ACT Party leader David Seymour says his party will not return a donation from Mike Allen, a Christchurch businessman who sells mock "Make America Great Again" hats to fund advertising for far-right Facebook pages and who threatened in a since-deleted Facebook post to "destroy mosque after mosque till I am taken out".
Allen asked Seymour to sign the hat and then auctioned it off on TradeMe in August, originally to raise funds for the Kidsline charity.
Seymour told Newsroom that he worried the auction would politicise the charity, which he supports as a local MP, and asked Allen to change the recipient of the funds to ACT.
Seymour is refusing to return the donation, and outraged that anyone would think badly of ACT over this. But this isn't an innocent donation by a stranger - Seymour enabled and solicited it from a known racist. And we are perfectly entitled to judge him and his party on that. If he doesn't want that judgement, the answer is simple: don't work with Nazis.