Florida voters elect Republican who marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville

A right-wing extremist who once cheered the prospect of executing gay people just won a seat in the Florida Legislature.

Republican Marshall Rawson won 68.15 percent of the vote in Florida House District 10, easily beating Democrat Merrillee Malwitz Jipson in deep red North Florida. His victory was widely expected in the heavily Republican district. But in August, Rawson won the GOP primary for the open seat in a surprise victory over Chase Brannan, the son of retiring Florida Rep. Chuck Brannan.

Some of his extremist rhetoric had been reported in local outlets like Clay News & Views, which in January spotlighted a 2023 post on Twitter, now X, in which Rawson shared a report on Uganda charging men with “aggravated homosexuality.” Responding to the prospect of the men facing the death penalty, Rawson wrote, “This is how you would run the pervs and miscreants out of Florida.”

Florida Politics reported on Rawson’s lengthy involvement with the League of the South, which has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2000. He also criticized the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and posted that “taking old dead communist heroes of the past and dressing them up as Christian Conservatives isn’t conservatism, it’s defeatism.”

After Rawson’s primary win, his extremist ties drew national scrutiny. In September, Talking Points Memo published an investigation into the citrus farmer’s background beyond agriculture.

TPM documented his attendance at the notorious Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Virginia in 2017. Video showed Rawson marching at the white supremacist gathering, while a photograph showed him standing near James Alex Fields Jr., who was later sentenced to life in prison for driving a vehicle into a crowd of counterprotesters at the event and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

The investigation also found that Rawson’s campaign received more than $15,000 in donations from individuals with ties to white nationalist organizations or documented histories of extremist, racist activism.

In response to TPM’s questions, Rawson said his activism involved defending historical monuments. He also said he did not screen donors and argued that their contributions did not amount to his campaign endorsing their views.

His social media history also includes attacks on transgender people and women who work in traditionally maledominated professions. Florida Politics highlighted a July 2024 Facebook post in which he invoked actress Melissa McCarthy to disparage a female Secret Service agent following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

“There would be no wide spread gender dysphoria and all the things that come with that in society if we had not begun allowing and encouraging the Melissa McCarthy’s of the world to do a man’s job — yes I said it,” Rawson wrote in the post. “There is no beating around it. There is nothing decent, conservative or wholesome about encouraging women to do men’s work. It is not only ok for men to act like men and women to act like women — it is much better for everyone involved.”