The California Republican Party has recruited attorney Scott Meyers to run for Congress in the state’s heavily Democratic 30th Congressional District, partly to block an “extremist figure” from gaining influence within GOP ranks, a party official said.
Meyers is seeking to unseat Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Calif.), who has represented the Los Angeles–area district since January 2025, but must first advance through California’s June primary against Dennis Feitosa, who is also running on the Republican ticket.
Feitosa is a YouTube content creator whom Jewish community leaders in the state party say has expressed views aligned with the antisemitic “groyper” movement associated with far-right activist Nick Fuentes, known for his white nationalist views and Holocaust denial.
Elizabeth Barcohana, California GOP’s chair of Jewish community engagement, told JNS that she first became aware of Feitosa’s views after encountering his booth at the Turning Point USA America Fest conference in December.
“I couldn’t tell if he believed what he was saying or if he viewed it as a strategic necessity to engage groypers and bring them into the movement,” Barcohana said. “Afterwards, people started sending me clips of his podcasts.”
Barcohana said such views disqualify candidates from public leadership. “A person who is antisemitic has ingested poison, and the poison leads to irrational thinking that completely disqualifies you from any leadership position in public life,” she said.
Barcohana said the party recruited Meyers, who is not Jewish, to counter Feitosa’s candidacy and has not endorsed Feitosa.
Though Democrats have long dominated the district, Barcohana noted that Republican candidate Alex Balekian won roughly one-third of the vote in the 2024 general election and managed to “flip certain precincts in the district red for the first time.”
She emphasized the stakes of the primary, saying Republican nominees can become delegates to the state party with voting rights. “That is the mechanism,” she said. “When we say infiltration, that’s the mechanism.”
Barcohana compared the attempted antisemitic infiltration of the Republican party with “how the Democratic Socialists of America infiltrated the Democrats.”
“Their response was to work with them,” she said. “We have to learn from their mistakes and not repeat them here. If the Democrats have been taken over by this complete mental illness, then the only thing standing between complete destruction and the security of the United States and its existence and its founding principles is the Republican Party.”
Barcohana said the state party aims to formally endorse Meyers before the mid-April California Republican convention in San Diego to diminish Feitosa’s internal influence.
Barcohana told JNS that the California GOP has already taken steps to address broader extremism within the party, citing a resolution adopted at the California GOP’s fall 2025 convention condemning a self-identified Republican gubernatorial hopeful who posted a photo from Auschwitz with the caption, “My 0% unemployment plan.”
The resolution declared that “there is no place in our party for antisemites, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, or any individual who aligns with hatred.”
