Good Riddance to a Vicious Bigot

Farewell, Andy Ogles—we hardly knew you, and that was still too much.

Alex Skopic

filed 09 August 2026 in Politics

Representative Andy Ogles has lost his seat in Congress, and the nation is a better, cleaner place for it. Few people did so much, in so short a time in elected office, to drag America’s public discourse into the gutter of bigotry, religious hatred, and outright fascism. Practically every week, a new statement came from Ogles’ office that marked a new low point in ethics and good taste. “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month,” the representative’s official account tweeted this June, mocking the month’s LGBTQ Pride events. Ogles would later delete the post and blame “a member of my comms team,” but on other occasions he used the same language to disparage other groups, writing that “Muslims don't belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.” That post is still up.

Worst of all, Ogles openly endorsed the mass murder of Palestinians. When he was questioned by an anti-war activist about the deaths of children and other civilians in Gaza, his response was flagrantly genocidal: “I think we should kill them all.” And yet, despite the urging of civil rights groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Ogles was not censured by the House—the same body that did censure Representative Rashida Tlaib in 2023, merely for using the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The lesson was clear: in Washington, some people’s lives and deaths simply don’t count for much.

If Ogles were just another MAGA supporter making nasty comments on the internet, he wouldn’t be noteworthy. But for four years, he held real power in this country, and he wanted to use the power of the state as a weapon against his political enemies. Last year, he led an abortive effort to deport Zohran Mamdani, calling him a “communist who has publicly embraced a terroristic ideology” and vowing to “put him on the first flight back to Uganda.” It was a worrying return of the authoritarian Red Scare politics of the 20th century, which saw socialists like Eugene Debs imprisoned for their stance against World War One and thousands of others deported.

The America Ogles wanted to see was a tyrannical one, where having a non-Christian religion, a non-hetero sexuality, or any form of left-wing politics marks you out as an undesirable, and could even be grounds for punishment and expulsion. Now, though, Mamdani’s more welcoming political project is alive and well, while Ogles and his fascistic tendencies have gone down in an embarrassing public defeat.

Ogles got beaten handily in Tennessee's Republican primary, losing 46-53 to Charlie Hatcher, the state’s former agricultural commissioner. In part, it seems that Republican redistricting efforts backfired on him. In Tennessee, the GOP has been redrawing the voting maps to eliminate the only Democratic-leaning district, splitting majority-Black Memphis across three new jurisdictions. Thousands of the citizens of Memphis got shunted into Ogles’ new district, and according to one estimate, 82 percent of his constituents in the redrawn TN-5 had never been represented by him before, severely weakening his incumbency advantage. It seems that, even as Republicans voting in a GOP primary, Tennesseeans concluded that Ogles’ history of homophobia, religious bigotry, and red-baiting wasn’t serving their interests. (And the representative’s questionable statements about his finances can’t have helped.)

By itself, Ogles’ downfall is worth celebrating. But it’s also an important data point for the upcoming November midterms. It used to be that, if Donald Trump endorsed a Republican candidate, they were all but guaranteed to win their primary; that was the case with Ed Gallrein, who beat Thomas Massie in Kentucky this May despite claiming that his background in the Navy was “classified” and nobody was allowed to know about it. But even though Ogles got the Trump co-sign, it wasn’t enough to push him over the top—which suggests that, several months into the Iran war and the corresponding cost-of-living crisis, even some Republicans are getting sick of listening to their president. And if Trump’s stock has fallen that much, even in a deep-red state like Tennessee, the Republicans he endorses for November may be in serious trouble too.

If history remembers Andy Ogles at all, it will be in the same light as segregationist Strom Thurmond or Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, both of whom held elected office: as a sad example of the depths American politics can sink to on its worst days. But as writers Ryan Suto and Heba Mohammad warned in Current Affairs this April, there are plenty more like him who promote “anti-Muslim hate, and racism more broadly” at the highest levels of power. There’s Representative Randy Fine in Florida, who has compared Muslims to dogs and tried to ban the rainbow Pride flag from government buildings, or Senator Tommy Tuberville in Alabama, who has described people on welfare as “inner-city rats.” And then, of course, there’s Donald Trump himself, who opened the door to so much of this rhetoric in 2016. Ogles may be on his way out, but the task of ridding America of the poison he represented will be a long one.