Republican Candidate in Virginia Caught in Tumblr Nazi Porn Scandal

You may recall the Nazi porn scandal that plagued the Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina last September. For the second year in a row, the cooler months have ushered in a Republican Nazi porn scandal, this time beleaguering a candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia.

Republican nominee John Reid faces fresh scrutiny surrounding a Tumblr blog, allegedly linked to him, that contained pornographic content. Reid denies ownership of the profile, which has the same username as other social media accounts of his: “JRDeux.”

It was previously reported that “JRDeux” reposted users’ photos that, per The Washington Post, ranged “from explicit photos of male genitalia to images typical of a racy underwear ad.” When that news broke, Reid, who is gay, persisted with his campaign despite Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin urging him to drop out.

On Wednesday, American Journal News unearthed additional details about the “JRDeux” Tumblr profile. In October 2015, the blog reposted an image of “a male college student in underwear,” which was published by a Nazi fetish account with a racial slur in its username; it contained the phrase “obedient n—.”

The user described himself as a “subservient n— who knows his place in society” and who was seeking “superior white men” in the Washington, D.C., area. According to American Journal News, the Nazi fetish account also posted sexual images including swastikas and white supremacist slogans, but “JRDeux” only shared the one underwear post.

“JRDeux” also shared posts from an account called “slaveandy,” devoted to content about sexual slavery.

According to Reid, the whole story was concocted to smear his sexuality.

Virginia Democrats, however, are calling on Reid to suspend his campaign.

“The accounts that Reid appears to have promoted and engaged with are full of hateful, racist, bigoted imagery,” said Virginia Delegate Mike Jones. “John Reid’s track record shows he is comfortable with white supremacy. Now, it looks like he’s fine with it showing up on his social media feed.”

“The news of the racist, antisemitic online content linked to John Reid on a social media account is appalling and shameless,” said state Senator Adam Ebbin. “They reveal John Reid has a disturbing level of comfort with disgusting, dehumanizing ideologies.”

The scandal echoes that which dashed the 2024 gubernatorial campaign of former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Last year, CNN reported that an account linked to Robinson had boasted about being a “Black Nazi,” among other shocking posts, on a pornographic forum.

Free-speech grifter Bari Weiss will soon be named editor in chief of CBS News, multiple outlets reported Thursday, and her right-wing, genocide-denying blog The Free Press will be acquired by Paramount Skydance for about $150 million. Paramount will make the official announcement in the coming days.

This move comes soon after CBS was acquired by David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Oracle, of course, recently made headlines for getting control of TikTok’s U.S. assets, as the group’s CEO also seeks to “embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture.”

Weiss gained notoriety for her controversial exit from The New York Times in 2020, when she claimed she was targeted by her co-workers for being insufficiently woke after she defended a grotesque and incendiary op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton urging President Trump to use the military against Black Lives Matter protesters. She took that momentum all the way to establishing The Free Press, becoming a symbol for right-wingers who are more afraid of people of color, LGBTQ folk (and trans people specifically), and student protesters than they are of President Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

Weiss’s The Free Press notably recently made headlines for a repugnant, cruel attempt at a “gotcha” article claiming that viral images of gaunt, malnourished Palestinian children in Gaza should actually be disregarded as pro-Hamas propaganda because the children pictured already had preexisting conditions like cerebral palsy—as if that in any way explained their starvation. If anything, as most people pointed out, Israel’s genocide only exacerbated their health conditions.

Now Weiss, who wants to be a martyr in the woke wars and who oversaw countless stories denying the suffering of Palestinians, will be in control of one of the country’s largest media conglomerates, as the larger media landscape shifts rightward.

Mexican American GOP lawmakers have been largely silent on MAGA’s sombrero memes this week.

President Donald Trump on Monday shared a video featuring House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Truth Social, using AI to depict Jeffries wearing a mustache and sombrero while mariachi music plays and Schumer trashes Democrats.

The president’s allies (including the official Republican Party) have gleefully seized on the absurd video, making and sharing their own memes of Democratic lawmakers in sombreros. Some Latino advocacy groups have condemned Trump for using stereotypes to demean Mexicans.

But most Mexican American Republicans in Congress—Representatives Brian Mast, Tony Gonzales, David Valadao, Juan Ciscomani, Monica De La Cruz, and Gabe Evans—have not addressed the memes publicly as of this writing Thursday afternoon.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna is the only Mexican American Republican to comment on the meme, and in fact, she can’t seem to stop. The Florida representative has even changed the profile picture on her congressional X account to a portrait of herself in a digitally added sombrero.

Luna dismissed “fake outrage” over the memes on Wednesday, and later told Fox News host Jesse Watters that the joke inspired her to purchase red sombreros for Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

On Wednesday evening, Luna shared a photoshopped picture of JD Vance donning a sombrero and mustache. On Thursday, she posted a photo of herself, Vance, and Jeffries in sombreros, asking her followers, “Who wore it better?”

On the Democratic side of the aisle, many members of Congress of Mexican descent have reacted to the memes.

Senator Alex Padilla and Representative Teresa Leger Fernández seized on the moment to criticize Trump’s childish posting habits and pin blame for the ongoing government shutdown on Republicans.

“Democrats came to the White House to keep the government open. The President answered with a racist AI video,” Padilla wrote on X. “Anyone searching for an answer on who owns this shutdown—look no further.”

Fernández accused Trump of “acting like a 6-year-old,” saying, “The problem is that when he acts like a 6-year-old, it’s not like you can just get mad at him and say, ‘Stop drawing mustaches on people.’ People will die because of their decisions.”

Representative Jimmy Gomez responded to the memes with an AI-generated movie poster featuring Donald Trump and the late notorious sex criminal—and former Trump associate—Jeffrey Epstein. “Every time Donald Trump puts up a racist AI generated video of Hakeem Jefferies or any of my colleagues, I’ll put [up] a new movie poster about Trump and Epstein,” he wrote.

Senator Ruben Gallego responded to Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s sombrero meme by highlighting the 2021 scandal in which the Texas senator took a trip to Cancún, Mexico, while a winter storm left millions of his constituents freezing without power and heat.

Posting an image of Cruz in the airport—with a photoshopped sombrero and mustache, of course—Gallego wrote, “Cancun Cruz knows a thing or two about Mexico and a lot about raising health care costs for 24 million Americans.”

The Department of Homeland Security blatantly lied about the victim of a recent shooting committed by an ICE agent during an immigration arrest in Chicago. 

Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, 38, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Franklin Park during an attempted immigration detention. DHS claimed Villegas-Gonzalez had resisted arrest and dragged an officer for “a significant distance” with his car. Nearby surveillance footage revealed the agent fired two shots, and Villegas-Gonzalez died from his injuries later at a hospital.

But the agency’s justification of deadly force doesn’t quite add up. 

On September 19, DHS published a press release that claimed that Villegas-Gonzalez was “a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving.” But apparently, that’s completely wrong: NBC News reported that he had no criminal history. Villegas-Gonzalez had pleaded guilty to four traffic violations, including speeding, the most recent of which was in 2013.

The federal press release also claimed that the ICE agent responsible for the shooting had been “seriously injured” in the line of duty. But bodycam videos from Franklin Park police officers shortly after the incident showed the ICE agent describing his injuries as “nothing major,” NBC News reported Monday. 

It’s not clear why ICE had targeted Villegas-Gonzalez in the first place. David J. Bier, the  immigration director for the Cato Institute, wrote on X that ICE had manufactured the incident through a needless traffic stop.

“ICE tried to grab him just after dropping off his two little kids at day care. There is no reason why this interaction needed to happen at all,” Bier wrote, adding, “Desperate people in desperate spots can make stupid decisions like this guy did. But ICE shouldn’t manufacture these situations either.”

Additionally, one witness speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times claimed that ICE’s account of the fatal shooting had been inaccurate, and questioned whether the incident would be properly investigated. Neither of the officers involved in the incident were wearing body cameras, even though policy requires they wear them “as soon as practicable at the beginning of an Enforcement Activity and deactivation when the activity is concluded.” 

A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Illinois Representatives Jesús “Chuy” García and Delia C. Ramirez, as well as Senators Dick Durbin, Richard Blumenthal, and Tammy Duckworth sent a letter Tuesday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Director Todd Lyons demanding that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari investigate the shooting. 

It’s not entirely surprising that ICE would pursue an arrest of someone with no criminal conviction, or that they would lie about it. A Cato Institute study from June found that 65 percent of ICE detainees since October 2024 had no criminal record, and 95 had no violent criminal convictions. 

DHS’s press release about Villegas-Gonzalez claimed that ICE law enforcement was facing a 1,000 percent increase in assaults against them, up from a nearly 700 percent increase in July. But considering that there were just 10 assaults against ICE agents during the same period last year, that places the total number of purported assaults at roughly 100.

That figure doesn’t seem all that terrifying, especially when considering all of the wildly inconsistent and patently phony allegations of assault that have come to light as the Justice Department consistently struggles to secure indictments against protesters accused of assaulting immigration officials.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement will soon be tracking cell phone data.

The immigration law enforcement agency has bought access to an “all-in-one” surveillance tool that gives it updated location data from hundreds of millions of phones, according to ICE documents obtained by 404 Media. ICE reportedly prefers the service because it also peels information from social media accounts.

Redacted documents make reference to two products, both produced by the contractor Penlink. They are known as Tangles and WebLoc. Both were created by an Israeli company called Cobwebs, which merged into Penlink in 2023. ICE has reportedly spent upwards of $5 million for access to the software, Forbes reported last month.

Previous attempts to monitor consumers’ location data for immigration enforcement were found to be illegal. A sweeping records request by the ACLU in 2022 found that DHS had obtained more than 336,000 location data points across North America by scraping app user data on hundreds of millions of phones during Donald Trump’s first term.  

“Every American should be concerned that Trump’s hand-picked security force is once again buying and using location data without a warrant,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

The decision to invest in Penlink’s products was informed by market research conducted in May and June by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, according to the documents.

WebLoc monitors the trends of mobile devices that have location data activated, and “how often they have been” to those locations, according to a government case study. Tangles creates a day-in-the-life profile of individuals based on mined social media data. It combines “posts, contacts, locations, and events they attended, combining it with any information leaked about them online,” Forbes reported, as well as captured images of a subject’s face that can then be searched for in databases by using Tangles’s AI-assisted tools.

ICE has praised Penlink’s products in internal documents, noting the tools forgo issues they’ve had with previous services, which would require analysts to “manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources.”

“Without an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive web investigations capabilities and automated analysis of location-based data within specified geographic areas, intelligence teams face significant operational challenges,” according to ICE documents published by 404 Media.

Read the full report at 404 Media.