I’ve been reading the reports about the “Project Fortress” text leaks, the ones from the Young Republican leaders. I see the outrage. I see the glee from the other side. And honestly, I don’t feel any of it.
What I feel is a profound sense of tragedy.
The easy thing to do is to call these young people monsters, to see them as cynical, power-hungry sociopaths. But that’s a lazy diagnosis. It’s the easy answer, and the easy answer is almost always a lie.
I want to ask you to do something harder. I want you to try and see them not as villains, but as a tragic and predictable product of the environment they were raised in.
Think of modern, high-stakes politics as a kind of gladiator school. You enter as a young, ambitious person, maybe with some real ideals. But to survive, to climb the ranks, you are taught a very specific and brutal set of lessons.
You are taught that your own base is not a constituency to be served, but a crowd to be managed. You learn that “rage bait” and “dog whistles” are not lies, but effective tools for keeping the mob on your side.
You are taught that the only thing that matters is winning the next fight. Your opponents are not fellow citizens with different ideas; they are the enemy, and they must be shouted down, discredited, and destroyed.
And you are taught that your survival depends on the absolute, unquestioning loyalty to the emperor in the big chair. His whims are the weather. His approval is the sun. His displeasure is a death sentence.
So when I read those leaked texts, I don’t see monsters. I see the logical and heartbreaking result of that brutal education. I see young people who have been systematically stripped of their own “genetic graces,” their own innate decency, in exchange for a seat near the throne. They have become the very thing the system demanded them to be.
This is not an excuse for their actions. It is an explanation. It is a diagnosis of the sickness.
And it leads to the only question that matters, a question I would ask them directly, not with anger, but with a genuine sense of sorrow:
“Was it worth it? Is this the person you hoped you would become when you started this journey? Is the power you’ve gained worth the integrity you’ve lost?”
The path back from that place is a difficult and lonely one. It requires a profound act of courage to walk out of the arena, to lay down the sword, and to try and remember the person you were before the crowd started cheering for blood.
That path is always there. But it has to be chosen. And that is the tragedy. Most of them never will.