Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania has a problem in his own office. His communications director, Arnaud Armstrong, belonged to a college group chat where members traded Nazi memes and joked about the Holocaust and statutory rape, the Judge Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
The man now speaking for a sitting Republican congressman was editor-in-chief of the student outlet whose writers posted some of the worst of it. And Mackenzie is fighting for his political life with four weeks to go.
Who Is Arnaud Armstrong?
Armstrong is the top communications aide to Mackenzie, a first-term Republican from the Lehigh Valley. He joined the team in 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In 2018 he was a senior at the University of Pittsburgh, active in the College Republicans and running a conservative student site called Polis Media. Its coverage ranged from hockey to paleoconservatism, the nationalist strain of Republican politics pushed by Pat Buchanan, a man with a long record of antisemitic remarks.
What Was in the Chat
The GroupMe chat had more than 80 members. Screenshots show memes joking about statutory rape, mocking Black people over absent fathers and pushing the stereotype that Asian children eat puppies.
One Polis Media staffer, Julia Henke, posted Hitler's face over a concentration camp photo with a fake quote celebrating a world with no Jews. She also posted a photo of Black children with cotton candy captioned as a slavery joke. The same staffer had once said she hoped to land a federal judge position someday. Per the Judge Street Journal, Henke also tagged Armstrong in a later message in the chat.
Pitt Republicans Kicked Members Out. Armstrong Defended the Chat.
When activists posted the screenshots in January 2018, the Pitt College Republicans found the material "utterly repulsive" and removed four members who were in the chat. Polis Media went offline and shut down soon after.
Armstrong's response was different. He said the chat existed to share inappropriate memes "out of curiosity for seeing what the worst of the internet could produce." He called the people who exposed it radicals and extremists and accused them of character assassination.
Not the First Time Armstrong Made Headlines
Last year, Democrats accused Armstrong of scrubbing his boss's Wikipedia page. The DCCC claimed he was behind edits that deleted a paragraph about Mackenzie's Tinder scandal and references to his votes for an abortion ban without rape or incest exceptions. A DCCC spokesman said voters "can't trust a word Mackenzie says."
That Tinder scandal is real. In 2020, while serving as a Republican state lawmaker, Mackenzie listed himself as 29 on the app. He was 37. More than 100 women from his district later signed a letter demanding an apology.
A Republican Already in Trouble
Mackenzie won this seat in 2024 by roughly 4,000 votes. Now he is behind. A September Franklin & Marshall poll had Democrat Bob Brooks, president of the state firefighters union, leading 45% to 40%.
Sabato's Crystal Ball moved the race to Leans Democratic last week. Brooks, backed by Gov. Josh Shapiro, has outraised Mackenzie in the latest quarter. This seat could help decide who controls the House.
What Armstrong Says
Armstrong did not respond to the Judge Street Journal's request for comment, and we could find no public response from Mackenzie's office. Back in 2018, Armstrong told the Pitt News he did not take part in the chat and said the memes did not reflect the beliefs of those who shared them.
To be clear: the screenshots reviewed so far do not show Armstrong sending any of the memes himself, and the full chat history is not public. But he was a member, his own staffers posted the worst of it, and his reaction was to attack the people who exposed it.
The Bottom Line
Ryan Mackenzie chose a spokesman who sat in a Hitler meme chat and called the people who exposed it radicals. So far, the Republican has offered voters no public explanation. Lehigh Valley voters get the final say on November 3.
Sources: Judge Street Journal (Timmy Facciola), Raw Story (Bennito L. Kelty), The Pitt News, The Nation, Daily Mail (Josh Boswell), The Center Square, Franklin & Marshall College Poll, The Hill, Armchair Lehigh Valley.