For the fourth time this decade, Republican Mike Cargile is challenging Democrat Norma Torres for Congressional District 35, an Inland Empire district which includes the cities of Chino, Claremont, Corona, Fontana, Ontario, Pomona and Upland.
Cargile previously ran unsuccessful campaigns for the district in 2020, 2022 and 2024.
I asked Cargile about his campaign, about what sort of legislation he would support in Congress, and why voters should finally elect him over Torres.
“Well, I actually support the Constitution of the United States. Norma Torres seems to have very little regard for it. It doesn’t matter the issue, whether it’s Second Amendment issues or respecting borders and border security. Norma wants wide open borders … So Norma supports criminal behavior. I support families.”
Torres’ campaign website doesn’t necessarily strike one as advocating for open borders, instead claiming that “we can secure our border” while doing so with “empathy and humanity.”
In promoting his candidacy, Cargile cited his support for family values and objected to “teachers telling their boys you could be a little girl” and males in female sports or bathrooms.
What Would Bukele Do?
Along with culture war issues, Cargile told me that he would support energy independence and that he would like to see the U.S. shift focus toward the Americas, citing Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele as a model that we should encourage in Latin America.
Bukele dramatically reduced crime in El Salvador, but did so by implementing mass arrests, often arbitrary and without due process. He has been accused of systematic human rights abuses including suppressing the media, torture and of using the military to intimidate law makers in the country.
We could also reduce crime in the U.S. by instituting martial law and sending the military into our streets to permanently detain anyone who even looks suspicious – I assumed that someone who loves the Constitution as much as Cargile would object to that, so I asked Cargile why he’s a supporter of Bukele’s tactics in El Salvador. He had a simple way out of this – they’re all lies.
“Well, they’re baseless charges. There are actually lies created for people who want to use El Salvador for nefarious reasons. El Salvador was the murder capital of the world. And under President Bukele, it’s now safer than any major U.S. city.”
Bukele’s human rights violations have been extensively documented but this was a preview of Cargile’s sweeping skepticism of plain matters of fact.
Chemtrails and the United States of the Americas
In one of his responses to this paper’s candidate questionnaire, he explained that he would push to end “geoengineering.” When I read that, I thought he was just a good old-fashioned denier of man-made climate change.
The reality was arguably worse in terms of what it says about his respect for evidence, but I could not help but be amused by it: “Well, geoengineering is because people can’t say chemtrails or things like that without being censored … But now we know what they’ve been putting in their cloud seeding or geoengineering efforts. And it’s toxic. It’s toxic and it lands on our food and we eat it … When you look at the sky and you see these long, long trails, they don’t dissipate.”
Our open-minded friend’s remarkable ability to believe in the most outlandish theories would only grow more obvious as the interview went on. Before that though, I steered the conversation back to more sensible matters, like foreign policy.
It wouldn’t stay sensible for long as Cargile proposed that North, Central and South American countries should unite to form the “United States of the Americas,” where “we would govern as a body for economic stability and for mutual defense.”
It’s possible that Cargile may have only been suggesting that we build a loose coalition in the Americas held together by treaties, but it sure seemed to me that he was suggesting a full-blown unification of the Americas, which would be one of the wildest proposals I’ve ever heard from a politician.
Mexican Biology
After Cargile criticized the Trump administration for our continued participation in the Iran war, we talked a bit about his opposition to birthright citizenship, which is clearly guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
Cargile explained that illegal immigration is analogous to someone breaking into your home and stated that, “Your parents are Mexican, and it doesn’t matter where you’re born. You’re a Mexican. You’re a Mexican citizen, and you’re Mexican in your biology, your inheritance. So this has been utterly abused.”
People of Mexican descent who are born in the U.S. are not Mexican citizens. There is also no such thing as a “Mexican biology” – Mexico contains one of the most genetically diverse populations in the world including indigenous, European, African and Asian ancestry. In fact, some indigenous groups in Mexico are as genetically distinct from one another as White Britons are from ethnically Japanese people.
Conceiving, as Cargile does, of birthright citizenship as a “loophole” would mean that millions of children of immigrants should have never been given the opportunity to pursue the American dream, so it would be a shame if Cargile’s opposition stemmed from this simple misunderstanding of human genetics.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Cargile’s social media activity has been seen as sympathetic to the QAnon movement, which spread conspiracy theories about the “deep state” including the infamous PizzaGate. When I asked him about it, at first he downplayed it, stating that the agreement was just about the existence of human trafficking.
QAnon is about so much more than just trafficking, so I asked if he shared in their belief that there exists a satanic cabal of cannibal elites who eat and sexually abuse babies.
“So if you go to my website and you look at the video that says Steve Hilton is in the Epstein files, and he is, in the center section up there where we’re talking about what you just described, children, cannibalism, all of this, all of that is verifiable in the Epstein files. Because Jeffrey Epstein was in the thick of it.”
“And you think they were satanic too?” I asked. Cargile just couldn’t help himself.
“Yes. No, they talk about it. It’s all satanic. And it’s a satanic cabal that Jeffrey Epstein was very fluent in.”
He described graphic scenes of the most awful things one can imagine including about alleged emails that showed that George Bush and Bill Clinton sexually assaulted “some dude on a boat”.
The flood gates had opened and there was now no stopping Cargile.
“Lyme disease was created by the U.S. government. It didn’t exist until a weapons lab let it out.”
“Alpha-gal, which is, I guess, skyrocketing all over … And they’ve got video of containers that have been dropped off full of ticks … And the tick bites you and you develop an allergy to meat. And this is, again, it’s Bill Gates and whoever he’s working with, And I hate to say it, inside our government, with Trump in control, the CDC, HHS, how is this allowed?”
Of course, 9/11 was also an inside job: “Absolutely. Absolutely. We know now that there were massive insurance policies taken out by certain individuals before it occurred. We know that the US government facilitated entry by known terrorists … And they still can’t provide evidence of an actual plane hitting the pentagon.”
Back to Earth
As entertaining as it is to speak to someone who treats evidence-based belief formation as an entirely optional inconvenience, Cargile has taken this to the extreme.
A quick survey of his Twitter/X account shows that he tweets or retweets about things like “free energy devices”, which would violate the laws of physics, chemtrail content posted by lunatics along with fake stories about brain cancer being cured by Ivermectin. Then there’s a post about a nefarious government plan to spread a meat-allergy disease via ticks, with Cargile adding that Bill Gates “conjured” it up while at Epstein’s Island.
If Cargile gets a kick out of believing every conspiracy theory he can find, then more power to him, but that’s not something we need more of in Congress.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.