When President Donald Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia, a 30-year-old lawyer and far-right provocateur, to run the Office of Special Counsel, he described him as a “highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar.” Just months later, and on the eve of a Senate hearing to confirm his position as head of the federal whistleblower agency, Ingrassia announced he was withdrawing from consideration for the job. The cause of this spectacular implosion was the revelation, in a Politico report published this week, of a group chat in which Ingrassia allegedly made a series of racist and offensive remarks. “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” read one.
Ingrassia’s lawyer offered two competing explanations for his client’s alleged texts. “Looks like these texts could be manipulated or are being provided with material context omitted,” the lawyer wrote in a statement to Politico. “However, arguendo, even if the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor making fun of the fact that liberals outlandishly and routinely call MAGA supporters ‘Nazis.’”
This prevalence of extreme rhetoric in Republican group chats isn’t a new problem. Journalist Aaron Sibarium said 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.”
“There is a problem on the right,” Sibarium says now in an interview with VF. “And it has gotten noticeably worse in the last two years.”
Ingrassia’s downfall comes just a week after Politico reported on another group chat of Young Republican leaders who exchanged a dizzying number of racist and antisemitic messages. The members of the chat, according to Politico, “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.” (The Young Republicans board called for those involved to resign, and said they “are appalled by the vile and inexcusable language revealed” in the article. “Such behavior is disgraceful, unbecoming of any Republican, and stands in direct opposition to the values our movement represents.”)
Richard Hanania—a writer once popular among the far-right who has since disavowed extremism—traces the rise of this trend back to 2015. In an interview, he describes how “the great awokening” on the left kicked into high gear just as Trump, a defiantly offensive political candidate, vaulted to the top of the Republican presidential ticket.
