He never expected the recording to matter as much as it did. For years, Ryan Amacher—a Lake Oswego, Oregon resident who posts online as Rhein Amacher—had been just another voice in the crowded, angry world of right-wing social media, trading in outrage and conspiracy theories with modest reach. But on a Sunday night, his name briefly slipped into the national spotlight when an elaborate hoax involving a Democratic candidate’s mental health collapsed in public, exposing not only a failed smear but also a long, disturbing paper trail of extremism. Amacher had tried to manufacture a story by repeatedly calling a psychiatric hospital in Ohio, impersonating a relative, and then releasing a misleadingly edited audio clip to suggest that Texas politician James Talarico had been treated there. Within hours, the story unraveled. Yet the episode left behind a crucial question: how did someone with such a history—Nazi sympathies, antisemitic rants, anti-Black slurs, calls for mass deportation and violence—end up in the middle of a political dirty trick in the first place? The answer, hidden in plain sight across his social media history, is disturbing.
The mechanics of the hoax were clumsy, but they reveal a willingness to cross lines that most political operatives would not approach. Last week, Amacher phoned the Lindner Center of Hope, a psychiatric facility in Mason, Ohio, three times, trying to confirm a baseless rumor that Talarico had been admitted. The rumor had started with an anonymous X account called TickleTexts, which claimed Talarico was hospitalized. A Republican fundraiser named Caroline Wren then morphed it into a story about a private flight between Ohio and Austin. Amacher took the bait and ran with it. He called the hospital, identified himself as “Tim,” claimed to be a cousin sending a care package, and offered a fake four-digit patient code—2244—later admitting he made it up to bypass security. In a six-minute call, an employee repeatedly told him there was no record of Talarico under that name. But in the final seconds, she mentioned that a man who looked like Talarico had just been discharged that evening. That vague, likely unverified remark was enough. Amacher recorded the call, sliced it into a 47-second clip, and Nick Sortor—one of the larger right-wing influencers in the ecosystem—posted it under a headline claiming an Ohio mental hospital had confirmed Talarico’s discharge. Amacher posted his own version. Elon Musk weighed in with a now-familiar “!!”. The story ricocheted around the right-wing internet, boosted by a staffer working for Talarico’s rival, Ken Paxton. But by Monday, the whole thing had collapsed. Amacher had offered the recording to Blaze Media and the Daily Mail, both of which reportedly declined to run it. By Tuesday, he had pulled out of an interview with the journalist Jesse Singal, saying his attorney had given him a “stand down order.” The legal trouble was suddenly real: attempting to obtain private health information is no small matter, and the public was beginning to understand that the man behind the hoax had a history far darker than a tasteless political prank.
This was not an isolated slip or a moment of poor judgment. Amacher’s timeline is filled with a disturbing reverence for Nazi Germany and far-right movements that predated it. Over and over, he invoked the Freikorps—the paramilitary units of demobilized German soldiers who crushed left-wing uprisings after the First World War and murdered communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In July, he posted an AI-generated image of German soldiers beneath Soviet flags alongside a long comment about Germany’s defeat in 1919, writing that socialists and communists wanted to “burn the nation down and install a Soviet-style dictatorship.” Then came the chilling follow-up: “Modern Freikorps volunteers are needed to step up to purge the German nation of the filth destroying it from within.” Another AI image showed a masked soldier wearing “Freikorps” and “Deutsches Reich” patches, with the imperial flag flying over the Reichstag. When critics pushed back, he told them to read up on what the Freikorps did to Luxemburg and Liebknecht, adding: “History has a way of repeating itself.” The Freikorps are widely understood as ideological ancestors of Hitler’s Nazi party, and Amacher seemed to admire them for exactly that connection. He wrote that World War II should have ended with re-arming the German Wehrmacht and joining forces to defeat Soviet communism—a statement that not only ignores the Holocaust but repeats a long-debunked conspiracy about General Patton being assassinated by Jews. He made jokes about his ancestors fleeing to Argentina in 1945 from the “Deutsches Reich,” praised Germany’s far-right AfD party, and called for the return of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. He offered to recruit a man into his “elite Panzer division” and captioned a photo of a figure skater with her arm raised “Heil yes!” To call such comments merely provocative would be a profound understatement. These are the words of someone deeply immersed in the aesthetics and ideology of fascism, a person who sees violent paramilitary purges as a model for the present.
Amacher’s racism and antisemitism were equally unmistakable. In one January exchange, he attacked a San Francisco Democrat by writing: “He looks like a Jew–I’m guessing he is a Jew!” and attached a nose emoji. That was far from his only such comment. When another user wrote that someone was Jewish, Amacher replied: “A ginger Jew? Worst of both worlds…” He accused pro-Israel supporters of being “hollowed-out puppet[s] dancing on Zionist strings” and claimed “Zionist infiltrators have sunk their claws deep into U.S. policy.” He called George Soros—the Jewish financier around whom so much antisemitic conspiracy thinking revolves—a “spawn of the Devil himself” and repeated the debunked claim that Soros turned in his own people during World War II to save his own skin. His contempt for Black people was just as explicit. When an anonymous account falsely claimed that some South African villages believed raping a baby girl could cure AIDS, Amacher responded: “Monkeys typically have an estimated IQ below 70.” He described a Somali asylum seeker as a “sub-human animal meant for zoos,” and wrote of a dog that found a missing child that it had “demonstrated an intelligence far superior to that of any illegal Somali invader!” He called Black protesters “savages and future super predators in the making,” said Chicago shootings could not be solved because you “can’t override biology or selectively breed out the ‘predator’ gene in certain populations,” and used the racist slur “mudshark” to describe a white woman with a Black man. When a crowd of mostly Black supporters gathered outside a murder trial, he wrote: “I hope none of these animals breed.” There was even the baseless “Big Mike” insult aimed at Michelle Obama, wrapped in a joke about “no monkey business.” This was not the language of a man who occasionally falls into bad-faith political debate. It was the language of racial hatred, repeated dozens of times without fear of consequence.
Perhaps the most dangerous thread in Amacher’s online history is his obsession with “remigration,” the far-right euphemism for mass deportation of immigrants, often including citizens with migrant backgrounds. Since November 2025, he used the term more than thirty times. He posted that Muslims were “sub-humans” who “must be forcibly extracted from America and shipped off in crates back to the Middle East.” He proposed “one-way, remigration flights” for Somalis in Minnesota, and said that if the government would not deport “third-world invaders,” then ordinary Americans should “hunt them down ourselves, round them up like the illegal trash they are, and throw their asses back across the border.” In another post, he suggested that migrants should be shot to save money, and that a suspected attacker in Washington DC should be “publicly executed in Lafayette Square using bacon grease, with the entire nation watching.” He celebrated Jake Lang, a pardoned January 6 rioter who has become a leader of anti-Muslim protests, calling him “the general leading our generation’s Crusade to save our nation’s cultural identity and heritage” and saying America needed “another Crusades—except on our own home turf!” He also expressed support for the British far-right activist Tommy Robinson and suggested that “uncivilized savages can leave Britain on their own—or be removed at gunpoint by a mob of furious native Britons.” The through-line here is not simply anti-immigrant policy. It is a call for vigilante violence, ethnic cleansing, and a future in which entire populations are forced from their homes on the basis of race, religion, or migration status. And this is the person who felt comfortable orchestrating a scheme to destroy a political candidate’s reputation by exploiting private health information.
Who is Ryan Amacher, and how did he get here? Public records show that he has gone by two names, Ryan and Rhein, at the same house in Lake Oswego. Oregon business filings list Ryan David Amacher as the registered agent of Amacher & Company LLC; federal campaign finance records list “Rhein Amacher” as the company’s president; and his columns in the local newspaper use the name Rhein. In 2018, he wrote a letter to the Lake Oswego Review calling for repeal of US immigration law, drawing a rebuttal. By last year, he was showing up at anti-ICE protests in Portland, antagonizing demonstrators, and even boasting of stealing leaf blowers from an abandoned protest camp. Until the Talarico hoax, he was a lower-tier player in the right-wing influencer economy, with roughly 35,000 followers on X—dwarfed by the likes of Nick Shirley, Nick Sortor, and Katie Daviscourt. But his placement in the ecosystem matters more than his follower count. He was close enough to the action to be handed a rumor, willing enough to lie to a health facility, and savvy enough to edit the resulting recording into something that briefly exploded across the internet. The fact that a staffer for Ken Paxton boosted the claim shows how such material travels among Republican circles. The fact that Elon Musk amplified it shows how quickly contempt for truth spreads from obscure accounts to the mainstream. None of this happened by accident. Amacher built a persona that was both extremist and useful: a man who could be deployed to do the dirty work of politics, making calls no legitimate journalist would make, spreading videos no responsible media outlet would publish, and doing it all with a track record of hatred that should have disqualified him from any role in public life. His moment in the spotlight was brief, but it was a revealing glimpse into the sewer. The hoax failed, but the underlying problem remains: a man with this history, in this ecosystem, was able to get this far—and he will not be the last. The only real question is whether the rest of us will finally pay attention to who these people really are before they do more damage.