An AP review found racial slurs, antisemitic material and posts minimizing Nazi Germany inside the online community controlled by Nevada Republican congressional candidate Marty O’Donnell.
Marty O’Donnell built a fan base composing music for Halo. Now he is running for Congress with Trump’s endorsement, calling himself the “benevolent dictator” of an online community where Associated Press reporters found Nazi talk, racial slurs and white-nationalist conspiracy theories.
The forum is called “The Marty Army,” and it began as a community for fans of O’Donnell’s gaming work. As his political profile grew, the group also became a campaign organizing space.
AP reviewed thousands of posts and found antisemitic content, coded extremist language, racial slurs and comments defending or minimizing Nazi Germany. Some users also promoted white-nationalist conspiracy theories.
O’Donnell says he rejects hate speech and has banned roughly 200 users from the community. His campaign says moderators work to remove offensive material, but AP found that substantial amounts of hateful content remained visible.
Then there is the photo. O’Donnell previously posted an image of himself wearing a Benito Mussolini mask, which his campaign says was not intended as praise for the Italian fascist dictator.
That explanation may be accurate, but it also creates the sort of sentence no congressional communications director enjoys typing: “The Mussolini mask was not an endorsement.”
O’Donnell has described himself as the forum’s “benevolent dictator,” apparently as a joke about moderating the community. In a vacuum, that is goofy internet branding. Next to Nazi apologetics and a Mussolini mask, the joke acquires some extremely inconvenient lighting.
The candidate is running against Democratic Rep. Susie Lee in a competitive Nevada district and has Trump’s endorsement. His campaign has tried to present him as an outsider bringing entrepreneurial and creative-industry experience into politics.
The online community complicates that pitch because campaigns are judged not only by what candidates personally say but also by the spaces they cultivate and use to mobilize supporters. O’Donnell’s team argues that bad actors in a large forum do not speak for him.
That defense is not unreasonable. Anyone who has moderated a large online community knows that eventually somebody posts something deranged before breakfast.
But AP’s reporting is not about one random troll. The investigation found a recurring pattern of slurs, coded hate and Nazi-adjacent content inside a forum O’Donnell controls and actively uses for political purposes.
The campaign says enforcement has improved and points to the hundreds of users already banned. Critics say that if a candidate wants credit for commanding an online army, he also inherits questions about what the army keeps posting.
No evidence in the AP report shows O’Donnell personally endorsing Nazism or white nationalism. The story is about the content thriving in his community, his moderation of that space and his own past imagery.
Still, “Halo composer runs for Congress with Trump endorsement while moderating a forum full of Nazi arguments” is the kind of political sentence that would have sounded rejected by a television writers’ room ten years ago.
In 2026, it is apparently just Sunday.
