By Alex Kotch
Sludge (7/3/18)
Breitbart News may have rejected him. Twitter may have banned him from its services. But multiple public employees appear to have stuck with Paul Nehlen, an openly anti-Semitic white supremacist running on the Republican ticket in Wisconsin to replace House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Sludge has found that one State Department employee, a Wisconsin county supervisor and two public university professors have all donated to Nehlen’s current campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records. None of these donations were returned.
Laurence Berg, a pathologist and elected member of the LaCrosse County, Wisconsin Board of Supervisors, made a series of donations to Nehlen from mid-2017 to February, totaling $1,500. His most recent donation came after Nehlen was banned from Twitter. Emails and phone calls to Berg and to the County Board Chair were not returned.
Nehlen has at times denied being a white supremacist and at others dodged the question, but his public actions and comments indicate, at the very least, a strong sympathy for white supremacist ideas. Nehlen says he is a “pro-White” candidate and was banned from Twitter because of his racist posts. Breitbart News, which former executive chairman Steve Bannon has called “the platform for the alt-right,” said Nehlen went off the “deep end” and allegedly cut ties with the candidate. Nehlen did not respond to a request for comment.
One of Nehlen’s many anti-Semitic tweets reads: “Poop, incest, and pedophilia. Why are those common themes repeated so often with Jews?”
On Twitter, Nehlen posted a list of his alleged critics (which included this author and many other journalists), claiming most were Jewish, and clearly encouraging his sizeable alt-right and neo-Nazi following to harass those people. (Some people he called Jewish were not Jewish.)
After tweeting the list, Nehlen then tweeted out a link to a page on his website that disclosed alleged critics’ phone numbers and email addresses. Nehlen was banned from Twitter in February after he sent a racist tweet attacking Meghan Markle, who is now married to Prince Harry.
On January 15, after Breitbart had denounced him for racist and anti-Semitic statements, State Department foreign affairs officer Matthew Q. Gebert donated$200 to Nehlen’s campaign. That brought his total donations to the white supremacist’s campaign to $225.
Gebert’s only other donations so far for the 2017-18 election cycle were two $500 contributions to Corey Stewart, the Republican nominee to represent Virginia in the Senate who is outspoken about preserving public Confederate flags and monuments. In a Facebook Live video taken during his 2017 campaign for Virginia governor, Stewart stood in front of a Confederate flag and declared, “I’m proud to be here with this flag.” …