Trump Campaign Ads Are Monetizing Pro-Nazi Content on Rumble

Tim Dickinson
·8 min read
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Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is running online advertising to raise cash for 2024 — and a portion of that ad spending is monetizing pro-Nazi content on the streaming service Rumble, Rolling Stone has observed.

In a short video ad that plays before select videos on Rumble, Trump makes a pitch to the MAGA masses to help him counter “crooked Joe Biden” by donating to his 2024 campaign: “I am very humbly asking if you could chip in $5, $10, or even $25.” Trump vows that donors will help him “win back the White House” and “make America great again, greater than ever before, I promise you that.”

On Monday, Trump ads were being served up at the beginning of a new Rumble video by the reactionary broadcaster Stew Peters. In that video, Peters touts Adolf Hitler as “a hero” for the horrific Nazi book burnings of the 1930s, calling the violent display of cultural erasure “awesome.” Peters even advocates a modern reenactment of the fiery Nazi spectacle, seeking retribution against what he falsely paints as a Jewish-led conspiracy to “make us surrender” to LGBTQ acceptance and sexual “degeneracy.”

It should be shocking for any American presidential candidate’s advertising to appear alongside pro-Nazi content. Yet in the context of the 2024 campaign, there are few surprises when it comes to open fascism. Trump has in recent months echoed Hitler himself by claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, and polls show such fascist rhetoric has been avidly received by MAGA supporters.

Peters, likewise, has been undergoing a steep slide into fascism. A failed rapper and former bounty hunter, he found success in far-right media, particularly on Rumble, where The Stew Peters Network has more than 500,000 followers. But what began as Peters promoting dark conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccine soon morphed into calls for Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden to be hanged. In response to the Israel-Gaza war, Peters began spouting anti-Zionism, mixed with far uglier antisemitism. He soon dropped any pretext by hosting Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his show to “expose international Jewry,” as well as by platforrming the neo-Nazi leader of the “Goyim Defense League.”

Why are Trump campaign ads monetizing Peters’ explicitly pro-Nazi content? The campaign lays responsibility for placement of the advertising with Rumble. A spokesperson for the Trump campaign tells Rolling Stone: “We aren’t picking any particular video or channel to run ads on, and we are not given visibility into every single ad that is served during every video. Rumble is ultimately responsible for the ads that are served on any given video on their platform.”

The Trump advertising links out to a landing page seeking donations that benefit the Trump Save America joint fundraising committee. The fundraising arm benefits both Trump’s official 2024 campaign and Save America, his “leadership PAC,” which is helping pay off the former president’s astonishing array of legal bills. The URL for the donation page includes the words “generic,” ”rumble,” and “video,” lending credence to a lack of targeting.

Rumble touts its streaming service as an “unapologetically free-speech platform” that is “content neutral” and “designed to be immune to cancel culture.” The company’s early investors include J.D. Vance, now a GOP senator from Ohio, who is said to be in the mix for Trump’s 2024 running mate. As a YouTube alternative popular with far-right and cultural-outcast creators, Rumble hosts controversial figures including Andrew Tate and Russell Brand. Last year, it suffered a public flight of advertisers who chose not to be associated with such content.

Rumble did not respond to multiple emails from Rolling Stone about whether the platform has guardrails to avoid placing a presidential campaign ads against pro-Hitler content, or whether individual advertisers can choose to block certain content or creators.

In an FAQ for Rumble investors, the company says it offers both “programmatic and non-programmatic” advertising — that is, advertising placed by computer algorithm and not. The Trump campaign statement refers to its use of “run of network inventory” — a term of art for untargeted, computer allocated advertising — meaning its ads “appear on any video the algorithm serves.” The Trump campaign did not answer questions about whether it has any concerns about its advertising relationship with Rumble or qualms about helping Peters monetize his pro-Nazi views.

In the March 8 video where the Trump campaign ads appeared, Peters leaped over the fascist line he’s been towing, and landed squarely in pro-Nazi territory. The title of Peters’ video is chockablock with buzzwords that a responsible advertiser might choose to avoid: “America TRANSforms Into Weimar 2.0: Nazi’s BURNED LGBT Propaganda To Cleanse Germany.”

During the broadcast, Peters blasts the “Weimar conditions” in the contemporary United States and insists they must be met by “Weimar solutions.” Weimar is a reference to the German Weimar Republic that was overthrown by the Nazis. Peters praises the horrific Nazi campaign of book burning that was enacted shortly after Hitler came to power, calling it “one of the first remedies that Hitler and the National Socialists had to offer” to what Peters described as a Weimar era of “complete and total degeneracy” and “sexual perversion,” which had been encouraged, he claimed, by a government and culture “ruled” by Jews.

In Peters’ twisted telling of this dark history, Nazis across Germany united to “storm perverted libraries, perverted bookstores, and burn all of their transgender manuals, all of their porn, all of their disgusting literature on leading homosexual lifestyles.” (The Nazis infamously also burned books by Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, and Hellen Keller.) Peters said the Nazis “did exactly what reasonable people would do if given the opportunity,” and insisted of the book burning: “It was justified. It was great. It was awesome. Period. Point blank.”

Peters used his show to voice denial about the Holocaust — claiming war “propaganda” made it impossible for him to know if Hitler was really “a ruthless person that murdered millions” — before returning to the book burning campaign. Peters asked of the Nazi leader, “Wasn’t he a hero?” for enacting it, elaborating: “Wasn’t Hitler doing the right thing when he ordered these books to be burned and these places to be stormed by force?”

Leaving no doubt about his own dark agenda, Peters called for a modern reenactment. “I want to see people on horseback storming the school libraries and collecting these books — and the people who push them,” he said, adding that the bonfires would serve as “a public societal cleansing ceremony.” But Peters does not want to stop with spectacle: “We will burn their books, we’ll burn their ideas to the ground. And then we’ll put them on trial, and they’ll be held accountable for their assault on humanity, and the rape and murder of childhood innocence. No quarter for parasites. Maximum accountability. Extreme accountability is the only remedy here. Kill it with fire.”

(Full disclosure: Peters has previously called on this reporter to be publicly hanged — after a trial for “mass psyops” — as part of his agenda for “extreme accountability.”)

Rumble’s terms of service supposedly prohibit creators from posting content that is “abusive, inciting violence, harassing, harmful, hateful, antisemitic, racist or threatening.” It’s unclear how much Peters makes from his Rumble broadcasts, or if monetization of his videos has ever been in jeopardy. Peters is currently preparing to launch a new show called Uncancelable.

The evening after this article was published, Peters posted a show segment titled “Rolling Stone TARGETS Stew Over Weimar TRUTH.” Peters doubled down on his description of Nazi book burning as a “heroic act,” but he added: “That’s not to say that Hitler was a hero; that’s not to say Hitler and his cronies didn’t do bad things. Of course they did. Everyone did. It was a war!” (Peters also insisted that media “vultures” like Rolling Stone are “in league with Satan.”) In a quote provided to Rolling Stone, Peters continued to advocate modern-day book burning: “If you’re like Rolling Stone and you’re NOT advocating for the mass burning of perverted, pedophilic and/or pornographic content, you are COMPLICIT in child sexual exploitation.”

Rumble is hardly alone in keeping Peters’ content in circulation. He is active on Telegram. Despite a vow by X execs to stamp out antisemitism, Peters posts and streams regularly at Elon Musk’s platform. He even has an Instagram channel that is brimming with antisemitic content.

Ironically, while Trump ads run against his show, Peters does not take a kind view of the former president, whom he claims “bows to his Zionist masters.” In recent days Peters has been posting memes of Trump mugging with a menorah and a cartoon of Trump pulling apart his shirt to reveal a Star of David where a Superman ‘S’ might go. In a caption to the cartoon, Peters writes of Trump: “America FIRST… after Israel of course. 🇮🇱🇺🇸.”

Update, Mar. 15: This story has been updated to reflect Peters’ latest remarks and statement to Rolling Stone.

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