Virginia House candidate says there’s nothing sexual about his interest in Bigfoot

“These are good people, they’re smart, they’re intelligent, and they want Bigfoot to be with them.”

A Republican candidate in Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District whose opponent has accused him of being “a devotee of Bigfoot erotica” has responded in perhaps the weirdest moment of a very weird month in the very strange political year that is 2018.

Retired Air Force intelligence officer and brewery owner Denver Riggleman is running for office as a Republican after being chosen at a party convention following the retirement of Republican Rep. Tom Garrett. One reason he’s running for office, he said in a video interview Monday, is to fight for “the freedom to believe in any type of Bigfoot you want.”

Riggleman is the co-author of a self-published 2006 book called Bigfoot Exterminators, Inc.: The Partially Cautionary, Mostly True Tale of Monster Hunt 2006, a work about people who look for Bigfoot.

Recently, his Democratic opponent, Leslie Cockburn, has been sharing his social media postings focused on Bigfoot and, more specifically, Bigfoot’s hypothetical genitalia.

As my colleague Matthew Yglesias wrote on Monday morning, there’s a reason for this. Namely, Virginia’s midterm races are highly competitive down ballot, and everything — everything — is fair game:

In short, while Bigfoot erotica isn’t exactly the most important issue facing the country this year, it could well prove decisive in the extremely important question of whether America elects a new Congress that is inclined to try to check Donald Trump or to stick with the status quo.

But on Monday afternoon, Riggleman responded with a six-minute interview on the conservative outlet CRTV’s Kibbe on Liberty show, in which he discussed the “religious war” going on between different types of Bigfoot believers — among them those who hold that Bigfoot might be able to use “psychic terror vibes” against its victims “to make you run through the woods and crash into the trees,” permitting Bigfoot to forcibly impregnate them — and said that he was proud to have fought for the rights of all Americans to believe “in whatever Bigfoot they want,” even, for example, a gluten-intolerant Bigfoot.

“These are good people, they’re smart, they’re intelligent, and they want Bigfoot to be with them. And I think that’s a noble pursuit,” Riggleman says in the video.

Watch the full video here.