The Other Republican Paul In Southeast Wisconsin

In his GOP primary against Paul Ryan last year, neo-Nazi multimillionaire Paul Nehlen got wiped out, 57,364 (84.1%) to 10,864 (15.9%), after spending $1,451,041 on the race, just $62,766 out of his own pocket. Ryan crushed him, effortlessly. But this year Nehlen is back and he's already raised $121,850 and has altered his approach slightly-- to appeal to an even smaller but more energized fascist fringe. If there was a Nazi Party in Wisconsin he'd be running on it's line. And... there has been constant chatter in Breitbart-world that Nehlen will indeed run as an independent next year, and not waste his time on a primary contest he can't win.

Last week, as HuffPo reported over the weekend, he was down in Alabama campaigning for Roy Moore. They also reported that "Nehlen claims to have raised 'six figures' for the Moore campaign." Nehlen's FEC record doesn't show him being a very generous a campaign donor, with just 3 ever campaign contributions, all in the summer of 2016-- $800 to Trump and $200 to the RNC on June 14 and another $1,699 to Trump August 26-- and I see no record of any contributions from Nehlen or his company, Blue Sky Global LLC, to Moore.

But one week ago he was a speaker at a Moore rally in Midland City, Alabama, huckstering the revival tent suckers with nonsensical crap about "a spiritual battle" and how Moore will "drain the swamp." HuffPo reported that 2 days before that Nehlen was on the overly anti-Semitic white power podcast Fash The Nation with two real live Nazis who use the named "Marcus Halberstram "and "Jazzhands McFeels." As you probably surmised, "fash" is alt-right shorthand not for fashion but for fascist.

It was Nehlen’s second appearance on the show, and his fluency with white nationalist jargon was evident as he made thinly veiled anti-Semitic remarks and proudly recounted having told a Jewish magazine editor to “eat a bullet.”

On Dec. 8, Nehlen used Gab, a micro-blogging platform used primarily by white nationalists, to repost a drawing another user had made for him. The drawing showed a puny Ryan, seen as the anti-Trump, next to a buff “Chad” Nehlen. (Chad is an alt-right term for a fit alpha-male womanizer.) In the accompanying text, Nehlen is described as having “redpilled on globalism, RR and JQ.”

“Redpilled,” a reference to the Matrix movie trilogy, is used to describe an awakening to white supremacist teachings. “RR” stands for “race realism,” and “JQ” stands for the “Jewish question,” the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews have undue influence over the media, banking and politics.

Earlier this month, Nehlen tweeted [as he frequently does] “It’s okay to be white,” a meme that originated on the message board 4chan, a haven for neo-Nazi trolls, and was spread enthusiastically by white nationalists. “In fact it’s pretty awesome,” he added in a follow-up tweet.

His twitter feed embraces racism and is always a baby step away from calling for deadly violence for anyone opposing fascism, or, as he might called it, "Fash." HuffPost reported that "After an argument over gun control, Nehlen had tweeted to Podhoretz, who is Jewish, that he should 'self-deport' and 'eat a bullet.'" Podhoretz responded by referring to him as "Bannon's catamite," which would imply that Nehlen takes it up the ass, at least metaphorically, from Bannon. When Nehlen was suspended from Twitter for 12 hours for the "eat a bullet" comment, he ran to a Nazi podcast and claimed he "got shoah’d for 12 hours," demeaning the Holocaust in a purely neo-Nazi framing.