Former Republican California Rep. Tim Donnelly opened his home to far-right YouTube political entertainer Stefan Molyneux for an interview in February; Donnelly spoke with Molyneux on camera months after the social media personality had explicitly stated his sympathies for white nationalists in a documentary.
Prior to serving in the California State Assembly from 2010 to 2014, Donnelly had been involved in the Minuteman movement. In 2014, Donnelly ran for governor and placed third after a scandal in which a campaign associate accused a primary opponent of “submitting to the Islamic, Shariah banking code in 2008.” Donnelly attempted to run for national office in 2016 and 2018 and lost both elections.
Molyneux’s interview with Donnelly was set inside of Donnelly’s Twin Peaks, California, home and was included in Molyneux’s ongoing series “Sunset in the Golden State,” the latest episode of which was published on YouTube yesterday. Donnelly’s Twitter feed indicates that he spoke with Molyneux on February 7, which was just about three months after Molyneux released a documentary in which he said a trip he took to Poland had eased his supposed skepticism about white nationalism.
During the interview, Donnelly and Molyneux repeatedly described immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border as a silent mass “invasion” designed to subvert the United States. Molyneux claimed that immigrants coming to California from Mexico had a “bigger or deeper motivation” about “reconquering” California on behalf of the country of Mexico, to which Donnelly agreed, accusing Latinx leaders in the region of plotting a “creeping invasion.” The rhetoric echoed Molyneux’s well-documented history of paranoid remarks about immigration.
Donnelly said that the fate of America will play out in California, adding that he feared a civil war. While Molyneux said that he hopes that the conflict they perceive in the political system is worked out in nonviolent ways, he thought it was possible that people would rise up in more violent ways.
“Should free speech fail, should the First Amendment not be enough, the Second seems inevitable,” Molyneux, a Canadian citizen, said.
In recent months, Molyneux has waded into the toxic waters of more blatantly extreme rhetoric.
On July 11, Molyneux suggested that Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young teenagers was somehow related to his Jewish ethnicity.
On July 18, Molyneux said he was fighting against anti-Semitism for years until it “dawned” on him that “Jews weren’t really fighting against anti-white racism.”
On July 20, Molyneux wrote, sarcastically, that “access to white wallets” had become “a universal human right.”
On August 1, Molyneux approvingly shared a post from a group named in reference to the Nazi Luftwaffe, as the German Air Force was named under the rule of Adolf Hitler.
On August 2, Molyneux quote-tweeted a white nationalist who resigned from The Daily Caller after it was discovered he was quietly writing under a pen name for a white nationalist publication and asserted that diversity “means no white people.”
On August 5, Molyneux downplayed the evils of white nationalism. Two days later, he claimed that people criticizing white nationalism without criticizing “any other kind” are “just creating more white nationalists.”
On August 8, Molyneux tweeted that without white males in Europe, there would be “no modern world.”
