Marshall Rawson, the Republican nominee for Florida’s House District 10, attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and marched alongside the neo-Confederate League of the South, according to a new investigation.
Video footage reviewed by Talking Points Memo shows Rawson and his now-wife being greeted by name by League of the South members at the rally, which was billed as the nation’s largest white supremacist gathering.
A photo obtained by the outlet shows Rawson standing near James Alex Fields Jr., the neo-Nazi who shortly afterward drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Rawson’s attendance at the rally had not previously been reported.
Rawson, 34, won an upset primary victory on Aug. 18, just over a week after Florida Politics reported on his yearslong history with the League of the South, which he has acknowledged but downplayed as opposition to “unfettered immigration” and defense of Confederate monuments.
He has not denounced the group, which was founded to pursue a “national divorce” of Southern states and whose leader has described himself as “a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite.”
TPM’s investigation additionally found that Rawson received more than $15,000 in campaign donations from dozens of people with documented ties to white nationalist organizations, including the League of the South’s Florida chapter leader, a former KKK lawyer, and a man who attended the Charlottesville rally’s torch march.
One donor was arrested at the 2017 rally for carrying an unpermitted firearm.
TPM also uncovered indications that Rawson operated a pseudonymous X account from 2017 to 2020 that advocated public lynchings, writing in 2018 that “multiculturalism kills and public lynchings worked.”
Rawson has also posted bigoted statements under his own name, including comments defending slavery and endorsing the death penalty for gay people in Uganda.
In a statement to TPM, Rawson said he does not screen his donors and that any contribution “is presumably an endorsement of my agenda and not my campaign’s endorsement of a donor’s views.”
Neither the Florida Republican Party nor the national GOP responded to requests for comment.
Rawson is considered heavily favored to win the general election in November in the conservative North Florida district.
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