When Social Media Exposes Moral Rot - 10/20/25

The political landscape has been roiled on three separate occasions this month by a trio of remarkably similar scandals. In each incident, the perpetrators used digital platforms to express the type of repulsive thoughts that should not only disqualify them from any meaningful political involvement in the future but also raise serious questions about their emotional well-being and ability to function in society.

Two Democratic candidates for statewide office and a collection of officially recognized Young Republican organizations across the country have been exposed for incendiary and hateful online behavior. Together, these scandals have raised troubling questions about what happens when actors in a polarized political system and deeply divided society use the tools of technology to broadcast their anger and intolerance to an online audience.

The first of the three to become public was Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for Attorney General in Virginia, whose texts to a colleague used violent and inflammatory language in which he referenced the potential assassination of a political opponent. Days later, it was reported that leaders in the Young Republican National Federation and several of their state affiliates had used a group chat to exchange racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic messages, including laudatory references to Nazi ideology, slavery, and sexual assault. Most recently, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was forced to explain his past posts advocating for armed insurrection against the government, dismissing rural residents of his state as racist, and minimizing the seriousness of rape in the military.

All of this occurred within the span of about three weeks, over which time a familiar and depressing pattern emerged. On each occasion, the opposing political party responded with outrage, demanding severe penalties against the hatemongers. Just as predictably, members of the perpetrators’ own parties downplayed the importance of the offensive postings, usually combining and therefore diluting their condemnation of the statements themselves with either a defense of the culprit’s accomplishments or an attempt to change the subject to similar conduct in the other party.

Many Democrats criticized Jones’ remarks, but almost none have called on him to withdraw from the race. The same Republicans who are demanding that Jones step down are not nearly as agitated by the Young Republicans’ similarly noxious conduct. Kudos to the single Democratic legislative candidate in Virginia who has publicly stated that Jones should end his candidacy and the Vermont state GOP leaders who forced the resignation of a state legislator involved in the Young Republican group chat. But otherwise, the depressingly familiar spectacle of both sides’ loyalists placing partisan allegiance over personal integrity and human decency has dominated the discourse. In hyper-polarized America, selective outrage is alive and well.

It’s not clear why so many otherwise politically skilled individuals succumb to the false intimacy that social media offers. We all know that anything we post is available to a theoretically worldwide audience, but these professionals all possessed sufficient hubris to decide that sharing their destructive and indefensible language was perfectly acceptable. The question is whether they believed their postings would never become public—or that there would not be any detrimental consequences if they did.

Some of the Young Republicans expressed concern about the problems that would arise if their messages were leaked, but few were sufficiently worried to actually stop sending them. Otherwise, both Democratic candidates and most of the GOP activists offered apologies or explanations for their comments but did not accompany their contrition with any meaningful remediative action. And with only the isolated exceptions mentioned two paragraphs above, most of them seem to have been welcomed back into their respective partisan ranks.

The challenge of digital media is that it allows us to create an ideologically uniform community in which everyone is in agreement on almost everything. If we choose to never expose ourselves to those who have different opinions than our own, it’s easy to become lulled into the false belief that the entire society supports our ideologies, our biases. and our acrimony. So we acquire the false sense of security that no reasonable person could ever possibly disagree with what we know to be true.

Digital and social media can empower us in valuable ways. But it can also isolate us, making us either oblivious or uncaring to those with different perspectives. We are all entirely capable of reaching beyond our political comfort zones, but it is often inconvenient and sometimes unpleasant. But it is necessary. These are three reminders of what happens when we decide that open-mindedness is not worth the effort.