All those Bigfoot erotica jokes are helping normalize white supremacy

House candidate Denver Riggleman should be taken to task, but not for enjoying cryptid porn

The internet has long been a place where we’re free to indulge our seediest desires, a playground where letting your freak flag fly isn’t just acceptable, but practically expected. But as that space has become a more and more integral part of our daily lives, it’s also become increasingly common for some of those private explorations and enjoyments to wind up in the public eye. There was the time Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald tweeted out a photo that revealed he’d been browsing tentacle porn, for example, or the time Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall accidentally shared a link from Pornhub, or the time Ted Cruz’s Twitter account liked a tweet containing incest porn.

And now, in the most direct instance of explicit content taking over our political conversation, Virginia Democrat Leslie Cockburn, a candidate for the House of Representatives, has brought her opponent’s interest in Bigfoot erotica into her campaign rhetoric. On Sunday evening, Cockburn tweeted out a screencap of one of Denver Riggleman’s Instagram posts, noting that his erotic interests were “not what we need on Capitol Hill.”

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