Yep, it’s another story about public figures defiantly defending and dismissing concerns about their embrace of Nazi symbols, Nazi ideology, and Nazi evil.
Story No. 4 is not the swastika-flag story involving Rep. Dave Taylor, the first-term Republican from Ohio. That story certainly involves Nazi symbolism, and Taylor’s flustered response was sometimes awkwardly defensive or dismissive, but — to his partial credit — Taylor never attempted to diminish the meaning of the Nazi symbol and he condemned that meaning without qualification.
During an online video meeting including a staffer in Taylor’s office, an American flag with the stripes altered to form a swastika was clearly visible hanging behind the staffer in his workspace:
“I am aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office,” Taylor said in a statement. “The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff, or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms.”
Taylor said he “immediately” directed a thorough investigation alongside the Capitol Police, adding, “No further comment will be provided until it has been completed.”
The flag was found inside Taylor’s office in the Cannon Building in Washington, D.C., Tuesday afternoon, according to an office spokesperson. Taylor believes it is the result of “foul play or vandalism,” the spokesperson said.
Taylor’s inept response over the following days makes it difficult to praise him for how he handled this. He claimed that the flag was an “optical illusion” that his staffer didn’t notice, and that his office was the victim of a “ruse” intended to make them look bad, and those claims didn’t hold up.
But I respect that in all of that desperate flailing Taylor did not try to argue that a swastika wasn’t that bad, or to characterize this as some kind of “free speech” issue or “cancel culture” attack on MAGA conservatives’ right to affirmative protection of their “intellectual diversity” or any of the other bogus nonsense that his fellow Republicans rolled out to defend the Nazi language and Nazi ideology casually tossed around by dozens of Young Republicans. Nor did he respond with the winking, irony-poisoned, 4chan-style non-denials of the nihilists cranking out Nazi-style propaganda at the departments of Labor or Homeland Security or of the multiple Republican eminences smirking while sig-heiling on camera over the past two years.
Dave Taylor is a proud Ohio Republican in the year of our Lord 2025 and that almost certainly means he is, at best, comfortable with white nationalist MAGA ideology and Steven Miller’s agenda of ethnic cleansing and mass deportation of nonwhite Americans, immigrant and citizen alike. That is dangerously Nazi-adjacent, and Taylor is an oblivious frog in a pot of water that’s getting hotter every day. But Taylor is not a Nazi. He does not want others to think that he might be a Nazi, and he certainly does not want to think of himself as one.
So when Dave Taylor found out there was a swastika flag hanging in his Capitol Hill office, he tripped over himself to insist that he didn’t know it was there, he didn’t put it there, none of his people would ever have put it there on purpose, etc. He called it “vile” and condemned it “in the strongest terms.”
He was, in short, upset.
And it’s good that he was upset. Taylor’s response wasn’t as thoughtful or introspective as the kind of remorseful anger we talked about last week — the anger that leads to, and signals, actual repentance. He has put far more energy into avoiding and denying blame than he has into exploring what it was that made such a thing possible in his very own office, but at least he was genuinely recoiling from Nazi imagery and insisting that he didn’t want anything to do with it.
In other words, Taylor was upset in a way that the Young Republicans and J.D. Vance and Paul Ingrassia and Graham Platner were not upset in any of the first three stories of unrepentant Nazis in the news.
Which brings us, at last, to Story No. 4, which involves a local Republican official who seems eerily, creepily, not-at-all upset to have learned that her husband is a straight-up, Mein-Kampf-celebrating, Hitler-admiring, Nazi Nazi.
The headline for the local news report gets at that: “A Michigan elected official is married to a neo-Nazi. Some constituents have a problem with that.” Two things are chilling in that headline and in that story. First, that “some constituents have a problem with that,” while some do not. And second that the Republican elected official in question, Maple Valley Township Treasurer Meghyn Booth, does not seem to have a problem with that, hardly at all.
That local reporting is, itself, a bit uncanny, in that it outsources the identification of this as “a problem” to those constituents. The story relies on the creaky “critics say” framework to inform us that some critics say Neo-Nazism is, in their view, bad. But, you know, opinions differ, and it’s not the job of an objective reporter to take sides on whether or not a Nazi YouTuber’s claim that Hitler “broke the chains of Jewish tyranny in Germany” is accurate or true or good or right.
This local reporting is also playing catch-up, since the outlet that broke this story from Michigan was a newspaper on the other side of the Atlantic. Jason Wilson had this story for The Guardian (UK) back in August, “Unmasked: the man behind one of the fastest growing far-right YouTube channels.”
The Guardian has identified the self-described “national socialist” behind an openly extremist YouTube channel that in just over two months has accumulated 50,000 subscribers, seen more than 2.3m views, and likely made thousands of dollars from YouTube’s revenue-sharing monetization program.
Johnathan Christopher “Chris” Booth, 37, lives in the unincorporated community of Coral, a part of Maple Valley Township in Michigan’s Montcalm county, and is married to a senior local Republican official.
Booth has published more than 70 YouTube videos since May on his Shameless Sperg account, whose graphic design elements feature stylized SS bolts. Titles of his videos – generally a recording of him delivering his views direct to camera – include: “Why I Dislike Jews. It’s not complicated”, “Black Crimes Matter: Never Relax” and “Jews and FBI hate you and your free speech.” …
Booth is married to Meghyn “Meg” Booth, the Republican treasurer of Maple Valley Township. Meg Booth has “liked” several posts with extremist themes on Chris Booth’s Facebook account with her personal account. Chris Booth’s Facebook page also features extensive racist propaganda along with iconography often employed by neo-Nazis.
That article includes much more from Chris Booth’s public videos, including his enthusiastic identification of himself as a “fascist” and a “national socialist,” and his call for getting rid of every Black person in America.
The Guardian gave Meghyn Booth the opportunity to comment on her husband’s Nazi video channel:
In an email, Meg Booth appeared to repudiate her husband’s views.
“I am not involved in my husband’s content or political views, and I do not share or support any form of racism, antisemitism, or hate speech,” she wrote, adding: “My values are my own and are grounded in respect, inclusion, and service to the community.”
Meg Booth concluded: “As an elected official, I’ve always acted independently, with integrity, and in line with the expectations of my office. I respectfully decline further comment.”
This is the same, creepily pro forma tone Meg Booth has used in responding to the concerns of her constituents and colleagues in local government. She insists, placidly, that she does not “condone” her husband’s views, but only condemns them in the most ethereal and abstract way.
She is not upset.
Well, she is not upset except in the way that J.D. Vance was upset when the Nazi and racist chats of the Young Republicans were made public — he was upset that others were upset by this. He was upset that liberals were attacking the good names of good Republican Americans over something as minor and frivolous as their open advocacy of segregation, white supremacy, tiered citizenship, ethnic hierarchy, ethnic cleansing, and Nazism.
The way that Meg Booth is not upset is upsetting. It’s unnerving. And it casts doubt on her claims that she does not share or condone her Nazi husband’s views.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In