Brian Lear on WNYC.

Now I'll end today's show with a closer look at the culture behind the young Republicans leaked chats that caused such a controversy earlier this month. If you missed the story with all the

other major headlines taking place, here's what happened. A few weeks ago, Politico reporters

published private messages from a telegram chat amongst leaders within the young Republicans

organization. These messages were categorically offensive. I don't think anybody disagrees with that.

They contained racial and homophobic slurs, Holocaust jokes, Nazi glorification, and we're just scratching the surface here.

Most of the participants did face backlash.

Some lost their jobs with Republican elected officials, and the entire New York chapter of the young Republicans was disbanded.

With me now to discuss where this leak group chat suggests our politics may be headed is Calder McHugh, reporter at Political Magazine.

His piece on this story is titled, The Young Republicans' Leak Chat is a sign

of where we could be headed. Hi, Calder. Welcome to WNYC. Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. First,

you describe these chats as commonplace humor circulating in far right circles on social media.

Tell us more about edge lord culture as you describe it or for our listeners

who haven't heard this word before what a groper is. Yeah. So for those people who don't know what

these words are, I might count them lucky. You know, edge lords and groipers, this sort of language

is sort of often currency in some of these new right

spaces. It's kind of the price of entry. Edglords are people who are sort of adopting a

provocative or an extreme persona, in particular online on purpose. And Groypers are sort of a subset of that.

Basically, they are people who are on the, what would probably be considered the far right,

on the internet, and you have sort of adopted this persona of, you know, basically

saying anything and everything that can be offensive.

It's sort of, you know, in some of these,

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