia Trend Magazine as one of the 500 women to watch in Georgia in 2022; retired as the Clara Carter Acree Distinguished Professor of Socio-Cultural Studies at Mercer University; is a community and wellness activist and midwife to the soul; and the author of The Night Is Long, But Light Comes In The Morning, Meditations on Racial Healing, She previously served as founding executive director of Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing and currently serves as founder and executive director of the Turquoise and Lavender Institute for Transformation and Healing. She lives in Atlanta.
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