Poor, misunderstood Young Republican: racist, antisemitic, misogynistic messages were just jokes!

by Bob Johnson

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday, Dec. 03, 2025 Wednesday, Dec. 03, 2025 at 4:38:26pm PST

Young Republican William Hendrix can't understand how everyone doesn't get the joke.

I’m sure most folks here remember this Politico story from October about a group of Young Republicans exchanging Signal chats about their admiration for Hitler, wanting to shove their opponents into gas chambers and making virulently antisemitic, racist and misogynistic comments to one another.

Well, in case you didn’t know, those were all jokes! Just a few barbs and laughs among friends!

Now, thanks to today’s edition of The New York Times, we get the full inside story told by none other than William Hendrix, one of the participants in the Signal chat group and a leader of the Kansas Young Republicans organization. Poor William was shocked — shocked, I tell you! — by the response to the release of the group’s Signal messages:

Mr. Hendrix, who has not spoken publicly about the group chat until now, said in a series of interviews that he was stunned by the intensity of the uproar and the fallout on his life. He echoed Mr. Vance’s defense, describing the chat members as friends who understood that they were all joking.

…

The group, he said, was firing off zingers at each other, like towel snaps in a locker room.

See? It was just “locker room banter!” _{^{(Where have we heard that before?)}} They were joking, okay? Even J.D. Vance said so! And poor William Hendrix has had has life turned upside-down as a result of the group’s Signal chats being exposed.

Today, Mr. Hendrix is still trying to process what happened.

He lost a job he had loved. Prominent state Republicans denounced him. He was deluged with messages calling him a racist. His picture, one that he hated, was everywhere, including on “The Late Show With Steven Colbert.”

“It felt like my entire life caved in,” he said.

…

He said he has no regrets. And he continues to talk with people from the chat, including Mr. Dwyer.

Go figure, Bill. It just ain’t fair. What are a few towel snaps among friends?

C’mon, libtards, show some sympathy for poor William!