Paul Nehlen might be an anti-Semite and a white nationalist, but he won’t be the next Republican representative elected to serve in Congress by the people of Wisconsin.
Ballotpedia reports that Nehlen received just a hair more than 11 percent of the vote during yesterday’s primary election in his bid to represent Wisconsin’s 1st District in the U.S. Congress—the seat that will soon be vacated by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Republican Bryan Steil led Nehlen by 24,000 votes. But still, Nehlen managed to scrape up more than 6,600 votes for his abhorrent extremist campaign.
Nehlen ran against Ryan in 2016 and, despite the fact he had acquired endorsements from big-name conservative activists like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and Steve Bannon, he was devastated by nearly 70 points in that primary. Somewhere along the line after he lost, he began a public radicalization and would begin espousing unvarnished anti-Semitism and white nationalism and appearing on extremist podcasts like “Fash the Nation.”
At the end of last year, Nehlen exploded in an alt-right flavored meltdown after some public rhetorical altercations with Jewish conservative commentators. While this curried favor for him among the alt-right, it scared off many of his former allies in the conservative movement. That being said, it did take nearly two months after hate-speech histrionics for the Wisconsin GOP to disavow Nehlen publicly.
Since we’ve been watching him, we have witnessed Nehlen rise in and fall out of favor with white nationalists online. His most brutal backlash came after he revealed that the private identity of a prolific alt-right account flying under the moniker “Ricky Vaughn” was that of Douglass Mackey; a move that many in the alt-right believed to be clearly out of bounds.
As his campaign viability began to rot away and fundraising efforts began to prove desolate, Nehlen began funneling campaign funds to his wife and next door neighbor.
It’s unclear whether Nehlen intends to run again or if he will continue his appearances on far-right programs. In the meantime, we’ll catch him on Twitter, where he’s currently side-stepping a permanent suspension as the Federal Election Commission considers his complaint—that his account suspension amounts to a violation of election law—and continues to post a near-endless stream white nationalist and anti-Semitic propaganda.
And Paul Nehlen continues to evade his ban, @TwitterSupport. Though it *does* mean we get lovely messages like this. pic.twitter.com/hVCBexZk1I
— Intellectual Snark Web (@EyesOnTheRight) August 15, 2018
