Expressing deep concern about the safety of his family, Vermont State Senator Samuel Douglass resigned Friday after participating in a group chat that joked about sending political opponents to gas chambers, announcing with evident bewilderment that he and his wife had received "some of the most horrific hate one could imagine" following the leak.
Douglass, a 27-year-old crisis interventionist and mental health professional, said he was profoundly shaken to discover that strangers on the internet were capable of directing violent threats toward his family after he spent seven months in the "RESTOREYR WAR ROOM" Telegram chat, where members discussed placing political rivals in gas chambers, sexually assaulting adversaries, and referred to Black people as "monkeys" and "the watermelon people."
"In this political climate I must keep my family safe," said Douglass in his resignation statement, apparently unaware that political climates are largely shaped by people like him participating in chats where someone wrote "I love Hitler" without objection.
The senator, who works helping people in mental health crises, said the violent messages directed at his newborn child were particularly disturbing, noting he could not understand who would target an innocent family based solely on leaked private conversations in which he made racist comments and his wife made antisemitic remarks while other members casually discussed rape and genocide.
Douglass clarified that his comment about an Indian woman not bathing often "was not a generalization" but rather "an unflattering remark" directed at a specific individual, which he believed made it significantly better somehow.
"The contents of the article do not reflect me or the values of our state," Douglass said of the Politico report containing his own written words, employing a novel defense strategy of denying that things he definitively said reflect his character.
Governor Phil Scott, who had endorsed Douglass and nominated him for "Legislator of the Year" just days before the scandal, called the chat's contents "deeply disturbing," apparently having failed to conduct even minimal vetting of a candidate who spent months in a group chat titled "WAR ROOM" discussing violence against political enemies.
