No Place for Nazi Politics in the Republican Party

In January 2023, the Republican National Committee condemned Nick Fuentes by name in a resolution declaring that antisemitism has no place in the party.^[1] Republican candidates should honor that judgment by refusing political cooperation with Fuentes and with anyone who promotes his antisemitism or his admiration for Adolf Hitler. Fuentes could agree with me on every bill before Congress and I would still refuse his help, because the people whose liberty I want my party to defend include the neighbors he holds in contempt.

Here in Texas, the distinction between condemning antisemitism and refusing an alliance with its advocates came to a vote twice in the same afternoon. In October 2023, a reporter and photographer for The Texas Tribune saw Fuentes enter the offices of Jonathan Stickland, who headed one of the Texas Republican Party’s largest donor groups, and leave more than six hours later.^[2] That December, the state party’s executive committee voted 32 to 29 to remove a pledge against associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers, then voted 63 to 0 to condemn antisemitism.^[3] Some members objected to the breadth of the pledge, and in February 2024 the committee adopted a revised commitment to refuse association with people or groups that espouse antisemitism, without a dissenting vote.^[4] The Texas Republicans who brought the issue back for a vote did their party a service by committing it to turn away even a political ally whose money it might need.

In August 1790, Moses Seixas welcomed President George Washington to Newport on behalf of its Hebrew congregation and expressed his gratitude for the liberty its members enjoyed as citizens. “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington replied, before explaining why it would be presumptuous for one class of Americans to speak of tolerating another’s faith.^[5] As a Christian, I would take exception to a public official who spoke of granting me permission to go to church, and I owe my Jewish neighbor better than to offer him those terms.

Hitler’s government gave the opposite answer in 1935, when it decreed that “A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich” and barred Germans whom the regime classified as Jewish from voting or holding public office.^[6] When Piers Morgan asked Fuentes about his admiration for Hitler in December 2025, Fuentes mentioned the uniforms and the parades. Morgan played him a message from Daniel Finkelstein, the British journalist whose mother survived Bergen-Belsen and whose grandmother died of starvation. When Morgan explained why a man whose family had suffered those losses took exception to hearing Hitler described as cool, Fuentes answered, “I don’t care.”^[7]

I want Republicans to be able to explain in the same breath why this country may enforce its borders and why Vivek Ramaswamy, born in Cincinnati to parents from India, is every bit as American as I am.^[8] After Ramaswamy denounced Fuentes at a conservative conference, Fuentes answered with a racial slur and vowed to defeat him for governor of Ohio.^[9] An Ohio voter who objects to one of Ramaswamy’s proposals owes him an argument that his parents’ birthplace could never supply. I have no intention of surrendering the case for a secure border to Fuentes or letting him borrow it to pass off a racial preference as a Republican principle.

A candidate who hopes to persuade young men in Fuentes’s audience has good reason to speak to them himself and to explain why he rejects a man they admire. Those voters can hear him out and make up their own minds, just as Fuentes can urge them to withhold their votes, a power he described to Vanity Fair as a “veto.”^[10] What lies within a candidate’s control is whose endorsement he seeks, whom he authorizes to raise money in his name and whether he will share a campaign stage with an organization that promotes Nazi politics.

Republican candidates and party officials should turn down every offer to campaign or raise money alongside Fuentes or those who organize his movement, even when a donor objects or his followers could decide a close election. A Jewish American owes the Republican Party nothing in exchange for its defense of his liberty, and we owe him that defense even if he votes against us in every election for the rest of his life.