LOCAL REPUBLICAN PARTY’S NEW ACTING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR MADE NAZI JOKES AS TEEN

By Miriam Raftery

December 28, 2016 (San Diego) - San Diego Republican Party Chairman Tony Krvaric has named a new acting executive director, Sage Naumann.  But there’s controversy surrounding the appointment due to photos of Naumann making Nazi jokes while wearing a German military uniform for Halloween seven years ago in 2009, when he was 18 years old. 

The photos torpedoed Naumann’s run for the Carlsbad School Board in 2014. Naumann had posted the photos on his own social media account originally, voicing sympathy over Hitler’s death.  In one photo, he wrote in Finnish, “Sad Nazi mourns the loss of der Fuhrer.” (View photos at the San Diego Union-Tribune:  http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/sd-me-gop-director-20161221-story.html).

Copies of his post were sent to media and to PTA parents during his school board campaign. Naumann called it a mistake he attributed to youthful lapse in judgment. That lapse cost him the support of some prominent Republicans, though the county party stood by its endorsement.

Naumann’s actions were defended by The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist site.

Krvaric, an e-mail to the San Diego Union-Tribune, called the attire an East German military officer’s uniform and noted Naumann’s youth at the time. He praised Naumann, who formerly served a Deputy Executive Director of the local party, as “one of the hardest working and most talented young individuals I've ever met.”

Krvaric called media coverage of the incident “vile and disgusting” noting that Naumann has a brother with Cerebral Palsy who “would have no doubt perished under the Nazis.”

Krvaric weathered his own controversies when he was named party chairman. A media investigation revealed that in his youth in Sweden, Krvaric co-founded an organization called Fairlight and later established a branch in the U.S. 

Fairllight began as a game-cracking ring run by Swedish teens hacking proprietary video game software.  According to the Center for Digital Government, an international advisory group, later on Fairlight grew to become one of the “most notorious online piracy release groups in the world,” specializing in “the illegal distribution of computer games, including PC and console games.” In the U.S., many of its participants were arrested by the FBI, though Krvaric was not prosecuted.

As with Naumann’s controversies, Krvaric dismissed criticisms of his own past as co-founder of a criminal enterprise as a youthful indiscretion.