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 “worrying trend that’s been on the rise” amongst the Republican Party ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections — they’re apparent affinity for Nazis.
There is Peter Oberacker, a Republican candidate for New York’s 19th congressional district. Back in 2015, Oberacker posted a photo to Facebook on Veterans Day memorializing his late grandfather — in full Wehrmacht uniform — who’d died fighting for Nazi Germany. Oberacker later claimed it was the only photo of his grandfather that he had.
“Yeah, not great!” exclaimed Oliver. “If that is the only picture that you have, maybe consider having no pictures of him! You can sit Veterans Day out. No one will think that’s weird.”
The HBO host then brought up how Elon Musk delivered what very much appeared to be a Nazi salute to Trump supporters at a rally following his election in 2025.
“Everything about that screams, ‘Nazi!’” said Oliver, adding, “Well, almost everything. To be fair to the Nazis, unlike Elon, they at least looked sharp in their suits.”
He continued, claiming, “It does feel that the Republican Party has been getting way too comfortable with some, at best, Nazi-adjacent shit,” including Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to the Office of Special Counsel, who withdrew his nomination after leaked group chat messages revealed him saying, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” and Brandon Herrera, a Republican nominee for Texas’s 23rd congressional district, who posted a YouTube video in 2022 where 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 “bigots” like Bo French, a candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner known for racist social media posts, adding, “Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch 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 on this moment and elevate antisemitic conspiracy theories,” including Tucker Carlson’s warm podcast interview with the Hitler-worshipping neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. The Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts defended Carlson’s chummy interview with Fuentes and said the podcaster was under attack from “globalist forces,” later walking back the defense by claiming that he, the leader of the top conservative think tank, doesn’t pay attention to the news.
Fuentes claimed on his podcast that “whites built everything” and “Jews are money-changers, bullshit artists, psychopaths, charlatans, grifters, manipulators… why do you think they’re so obnoxious? Why do you think they’re so fucking obnoxious? They have no manners because they’re from the third world. They come from the literal ghetto.”
Cue Oliver: “It makes it all the more laughable that Tucker made such a show of offering Fuentes, a man who’s literally spent thousands of hours on the internet saying whatever he wants, the chance to finally say what he thinks… And the worrying thing is, it’s not just Tucker. Fuentes has been inching closer and closer to mainstream Republicans over the years,” such as GOP Congressman Paul Gosar, who gave the keynote speech at Fuentes’s 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 brought him there — one month after West tweeted, “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”
“Nazis getting power doesn’t historically bode well for anyone, including, for what it’s worth, Nazis, who didn’t exactly have the best 1945,” reasoned Oliver, who further highlighted the Republican Party’s “groyper problem” by pointing to a Manhattan Institute analysis of the GOP that determined, “Nearly four in ten in the current GOP (37%) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians described,” including “54% of men under 50.” The comedian then pointed to the leaked group chats from leaders of Young Republican groups around the country praising Hitler and spouting racial epithets left and right.
“There are some who will say, ‘Calm down. This seems to be just a bunch of kids and shitty streamers. You can just ignore it,’” said Oliver, which is something JD Vance argued when he was asked about the group chat, saying, “Kids do stupid things.” They weren’t kids, though, but rather full-grown adults in their twenties and thirties.
“The far-right fringe currently rising up in this party is not remotely new, from the John Birch Society through Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, the Republican Party has always left its door ajar for bigots, cranks and conspiracy theorists,” asserted Oliver. “Have you ever listened to the Nixon Tapes? They would do numbers on Rumble today.”
Other sketchy GOP candidates include Marshall Rawson, running for Florida House District 10, who marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Oliver brought up how, when 28 GOP officials were asked if they’d denounced Rawson given his neo-Nazi ties, only three responded, and two of them stood by Rawson.
“The point here is: Far-right views in the Republican Party are by no means irrelevant and they are way past the point of being ignorable —some of them are literally on the ballot in nine days, in an election, by the way, where the single biggest campaign spender is [Elon Musk], you know, of the Adolf-aloha wave.”
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