GOP returns dues from ‘racist’ Ryan challenger

Wisconsin Republicans collectively said Tuesday that they’d had it with the primary challenger to House Speaker Paul Ryan, saying Paul Nehlen is a racist who doesn’t belong in the GOP.

Republican county offices are returning or donating to charity dues received from Nehlen, who had his Twitter account suspended after posting a series of outrageous tweets in recent weeks. Nehlen has used the racist and anti-Semitic posting to help his campaign raise funds and, in turn, pay his wife a salary.

“Paul Nehlen is not a member of the Republican Party of Wisconsin,” GOP spokesman Alec Zimmerman said. “Nehlen and his ideas have no place in the Republican Party.”

State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), who lives in the 1st Congressional District currently held by Ryan, was even more blunt.

“I didn’t read all of (Nehlen’s) comments. But it looks to me like he’s a racist bigot,” said Vos, a longtime Ryan supporter. “I don’t want him as part of my party.”

Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign agreed. “The governor has always supported Paul Ryan, and stood against racist comments like this and those who make them,” spokesman Nathan Craft said in an email.

Nehlen drew international criticism over the weekend for tweeting an image that replaced the mixed-race fiancée of Prince Harry with a dark-skinned prehistoric Briton known as “Cheddar Man.”

“Honey, does this tie make my face look pale?” Nehlen tweeted along with the image, which the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is not sharing.

Last month, Nehlen provoked outrage by making anti-Semitic tweets and then posting the contact information of ordinary citizens who called and emailed to berate him.

Nehlen responded to his critics in kind late Tuesday, calling them “traitorous, spineless apparatchiks.”

“The Republican Party of Wisconsin is not Scott Walker and Robin Vos’ personal cartel, and I will not be lectured to on conservative values by self-righteous prigs who have managed to conserve nothing,” Nehlen said in an email.

Nehlen has been promoted in the past by the website Breitbart and its then-leader Steve Bannon, and even by President Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. But Nehlen was trounced by Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2016 and has since been denounced even by Breitbart for his increasingly extreme tone.

But that hasn’t kept Nehlen from continuing to campaign, raise money and pay his wife a salary of $13,000 over three months — a highly unusual move for a candidate.