This week a reporter ran a simple test. Christopher Mathias of Talking Points Memo had documented that Marshall Rawson — the Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House — marched at the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville among men carrying swastika flags, spent years involved with a neo-Confederate group, and that an account that appears to be his posted that "public lynchings worked."

Then he asked 28 Republican officials in Florida a single question: will you denounce him?

Three answered. None denounced him.

That is not a Florida story. Below are the Republicans on this site who have had a white nationalist on the payroll, on the stage, or on the ticket, or who made the case themselves — and what each of them said when someone noticed.

Mike Collins has lost count

Mike Collins, the Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, has had four separate people around him caught with white nationalist or antisemitic material.

His then-chief of staff, Kip Talley, was reported to have been in a group chat with the white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, where he wrote that he was "going to try and use the levers of the legislative branch to check into his detention" — that of an imprisoned Holocaust denier — adding, "Trying to get him out." The man who served as his digital director in 2025 — William Paul, the son of Sen. Rand Paul — told Rep. Mike Lawler in a Capitol Hill bar that Jews were "anti-American" and that Lawler's Jewish supporters served Israel more than America, with a NOTUS reporter sitting there. His PAC paid $7,700 to a former staffer whose X account carried a swastika and an image of himself in Klan robes. A CNN investigation found his own son-in-law is a white nationalist influencer pushing antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi imagery to more than 1.5 million followers.

Collins says he has "always condemned" racism and antisemitism. His response to the staffer story was to attack his Jewish opponent.

Paul Gosar went to the conference twice

Paul Gosar did not hire a white nationalist by accident. He spoke at one's conference.

Seven weeks after January 6, Gosar appeared at the America First Political Action Conference, the white nationalist gathering run by Nick Fuentes, where Fuentes took the podium after him and called the Capitol riot "awesome." He went back the following year by video. Kevin McCarthy called it "appalling and wrong"; Mitch McConnell said "there's no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or anti-Semitism."

Gosar said nothing for weeks, then blamed his staff: "It wasn't supposed to go to Nick's group. We're kind of short-handed. And there was miscommunication." He had attended in person the year before and posed for a photo with Fuentes. He also wrote the FBI on congressional letterhead defending Fuentes, and his own digital director was traced to a Groyper account.

His Arizona colleague Andy Biggs took a smaller version of the same walk, speaking at a 2024 rally outside the state Capitol sponsored by the Proud Boys and College Republicans United, a group the Daily Beast reports has ties to Fuentes and promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories. Biggs declined to comment.

Mike Rogers (MI) built a student team out of it

Mike Rogers (MI), running for Senate in Michigan, recruited students to campaign for him. The Detroit Metro Times went through who they were.

His campaign's student outreach team included Cameron Dundas, who replied "Send them to North Korea?" to a post asking what should be done about "these people" — an apparent reference to Jews — and who repeatedly promoted a far-right internet figure criticized for his ties to Fuentes and the Groyper movement, and whom the Southern Poverty Law Center likens to Fuentes.

His University of Michigan campus coordinator, Alexander Richmond, publicly defended the participants in the leaked Young Republicans group chat that featured "I love Hitler," gas chamber jokes and racial slurs. His defense was: "Loyalty is the only political virtue that matters."

Jon Husted's political director, found by a reporter

Jon Husted ran Ohio's Senate campaign with Stephen Woytek as political director for about a month. Woytek's Facebook profile picture showed soldiers from Hitler's personal SS division.

Husted's campaign did not find it. A reporter did — and it was the second person the campaign had lost in two months over something a reporter found first.

Scott Perry said it himself

Some of them do not need staff for this.

In a closed-door briefing for lawmakers on antisemitism, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania claimed the Ku Klux Klan is "the military wing of the Democratic Party" and appeared to defend the "Great Replacement Theory" — the white nationalist belief that white people are being deliberately replaced by minorities and immigrants.

Two months later his campaign Facebook page posted an antisemitic meme: stereotypically Jewish bankers with hooked noses around a Monopoly board propped on the backs of naked people, captioned "Says it all ..." It came down after Jewish Insider asked about it. The Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg and the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition strongly condemned it.

Tommy Tuberville would not say the word

Asked directly whether white nationalists are racist, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama disputed defining them that way. A white nationalist, he said, is just "an American," and the definition was "some people's opinion."

Given a night to reconsider and asked again the next morning, he would say only that if that was the Democrats' definition, "then I'm totally against white nationalists" — and: "There's nobody less racist in this building than me."

Ralph Norman circulated the petition

When Rep. Steve King was stripped of his committee assignments in 2019 for defending white nationalism and white supremacy in a New York Times interview, most Republicans let it stand.

Ralph Norman of South Carolina was one of a small group — alongside Paul Gosar — circulating a petition to force the Republican Steering Committee to vote on giving them back.

David Taylor and the flag nobody can explain

In October 2025, Capitol Police opened an investigation after a staffer in David Taylor's office appeared on a Zoom call with an American flag bearing a swastika behind him.

Taylor called the symbol "vile and deeply inappropriate" and said it was vandalism — flags handed to "numerous Republican offices" that were "initially indistinguishable from an ordinary American flag to the naked eye." Hill staffers told reporters the opposite: "It was plainly obvious to us that there was a swastika on the flag with the naked eye". One office threw its flag away "like we would hate mail."

Eleven months later, Taylor still has not explained how it got there, or said whether the staffer still works for him.

The answer is always the same shape

Now look at what these men say when asked.

Byron Donalds was one of the three who answered Mathias's question this week. The Republican nominee for governor of Florida sent back a statement that never mentioned Marshall Rawson or Charlottesville: "I denounce racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry in all of its vile forms." Ashley Moody, one of Florida's two senators, did not respond at all.

In Texas, Ken Paxton was asked the same kind of question about Bo French, the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner who called students at a University of Texas game "a problem." Paxton never said French's name and attacked his Democratic opponent instead. He had endorsed French in May.

And when Republicans spent millions in a primary calling Brandon Herrera — who films himself with a Nazi submachine gun he calls "Hitler's street sweeper" — too extreme for Congress, nothing about that record changed. A seat came open, and Mike Johnson headlined a fundraiser for him and went to San Antonio to campaign beside him.

It is not that none of them will condemn racism. Every one of them will condemn racism. Steve Scalise has been condemning it since 2014, when his 2002 speech to a white supremacist group founded by former Klan leader David Duke surfaced and he called it a group "whose views I wholeheartedly condemn."

What they almost never do is name the person or take the endorsement back — and the one firing on this list, Husted's, came the day a newspaper found what his campaign had not.

What the record shows

At least eight Republicans on this site have had a white nationalist or a neo-Nazi sympathizer on their staff or their stage, or made the case themselves: Mike Collins has had four such people around him including his then-chief of staff and his son-in-law; Paul Gosar spoke at Nick Fuentes's conference two years running and defended him to the FBI on congressional letterhead; Mike Rogers (MI)'s student outreach team included one member who replied "Send them to North Korea?" to a post about Jews and a campus coordinator who defended an "I love Hitler" group chat; Jon Husted's political director used an SS photo as his profile picture; Scott Perry told an antisemitism briefing the Klan is "the military wing of the Democratic Party"; Tommy Tuberville disputed defining white nationalists as racist; Ralph Norman circulated a petition to restore Steve King's committee seats after King defended white supremacy; and a swastika flag hung in David Taylor's office for a Zoom call he has never explained. When Talking Points Memo asked 28 Florida Republicans this week to denounce a nominee who marched at Charlottesville, three replied and none of them did.

Sources

Reporting on Marshall Rawson and the 28 officials: Talking Points Memo, by Christopher Mathias. Each candidate's record is sourced inline above and on their report-card page.