Tuesday, August 11, 2026

PAY NO ATTENTION TO ALL THE FREAKS IN THE GOP, THE PARTY OF NORMAL PEOPLE!

Today's Michelle Goldberg column is about a proud Republican asshole named Brandon Herrera, who's running for a House seat with the support of prayerful invertebrate Mike Johnson:
Because this is a family newspaper, I cannot quote the piquant term that Brandon Herrera, a Republican House candidate in Texas, used to refer to children in a 2023 video. I can only report that he called them “trophies” for getting a man to ejaculate. Nor, alas, am I allowed to repeat the obscenities that Herrera, a gun influencer, used to explain why the opinions of mothers are without value. I can only say that he argued, essentially, that getting pregnant requires no special skill.
This is not a family blog, so I'll provide that Herrera quote, though you may want to take a shower afterward:


Jesus, apparently, doesn't have a problem with this.


Goldberg continues:
I can, however, tell you about the Nazi and eugenics stuff. In a 2022 video, Herrera and a buddy in sunglasses and a balaclava tested a Nazi-era submachine gun, then goose-stepped to a Nazi marching song. Herrera called the weapon “the original ghetto blaster.” In a 2024 podcast, after calling for abolishing Social Security, he joked that we should also “abolish old people,” laughing along as his co-hosts riffed about killing them off as in the cult horror film “Midsommar.”
Herrera was the less offensive of the two major candidates in his primary.
Herrera became the Republican nominee in his South Texas district in March after the sitting congressman, Tony Gonzales, withdrew due to a sexual harassment scandal.
Gonzales reportedly had an affair with a married staffer who then committed suicide by setting herself on fire. But remember, the Republican Party is the party of traditional moral values.

I give Michelle Goldberg a lot of credit. She regularly writes about sick freaks in the Republican Party. Two years ago, she wrote about Royce White, the Alex Jones-loving misogynist (“Women have become too mouthy”) who ran unsuccessfully for Amy Klobuchar's Senate seat. (Goldberg was on to him long before his current campaign, which has been accompanied by a cheap stunt -- White is claiming he's a woman so he can participate in the WNBA draft -- and a judge has issued a fifty-year no-contact order preventing him from interacting with his ex-wife and one of his children, whom he's said to have abused). Goldberg has written about Micah Beckwith, the Christian nationalist book-banner who's now Indiana's lietenant governor, and Victor Marx, the self-styled exorcist who, if we're to believe him, killed someone when he was seven years years old.

But even the most engaged resistlib Trump haters have probably never heard of these people, or, as Goldberg says in the current column, this guy:
I regularly speak to people who follow politics closely but haven’t heard of Cory Mills, a Republican representative running for re-election in Florida. One ex-girlfriend of Mills won a restraining order against him after saying he threatened her with revenge porn. Another, whom he was seeing at the same time, told the police he’d assaulted her, though she later recanted. (He denies both charges.) Mills is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of both sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations. Yet it barely made a stir when Trump endorsed him in the Republican primary, which takes place next week; polls show him ahead in the four-way contest.
She notes that the alleged abuse by Ohio congressman Max Miller "finally breached what we might call the bad-even-for-Republicans line," but he's the exception, not the rule.

I'm glad Goldberg regularly draws attention to these GOP lowlifes. But I don't fully agree with her on the reason they generally get so little attention:
That Herrera has flown somewhat under the radar is a testament to a fundamental asymmetry between the parties, as well as in our discourse about them. Thanks to Trump, misogyny and extremism among Republicans has become what journalists sometimes call a dog-bites-man story, something so ordinary and predictable that it breaks through only when it reaches an absurdly high threshold.
Is it really just Trump? He lowered the bar, but outside of leftist/liberal spaces, the master narrative surrounding the GOP defines it as the party of Real Americans, regular folks with traditional values and ideas, while the Democratic Party is said to be full of weirdos with bizarre ideas and lifestyles. The latter characterization has persisted even though the party's most prominent figures, at least until recently, have been moderate dullards -- Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries.

Republicans can generate a national panic about "communist" Democrats because for years they've been characterizing even the most moderate Democrats as socialists and commies. Right now, they're just taking advantage of a well-established narrative. Outside of left/liberal spaces, there hasn't been a master "Republicans are extreme, nasty weirdos" narrative -- Tim Walz tried to get one going in the 2024 presidential campaign, but he was asked to stop calling Republicans "weird" and, sadly, he complied.

I blame the mainstream media for not writing a thousand trend pieces about Republican pathology. And Democrats are still unwilling to condemn the Republican Party categorically, even when there's so much to work with (and even when it's obvious that categorically condemning the Democrats has been a highly effective strategy in much of Middle America, sustaining the GOP's political dominance even though the party has nothing to offer ordinary Americans on real issues).

Democrats' message should be: This is who Republicans are. They abuse with impunity. Their ideas are extreme. They're the party that's out of touch with normal American values. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that narrative to take hold.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:14 AM

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