An influencer who played a key role in hoax claims that James Talarico was in a mental health facility has a long history of social media posts that favorably invoke Nazi Germany, express antisemitism and anti-Black racism, criticize miscegenation and call for “remigration” of refugees.
On X, the Lake Oswego, Oregon, resident Ryan Amacher, known online as Rhein Amacher, has described Muslims as “sub-human”, claimed that Black Africans are “monkeys” with low IQ, characterized immigrants as “vermin” and expressed support for the far right, including Germany’s AfD and the UK’s Tommy Robinson.
His attempt to damage Talarico’s campaign with false claims about a supposed inpatient admission to an Ohio facility fell apart quickly on Sunday night, but not before his claims were boosted by a staffer on the campaign of Talarico’s Republican rival, Ken Paxton. Since working for the Trump campaign in 2024, he has remained in the milieu of Republican politics and rightwing influencers.
Neither Amacher nor the Paxton campaign responded to requests for comment.
Last week, Amacher phoned the Lindner Center of Hope, a psychiatric hospital in Mason, Ohio, three times, trying to confirm a false rumor that Talarico had been admitted there. The rumor apparently began with a 9 October post by an anonymous X account, TickleTexts, which claimed Talarico had been “hospitalized at Lindner Center for HOPE”, and was picked up by the Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren, who falsely tied it to a private flight between Ohio and Austin. Before calling, Amacher had posted as fact that Talarico “was hospitalized at the @LindnerCtrHope” and tagged the hospital asking it to confirm.
In the full recording of the second call, he gives his name as “Tim”, says he wants to send a care package to his cousin, and offers a four-digit patient code. “I simply made one up (2244) in an attempt to bypass the facility’s security restrictions to discuss the patient,” he later wrote on X. For most of the six-minute call the employee tells him she has no record of Talarico. In its final seconds she says a man that looks like Talarico “was just discharged this evening”.
An excerpt of the recording was incorporated into a 47-second clip that Nick Sortor posted on Sunday afternoon under the headline “Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week”. Amacher posted his own version minutes later, and Elon Musk replied with a characteristic “!!”. Amacher had first offered the recording to Blaze Media and the Daily Mail, which reportedly declined to run it, and said in an X Space that evening that influencers are “not held to the same journalistic standards”. By Tuesday he had reportedly pulled out of an interview with the writer and podcaster Jesse Singal, saying his attorney had given him a “stand down order”.
The purported legal advice coincides with coverage of the fiasco, which has included speculation that Amacher’s attempt to access private health information may land him in legal trouble.
Previous coverage, however, has not probed Amacher’s long history of extremist commentary.
‘Modern Freikorps volunteers are needed’
Amacher often invokes Nazi Germany, and the paramilitary movement that preceded it, with apparent admiration.
“In 1919, Germany’s defeated soldiers came home only to be stabbed in the back by socialists and communists who wanted to burn the nation down and install a Soviet-style dictatorship,” he wrote on 29 July, over an AI-generated image of German soldiers beneath Soviet flags beside uniformed men under crescent moons at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. In a follow-up post he wrote: “Modern Freikorps volunteers are needed to step up to purge the German nation of the filth destroying it from within.” An AI-generated image accompanying it showed a masked soldier wearing “Freikorps” and “Deutsches Reich” patches, with the black, white and red flag of imperial Germany flying over the Reichstag.
The Freikorps were paramilitary units of demobilized soldiers that crushed leftwing uprisings in Germany after the first world war. In January 1919, Freikorps troops murdered the communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In June, Amacher told critics to “read up on the German Freikorps after 1919–and what became of Luxemburg and Liebknecht”.
“History has a way of repeating itself when revolutionary movements collide with a nation pushed to the brink,” he added. The Freikorps are widely seen as an ideological ancestor of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, though he later turned against them.
In July, replying to a post that said “we fought the wrong enemy in WW2, just like General Patton said before the jews assassinated him in 1945”, Amacher wrote: “We should have immediately re-armed the German Wehrmacht and auxiliary troops and joined forces to defeat Soviet communism, once and for all!”
Patton died in December 1945 after a car crash in occupied Germany; conspiratorial claims that he was assassinated have long been debunked.
When fellow influencer Cam Higby complained in February that saying Nick Shirley was not a Nazi had led others to call him one, Amacher replied that “a colleague’s great-grandfather served as a paramilitary adjunct in Germany’s ‘other’ military force (not the Wehrmacht)”. He went on: “By your logic, does that make him a Nazi? Asking for a friend…” and attaching an “OK” emoji.
He has captioned a photo of a figure skater with her right arm raised “Heil yes!” and offered to recruit a man “straight into my elite Panzer division”. Panzer divisions were armored tank units in Nazi Germany’s army. In July 2025 he joked that his ancestors “fled to Argentina as well, but way back in 1945, departing from the Deutsches Reich”.
He has also called for the return of the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, writing: “Bring back Francisco Franco!” in July under a post claiming that “African military-aged males by the THOUSANDS” were entering the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. And he has praised Germany’s AfD, which the country’s domestic intelligence agency labeled a “confirmed rightwing extremist” force last year. “The @AfD is the ONLY party left that will actually SAVE Germany from destruction,” he wrote in April. “We will restore traditional German societal norms, identity, and culture.”
‘He looks like a Jew’
In January, replying to a post attacking the San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener, Amacher wrote: “He looks like a Jew–I’m guessing he is a Jew!,” and included a nose emoji.
In May 2025, after another user wrote of a man that “He’s also jewish, no surprise there”, Amacher replied: “A ginger Jew? Worst of both worlds…” Under a December post blaming Somali Muslims in Minnesota for “the largest theft of tax payer dollars in American History”, he wrote: “Both peoples are despicable, but the Somalis are ahead of the Jews by far!”
He has told a pro-Israel account that it was “a hollowed-out puppet dancing on Zionist strings” whose loyalty was “to a parasitic regime halfway across the world”, and written that “Zionist infiltrators have sunk their claws deep into U.S. policy”.
Another recurring subject is George Soros, the Jewish financier who is a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Amacher has called him “a spawn of the Devil himself”, and in February 2025 wrote that Soros “allegedly turned in his own people during WWII just to save his own skin”, a claim factcheckers have repeatedly debunked.
‘Monkeys typically have an estimated IQ below 70’
In June, TickleTexts, the anonymous account that started the Talarico rumor, baselessly claimed, “as a born South African”, that “some villages believe r*ping a 6 month old baby girl will cure their AIDS”. Amacher replied: “Monkeys typically have an estimated IQ below 70.”
Replying in January to a post about a Somali asylum seeker who, it claimed, had raped a 10-year-old girl in Denmark, he wrote: “Seriously, f*ck international obligations! These people are sub-human animals meant for zoos for viewing purposes only!” In February, he wrote that a dog said to have led police in Louisville, Kentucky, to a missing three-year-old had “demonstrated an intelligence far superior to that of any illegal Somali invader!”
In June, he credited Nick Shirley, whose videos about Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota set off a national panic, with exposing a “mastermind” who, Amacher wrote, had “funded the savage, low-IQ black Tusken Raiders fleecing Minnesota taxpayers”. In January, under a post about Trump’s claim that fraud in Minnesota could reach $80bn, he proposed “one-way, remigration flights back to Somalia as starters!”
‘Future super predators in the making’
In June 2025, after another user told the Hodgetwins, a pair of Black conservative YouTubers, that they were “NO longer welcome”, Amacher wrote: “I’m waiting for their response of, ‘hey sorry, blame it on my negro brain!’”
On 7 October he replied to a comment about “the white girl in the front” of an image: “Getting strong mudshark vibes with that one.” “Mudshark” is a racist slur for a white woman who partners with Black men.
Last November, under a post about “a mob of black ‘kids’” accused of attacking a pregnant woman in Chicago, he wrote: “F*cking savages and future super predators in the making!” In May, replying to a post about a weekend of shootings in Chicago, he wrote: “You can’t override biology or selectively breed out the ‘predator’ gene in certain populations.”
In June, under a post claiming that “the biggest scandal in American history” was “convincing millions of people that Michelle Obama is beautiful”, Amacher wrote: “Hey now–‘BIG Mike’ ain’t playing around! No monkey business here…” The reference to “Big Mike” probably comes from a baseless conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama is a man.
That month, Karmelo Anthony was convicted of murder in Texas for the 2025 stabbing of a fellow student, 17-year-old Austin Metcalf. Replying to a video of a crowd of Anthony’s supporters, most of them Black, outside the trial, Amacher wrote: “I hope none of these animals breed.”
‘Remigration is the ONLY answer’
Since November 2025, Amacher has used the word “remigration” in more than 30 posts. The term, promoted by Europe’s far right, describes the mass deportation of migrants; plans discussed at a meeting in Potsdam attended by AfD members included people with German citizenship. Last month Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, accused the AfD of pursuing an “ethnic cleansing” policy.
“The word for 2026 is remigration!” Amacher posted in January. Asked by another user in November 2025 what should happen to Muslims in America, he replied: “Remigration to native homelands for those with insufficient loyalties.” In April he shared an AfD video with the comment: “Remigration is the ONLY answer–great video by the @AfD!”
In June, under a post complaining about the Muslim call to prayer in Dearborn, Michigan, he wrote: “These sub-humans must be forcibly extracted from America and shipped off in crates back to the Middle East.”
He has also cheered Jake Lang, a pardoned January 6 rioter who has led anti-Muslim protests. Replying last November to a post about clashes between Muslim residents and Christian protesters in Dearborn, where rightwing influencers have staged anti-Islam rallies, Amacher wrote: “Jake is the general leading our generation’s Crusade to save our nation’s cultural identity and heritage. Brave, fearsome, and ready to drive out the foreign invaders!” When Lang led a protest in Plano, Texas, in December “against the Islamic takeover of America”, Amacher tagged him in a post calling him “the leader for the next Crusades!” On 21 December he wrote that he had texted Lang to confirm he was “not Jewish”. Earlier this month, he posted: “We need another Crusades–except on our own home turf!”
Two national guard members were shot in Washington DC last November, and an Afghan man, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was arrested as the suspect. That evening Amacher wrote that the attacker “should be publicly executed in Lafayette Square using bacon grease, with the entire nation watching”. He added: “This will send a clear message to third world invaders that we will not tolerate their presence!”
Other posts urge that migrants be shot, or rounded up by ordinary citizens. Under a June 2025 post by the British far-right activist Tommy Robinson about a defaced statue of Joan of Arc in Paris, he wrote: “These invaders don’t deserve deportation–better yet, shoot them and save the cost!” This June he wrote that “those uncivilized savages can leave Britain on their own–or be removed at gunpoint by a mob of furious native Britons”.
Replying in April to Nick Sortor’s post that “hard choices are going to have to be made soon”, he wrote that if the federal government would not deport “these third-world invaders, then we, the American people, will have no choice but to hunt them down ourselves, round them up like the illegal trash they are, and throw their asses back across the border where they belong!”
“Bounty hunters get paid to track down bail jumpers and hand them over,” he wrote in July. “We should be able to do the exact same thing with illegal immigrants–hunt them down, turn them in to @ICEgov, and get rewarded.”
Public records show Amacher has used two first names. Oregon business filings list Ryan David Amacher, at a house in Lake Oswego, as the registered agent of Amacher & Company LLC, formed in 2012. In 2018, a letter from “Ryan Amacher” calling for the repeal of US immigration law drew a rebuttal in the Lake Oswego Review. By 2024 he was signing himself Rhein: federal campaign finance records list “Rhein Amacher”, at the same address, as the company’s president, and his columns in the Review now carry that name. Last year a Portland police dispatcher logged a call from “RYAN AMACHER” at the city’s ICE facility, while officers ran a records check on “Rhein David” Amacher. The Daily Mail has reported that his “real name is Ryan”.
Until now, Amacher has been a lower-tier player in a rightwing influencer economy whose currency includes live streams of contentious events, tendentious coverage of perceived political foes, and disinformation campaigns.
Even now, his social media following is relatively modest. His biggest platform is X, where his follower count (about 35,000) is dwarfed by those of similar rightwing creators such as Nick Shirley (1.8m), Nick Sortor (1.6m) and Katie Daviscourt (512,000).
His first brushes with broader notoriety came during anti-ICE protests in his native Portland, Oregon, last year, when his antagonism toward protesters extended to the self-confessed theft of leaf blowers and other items from an abandoned protest camp.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
