Beauty queen stripped of crown for racist tweets takes over state GOP's digital media

In 2019, Kathy Zhu had her title of Miss Michigan beauty queen taken from her due to offensive tweets deemed by many to be racist and Islamophobic. Almost seven years later, she’s handling digital media for the Michigan House Republicans.

Zhu has been employed as digital strategist director for the Republican Central Staff at the Michigan House of Representatives under Speaker Matt Hall since August 2025. The fact that Zhu has held the job without any public outcry might be an indicator of how thoroughly the far right has infiltrated the Michigan GOP.

“It’s very feasible that she might not feel pressure to disavow the views that she had,” Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, told Raw Story. “It might help her brand to be able to say to the Michigan GOP that she’s able to tap into edgy, young, right-wing culture.”

Zhu’s rehabilitation from disgraced beauty queen to Republican state legislative aide offers an example of a Generation Z conservative who responded to public censure by doubling down on extremism, while finding acceptance from the GOP establishment.

Then the president of the College Republicans at the University of Michigan, where she was studying political science, and an avid supporter of President Donald Trump, Zhu was forced to relinquish the title of Miss Michigan after the Miss World America organization deemed her anti-Black and anti-Muslim tweets to violate its rules on “good character.”

The tweets that Miss World America flagged as “offensive, insensitive and inappropriate” included one calling on Black Lives Matter activists to address crime within the Black community before protesting police violence, and another accusing Muslim students celebrating World Hijab Day of “trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam.”

Other tweets from Zhu’s now-suspended account, which have been archived, are even more provocative.

Zhu described Adolf Hitler as “very smart and a good public speaker” in a 2017 tweet that appears to be framed as a rhetorical parry against criticism leveled at Trump for praising North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as a “tough cookie” and a “smart guy.”

In another tweet that appears to argue against equating white supremacist violence with Islamic extremism, Zhu posted: “KKK DOESN’T BLOW UP ARENAS AND SHOUT IN THE NAME OF JESUS.” The Ku Klux Klan’s history since its founding is replete with acts of terrorism, intimidation and murder, including the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, resulting in the deaths of four Black girls. Klan members have historically cloaked their violence in Christian rhetoric.

Rather than apologize in the aftermath of the Miss Michigan controversy, Zhu went on a media tour, telling CNN in one interview, “I stand behind every tweet that I post.”

Zhu’s appearance on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” got the attention of Trump, who singled her out at Turning Point USA’s Teen Student Action Summit in Washington, DC.

“What they did to this young lady was terrible,” Trump said, adding that it “was pretty cool” that she had worn a “Make America Great Again” hat on “Fox and Friends.”

With her newfound notoriety following the controversy, Zhu networked with an array of influencers to the right of the mainstream MAGA movement and Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump group led by the late Charlie Kirk.

Zhu reportedly attended a dinner in September 2019 with Nick Fuentes and other far-right luminaries described by People for the American Way as “white nationalist and anti-Semitic content creators.” Turning Point USA severed ties with one of its brand ambassadors who attended the dinner, while denouncing white nationalism as “abhorrent and un-American.”

At the time, Fuentes, a rising influencer with a history of questioning the Holocaust and praising Hitler, was dispatching his followers to Turning Point USA events to heckle speakers and pose questions intended to embarrass them over their support for Israel in a campaign known as the “Groyper wars.”

At the time of the September 2019 dinner with Zhu, Fuentes had recently attacked a conservative commentator for condemning a mass murder carried out by a white supremacist targeting Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Fuentes, during a livestream that was apparently cut from his podcast, reportedly called Matt Walsh a “shabbos goy race traitor” who worked for Jews. Walsh was employed by the Daily Caller, owned by Ben Shapiro.

Fuentes has said that he and Zhu were in contact during the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and that he later saw her in Orlando, Florida. Fuentes' comments don’t explain the circumstances of the meeting, but his group, America First Political Action Committee, hosted conferences in Orlando in February 2021 and February 2022.

It’s unclear whether Zhu and Fuentes have remained in contact.

While working as a scheduler and director of operations for Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) from 2022 to 2025, Zhu maintained a relatively low profile and stayed out of the headlines. In a 2025 LinkedIn post, Zhu said she had earned a master of arts in global security studies from Johns Hopkins University and was undergoing “spiritual transformation” as a convert to Catholicism.

Zhu could not be reached for this story. While she has not publicly renounced any of the views expressed in her past social media posts, it’s unclear whether she still holds them. It’s also unclear whether she views herself as being aligned with Fuentes and his Groyper movement.

Regardless, the views of someone like Fuentes, who dined with Trump in 2022, are no longer out of line in the Republican Party. By early 2024, Kirk, formerly the standard-bearer of youth conservatism in the Trump era and the one-time target of Fuentes’ attacks, had voiced white nationalist talking points. Conservative writer Rod Dreher reported last November that a D.C. insider estimated that "between 30 and 40 percent of of the Zoomers who work in official Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes."

“I can say since 2019 the spectrum of respectable, young, conservative opinion has gotten closer to Nick Fuentes,” Lorber said. “For someone like [Zhu], a past association with Nick Fuentes is really not much of a deal-breaker in the way it might have once been.”

The office of Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall did not respond to messages from Raw Story inquiring whether he was aware of Zhu’s history of losing her Miss Michigan title for her controversial social media posts at the time she was hired for the job of digital strategist director.

Hall, whose party took control of the Michigan House in January 2025, has not shied from controversy. In Trumpy fashion, he reportedly attacked a Democratic colleague by calling her “a very low IQ representative” and “probably one of the dumbest ones in the legislature” during a weekly press conference last year.

Hall held on to his leadership position over the objections of at least one of his Republican colleagues after the Daily Beast reported that he was accused of domestic violence against his girlfriend and interfering with a 911 call in 2019, but was never charged.

Hall has also acknowledged sending an email threatening to kill a college student in 2001, although he told the police he did not actually have any intent to harm the recipient. Hall reportedly wrote in the email, “We are going to impose our Southern ways on you! I’ve got a shotgun rifle and I just put a bullet in it with your name on it!”

Since 2019, views once considered taboo, such as the idea that America should be a Christian nation and that white people are being replaced, have become widely accepted in the Republican Party.

“She may very well be encouraging Michigan politicians to adopt some of that edgy, right-wing culture to connect with young conservatives,” Lorber said. “It might even be a benefit for her to say that she’s been an influencer. It really doesn’t matter if she’s secretly a Groyper, or has no connection to those views. There’s such a wide acceptance of the views that used to be considered beyond the pale that she can fit comfortably in the young GOP.”