With his normcore style and measured, talk-radio voice, John Reid, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia, is no internet-pickled groyper. He’s a stock MAGA uncle, smarmy and bluff. But for six months now, he’s been giving lech. He’s been giving Gaetz lite.
Back in May, research from an anti-Reid faction in the state GOP alleged that he was behind a Tumblr account, “JRDeux,” which posted penis pics. (Reid’s Instagram account has the same handle.) At the time, Reid denied he was responsible for the account, claiming he was the victim of a smear campaign for being openly gay; he stayed on the ticket over the objections of his own party, including Governor Glenn Youngkin.
But you can’t keep this sordid story down. Last week, with early voting well underway in the November 4 election, American Journal News revealed that, on the same porny Tumblr blog, JRDeux didn’t just serve up lewdery. He boosted a user who brandished swastikas. (See: “Republican Candidate in Virginia Caught in Nazi Porn Scandal.”) Back in 2015, JRDeux also shared an image of a male college student posted by a user who self-described with a racial slur and sought the company of “superior white men.” Turns out Reid’s alleged Tumblr clique was devoted to the eroticization of slavery and “overt Nazi fetishism.”
“No one’s ever seen a candidate like me in Virginia and quite frankly most places across the country,” Reid boasted not long ago to a Charlottesville media outlet. He’d be right—except that, for those keeping count at home, Reid is the second Republican to be engulfed in a Nazi porn scandal in just over a year.
So that’s all deeply bleak. But what’s weirdest about Reid is not his weirdness. It’s how MAGA-typical his whole career is. Billing himself as an “American Patriot, Reagan Conservative, Virginia Gentleman,” Reid has a personal story that doubles as the spiritual journey of four decades of GOP putrefaction. Reid has Zelig-ed his way through just about every stage in the GOP’s metamorphosis from anti-fascist family-value conservatism to its current incarnation as the profa (as opposed to antifa) party of pervs.
Four decades ago, Reid started strong. He graduated from tony St. Christopher’s prep school in Richmond, and then Baylor, the Christian university that later brought in Ken Starr as president, only to fire him for licensing campus sexual assault. In 1993, Reid moved to Los Angeles to intern for former President Ronald Reagan.
What telegenic Reagan conservative of the 1990s didn’t want to be on TV? Reid then spent a decade as a reporter and then anchor for a morning show at the ABC affiliate in Richmond. Years later, he built on this success by hosting a conservative radio show on WRVA. Trump called in to his radio show last February, and Reid buttered him up.
In the 2000s, Reid flacked for then-Senator George Allen during Allen’s infamous racist interludes. (A longtime friend to the Sons of the Confederacy, Allen, as Virginia governor, declared April “Confederacy Month.”) All along, Reid has had a soft spot for Richmond’s racist monuments. “We must not let angry mobs and corrupt lawless Democrats destroy and erase our history and our public artwork, monuments, memorials, and tombs,” he posted to Facebook in July.
And the Virginia Flaggers have never forgotten Reid’s kindness to their movement. Last month, the Flaggers, a neo-Confederate group known for espousing Lost Cause ideology and installing massive Confederate battle flags over highways, posted to Facebook: “John Reid for Lt. Governor of Virginia is the ONLY candidate for statewide office who is not afraid to speak out and speak up about the war on our history and heritage!”
In 2011, Reid joined what has been called the Torturers’ Lobby, the K Street “communications” firms whose dark arts for whitewashing foreign authoritarian regimes were pioneered in part by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. In 2011, Reid rose to partner at Qorvis, the strategy firm notorious for counseling barbaric governments like Saudi Arabia and Libya. (Most recently, Qorvis helped Saudi Arabia sweep under the rug the torture and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by government agents.)
At Qorvis, Reid became a registered foreign agent. “Reid’s experience normalized influence-peddling for repressive governments,” David Leblang, who teaches public policy at the University of Virginia, told the Virginia Mercury. On September 8, Qorvis CEO Matt Lauer (not the disgraced TV guy) appears to have attended a Reid fundraiser on Capitol Hill, along with loose-collared Dancing With the Stars personality Sean Spicer.
Though Reid came out as gay in the 1990s, and has been with his boyfriend, Alonzo Mable, for eight years, he opposes enshrining gay marriage (along with voting rights and reproductive rights) in Virginia’s constitution. He regularly orates on “predatory” trans women, “the physical mutilation of children,” and the rest of the MAGA urban legends.
Meanwhile, his whole ticket is troubled. At the top, gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears is polling well behind her Democratic rival, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger. Youngkin, for his part, is whipping up made-for-Fox outrage about Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, who not long ago shared high-key disturbing fantasies about committing political violence. And on Tuesday, the Republican Governors Association dropped another $1.5 million into the race to boost Earle-Sears.
So it’s gonna be another nutty month in Virginia. But have no fear for John Reid. If he wins, he wins. But if he leaves Richmond for D.C. in some Trumpy capacity, he might also get a hero’s welcome there. The perv-fascist solidarity in Trump’s Washington has come to seem like the #MeToo movement in reverse. Lechy newcomers get to burst onto the scene at Butterworth’s—“me too, guys!”—into the loving arms of the sex-scandal-plagued elite: former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, and of course Trump himself.
