The Guilford County Democratic Party has withdrawn its backing from Shelly Kates Headen, the party’s candidate for the North Carolina House, after a campaign post surfaced showing her posing in front of the cremation ovens at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. WRAL reported that the party pulled financial, operational, and organizational support following the emergence of a Facebook post in which Headen called for Trump supporters to be sent to a Nazi concentration camp.
The photograph itself is the kind that stops a reader cold. Headen is not pictured at the camp’s main gate under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign. She is standing directly in front of the ovens — the furnaces that consumed the bodies of tens of thousands of murdered prisoners — and she is smiling. The caption she attached to the image reads: “This is where Trump supporters belong.”
Timing of the Decision
American Thinker contributor Jim Davis, writing in a September 14 commentary piece, argued that the party should have severed ties the moment the photo first appeared. Davis described his own reaction to the post in visceral terms, writing that it “made my blood run cold” and that the caption was not political disagreement but rather “a bloodlust fantasy, dressed up as progressive virtue.”
The Guilford County party’s decision to finally cut support came after the image had already circulated, and Davis’s piece makes clear he believes the delay itself is telling. The commentary does not identify by what margin Headen was running or whether she has since dropped out of the race.
A Broader Argument About the Left
From there, Davis’s essay pivots sharply away from Headen and toward a broader thesis about the Democratic coalition. He points to a roster of Muslim candidates and officeholders he says the party has elevated — Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Zohran Mamdani in New York, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib — and notes that El-Sayed recently won a Senate primary. He also names Darializa Chevalier in New Jersey, describing her as the co-founder of a university group whose charter endorses the Palestinians and demands Columbia University adopt anti-Israel policies.
Davis then ties this modern political landscape to World War II history, writing that Hitler and Stalin alike understood the principle of marching through institutions. He cites the recruitment of Muslim volunteers into Nazi units: the 13th Waffen-SS Handschar Division, drawn largely from Bosnian Muslims; the 21st Waffen-SS Skanderbeg Division, drawn from Albanians in Kosovo and Albania; and the Turkestan Legion, recruited principally from Muslim peoples of Soviet Central Asia, often from Soviet POWs. He notes that the word “Handschar” refers to the scimitar and states that by 1943, 54 of 79 Eastern Legion infantry battalions were Muslim or Muslim-dominated. He also references the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s observation that individual soldiers from these units participated in capturing and killing Jews in hiding.
His conclusion from that history is a direct claim of continuity: the alliance between Nazi socialists and Muslims was no accident then, he writes, and the current alliance between American socialists and Muslims is no accident now. He punctuates the point with a repeated phrase — “There are no coincidences.”
The Two Futures Framed in the Piece
Davis closes by contrasting two visions of America. One is a country where families of any faith or none are free to practice as they choose, where the civic picture includes quiet belief in God and an afternoon with a barbecue grill watching the Cubs lose or the Bears finally win another Super Bowl — a picture he ties to the Chicago he says he knows and loves.
The other vision he attributes to El-Sayed, Chevalier, Tlaib, Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and what he calls their DSA enablers. In that future, he writes, burqas become the expected women’s dress code, a jizya tax falls on non-Muslims, and local rules keep non-Muslim houses lower than the mosque next door, with the minaret becoming by law the tallest building in every town. He frames the choice in blunt terms and ends with a call to action: help local Republican candidates walk the streets, knock doors, make phone calls, and get out the vote.
The piece links to two related readings on the same candidate — “Shelly Headen’s Kampf” by J.R. Dunn and “Democrats sure can pick ’em: Get a load of North Carolina congressional candidate Shelly Headen” by Monica Showalter.
What the Post Says and What Follows
Strip away the historical digressions and the electoral strategy, and the core fact remains the same: a candidate for state office stood in front of the furnaces of a death camp, smiled for the camera, and wrote that her political opponents belong there. The county party that had been funding and organizing for her has now withdrawn that support. Davis’s argument is that the withdrawal is correct, overdue, and should be read as a warning about what he sees as a larger pattern on the left.
Whether that larger framing persuades readers is a separate question from the photograph itself. The image, the caption, and the party’s decision do not depend on any of the historical claims Davis makes about Waffen-SS divisions or the composition of Eastern Legion battalions. They stand on their own — and for many voters, they may be more than enough to decide the race.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/democrat-loses-support-for-her-smiling-pose-in-nazi-death-camp/