Minnesota Reformer

GOP Congressional campaign staffer ousted for dark comment: 'I hate Trump'

In March, from a now-deleted account, Austin Brown posted on an X thread:

“You hate Trump because you think he’s Hitler
I hate Trump because he’s not Hitler.
We are not the same.”

Just two months later, Brown was on the payroll for Republican state Sen. Eric Pratt’s campaign for the 2nd Congressional District, according to public campaign spending filings. Brown said he was Pratt’s field director, according to a now-deleted post, which was released by the campaign of Matt Little, Pratt’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor opponent.

Little’s campaign released screenshots of several other of Brown’s antisemitic, anti-Muslim, racist and homophobic social media posts. In other posts, Brown describes himself as a white nationalist and a “groyper,” a term referring to far-right supporters of the far-right, antisemitic commentator Nick Fuentes.

Little’s campaign held a press conference on Brown on Thursday and within hours Pratt announced Brown’s resignation.

“The central theme of my campaign has been stability over chaos,” Pratt said in a statement. “Throughout my career, I have prided myself on the ability to lead with compassion, accountability and focus. I have always been clear that antisemitism, racism, and discrimination of any kind have no place in our politics or our communities.”

Brown did not respond to an Instagram message for comment. His other social media accounts appear deleted or were otherwise inaccessible. Pratt’s campaign also did not respond to emailed questions.

Republican politics have been roiled in recent years by the injection of far-right extremism into its professional political class. Politico reported last year, for instance, on Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont that were openly racist and antisemitic. The conservative writer Ron Dreher said he’s been told that as many as 30 or 40% of Gen Z congressional and administration staffers are so-called groypers.

The south metro 2nd Congressional District, currently held by U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, is Minnesota’s most competitive. In 2024, over $13.3 million was spent on the race, most of which supported Craig’s campaign, down from over $31 million in 2022, according to campaign spending tracker OpenSecrets. Craig turned the district blue in 2018 and has won close races ever since, widening her victory in 2024 despite the Republicans’ victory nationwide.

Craig announced last year she was not running for reelection. She lost a Democratic primary for U.S. Senate last month to Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan.

According to campaign spending filings, Pratt’s campaign paid $10,500 to Austin Brown from May to July.

Little is the former two-term mayor of Lakeville who represented the area in the state Senate from 2016 to 2020, when he lost to a Republican. Little positioned himself as the progressive candidate in his party’s three-way primary election.

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

The man with the hoe

Editor’s note: American poet and educator Edwin Markham wrote the following poem after seeing Jean-François Millet’s painting “L’homme à la houe” (“Man with a Hoe”). It was published in the San Francisco Examiner in January 1899 after an editor heard Markham recite it at a New Year’s Eve party. It was reprinted in periodical across the country and included in “The Cry for Justice,” an anthology of humanist writing edited by Upton Sinclair. The anthology, published in 1915, was referred to as “a new Bible,” which Sinclair called a “Gospel of the new hope of the race … a book to cheer the discouraged and console the wounded in humanity’s last war of liberation.”

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul—
More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on Facebook and Twitter.