State lawmaker Travis Corcoran posted to X calling for a final solution when his Jewish colleague sent out a karaoke invitation. Here’s how his hearing went.
Rep. Travis Corcoran told the House Legislative Administration Committee on Monday that his March 10 social media post calling for a “final solution for theater kids in politics” was a sarcastic joke.
Despite the rhetoric, he testified that he had not known the colleague he was citing was Jewish, declined to take questions, and left the hearing room before that colleague — Rep. Jessica Grill, D-Manchester — and more than a dozen other witnesses could speak against him. The original remark drew widespread outrage from across the country.
Corcoran was the first person to speak at the hearing, which was scheduled to “review and report” on his conduct after a rare House floor vote on April 9 referred the matter to the committee.
He left briskly after speaking and did not return.
In remarks to the committee titled “Kangaroo Court,” Corcoran repeatedly said his posts targeting Grill were a joke, but did not at any point apologize for making them.
“I did not know Representative Grill is Jewish,” Corcoran told the committee. “Had I known, I would’ve chosen other words. The joke still would’ve been a joke, and it still probably would’ve offended some people, but it would not have been phrased in a way that invited this particular bad-faith reading.”
Corcoran’s testimony directly contradicts a public statement he made hours after the original post.
“I wasn’t joking… We really do need to purge theater kids from any role that puts them anywhere near levers of power. Reality is a hard problem and you children are incapable of dealing with it,” Corcoran wrote.
Grill, the Jewish lawmaker whose karaoke invitation Corcoran responded to, testified after he had left.
She told the committee the Karaoke Caucus is a bipartisan social group that started in 2023 and has “no political agenda.” She said Corcoran posted his original “final solution” comment “before an audience of over 10,000 social media followers,” then doubled down with the “wasn’t joking” remark. She also disclosed a detail that has not been part of prior public coverage.
“He left up his original post, including a screenshot displaying my name and phone number,” she said.
“As a Jewish lawmaker, the use of the phrase ‘Final Solution’ is especially disturbing. It is not vague or thoughtless. It is targeted language with a specific historical meaning, delivered at a time when antisemitism and political violence are rising threats across the ideological spectrum.”
She asked the committee to go beyond the Letter of Caution that Speaker Sherman Packard sent Corcoran on April 6.
“For that reason, a reprimand alone is not enough. I ask this committee to recommend that Rep. Corcoran be removed from the House,” Grill said. “Rep. Corcoran studied history. He knows what those words mean. Given his insistence that he wasn’t joking, we have every reason to take him at his word.”
Rep. Bill Boyd, R-Merrimack, read a letter into the record co-signed by 3 other Republican lawmakers: Reps. Nick Bridle of Hampton, Mike Bordes of Laconia, and Matt Coker of Meredith asking the committee to support a reprimand resolution.
“While it is easier to hold our political opponents to a high standard, it is far more difficult, but necessary, to hold our own members to a higher standard. This is not a matter of politics. It’s a matter of principle,” Boyd said. “We cannot ask Granite Staters to hold us in high regard if we do not hold ourselves accountable.”
The letter cited Part 2, Article 22 of the New Hampshire Constitution, which gives the House authority to discipline members for disorderly behavior, including the power of expulsion. It said Corcoran’s conduct “constitutes a breach of conduct expected of a member of the General Court.”
Rep. Wendy Thomas (D-Merrimack) read written testimony into the record on behalf of Rep. Luz Bay (D-Dover), who could not attend. Bay, a naturalized US citizen born in the Philippines and 2026 candidate for executive council, told the committee that Corcoran tagged senior Trump administration officials in an attempt to have her deported while she was actively delivering a floor speech against a constitutional amendment she said would have harmed the participation of immigrants in state government.
“He did this in real time during my remarks, while I was standing on the floor fulfilling my constitutional duty,” Bay’s testimony read.
“It was not a critique of my argument. It was a call for the removal of a sitting legislator from the country that she serves. It was an attempt to intimidate me into silence, and it was a message to immigrants and naturalized citizens across New Hampshire that their place in civic life is conditional and vulnerable to those who believe they do not belong.”
Rabbi Daniel Aronson of Congregation Ahavas Achim in Keene told the committee Corcoran’s words were made worse by his background.
“It is even more detestable coming from someone who understands just how detestable it is — a former National Merit Scholar, a history major at an Ivy League University and a prize-winning author,” Aronson said. “A supposedly intelligent, well-educated person who understands the historical, political, and social implications of the term ‘the final solution,’ and who presumably chooses his words with great intention.”
Aronson also expanded the harm beyond antisemitism. “It would be a mistake to only categorize Mr. Corcoran’s post as an expression of antisemitism without also acknowledging his attacks on theater kids and politics,” he said, calling it a direct threat against a group “disproportionately creative, intellectual, liberal, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, non-binary, or transgender.”
Eric Martin, executive director of the Jewish Federation of New Hampshire, told the committee that antisemitic incidents nationally rose more than 300% after Oct. 7, 2023, and pointed to recent local incidents including a neo-Nazi demonstration in Concord, swastikas spray-painted on a Portsmouth synagogue and minority-owned businesses, and white nationalist propaganda distributed at a synagogue in Bethlehem.
“Synagogues are increasing security. Parents are having difficult conversations with their children. Community members are asking whether it’s safe to visibly express their Jewish identity,” he said.
Rev. Zachary Harmon of St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Hampstead, and former Rep. Jeffrey Sway — past chairman of the Northeast District of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, who lost half his family in the Holocaust — also testified in support of disciplinary action.
Anthony Poor, president and CEO of the New Hampshire Center for Justice and Equity, told the committee Corcoran’s social media activity has had concrete operational consequences for his organization.
In a June 2024 X post about the nonprofit’s work, Poor said that Corcoran wrote: “This is the enemy. This is who we fight.” In January 2025 posts about a Corcoran bill targeting nonprofits’ tax-exempt status, Corcoran wrote: “There are dozens and dozens of New Hampshire NGOs and people that we need to specifically harm.” Poor said Corcoran’s posts in that period included street addresses of organizations and, in some cases, home addresses of board members.
Poor said his organization responded by investing in enhanced locks, an upgraded security system, and private security at public events, and now walks staff members to their cars. He said the nonprofit maintains a running portfolio of threats it reports to the New Hampshire Department of Justice Civil Rights Unit.
“It’s very scary when you have to confront such threats,” Poor said. “You shouldn’t have to work in an environment, particularly when our nonprofit organizations step up every single day and oftentimes fill the void left behind by state government.”
The committee did not vote Monday. Chairman Gregory Hill said the committee will draft a recommendation, which will then go to the full 400-member House for a vote at a date yet to be set.
A committee member reminded the audience that whatever the panel recommends, the final decision rests with the House, and urged Granite Staters to write to their own representatives ahead of that vote.
The Legislative Administration Committee has not been asked to consider sanctioning a sitting member since 2017.
Corcoran’s history of inflammatory speech predates his time in the New Hampshire House. In January 2011, Arlington, Massachusetts police suspended his firearms license and confiscated his guns and ammunition after he wrote a blog post following the Tucson shooting that injured US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
The post included the phrase “1 down, 534 to go,” referring to all the members of Congress.
In a separate post around the same time, he wrote, “I think that it is morally legitimate to kill pro-regulation senators and pro-regulation judges, if it can be done without harming innocents.” Police characterized the writing as a potential credible threat. Corcoran was not arrested or charged.
Two years later, Massachusetts police searched his home after a Twitter account linked to him posted comments appearing to call for the shooting of government employees installing surveillance cameras; firearms registered to his girlfriend were seized.
He sold the home and moved to New Hampshire shortly after.
Rep. Corcoran also has a long and documented history of racist rhetoric.
In 2023, he posted on Twitter encouraging followers to publicly use the N-word, writing that people should “say or type the word” in public as a form of protest. In May 2025, in response to an invitation from Everytown for Gun Safety to wear orange in honor of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, he wrote that “violence isn’t associated with the presence of guns, but with the presence of African Americans,” and claimed Black Americans “commit violent crimes a 5-10x the rate of whites.” He said he would wear a black shirt instead, “to help make people aware of the fact that crime is predominantly caused by African Americans, and not by guns.”
