The Republican texting scandals.
Tangle
Isaac Saul
4.7 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last Tuesday, Politico publishedscreenshots of text messages sent by members of Young Republicans, an organization for Republican party members between 18 and 40 years old, that featured offensive jokes and racist language. In the messages, various leaders of Young Republican chapters across the country joked about planting fake stories to smear rival GOP candidates, used racial epithets to refer to black people, and expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. Those implicated in the texts reportedly represent chapters in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. |
| 0:12.5 | Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place |
| 0:22.9 | we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of |
| 0:26.8 | my take. |
| 0:27.7 | I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the young |
| 0:31.2 | Republicans group chat, as well as the Paul and Gracia controversy, two oddly two chats that got leaked to Politico |
| 0:42.0 | that I think have had a really big newsy impact. |
| 0:46.5 | Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. |
| 0:49.6 | So I hope you guys can get something out of this newsletter today because I think there's been a lot |
| 0:56.6 | of noise on both these stories. I actually have a little bit of an optimistic take, though there's |
| 1:00.9 | some dissent from our staff, so we'll get into that. Before we jump in, though, I have a quick |
| 1:07.2 | note, a really fun announcement. The media industry, as many of you guys know, is changing, |
| 1:12.1 | and that change is happening fast. The future is uncertain. Every day, we are thinking of new ways |
| 1:18.3 | to do two things. One, ensure we can always reach our audience, and two, deliver content |
| 1:23.6 | that meets your needs as news consumers. To that end, we are launching a new future-proof |
| 1:29.7 | product we think our audience will love, a free text message service. We tested this out with about |
| 1:35.9 | 700 readers and listeners sending breaking news analysis behind-the-scenes updates and giving you |
| 1:41.5 | opportunities to help shape our coverage. It got rave reviews, so we're opening it up for free to the entire Tangle audience. |
| 1:49.5 | We'll never send you ads or share your phone number with any third party of any kind, |
| 1:53.4 | and we'll make sure we only text you with valuable information, rarely more than once a day, |
| 1:58.0 | depending on the alerts you sign up for. |
| 2:00.4 | So far, things are off to |
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