The business of hate

Dr. Stephen Soloway sits in a book-lined office in front of a screen, taping yet another interview with grassroots right-wing media.

This time, the host is a Rumble producer from Hackensack. Soloway, as he does in so many of his appearances, mixes self-promotion with red meat conservative politics.

The Vineland rheumatologist hawks the two books he has authored. And the self-described “Miracle MD” insists Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. The Memorial Day weekend show plays video clips that straddle those two worlds.

In one, Trump gives Soloway a public shoutout, describing him as “a tremendous doctor” and “my friend for years” during a 2023 event at Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster.

“No one loves you more than I do,” Soloway calls out off-camera in response.

In the other clip, Soloway keynotes an America First Republicans of New Jersey gathering in Bergen County, where he stands before a large American flag and rails against immigrants he claims are bringing violence and disease over the border.

“Everyone coming from the south is coming here to become a terror cell, to become a burden on society, to become a criminal,” Soloway tells his audience. “Like Trump says, ‘What are they doing?’ They’re letting out the insane asylum. They’re dumping them here. And now, we have to walk around carrying a gun or something, just to feel safe.”

Among New Jersey political insiders, Soloway is hardly a household name. His inflammatory rhetoric falls well outside the moderate GOP messaging that has long dominated the party in New Jersey.

But he is among a professional class of influential right-wing activists who have emerged here, remaking themselves as fearmongers to raise money, galvanize a grassroots base and promote themselves — all while promising to transform a deep blue state in their crimson red image.

They are selling outrage and scapegoating, targeting immigrants, the LBGTQ+ community and other vulnerable groups at a time when anger and conspiracy always have an audience. And they are trading on Trump’s name — and sometimes, his direct endorsement — to show bona fides.

Their efforts have seen mixed success: Some have raised just enough to pay the rent, while others have taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars and elevated their own status by trumpeting far-right grievances.

Soloway’s deep pockets have earned him a platform as “Trump’s doctor” after he donated more than $1 million over the years to the former president’s campaign and Republican causes, according to federal and state campaign finance disclosures. He now uses his pulpit to verbally attack migrants and the transgender community in his books and speeches for ultraconservatives groups such as the America First Republicans.

Cynthia Hughes has remade herself into a symbol of far-right patriotism — and a Trump cause célèbre — by raising millions for her nonprofit, Patriot Freedom Project, to aid defendants charged in the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Brick woman has worked to recast the alleged Jan. 6 rioters as political prisoners and likened their prosecution to institutional persecution.

On the other end of the spectrum, Gregory Quinlan is a vocal presence in the conservative parents rights movement, one of many amplifying claims that schools have become dark and dangerous places. The pastor, founder of the nonprofit Center for Garden State Families, has done it despite operating on a shoestring budget.

All told, millions of dollars are flowing into New Jersey to support right-wing extremist causes, suspects Michael Gottesman, the founder of the New Jersey Public Education Coalition, a group that seeks to counter extremism in schools. But a patchwork of federal and state political committees and nonprofit advocacy groups complicates watchdog efforts, he says.

“Everyone wants to follow the money, and it’s just very, very difficult to do,” Gottesman said.

Nonprofits do not have to disclose their contributors and offer few details about their financial picture beyond yearly tax filings. Many other organizations got their start as Facebook groups, overseen by volunteers raising funds through donations or T-shirt purchases.

But that small scale could have its benefits as they set out to create a movement, according to Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.

“If it’s not a super-organized effort, if it’s not a super-methodical effort, if it’s still a collection of individuals who are toiling away and doing their thing, then it’s probably not a really expensive thing either,” said Rasmussen, who hesitates to call the far right well-financed in New Jersey, despite pockets of money that some have tapped into.

But these activists are operating with a mixture of grandiosity, self-dealing and real-world success, a reflection of Trump’s own norm-breaking political career. They have risen in the far-right realm despite their own personal problems, ranging from bounced checks and bankruptcies to a sexual harassment lawsuit, casting themselves as God-and-country folk who have found a calling. And they insist they will prove the doubters wrong once again in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 900,000 registered voters.

Take Hughes, who was so pressed for money in 2018 that she and her husband sued their credit agencies, claiming financial hardship, according to court records. Or Soloway, who was sued last year by a former nurse in his practice, alleging he sexually harassed her, crudely bragged about sleeping with other employees and routinely referred to women who worked for him as “bitches.”

Their voices are being heard not only online but at sometimes packed and sometimes sparsely attended political rallies from Paramus to Keyport to Shamong. They’re also amplifying their messaging through crowdsourcing fundraisers and merchandise sales — including Trump memorabilia tables and Trump painting auctions at events.

The far right is making progress at the grassroots level, experts say, especially on school boards across the state, where clashes over sex education and LGBTQ+-themed library books are now common.

Gottesman fears the rhetoric will only get worse amid a superheated presidential election. Its vitriol is echoing at the local level, where he has heard right-wing advocates denounce transgender people as “sick,” “mentally unstable” and “sinners against God.”

“And it’s like they say it with impunity, because, unfortunately, we’re in a society now where we’re modeling politicians who have no problem saying that,” Gottesman said. “There’s no such thing as political incorrectness anymore.”

In some cases, political incorrectness is paying off handsomely.

Extremism … on a budget

Yet it isn’t clear how deep that largesse runs.

The America First Republicans of New Jersey has been holding “Too Big to Rig” election rallies across the state, staging more than 20 events this year. But it has raised just $20,705 since it was formed in February as a federal committee, according to Federal Election Commission filings. And of that, $5,000 in seed money came from Soloway, one of the group’s co-chairmen.

The committee reported $9,580 in spending — and $4,000 went to Pilgrim Strategies, a political consulting firm run by Michael Byrne, a fellow co-chair.

Byrne declined interview requests. Mike Crispi, another co-chair, did not return a phone call for this story.

Some on the far right acknowledge modest circumstances.

“You don’t get rich off of this,” said Quinlan, the founder of the Center for Garden State Families. He earned $60,000 through the center last year, according to tax filings.

“I drive a Subaru, not a Mercedes,” Quinlan said. “I rent an apartment. I don’t own a home. … I am where I am, and I’ll die poor like I’m poor now.”

Quinlan, a self-described “ex-gay,” has long courted controversy. In June, he appeared at the Statehouse in Trenton for a hearing on a bill that would add legal protections for school librarians over the books they stock.

Over several hours of testimony before the Assembly Education Committee, a raft of speakers denounced the effort as encouraging pornography and endangering children. When it was Quinlan’s turn at the microphone, committee Chair Pamela Lampitt, D-Camden, asked whether he agreed with a prior speaker who complained that schools were educating students about the risk of teen pregnancy.

Instead, Quinlan pivoted to butt plugs.

“Teen pregnancy isn’t sexually explicit, is it?” Quinlan responded. “I mean, are you talking about porn addiction? You’re talking about butt plugs and teen pregnancy? Because if you’re using a plug, you’re not getting pregnant.”

“Reverend, please,” Lampitt admonished.

Quinlan told NJ Advance Media he had no regrets, saying he was responding to a “ridiculous and leading” question.

“It’s at least how you get press,” Quinlan said. “Because, for the most part, you know, conservative voices like mine are ignored.”

The Center for Garden State Families is among a constellation of groups that have mobilized outrage at New Jersey’s public school system.

Others, like the New Jersey Project and Moms for Liberty, have endorsed candidates in school board races, lending organizational energy to typically little-noticed contests in which campaign spending rarely exceeds a few thousand dollars. Both organizations have been labeled anti-government groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism across the country, though they bristle over that designation.

So far, school elections have delivered the far right its biggest victories in New Jersey. But do those district-by-district gains presage larger successes?

That’s a question that could be tested in next year’s race for governor, when two candidates who have embraced hardline rhetoric — drive-time radio talk show host Bill Spadea and former state Sen. Ed Durr — are among those seeking the GOP nomination.

Spadea has proven a skilled fundraiser, reporting $846,800 in contributions in the first three quarters of the year, despite launching his candidacy in June. Yet that’s still less than half the $1.98 million raised by Jack Ciattarelli, a more typical New Jersey Republican who lost a close race in 2021 to Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

The far right is “trying to break the door down still,” said Rasmussen, the Rebovich Institute director. “In spite of their success, in spite of their higher profile in recent years, they’re still trying to topple the infrastructure.”

The patriotic fundraiser

And then there are those who, like Cynthia Hughes, have already made it big.

Her rise to far-right fame comes from a surprising starting place: The arrest of a New Jersey military contractor who, authorities said, was known to sport a Hitler mustache, deny the Holocaust and espouse white supremecist views.

Timothy Hale-Cusanelli was among the first rioters to enter the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, federal prosecutors said. He commanded the mob that breached the building to “advance,” and though he was not accused of violence, interfered in the arrest of a fellow rioter, prosecutors said.

At the time, Hale-Cusanelli was a sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserve and worked as a security officer at Naval Weapons Station Earle in Colts Neck, where he held a “secret” level security clearance.

He is also like family to Hughes, who has described the 34-year-old as her adopted nephew and akin to a son.

In public speeches and interviews with right-wing media, Hughes, 56, said her efforts to raise money for the Jan. 6 defendants began with Hale-Cusanelli’s arrest nearly four years ago. She was shocked when he was jailed pending trial and started networking to help him and others in his situation, she said.

Then Hughes received a phone call that lit a spark under her, she has said. On the line was Dinesh D’Souza, a prominent conservative provocateur who was pardoned in 2018 by Trump after an illegal campaign contribution conviction.

“I am like, ‘I sell auto parts for a living. Dinesh D’Souza is calling me?’” Hughes recalled during a September 2023 speech to a conservative group in St. Louis.

“He sent me a check for $100,000,” she told her audience.

And the Patriot Freedom Project was off and running. Hughes now rails against what she calls “the weaponization of government on every level,” while downplaying the violence of a mob that sought to block the peaceful transfer of power.

The nonprofit raised nearly $2.2 million through 2022, according to tax filings. (Figures for 2023 and 2024 have yet to be disclosed.) The money is being spent on legal fees for Jan. 6 defendants and aid to their families, Hughes has said.

In March, Hughes — who wasn’t drawing a salary from the nonprofit, according to the 2021 and 2022 filings — announced contributions had reached $3 million while speaking at an America First event in Keyport.

Trump’s Bedminster golf course has hosted fundraisers for her group.

“I want to thank Cynthia Hughes for the tremendous job that she does,” Trump said in a June video recorded for one of those events. “And all of the people there, you’re amazing patriots. You love our country.”

Humble beginnings

As recently as six years ago, it was Hughes who was in need of a helping hand.

She grew up in Bradley Beach, the daughter of a local police officer. Her husband, Shawn Dunphy, was also in law enforcement — a state parole officer who retired last year after a 25-year career, according to pension records.

In 2019, Hughes and Dunphy sued Brick Township after a flash flood ripped through their $475,000 property overlooking the Manasquan River. The deluge flooded their home, washed away parts of their backyard and damaged their retaining walls.

The couple was already in financial straits before the 2018 flood, according to court records. The month before, they sued several credit reporting agencies in a handwritten lawsuit in which they said “serious financial hardship” had ruined their credit and made it difficult for them to borrow needed money.

The agencies ultimately settled out of court, records show. Brick agreed to pay the couple $75,000 over their flood-related claims, according to a settlement agreement obtained from the township through a public records request.

But Hughes’ financial difficulties had existed for decades, court records suggest.

In municipal court in Ocean Township, Monmouth County, she was convicted of passing bad checks in 1992 and 2002. Details of the cases were unavailable because the files had been destroyed, according to MaryAnn Spoto, a spokeswoman for the state judiciary.

Hughes was granted bankruptcies in the late 1990s and early 2000s and also sued her credit agencies in 2013, court records show.

“I have serious bills piling up and have been desperately trying to secure any loans to pay off or consolidate my debt and have been refused from every (lender) I have gone to,” Hughes wrote in the suit, which she filed without a lawyer. “Reasons are because of serious negative entries, bankruptcy, high balances on current accounts, and low credit score.”

Hughes did not respond to interview requests by NJ Advance Media, including a letter detailing this story’s findings.

In public appearances, she has cast her life as full of challenges, saying she had “a bit of a troubled childhood” and lived through a “very toxic (prior) marriage and then horrible divorce.”

“I’ve had a very hard life myself and I too have a lot of reasons to be a bad person and, you know, turn to very bad vices to ease your pain,” Hughes said in a March 2023 interview with the World Prayer Network, a conservative Christian broadcaster.

“I turned to church and I turned to God and I read every self-help book and I changed my life and I did really well for myself.”

In September, two NJ Advance Media reporters went to her home, seeking to interview her.

Hale-Cusanelli answered the door.

Last December, he was released from federal prison after serving nearly three years of a four-year sentence. He was convicted at trial in 2022, telling the judge at his sentencing, “I disgraced my uniform, and I disgraced my country.”

But since Hale-Cusanelli’s release, he has denounced what he calls his “political persecution.” He has trafficked in conspiracy theories on social media about the riot, while insisting he was falsely labeled a white supremacist.

He is also pursuing an appeal to his conviction, which included obstructing an official proceeding, a felony offense the U.S. Supreme Court called into question in a June ruling.

“She doesn’t even live here,” Hale-Cusanelli said outside the home, where the American flag, a Trump 2024 flag and a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake flag flew.

After the reporters returned to their car, a woman with neck tattoos came out of the house, recording them on her cellphone.

“Who are you?” one of the reporters asked after rolling down the window.

“Thank you,” she said, before turning and going back inside.

Deep-pocketed donor

One thing is constant on hardline conservative media appearance after hardline conservative media appearance: When Dr. Stephen Soloway is on hand, the hosts gush about his friendship with Trump.

“You’ve been on Trump’s plane,” Mike Crispi, host of Mike Crispi Unafraid and co-chair of the America First Republicans of New Jersey, said in July on his show from Milwaukee. He and Soloway were there serving as New Jersey delegates at the Republican National Convention.

“You’ve been to Trump’s beauty pageants with him,” Crispi said. “You’ve been everywhere with the guy for 25 years.”

Soloway, who went to medical school in the Caribbean and opened a practice in the Pine Barrens in 1993 that made him wealthy, donated more than $450,000 to the Republican National Committee, the Trump Victory Committee and Trump’s campaign during his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids, federal disclosures show.

In 2018, Trump named Soloway to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, alongside luminaries such as football coaching legend Bill Belichick, Yankees Hall of Fame closer Mariano Rivera and retired bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno.

A fellow Queens native, Soloway has said he befriended Trump and his family after he began investing in Trump properties in the early 2000s. It landed him on the ownership boards of hotels across Trump’s real estate empire.

Soloway says his patients sometimes call him “Dr. Trump.”

He is also a bigtime contributor to the Cumberland County Republican Organization and South Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew, a Democrat-turned-MAGA Republican.

Soloway, 61, declined comment after NJ Advance Media provided written questions detailing its reporting.

But few would accuse the Vineland physician of underestimating himself.

“My name is Dr. Stephen Soloway, and I’m the best. The sharpshooter. The caviar. The Rolls Royce of Rheumatology,” Soloway wrote in the first sentences of his 2020 book, “Bad Medicine.”

“Everyone has an opinion, but I always seem to be right,” he wrote in his second work, “Medical Politics,” published in 2022.

Taken together, the books are part-memoir and part-critique of the medical system, insurance companies and government bureaucracy. They are also part-far-right politics, with Soloway claiming China purposefully released the COVID-19 virus and that mail-in voting is “instant corruption.”

Transgenderism “has to be a mental illness,” Soloway wrote in the second book. “It is in fact a delusion, which is defined as a false, unshakeable belief. Delusions, along with illusions and hallucinations, are the three features of psychosis. These definitions have been accepted for centuries.”

At public events and in his interviews with right-wing media, Soloway has not shied from similar full-throated claims, whether about the 2020 election, immigration or political correctness.

“Everyone’s a racist,” Soloway said in a November 2022 interview on WSMN radio in Manchester, New Hampshire. “If you don’t agree with the leftists, you’re a racist. If you look at a woman sideways and she’s a leftist, you’re a rapist too. You’re everything.”

Six months later, Soloway was sued in Superior Court in Cumberland County for sexual harassment.

The allegations were made by a registered nurse who worked for Soloway for nine months in 2021. During that time, the suit charged, Soloway repeatedly pressured her to enter into a romantic relationship with him, made crude sexual comments to her and, on two occasions, touched her thigh and moved his hand toward her lap before she intervened.

The nurse, who is of mixed race, said other employees told her, “Dr. Soloway loves his dark skin girls,” according to the suit.

“That’s just how he is,” one of them told the nurse after she complained about his behavior, according to the suit. That co-worker recommended she avoid going into Soloway’s office alone and told her, “He has helped everyone out, so we all just go along with it,” the suit said.

Soloway called his female staff “bitches,” bragged that he could “f— anyone I want to” and claimed to have had sex with other employees, the lawsuit also charged.

“I hit it and now she won’t leave me alone,” Soloway allegedly told the nurse in reference to one of her co-workers.

The suit alleged sexual harassment, a hostile environment and wrongful termination. But the allegations won’t be heard in court.

When the nurse was hired, she signed an employment agreement mandating that any claims against Soloway or his practice be handled in arbitration, according to a legal filing by his attorney.

Arbitration agreements take disputes out of the hands of the legal system, in favor of an outside arbiter who considers the claims shielded from public scrutiny. In a #MeToo-inspired law in 2022, Congress prohibited such agreements for sexual harassment or assault cases, but the nurse’s circumstances predated that statute, said John Luke Jr., her attorney.

Luke declined to discuss details of the nurse’s case, but said this month that the dispute remained unresolved, with the arbitration process starting.

Yet Soloway remains a VIP at far-right events.

In March, he strolled to the podium at an event in Shamong co-hosted by the America First Republicans. He took the microphone as the featured speaker before a friendly crowd of conservative diehards.

Soloway worked his way through an impromptu speech, sprinkling anecdotes about his relationship with Trump with a host of right-wing grievances. Ultimately, he landed on immigration and the “vermin” coming into the country.

When he was finished, the audience of a few dozen broke into applause.

For a moment at least, New Jersey was transformed into the deep red state they always knew it could be.

Then Soloway called out with one final thought.

“Buy my book!” he said.

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Riley Yates may be reached at [email protected].

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