Suzanne Downing: Matt Schultz signs off by saying Republicans love fascists, Trump is a rapist, and oil is evil

By SUZANNE DOWNING

July 22, 2026 – Matt Schultz has withdrawn from Alaska’s race for Congress, but before leaving the stage, the downtown Anchorage Presbyterian minister delivered a searing political benediction in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

His column, “Why I decided to end my campaign for congress,” was signed by him as a “reverend,” but it was less “love your neighbor” and more like “condemn your neighbor.” Especially if that neighbor happens to vote Republican.

Schultz began his farewell missive by declaring that his campaign was rooted in the Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbor. A few paragraphs later, he accused the Republican Party, and, by extension, the tens of millions of ordinary Americans who support it, of  “fascism.”

There are Republicans sitting in the pews of Schultz’s own Fairbanks congregation. They may want to pay particular attention to what their pastor says about them when he is speaking to a political audience.

Schultz also compared today’s Republicans to those who enabled the rise of the Nazis, writing that “moderation is complicity.” It was his way of warning Democrats against moving toward the political center after his party pressured its leading congressional candidate out of the race.

For the record, the Nazis called themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. A political organization’s chosen name does not settle its ideology, of course, but neither does Schultz’s decision to call Republicans “fascists” make it true.

Republicans have been rather good to Alaska.

President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act in 1958 and issued the proclamation making Alaska the 49th state in 1959. President Richard Nixon signed both the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, clearing the way for construction of the pipeline that transformed Alaska’s economy.

President Donald Trump has reopened Alaska’s resource opportunities after the Biden administration spent four years locking them away. Trump’s “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” order directed federal agencies to advance oil, gas, mining and the Alaska LNG project, while reversing Biden-era restrictions.

That is not the record of a party supposedly bent on destroying Alaska’s democracy.

But Schultz was only warming up. He got down and dirty.

“The president of the United States is a rapist, a fraud, is mentally and cognitively unfit, and needs to be impeached,” he wrote.

He declared that “ICE is racist.” He said, “Oil is burning us down and robbing us blind.” He accused Republicans of dragging Americans toward “enslavement to billionaires.”

This is the man Alaska Democrats just decided was too much even for them.

Schultz complains that Democrats helped push him out despite his having been the leading Democrat in the congressional race. That part is important. The party did not reject him because he lacked passion, organization or support. It rejected him because Democrats understand that his message would be political suicide in a statewide Alaska election.

Alaska still runs on oil. Our Permanent Fund was built with oil wealth. Our schools, roads, public safety and local governments have been supported by petroleum revenue for decades. Thousands of Alaska families depend directly or indirectly upon the industry Schultz says is “robbing us blind.”

If Schultz believes oil is evil, he should explain how he plans to heat Fairbanks homes at 40 below, keep airplanes flying to rural Alaska and replace billions of dollars in state revenue. Sermons are easy, Matt. Governing requires arithmetic.

His “enslavement to billionaires” rhetoric is equally overwrought. Americans face real economic pressures, especially from housing, food and energy costs, but the latest Census Bureau figures do not depict a nation being marched into economic bondage. Real median household income was $83,730 in 2024, statistically unchanged from $82,690 in 2023 and roughly even with the pre-pandemic 2019 level.

While it’s clear to all of us that life is far from perfect in America, there is not enslavement to billionaires.

What Schultz produced was a catalogue of the most aggressive claims of the activist left that controls the Democratic Party: Republicans are fascists, Trump is a rapist, ICE is racist, oil is evil, billionaires are enslaving us and moderation is collaboration with Nazis.

And he wrapped all of it in the language of Christian love.

Here’s who endorsed the crazed Matt Schultz for Congress:

Alaska may have dodged a bullet when Schultz left the congressional race. But clearly we have some wing nuts among us.

Democratic strategists apparently concluded that Alaska voters were not ready for the full Democrat program, so they cleared the way for Bill Hill—the Mary Peltola male-model candidate. Hill can present himself as independent-minded or “undeclared,” avoid emphasizing the Democratic label and attempt to sound moderate enough to survive a statewide contest.

It is the familiar Alaska Democrat formula: Campaign as a centrist, rely on the Democratic political apparatus and caucus with the Democrats after the election.

Schultz rejects that strategy. He wants Democrats to say openly what the activist wing of the party believes. In that sense, he may be more candid than the people who pushed him aside.

His column also revealed why they pushed him aside.

Near the end, Schultz returned to his promise to continue serving his church and advocating the ethic of “love your neighbor.” But calling one’s Republican neighbors and congregation members fascists and comparing them with Nazi collaborators is not love. It is dehumanization wearing a clerical collar.

Before delivering another lecture about the moral failures of millions of Americans, Schultz might crack open his Bible and revisit Matthew 7—the passage about attending to the log in one’s own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else’s.

A pastor need not agree with every member of his congregation. He should, however, recognize them as human beings rather than as promoters of  fascism.

Schultz’s farewell column was an angry partisan sermon against everything Alaska stands for.

Perfectly on-brand for today’s Alaska Democrats—just far too honest about it to win.

Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan.