[[link removed]]

HE MARCHED WITH NAZIS IN CHARLOTTESVILLE. NOW HE’S EXPECTED TO JOIN
THE FLORIDA LEGISLATURE.  
[[link removed]]


 

Christopher Mathias
September 14, 2026
Talking Points Memo
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ TPM’s investigation reveals that Rawson’s campaign got a boost
from members of the very groups that marched in Charlottesville nine
years ago. His campaign donations show he received funds from people
with ties to white nationalist organizations. _

Marshall Rawson in videos taken at Charlottesville in 2017., Left:
Archived YouTube video; Right: Vice News // Talking Points Memo

 

The Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of
Representatives marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017
“Unite the Right” rally
[[link removed]]
in Charlottesville, Virginia, a new Talking Points Memo investigation
can reveal.

Marshall Rawson — who won an upset
[[link removed]]
victory in Florida’s District 10 Republican primary last month —
attended the infamous Charlottesville rally, considered the largest
white supremacist gathering in a generation, marching with the League
of the South
[[link removed]], a
racist and antisemitic neo-Confederate group that advocates for the
secession of southern states from the U.S. 

Video footage reviewed by TPM shows Rawson and his now-wife arriving
at the rally and being greeted by name by League of the South members.
A photo obtained by TPM, taken at a different point during the violent
demonstration, shows Rawson standing near James Alex Fields Jr.
[[link removed]],
the neo-Nazi who a short time later drove his car into a crowd of
counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring dozens of
others.

 
Marshall Rawson arriving at Charlottesville in 2017. (Archived
YouTube video)
Rawson, a 34-year-old local GOP activist, handily won the Republican
primary on Aug. 18. His primary victory came only eight days after the
newspaper Florida Politics published
[[link removed]]
an article detailing parts of his past involvement, which he has
acknowledged, with the League of the South. Earlier this year a local
blog called Clay News & Views listed
[[link removed]]
bigoted statements Rawson made on X throughout 2023 and 2024 in which
the candidate condoned slavery and called for gay people to be
executed. 

His attendance at Unite the Right, however, has not previously been
reported in the press. 

TPM’s investigation can also reveal that Rawson’s campaign got a
boost from members of the very groups that marched in Charlottesville
nine years ago: an analysis of his campaign donations finds that he
received upwards of $15,000 from dozens of people with either
established ties to white nationalist organizations or well-documented
histories of extremist, racist activism. 

Finally, TPM can reveal indications that Rawson from 2017 to 2020
operated a pseudonymous social media account on X that he used to
advocate public lynchings. 

Responding to a detailed list of questions sent by TPM for this story,
Rawson emailed the following statement: 

_“Over the entire span of my adult life, I’ve been very active
defending historical monuments from destruction or removal, and I feel
that way about almost all monuments, not just those associated with
southern history._

“_I don’t screen my donors, and I put in tens of thousands of
requests for donations by email, text, and phone.  I’ve been
extremely transparent about my campaign agenda, and any donation to my
campaign is presumably an endorsement of my agenda and not my
campaign’s endorsement of a donor’s views or agenda.  Obviously,
I’m not privy to any conversation you reportedly had with any donors
and cannot speak to those conversations.”_

Rawson is widely expected to win the general election this November in
House District 10, which encompasses a conservative part of
northcentral Florida between Jacksonville and Tallahassee, raising the
prospect that an unrepentant white supremacist will attain elected
office in one of the country’s most populous states with no pushback
from the Republican Party. 

The Florida GOP did not respond to a request for comment about
Rawson’s involvement with the League of the South, his attendance at
Unite the Right, his white supremacist campaign donors, or the post he
appears to have made on X advocating lynchings.

The national Republican Party also did not respond to a request for
comment.

At a time when the GOP veers ever rightward, Rawson’s story is a
glaring example of how explicit white nationalism has established firm
roots in one of America’s two major political parties.

Rawson’s involvement with the League of the South was first noted in
2014 by a prolific antifascist researcher named Laura Sullivan.
Sullivan — who passed away
[[link removed]]
earlier this year — published
[[link removed]]an
article on her blog, Lady Liberty’s Lamp, detailing how Rawson, then
a college student at Shorter University, was appearing at League of
the South events while simultaneously interning for then-U.S. Rep.
Paul Broun (R-GA) in Washington D.C. Rawson, Sullivan documented, was
spending his internship posting League of the South propaganda
throughout the city, including a “SECEDE FROM OBAMALAND” sticker
in the U.S. Capitol building. 

Sullivan found another photo of Rawson passing out flyers for a League
of the South rally. “IMMIGRATION IS BAD FOR SOUTHERN WORKERS,” the
flyers said. 

In May 2025, in the early days of his campaign, Rawson published a
post [[link removed]] on his campaign’s
Facebook page acknowledging his involvement with the League.
“Apparently, the establishment isn’t happy with the level of
success we’ve had on the campaign thus far,” he wrote, predicting
that “the radical downtown Gainesville crowd and the spineless
establishment ‘Republicans’” would attempt to attack him by
citing a “defunct Antifa blog” and “my past League of the South
involvement.” 

“My advocacy in the League from 2013-2016 consisted exclusively of
myself and the organization demonstrating against the unfettered
immigration/ ‘gang of eight’ amnesty policies that were hurting
local workers, defense of marriage activism that was a response to
Federal Activist Judges overthrowing state law, and then later in
defense of our historic monuments that were being attacked by woke
rioters and weak politicians,” he wrote.

Florida Politics
[[link removed]]’
article about Rawson last month is based in part on Sullivan’s
research. Rawson did not provide a comment about his activism with the
League of the South to the news outlet, but did provide one to Main
Street Daily News, telling the Gainesville, Florida-based newspaper
that he’d only been involved with the League of the South for a few
years over a decade ago, and giving a similar description of his
activities to the one in his Facebook post.

Rawson has not denounced the League of the South or apologized for his
participation in its events. “I am happy to talk about my past
advocacy and activism on any issue,” he wrote on Facebook in 2025.
“I am also proud of the advocacy work that I have been involved with
for the past 13 years.”

It’s hard to emphasize just how extreme the League of the South
is. 

The group was founded in 1994, two years after Rawson was born, by a
group of professors obsessed with reviving the Lost Cause of the
Confederacy. They sought a “national divorce” in which the South
would finally secede from the rest of America. They were led by
Michael Hill, then a professor of British history at Stillman College,
a historically Black university in Alabama. In his decades at the helm
of the organization, Hill has spoken clearly about the League of the
South’s goals, denouncing
[[link removed]]
the “Browning of America” and pledging to spend his life
“fighting to restore the South as White Man’s Land.” 

“I pledge to be a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a
homophobe, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe, and any other sort of ‘phobe
that benefits my people, so help me God!” Hill wrote
[[link removed]]
in a 2016 screed. 

High-ranking members serving under Hill have variously praised the
system of chattel slavery in the South; organized a celebration of the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln; and participated in brawls at racist
and antisemitic demonstrations, according to an extensive history
[[link removed]] of
the group maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Although often eschewing explicit Third Reich imagery, the League of
the South has frequently collaborated
[[link removed]]
with outright neo-Nazi groups, joining with a neo-Nazi collective
called the Nationalist Front throughout the first Trump administration
to organize a series of rallies, often marching alongside men carrying
swastika flags. In 2018, Hill shared a video
[[link removed]]
online featuring himself and others burning a copy of the Talmud, the
primary source of Jewish theology, while sieg-heiling. “We stand for
the white race against all our enemies, particularly the Jews,” he
said. 

That same year, Hill celebrated
[[link removed]]
the Tree of Life shooting
[[link removed]],
when a white supremacist opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue,
killing 11 Jews. Sharing a video of the massacre online, Hill wrote:
“It never gets old! What a great ad for us!” 

The League of the South has claimed thousands of members throughout
its existence. Back in 2014, Hill was especially excited about a new
generation joining the organization. “Southern Nationalism is the
cutting edge and the wave of our future for Southern youth,” he
wrote
[[link removed]]
on Facebook, posting a photo of a young man in a League of the South
polo shirt at an anti-gay marriage rally in Richmond, Virginia.

The new recruit was Marshall Rawson. 

Although Rawson claimed to have ended his involvement with the group
over a decade ago, Florida Politics reported
[[link removed]]
that he was a featured speaker, alongside Hill, at the group’s 2021
“Florida Freedom Conference.” A dispatch
[[link removed]] from that
conference, published by journalist Tracey Eaton, noted that Rawson
was “not a member of the league,” even if his speech articulated
talking points perfectly in line with the League of the South’s
secessionism. 

“Southerners are ridiculed, scorned, and defamed at every turn,”
Rawson said in his speech, adding: “Yes, is it OK to be white and of
Caucasian origin. Yes, Southerners are a distinct people, a
nation.” 

On Aug. 12, 2017, while working as a reporter at HuffPost, I watched
roughly a thousand white supremacists invade Charlottesville. They
were converging on the city to hold a “Unite the Right” rally. It
was the coming-out party for the so-called “alt-right,” the
insurgent fascist movement emboldened by the rise of Donald Trump
— the moment this movement would step offline and into the real
world, showing all the power it had accrued. 

In the weeks and months leading up to the rally — planned ostensibly
to protest the slated removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert
E. Lee in a Charlottesville park — organizers were explicit in
stating that their actual goal for the event was to take America back
for the white man. “August 12, 2017 is going to be the shot heard
‘round the world,” boasted
[[link removed]]
Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.
“Thanks to the magnitude of this event, I truly believe, more than I
ever did before, that we will eventually win this struggle, and secure
the existence of our people and a future for white children. It is our
destiny. Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz. See ya
there, faggots.” 

A video posted to YouTube by a man associated with League of the South
shows white supremacists arriving at Emancipation Park for the day’s
events. “Marshall’s finally here!” the man can be heard saying
from behind the camera, as Rawson appears in the camera’s frame. 

“Good to see y’all!” Rawson says, before hugging him. 

“How ya’ doin’ Mrs. Rawson?!” the man says, leaning over to
hug Rawson’s wife, Megan.

_Marshall Rawson arriving at Charlottesville in 2017. (Archived
YouTube video)_

The man then filmed Rawson shaking hands with other rallygoers,
including now-former League of the South member
[[link removed]]
Christopher Monzon
[[link removed]].
In the background of the footage other demonstrators can be seen
waving the Reichs- und Nationalflagge, commonly known as the swastika
flag, of the German Nazi Party. 

The man’s video was originally over eight minutes long when it was
posted to YouTube in 2017. Sometime in 2022 the video was edited down
to only one minute, removing the footage of Rawson and his wife. But
anti-fascist researchers had preserved the original cut, which they
provided to Talking Points Memo. 

An archived 2022 thread
[[link removed]]
posted on X — when it was still called Twitter — by an
anti-fascist researcher going by the name ShermanMarching provides
other evidence of Rawson’s attendance at Unite the Right. 

ShermanMarching shared that thread with TPM, in which they noted
Rawson’s cameo in the viral, Emmy-award winning episode
[[link removed]] of Vice News Tonight
about Unite the Right that aired on HBO. Rawson can be seen in the
episode’s b-roll marching at the rally. Rawson is carrying a League
of the South flag. 

 

There is also a photo of Rawson standing near a phalanx of neo-Nazis
carrying shields. (The photo — taken by a local photographer — is
no longer online, but was archived by anti-fascist researchers.) Among
the neo-Nazis near Rawson is James Alex Fields Jr., wearing the
uniform of the white supremacist group Vanguard America. Not long
after the photo was taken, Fields drove his 2010 Dodge Challenger into
counterprotesters, sending bodies flying into the air and killing
32-year-old Heather Heyer. He was later convicted for the attack and
sentenced
[[link removed]]
to two life sentences. 

At least two people associated with the League of the South were
arrested that day. Tyler Watkins Davis was arrested for joining the
white supremacist mob I saw
[[link removed]]
beat and severely injure DeAndre Harris, a Black counterprotester.
(Davis later took an Alford plea in the case, accepting
[[link removed]]
a two-year-prison sentence without admitting guilt.) And member Jim
O’Brien was arrested
[[link removed]]
for carrying a pistol without a permit. (O’Brien maintains that he
received his citation after the rally ended and that it was
unrelated.)

Eight years later, O’Brien would be among the earliest donors to
Rawson’s fledgling campaign for Florida House District 10, donating
$300
[[link removed]].

If Rawson really did end his involvement with the League of the South,
as he has claimed, over a decade ago, public records indicate he
nevertheless enjoyed the group’s support during his run for public
office. 

A TPM analysis of Rawson’s campaign donors found dozens of people
associated with the League of the South donating to his campaign —
as well as many other donors TPM identified as having separate white
nationalist or extremist ties.

The League of the South donors to Rawson’s campaign include the
group’s Florida chapter leader, Michael Tubbs, a former demolitions
specialist in the Army’s Green Berets who pleaded guilty to stealing
munitions from a military facility
[[link removed]]. A
federal indictment alleged he had plotted to attack Black and
Jewish-owned businesses; he was ultimately sentenced to eight years in
prison. He donated $100
[[link removed]].
Gene Andrews — a League of the South member who works
[[link removed]]
as the caretaker for the childhood home of Confederate Gen. Nathan
Bedford Forrest, one of the early leaders of the Ku Klux Klan
— donated $20
[[link removed]]. 

Josh Doggrell, who was fired
[[link removed]]
in 2015 from his job as a police lieutenant in Anniston, Alabama over
his involvement with League of the South, gave Rawson’s campaign
$100
[[link removed]].
“I donated money to Rawson’s campaign because I believe he is a
fine man and will do a great job as a legislator,” he told TPM in an
email. Doggrell — who is now a lieutenant in the Calhoun County
Sheriff’s Office in Alabama — wrote to TPM from a Gmail account
that used a version of the “Celtic Cross” symbol commonly used by
neo-Nazis as its Google profile picture. “I use it because I am a
Christian and have Anglo-Celtic heritage,” he explained in a
followup email.

Non-League of the South donors include Sam Dickson
[[link removed]],
a former lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan who became
[[link removed]]
a leading figure in multiple white supremacist groups, including the
Council of Conservative Citizens
[[link removed]],
the National Policy Institute
[[link removed]],
and the Charles Martel Society
[[link removed]].
Dickson — who once stated
[[link removed]]
that “Negroes… are hopeless” — gave $1,000
[[link removed]]
to Rawson’s campaign. 

“I was asked to give a donation and I felt he was fighting the good
fight and he deserves support,” Dickson told TPM, recounting how
Rawson asked him personally for a donation. He’d met Rawson on
“multiple occasions” over the years, he explained, including at a
conference hosted by James Edwards of the Political Cesspool, a
longstanding
[[link removed]]
white supremacist podcast
[[link removed]]. 

Dickson added that Rawson had made it “very clear” to him “that
he’s taking a stand against discrimination against white
people.” 

“I believe that white people, white Christian Americans, European
Americans … are entitled to our own nation,” Dickson told TPM,
before adding: “Diversity is not a source of strength. Diversity is
a source of weakness.”

Andy Strickland, a Florida-based lawyer linked
[[link removed]]
to the white supremacist group Identity Evropa, donated $1,000
[[link removed]]
to Rawson’s campaign. (In 2017 I met Strickland in Williston,
Florida, where he was attending a dinner
[[link removed]] with white supremacist
figurehead Richard Spencer
[[link removed]].) 

And Antelope Hill
[[link removed]],
a Pennsylvania-based white nationalist publishing house that
specializes in translating and reprinting books written by German Nazi
Party members, donated $100
[[link removed]]. 

A number of donors to Rawson’s campaign marched alongside him in
Charlottesville in 2017. They include Texas-based John Verdier, who
took part in the infamous torch march on the eve of the Unite The
Right demonstration, when neo-Nazis brandishing tiki-torches attacked
students on the University of Virginia campus and chanted “Jews will
not replace us!” 

Verdier, who recently confessed
[[link removed]]
to organizing a party celebrating the birthday of former Ku Klux Klan
leader and neo-Nazi David Duke, donated $250
[[link removed]]
to Rawson’s campaign. (Reached for comment by TPM, Verdier did not
respond to a question about his donation to Rawson, texting instead:
“Good luck with your anti-white article.” Speaking recently to the
Texas Observer, Verdier denied being a white supremacist. “I just
want freedom to live on my own,” he said. “I want to live in a
neighborhood with people like me, I just want to be able to send my
kids to school with other kids of European ancestry.”) 

David Duke’s own daughter, Kristine Duke, appears to have donated
$200
[[link removed]] to
Rawson.

TPM reached out to all of the donors mentioned by name in this section
for comment.

All told, dozens of white supremacist donors identified by TPM gave
more than $15,000 to Rawson’s successful primary campaign. He won
his election against Chase Brannan, a right-wing, Trump-supporting
politician and son of the term-limited incumbent Rep. Chuck
Brannan, by just over 2,000 votes
[[link removed]].

Rawson has repeatedly posted bigoted statements to social media. 

In August of 2023, according to Clay News & Views, Rawson on X cheered
[[link removed]] news
that two men in Uganda faced the death penalty for being gay,
advocating that such harsh penalties for queerness be brought to
America. “This is how you would run the pervs and miscreants out of
Florida,” he wrote, adding: “A one-way ticket to no more
sexualizing of children and the lgbtq+ agenda in Florida!” 

In a series of October 2023 posts, Rawson appeared
[[link removed]] to
defend slavery, writing, according to Clay News & Views, that “God
did many ‘racisms’ too.” Responding to a Christian pastor on X
who argued that those who condone slavery should not be allowed in
church leadership positions, Rawson argued there were biblical
justifications for the institution of putting people in chains.
“Apparently if you actually knew your Bible (Genesis 24:35 and every
other corner of the Bible) you wouldn’t let God into your church
either,” he wrote. “The irony of counterfeit Christians today.”
(That account of Rawson’s is now protected).

Such Christians, Rawson wrote, have a “straight ticket to Hell.” 

Despite these pronouncements under his own name on X, there are
indications Rawson may have still felt the need to operate a
pseudonymous social media account where he could express even more
extreme sentiments. There are several datapoints linking an X account
that posted from 2017 to 2020 under the handle “RockOfDixie” to
Rawson. Some of the posts from this account compiled by researcher
ShermanMarching
[[link removed]]
seem to have since been deleted, and the account’s most recent post
is from 2020.

The profile photo for the “RockOfDixie” account on X features
[[link removed]]
a bodybuilder flexing on stage. That exact image can be found in an
online gallery
[[link removed]]
of photos from the 2016 National Physique Committee’s Galaxy
Championships. The bodybuilder in the image is identified as Marshall
Rawson, who finished fourth out of six contestants in the
competition. 

“RockOfDixie” only has three followers on X, one of whom is
Rawson’s wife, Megan Rawson. (Megan did not respond to a request for
comment for this story.) 

In one post on RockOfDixie, Rawson appeared to advocate for public
lynchings. 

“Multiculturalism kills and public lynchings worked,” he wrote
[[link removed]]
in 2018. 

Rawson did not reply to questions about whether he was behind the
account.

There is an argument to be made that there is little daylight between
the views of white supremacists like Rawson who descended on
Charlottesville in 2017 and the MAGAfied Republican Party in 2026.
Rawson, after all, is not the only attendee in that day’s events who
went on to win public office. 

Judd Blevins, a leader in the white supremacist group Identity Evropa
who attended Unite the Right, was elected
[[link removed]]
to city council in Enid, Oklahoma in 2023 even after anti-fascists
exposed his participation in the event. (Local progressives eventually
mounted a successful recall effort.) 

Nick Fuentes, who was only 18 when he went to Charlottesville, has
since become one of the most famous and powerful white supremacists of
his generation, leading an army of young supporters he calls
“groypers.” Fuentes has sat down for dinner with Trump at
Mar-a-Lago; has held private meetings with powerful GOP officials and
donors in Texas; and has overseen a wave of groypers infiltrating
low-level positions on Capitol Hill. (“We have a generation of
rabid, incompetent idiots,” a senior Republican congressional
staffer griped
[[link removed]]
to Politico.) 

Some of the same neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville would go on
to be arrested for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. When Trump
returned to the White House in 2025, these neo-Nazis were pardoned. 

The conspiracy theories and talking points espoused by the neo-Nazis
in Charlottesville are now standard GOP fare. It is common for
Republicans to talk about the “Great Replacement” conspiracy
theory, or to advocate “remigration
[[link removed]],”
a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Stephen Miller, the powerful White
House advisor whose worldview was shaped by “alt-right”
propaganda, is overseeing an attempt to forcibly expel millions of
immigrants from the country. 

“Congratulations to Marshall Rawson, our Republican Nominee for
Florida House District 10!” the Florida GOP wrote on X after
Rawson’s primary win, days after Florida Politics published its
article detailing parts of Rawson’s involvement in the League of the
South. 

“Ready to fight for North Florida and keep our state strong and
free,” the Florida GOP wrote. “Looking forward to a BIG win!” 

_[__CHRISTOPHER MATHIAS _
[[link removed]]_is a reporter at
Talking Points Memo covering the far right and the author of To Catch
A Fascist: The Fight To Expose The Radical Right. Previously a senior
reporter at HuffPost, he’s done work for MSNBC, Zeteo, and WNYC. His
reporting chronicled the rapid radicalization of the GOP, and has
helped unmask white supremacist cops, soldiers, teachers, and
politicians. Mathias was a Deadline Awards finalist for feature
writing. He lives in New York and goes by @LetsGoMathias on BlueSky
and X ]_

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