Virginia Republicans obviously don’t want John Reid, a gay White man, on their DEI state ticket with a Black woman immigrant and the son of a Cuban refugee.
Reid went public in a video posted online on Friday with a claim that MAGA Gov. Glenn Youngkin had called to pressure him to drop out of the lieutenant governor race, after a Richmond-based news website published a story about a social-media account that was made to appear to be linked to Reid that contained explicit photos of men.
“What’s happened today was my worst fear. A total fabricated internet lie so basic that a middle-schooler could have constructed it,” Reid said in the video. “It’s predictable, but what I didn’t expect was the governor I have always supported to call and demand my resignation without even showing me the supposed evidence or offering me a chance to respond. I did not accept that, and I deeply resent it.”
It must suck for Reid to have to come to realize that the party that he thinks he’s a part of loathes him for being who he is, but this was, as Reid said in the video, “predictable.”
Republicans probably assumed that the June primary would take care of the John Reid-being-gay problem, but then the frontrunner in the Republican LG race, Pat Herrity, a member of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, had to drop out, citing issues with his recovery from heart surgery last month.
That left Reid, a Richmond radio talk show host and George Allen acolyte, as the nominee.
Reid had already been forced, ahead of being formally named the LG nominee, to deal with another generated controversy over online photos, involving images of him and his partner of eight years, Alonzo Mable, that he’d posted to social media from political events and vacation spots.
Reid addressed that smear in an April 17 social-media post, slamming “shady anonymous political people” for deciding “to ‘reveal’ personal pictures of me and Alonzo and pretend that they’re pornography.”
That smear didn’t work, so it would appear that the dirty tricksters – cue mental image of Nixon’s bumbling Watergate plumbers – decided that they needed to go the nuclear route.
A now-deleted Tumblr account that The Washington Post says shares the same handle as Reid’s other social media accounts had content “ranging from explicit photos of male genitalia to images typical of a racy underwear ad,” and a repost from March 2024 of “a photo of man facing a camera wearing only a baseball cap.”
It is odd that all of this would just be surfacing now that Reid is the Republican nominee, but it could be that there was a plan in place to save it for use later in the primary campaign if internal polls showed Reid giving Herrity trouble.
For what it’s worth, I’m not convinced that this isn’t what Reid says it is, a fake account created by political rivals; but neither am I convinced that Reid just forgot about an abandoned Tumblr account, because, seriously, Tumblr is still a thing?
Whatever is going on here, getting it out into the public domain now is clearly an effort to get the gay guy off the Republican statewide ticket.
I’d say I feel bad for John Reid here, but once this is leopards eating people’s faces writ large.
Reid, to his credit, seems to get that about what is going on here.
“Why am I the candidate who has to answer these questions on this topic? Let’s be honest, it’s because I’m openly gay, and I will not bow down to the establishment,” he said.
He could have just stopped at “it’s because I’m openly gay,” honestly.
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Chris Graham
