John Oliver Issues Urgent Warning Ahead of Midterm Elections About Republican Party’s Nazi Ties

John Oliver returned to the “Last Week Tonight” desk after a two-week absence and focused the entirety of Sunday night’s episode on a “disturbing trend that is on the rise” within the Republican Party ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections: They have an apparent affinity with Nazis.

There is Peter Oberacker, Republican candidate in New York’s 19th election.^th congressional district. In 2015, Oberacker posted a photo on Facebook on Veterans Day commemorating his late grandfather – in full Wehrmacht uniform – who died fighting for Nazi Germany. Oberacker later claimed that it was the only photo of his grandfather he owned.

“Yeah, not great!” Olivier exclaimed. “If that’s the only photo you have, maybe consider not having any photos of him! You can have Veterans Day. No one will think it’s weird.”

The HBO host then explained how Elon Musk delivered what appeared to be a Nazi salute to Trump supporters at a rally after his 2025 election.

“Everything about it screams ‘Nazi!'” Oliver said, adding, “Well, almost everything. To be fair to the Nazis, unlike Elon, they at least looked smart in their costumes.”

He went on to assert, “It really feels like the Republican Party has gotten way too comfortable with some of the, at best, Nazi-like bullshit,” including Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee for the Office of Special Counsel, who withdrew his nomination after leaked group chat messages revealed him saying, “I have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I admit that.” » and Brandon Herrera, Republican candidate in the 23 elections in Texas.^rd congressional district, who posted a YouTube video in 2022 in which he referred to the MP-40 as “Hitler’s street sweeper”, followed by footage of him and a friend goose-stepping to a Nazi marching song.

Even Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s presidency, issued a warning last month at the Texas Tribune Festival that his party was being taken over by “fanatics” like Bo French, a candidate for Texas railroad commissioner known for his racist social media posts, adding: “Nick Fuentes is going to Dallas and meeting with a group of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi. »

Oliver argued that Israel’s war in Gaza has led “some on the far right to seize this moment and raise anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” including Tucker Carlson’s heartwarming interview with Hitler-worshipping neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended Carlson’s friendly interview with Fuentes and said the podcaster was being attacked by “globalist forces,” later reversing his defense by saying he, the head of the largest conservative think tank, wasn’t paying attention to the news.

Fuentes claimed on his podcast that “white people built it all” and that “Jews are money changers, bullshit artists, psychopaths, charlatans, con artists, manipulators…why do you think they’re so hateful? Why do you think they’re so hateful? They have no manners because they’re from the third world. They’re from the literal ghetto.”

Cue Oliver: “It makes it all the more laughable that Tucker has made such a show of offering Fuentes, a man who has spent literally thousands of hours on the Internet saying whatever he wants, the chance to finally speak his mind…And what’s worrying is that it’s not just Tucker. Fuentes has moved closer and closer to mainstream Republicans over the years,” like Republican Congressman Paul Gosar, who gave the keynote speech at Fuentes’ America First Political Action conference in 2021 and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who did the same in 2022. Trump also infamously dined with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022, and none other than Kanye West took him there — a month after West tweeted, “I’m going to die with 3 against the JEWS.”

“Historically, the Nazis gaining power doesn’t bode well for anyone, including, for what it’s worth, the Nazis, who didn’t exactly have the best year in 1945,” reasoned Oliver, who further underscored the Republican Party’s “wholesale problem” by pointing to an analysis of the Republican Party by the Manhattan Institute that determined: “Nearly four in ten Republican Party members (37 percent) think the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or ignored. not produced as historians have described it,” including “54% of men under 50. The comedian then pointed to leaked group chats of Republican youth group leaders across the country praising Hitler and hurling racial epithets left and right.

“There are some who will say: ‘Calm down. This seems like just a bunch of kids and shitty streamers. You can just ignore it,” Oliver said, which JD Vance supported when asked about the group chat, saying, “Kids do stupid things.” These weren’t kids, though, but rather adults in their 20s or 30s.

“The far-right fringe currently rising within this party is not so new: from the John Birch Society to Barry Goldwater to Pat Buchanan, the Republican Party has always left its door ajar to bigots, cranks and conspiracy theorists,” Oliver said. “Have you ever listened to the Nixon Tapes? They’d be doing numbers on Rumble today.”

Other sketchy GOP candidates include Marshall Rawson, candidate for Florida House District 10, who marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Oliver explained that when 28 Republican officials were asked if they had denounced Rawson given his neo-Nazi ties, only three responded, and two of them stood with Rawson.

“The point here is this: far-right views within the Republican Party are by no means irrelevant and they’re well past the point of being ignored – some of them are literally on the ballot in nine days, in an election, by the way, where the biggest campaign spender is (Elon Musk), you know, of the Adolf-aloha wave. »