When White Folks Say They Want to Burn You, Believe Them

“I love Hitler.” 

“Stay in the closet, f*ggot.” 

“I’m ready to watch people burn.”

Those aren’t Telegram posts from some back-alley Nazi forum. They’re the words of Young Republicans who were on track to become future staffers, campaign directors, speechwriters, and elected officials. People who want power over policy, budgets, and bodies. And this country’s press corps still insists on treating it like an embarrassing group chat and not a promise of violence.

Calling this a “group chat scandal” with a weekend shelf life is a narrative choice, not an observation. The breathless headlines about resignations and chapter suspensions are just moral theater and costumes that let institutions perform outrage while preserving the backstage machine of white supremacy. The content of these messages — praise for genocide, fetishizing of suffering, casual dehumanization — is not juvenile profanity. It’s a roadmap for tyranny and an instruction manual on how to manage, punish, and permanently silence the people they hate.

But the press won’t call this what it is. 

They’re writing about it like it’s gossip from the political kids’ table, calling it “a group chat scandal,” “embarrassing remarks,” or “a lapse in judgment,” as if it’s not a dispatch from the future of the Republican Party. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance and the White House shrug it off like bad optics because they can’t afford to treat it as anything else. 

To admit what it really is would mean admitting the obvious: this isn’t the fringe. It’s the Republican base. It’s the bloodstream. 

It’s Trump ally Laura Loomer calling sitting Black Congresswomen “ghetto bitches.” It’s Donald Trump dining with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, mocking disabled reporters, and calling Black nations “shithole countries.” It’s Steve King asking why “white nationalism” became offensive. It’s Tommy Tuberville refusing to call white nationalists racist. 

It’s Paul LePage claiming drug dealers come to Maine and “impregnate young white girls.” It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene blaming wildfires on “Jewish space lasers.” It’s Ron DeSantis banning Black history and calling it “indoctrination.” It’s Matt Gaetz joking that women protesting abortion bans are too ugly to get pregnant. It’s Greg Abbott signing laws that criminalize trans children and then shrugging when migrants drown in the Rio Grande. 

These young Republicans aren’t being fired because their words are an embarrassment to the GOP. They’re being fired because they got caught saying the quiet part out loud. Their punishment isn’t moral, it’s managerial. They were supposed to wait until they had offices, not microphones. Because this is exactly how the president feels, how the party feels, and how millions of MAGA voters feel. This is the ideology that animates every policy, every press conference, every “law and order” sound bite.

That same venom is what’s fueling ICE raids and mass deportations. It’s fueling book bans that erase Black, queer, and Indigenous history. It’s fueling anti-trans legislation that polices bodies and identities. It’s fueling voter suppression and the gerrymandering of democracy itself. It’s fueling attacks on public education and teachers who dare to tell the truth. And it’s fueling a growing appetite for political violence, from school board meetings to the steps of the Capitol.

They can’t condemn this rhetoric because it is their rhetoric, just stripped of its public-relations polish.

That’s why the media’s soft focus is so dangerous. When they treat this as a scandal instead of a signal, they help white supremacy launder itself through journalism. Every headline that uses the word controversial instead of violent, every segment that pairs a Nazi quote with a “both sides” reaction, every anchor who says “Republicans distance themselves” instead of “Republicans produce them,” turns propaganda into background noise. It dulls the country’s reflexes. It trains the public not to panic when fascism clears its throat.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a moral lapse, it’s a rehearsal. A generation of young conservatives is learning to joke about extermination so they’ll feel nothing when the policies come. And if history teaches us anything, it’s that the distance between laughter and lynching, between memes and massacres, is perilously short.

This is how fascism dresses for dinner in America: it puts on a suit, cleans up its language, and calls itself a political party. The leaked chats just tore off the mask. The GOP isn’t infected with extremism; extremism is its DNA.

So the question isn’t whether these young Republicans should resign. The question is whether this country will finally stop pretending that white supremacy is an aberration rather than an organizing principle of its politics. Because if we can’t even call a Nazi a Nazi when they’re wearing a GOP lapel pin, then the next time they say, “I’m ready to watch people burn,” it won’t be in a chat. It’ll be policy

Black folks and every other target of this hate need to stop debating whether these people “really mean it.” They mean it. When someone says they want to burn you, believe them. When they fantasize about gas chambers, don’t call it trolling — call it a promise.

We have spent too many generations giving white rage the benefit of the doubt, pretending it’s bluster, misunderstanding, or “economic anxiety.” But every plantation, every lynching tree, every church bombing, every traffic stop has already shown us what happens when we don’t take them at their word.

Still, we keep hoping. Hoping that whiteness can be reformed. That white allies will step up. That whiteness will one day betray its own founding principles and neurological framework — the reflex that reads equality as danger, that flinches at accountability, that confuses justice with persecution.

And yet here we are again, staring at a leaked chat with 251 slurs typed without hesitation. Two hundred and fifty-one times, they rehearsed their hate. That’s not an accident or impulse. That sounds like fluency to me. That’s linguistic origami wrapped in violence. It’s a shared language, an initiation rite, a team-building exercise in cruelty. And the media still wants to ask if it represents the “fringe.”

Whiteness doesn’t betray itself. It doubles down. It evolves. It adapts to survive. It always will because it is irreparable. And these leaked chats are the next evolutionary stage of the same old virus, spoken out loud, shared in plain sight, and still being explained away as “immaturity.”

The truth is, they’ve told us exactly who they are. They’ve told us exactly what they want to do to us. Our job now is to believe them — and act like we intend to live.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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