Mike Rogers (MI) is running for Senate in Michigan on a résumé built almost entirely out of vetting people. He was an FBI agent. He spent years in Congress. He was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the panel that oversees the agencies whose job is finding out who someone really is.
This spring his campaign announced a student outreach team called "Students for Mike Rogers." The Detroit Metro Times looked up the two students on it.
It did not take an intelligence committee.
"Loyalty is the only political virtue that matters"
Alexander Richmond is a University of Michigan student whose LinkedIn profile identified him as Rogers's campus coordinator.
In October 2025, Politico published a leaked group chat among Young Republicans. In it, participants declared "I love Hitler," called Black people "monkeys" and "the watermelon people," joked about putting their opponents in gas chambers, and described rape as "epic."
Plenty of Republicans condemned it. Richmond went after the ones who did.
Loyalty is the only political virtue that matters. Performatively virtue signaling against your friends and colleagues will not save you from the wrath of those who hate you. They will continue to stick by each other's side until the very end, and until we do the same, we will never win. Capitulation is for losers.
That is the whole argument: the problem with a chat full of Hitler praise and gas chamber jokes is the people who objected to it.
The same day, Richmond offered a second defense — that Democrats say worse. "Imagine the Young Democrats' private group chats were leaked," he wrote. "Whatever they might say in private, just remember that they say the same vile things in public with no real repercussions. The difference is, their words actualize into violence." He gave no evidence for any of it.
Months later, Rogers's campaign made him its coordinator at the University of Michigan.
"Send them to North Korea?"
The other student named in the announcement was Cameron Dundas, who attends Northwestern Michigan College, wrestles at Davenport University, belongs to Turning Point USA, and works at a day care center in Traverse City.
On February 25, Dundas replied to a post asking what should be done about "these people" with five words: "Send them to North Korea?" Metro Times reported that the post he was answering appeared to be about Jews.
Dundas is also a frequent promoter of John Doyle, a far-right internet personality who has drawn criticism for his ties to the antisemite and white nationalist Nick Fuentes and to Fuentes's Groyper movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center puts Doyle on the same ground: "Like Fuentes, Doyle seeks to appeal to young white men — whom he reportedly describes as 'the forgotten gamers of America' — with misogyny, paleoconservative politics and racialist pseudoscience."
This is the man Dundas quotes. In 2022, Doyle said that Martin Luther King Jr. getting "assassinated is like the best thing that could have happened to him." After the 2020 election, Doyle spread false claims and urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to throw out the results; his Twitter account was suspended for violating the platform's rules.
On March 20, Dundas quoted Doyle approvingly to argue that women should not be in politics: "This is what happens when you get women in politics, I mean it sort of devolves to this stuff." On Instagram he told followers, "If you aren't listening to The John Doyle Show your mind is a sandbox for the CIA."
Dundas promoted his role with the Rogers campaign on Facebook the same day Rogers announced it.
What the campaign said
A campaign that had just been shown this could have said one sentence: these two are off the team.
Here is what spokeswoman Alyssa Brouillet said instead:
Mike Rogers is running a campaign focused on jobs, safety, and affordability. As it turns out, there are a lot of people across the state, with varying view points, who want to volunteer and support that mission. Maybe the Democrats would have better luck recruiting their own volunteers if they spent less time misconstruing posts to attack ours and more time campaigning themselves — but I won't hold my breath.
"Varying view points." Democrats had nothing to do with the reporting; a Metro Times journalist read two public social media accounts.
Note what is not in that statement. No disagreement with anything Doyle said. No condemnation of the group chat. No answer to whether either student is still on the team. Not one word about Hitler, or North Korea, or Martin Luther King Jr. Just an attack on the opposing party for the existence of the story.
This is the second time, and the excuse changed
Four months earlier, Metro Times reported that Rogers had built a "Faith Coalition Leadership Team" out of election deniers and anti-LGBTQ+ activists.
Linda Lee Tarver had petitioned the Michigan Supreme Court to seize Detroit ballots and block certification of Biden's win, and called federal LGBTQ+ protections a "godless, demonic, satanic and wicked agenda of the devil." Attorney Alexandria Taylor had been sanctioned by a Wayne County judge over a 2022 election lawsuit the judge found "devoid of arguable legal merit" and "rife with speculation," which cited the debunked film 2000 Mules. Pastor Lorenzo Sewell had told a state House committee that "we don't have fair elections; we're like China."
Rogers said the coalition would spread "Mike's America First vision." Asked about the members' records, his campaign said: "There's no way for him to know every view of every volunteer — no candidate does."
Put the two answers next to each other. In December the campaign could not have known. In April it was the Democrats' fault for looking. Neither time did the campaign say anyone was leaving the team, and neither time did the answer come from Rogers himself.
There is a third thread. Texas oil billionaire Tim Dunn gave $5 million to the Great Lakes Conservative Fund, a super PAC backing Rogers — more than 98% of everything the PAC raised in the first half of 2025. Dunn once told former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who is Jewish, that "only Christians should hold leadership positions," and a top official at one of Dunn's Texas PACs met with Nick Fuentes in 2023. Rogers did not publicly address Dunn's involvement, and his campaign did not respond when Michigan Advance asked.
It is not one volunteer. It is a faith coalition, a student team, and a super PAC.
He knows how this is supposed to work
Rogers is not a first-time candidate who got surprised by the internet. He is the man who, as Intelligence chairman, co-authored CISPA — a bill built on the premise that the government needs more information about people, faster.
He is also part of a broader pattern we have documented across this site: Republicans who keep white nationalists on the payroll, the stage and the ballot and answer questions about it by condemning bigotry in general while never naming anyone. Rogers's campaign did not even do the first half.
The bottom line
Mike Rogers (MI) — a former FBI agent and four-year chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — announced a two-person student outreach team in which one member, his University of Michigan campus coordinator, had responded to a leaked chat praising Hitler and joking about gas chambers by writing "Loyalty is the only political virtue that matters," and the other had replied "Send them to North Korea?" to a post that appeared to be about Jews and quoted a Groyper-adjacent influencer to argue women do not belong in politics. His campaign's answer was that volunteers have "varying view points" and that Democrats should recruit their own. Four months earlier, shown a faith coalition staffed with election deniers, the same campaign said there was "no way for him to know every view of every volunteer." Neither time did the campaign say anyone was leaving, and neither time did the answer come from Rogers himself.
Source
Detroit Metro Times, "U.S. Senate candidate Rogers taps students who defended Hitler group chat and spread misogynistic comments", by Steve Neavling. Photo: Rogers at CyCon U.S. in Arlington, Virginia, November 19, 2019, by P.J. Siquig, U.S. Army, via Wikimedia Commons.
