jon husted's political director spent 2018 dressed as an ss soldier, and the firing came the hour a reporter called

via The Washington Post, reported out by The Hill, with Mediaite, the Washington Examiner and The Advocate.

Senator Jon Husted of Ohio hired a 25-year-old named Stephen Woytek to run political operations for his reelection campaign in August. On Friday, the Washington Post called the campaign to ask about Woytek's Facebook profile photo. By the end of the day Woytek did not work there anymore, which is a hiring process running in reverse and at roughly four times the speed.

what the post actually found

The profile photo, set in 2018, showed soldiers of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the division that started life as Hitler's personal bodyguard. Not a generic wartime picture. That specific unit.

Then there is the Spotify account carrying Woytek's name and photograph, which made a public playlist titled "Tales From Rhodesia," described in the blurb as "homesick for a place that no longer exists." Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe. The place that no longer exists is white minority rule, and the playlist includes a song containing a racial slur for African soldiers. Woytek also does historical reenactment, portraying both the SS division and Union soldiers in the Civil War, and told the Post he does not embrace Nazi ideology and takes part to educate younger generations. Every reenactor we have met found a way to teach the youth that did not require the bodyguard division specifically.

who husted is when nobody is calling

The reason this lands on our desk and not just the politics desk is the man who signed the hire. Equality Ohio gave Husted a D in 2018. He voted for Ohio's same-sex marriage bans in the state House in 2003. In December 2023 he publicly went after Governor Mike DeWine for vetoing the SAFE Act, the bill that would have pulled trans kids out of girls' sports and cut off gender-affirming care for minors. He championed House Bill 8, which makes schools notify parents when a child identifies as LGBTQ and lets parents pull their kids out of anything touching sexuality. His defense of it, to The Advocate: "It's about creating the right kind of culture in our state."

Appointed in January 2025 to finish JD Vance's term, Husted now faces Sherrod Brown in November. He is running on the right kind of culture. The right kind of culture ran his field program until a reporter picked up a phone.

the part about the timing

Nobody at that campaign looked at a Facebook profile before handing a man the political director job. The picture had been sitting there since 2018, publicly, on the internet, where pictures live. The firing was not a discovery. It was a response to being observed, and those are different events that happen to look alike from the outside.

Ohio, meanwhile, keeps producing the other thing too. Two people in that state started with a $500 grant and shipped 580 boxes of care to trans Ohioans this year, which is roughly the entire ideological range of one state in two items.