Let’s start with the proximate inspiration for this post, as reported by The Hill: Husted ousts his political director over posts with Nazi imagery .
Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) fired his campaign’s political director, Stephen Woytek, on Friday after learning about social media posts linked to Woytek, including a Facebook profile photo of Nazi officers and a public playlist of songs celebrating Rhodesia, a now-defunct nation often venerated by white supremacists.
Here’s what the campaign had to say.
“Steve serves our country honorably as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army and is a proud graduate of The Citadel. He studies military history and routinely reenacts historical battles. While he denies negative intent, his social media activity displays a complete lack of judgement and disregard for its impact on others,” the spokesperson said. “Sen. Husted demands better of those who represent him. Upon learning about the social media posts today, Sen. Husted made the immediate decision to part ways.”
Let me note that this comes across as one part “we are sorry if anyone was offended” kind of “apology” and one part “the campaign is covering its ass.” What it does not come across as is a bright-line condemnation of Nazi imagery and white nationalism.
Also, nice handwaving about the reenactments, as the details are kind of important.
Woytek’s social media history included links to a military reenactment group whose members dress up as Nazi officers. There are public photos of Woytek in that attire with the group from 2018, when he would have been 16 years old, according to The Washington Post, which was the first to report on Woytek’s posts and departure.
And Husted isn’t the only GOP candidate this cycle who has had to fire staffers for similar reasons.
Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) replaced chief of staff Kip Talley in July, following reporting by Slate that Talley had been in a group chat with white supremacists and antisemites Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer.
Another former staffer for Collins had images on his social media of a swastika and himself in Ku Klux Klan robes, according to the Post.
But, you say, that’s just three people! These things happen!
But then there was the case of the Young Republicans text chains that included such declarations as “I love Hitler,” and the Miami-Dade County GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president, and the former College Republicans recruitment chair caught in a similar situation (both in 2025). See also, at the first link, the cavalcade of Nazi-inspired imagery coming out of various US government social media feeds (of which there has been much more since I wrote that post).
And from two campaigns to two broader yet still specific examples, to even broader concerns as noted by Politico last month: GOP Staffers Say the Party Has a Groyper Problem.
“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Huh. Maybe demonizing expertise was a bad idea? And weirdly, loyalty over competence or intelligence has a variety of downsides.
Of specific concern are those labeled groypers — technically, followers of the self-described “White Identitarian” Gen Z streamer Nick Fuentes, though it’s also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers, akin to the usage of “neocon” in the other direction. Fuentes, who has millions of viewers and a deeply antisemitic and misogynistic worldview, gained celebrity among young conservatives as a pro-Trump internet personality and far-right campus agitator. He has since turned on the president for his handling of the Epstein files and his support of Israel and the war in Iran. (Fuentes did not respond to a request for comment.)
And it’s not just Fuentes. It is Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk (to name but two additional prominent examples). There is a great deal of white supremacist, if not neo-fascist, rhetoric being spouted and consumed on a daily basis by large numbers of persons of importance within the substructure of Republican politics. X.com is full of it.
It isn’t just bad luck, or bad apples, when it ends up that prominent members of GOP congressional campaigns have Nazi sympathies. And the consequences, long-term, are real (and go well beyond Trump’s tenure in office).
If, as the adage goes, personnel is policy, the stakes are significantly higher than intergenerational trash talk, given the degree to which government staffers, across branches, effectively run the country. Student government types become interns become policy aides become senior advisers, chiefs of staff and even heads of agencies. If the conservative personnel pipeline is changing, Republican government will change with it.
See also the NYT: What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right.
By the way, stories like these are why I find declarations like the one Ross Douthat made (Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure) on the way out the door from the NYT both reprehensible and disturbing.
I find that I’ve lost my sense of which contemporary worldview is most in need of criticism or opposition, where the good guys and bad guys are.
Here’s a hint for Ross (just in case he is lurking): the party that appears to have a substantial neo-fascism problem that keeps repeatedly surfacing is where the bad guys are. And, moreover, if that isn’t obvious because maybe you like some of their policies and you are willing to look the other way, you are on the team with the bad guys.
Look, I would love for it to be the case that this avalanche of examples is just a bunch of aberrations, but at some point we have to admit what is going on here, which is the substantial shift of a large number of Republican operatives to some form of neo-fascist white nationalism. Just firing the ones who do it in public and excusing them by saying they had no “negative intent” is not taking the problem seriously (at best). At worst, it is just trying to get out of having one’s hand in the neo-nazi cookie jar while still wanting some of those sweet, sweet white supremacist cookies (you know, the ones with the white frosting inside two white wafers).
All of this is also why I find both-siderism, or evocations of the notion that there is no difference between the two parties, to be so frustrating and dangerous. It is also why I am increasingly of the view that we need to take the clear rise of fascism seriously and not dismiss it as a bunch of hyperbolic hand-wringing.
And this is not to say that the Democrats are some kind of saviors. But they are, at least, democratic (small-d!) life preservers in a growing flood of anti-democratic riptides in our politics.
