At first glance, Caleb Oriet’s social media accounts seem typical of a young member of the fringe, online right, featuring likes and reposts of far-right influencers and white nationalists expressing incendiary and bigoted views about racial and religious minorities.
The account belonging to the 21-year-old Montanan and self-proclaimed “Anglo-Saxon Protestant” and “menace to society” liked, for instance, a tweet that refers to Black Americans as “the most criminal, dependent, and socially destructive part of the population,” and attacks GOP efforts to connect with Black voters.
But Oriet isn’t just a denizen of the far-right fringes of social media. He’s also a staffer for one of the Republican Party’s top candidates to flip control of the U.S. Senate this year.
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According to Federal Election Commission filings)" href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/forms/C00844159/1775718/sb/ALL__;!!LsXw!TwMs4BITWhfkEla-kI8Eb-ApAm3p3yj9bxQqUThcpi6LPp2MR0Jfpx2pfb9_ytSQi0UNZlvoP5XNF5Nb40c-7ye_f9vp$">Federal Election Commission filings, Oriet is being paid by the campaign of Tim Sheehy, who is running against Sen. Jon Tester (D) in Montana. Since January, he has collected five paychecks, totaling $8,313.
Sheehy—a charismatic former Navy SEAL turned wealthy businessman—is preparing for a bruising face-off against Tester in what’s gearing up to be one of the most competitive Senate elections in the country. As Republicans try to retake the Senate majority, top GOP campaign brass is throwing their weight behind Sheehy as their best shot to defeat an incumbent Democrat.
Oriet’s apparent views clearly undercut that mission. Beyond his social media activity, he espoused hard-right, Christian Nationalist views during public presentations, a media interview, and an effusive comment on a book written by a Nazi-supporting Italian fascist thinker.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, for instance, Oriet took aim at the fact that “20.5 percent of Gen-Z says they’re gay” in an interview with a local Montana newspaper, given in his capacity as the leader of Montana’s chapter of the American Populist Union. (The APU is a group founded by Gen Z conservatives that is openly supportive of the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.)
“The political implications of this are disastrous,” Oriet told The Great Falls Tribune of the statistic. “As people my age start taking power, it’s just not going to be a good thing.”
Oriet may be emblematic of a new breed of very online, very young conservatives who are seeking to push the GOP toward their extreme views by embracing trollish tactics and provocation.
But mainstream Republicans have taken pains to reject that movement and its figures, like Fuentes, whom they see as politically toxic. Sheehy has run so far as a mainstream, Trump-allied conservative who is trying to defeat a well-liked, moderate Democrat in a politically idiosyncratic state.
In order to defeat Tester, Sheehy will have to appeal to Montana’s MAGA voters while still winning over the state’s sizable independent population. Not only will this staffer’s views be seen as offensive in those corners, but his accounts’ endorsement of racist posts and the writings of a fascist antisemite will force uncomfortable questions for Sheehy and a GOP that is casting itself as a true ally of Jews and a new home for Black voters.
Reached for comment by The Daily Beast, the Sheehy campaign confirmed it employed Oriet as a field staffer.
Asked if the campaign had previously been aware of Oriet’s views and social media activity, a Sheehy campaign spokesperson declined to say. In a lengthy statement, the spokesperson instead attacked Tester “as Two-Faced” and The Daily Beast as a “trash New York tabloid that no one reads”—but said nothing at all about the far-right content and views linked to Oriet that were brought to their attention.
“The liberal media is at it again,” said the spokesperson. “First, they do Jon Tester’s bidding by attacking decorated combat veteran Tim Sheehy and now they are trying to attack a young field staffer. We get it that Jon Tester doesn’t want to talk about his vote against deporting illegal immigrants or why he supports Biden’s radical open border agenda or why he votes with Biden over 91 percent of the time but trying to tear down a 21-year-old is just sad.”
Oriet did not respond to requests for comment sent to his social media accounts.
Within an hour of The Daily Beast reaching out to Oriet and Sheehy’s campaign for comment on Friday, every post on Oriet’s X account had been deleted. His X and Instagram biographies were also wiped.
For all of Oriet’s employment with Sheehy up to that point, however, his fringe views had been public for all to see.
One post liked by Oriet’s account from an influencer who posts under the pseudonym James Kirkpatrick—associated with white nationalist group VDARE—responded to an April Pew Research Center poll showing that just 12 percent of Black voters are aligned with Republicans.
“It’s strange that there’s a perceived moral legitimacy in winning the most criminal, dependent, and socially destructive part of the population,” Kirkpatrick said in the post Oriet liked. “All of American life revolves around trying to get around them, especially for wealthy white Democrats.”
A second Kirkpatick post from May 2023—also liked by Oriet’s account—reiterates that racist ideology.
“All of American life revolves around earning enough money to escape the consequences of the civil rights movement,” the May post said.
The Kirkpatrick posts are hardly the only eyebrow-raising content Oriet’s account engaged with on X. Oriet liked another post last year declaring that “Muslims bow down to a black box with a space rock inside.”
And in January 2023 Oriet’s account shared a post from another user declaring that “The West would rather self-immolate than come to terms with the fact the civilisation [sic] is incommunicable and that different groups of human beings are not equal and never will be.”
But Oriet’s public-facing social media presence is only one facet of his far-right identity, most of which is readily apparent via a quick Google search.
In June 2023, for example, Oriet gave a speech titled “The Need for Christian Nationalism” at a Montana church to raise money to attend Patriot Academy’s Leadership Congress, according to a Substack invitation. (Patriot Academy is a Texas-based evangelical nonprofit with the mission to “restore our Constitutional Republic.”)
In May 2022, a user on Audible identified as Caleb Oriet left a comment on a collection of essays called “A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth,” written by Julius Evola.
Evola, a 20th-century Italian fascist who influenced the Hitler-allied dictator Benito Mussolini, has become a trendy thinker in far-right circles, praised by the likes of Steve Bannon.
Among many other things, Evola was an admirer of the Nazis and a virulent antisemite; he referred to Jews as a “virus” and wrote the foreword to an Italian translation of the infamous antisemitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The user self-identified as Oriet gushed about Evola’s work. “Fantastic collection of essays from the perspective of the genuine right,” he wrote on Audible. “Both intelligent and comprehensible.”
By Saturday, after The Daily Beast reached out to Oriet and Sheehy’s campaign, the comment had been taken down.
During a January 2023 presentation hosted by the World Prayer Network—which featured presentations from several young people—Oriet identified as a “paleoconservative.” He defined the term as “a traditional conservative, or what the majority of people in this country believed up until right around like 1960.” (Fuentes has embraced the label, as has Tucker Carlson.)
During his presentation, which delved into the so-called decline of masculinity—a popular right-wing talking point—Oriet said no-fault divorce was an “unfortunate creation.”
Referring again to the statistic that over a fifth of Generation Z identifies as LGBTQ, Oriet said, “That’s terrifying to me. That’s terrifying.”
In the speech, Oriet mentioned that he was working for Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT). At the time, Oriet called Rosendale a “great congressman” whom he’d support as Montana governor or even U.S. president.
Ironically, over a year later, Rosendale challenged Sheehy for the GOP nomination for the Senate seat in Montana. Rosendale has since dropped out of the race, but there does not seem to be much love lost between the Montana GOP establishment and Oriet’s former boss.
As for Oriet’s professional future, he said during that 2023 presentation he’s interested in exploring his own foray into politics.
When asked by an event moderator if he’d consider a run for public office, Oriet said, “I say this a lot—it’s semi-joking, semi-not—that the ascent to power is inevitable. It’s slow, but we’re getting there.”
