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Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Bill Berrien
Does this make Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bill Berrien a hypocrite? His staff says no.
Bill Berrien, a deeply conservative, anti-transgender candidate for Wisconsin governor, has been following nonbinary adult entertainer and author Jiz Lee “and several other authors of sexually explicit essays” on the online platform Medium, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
Critics have called Berrien out for following accounts exploring gender and sexuality, but then publicly pushing traditional conservative talking points about those same topics.
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Berrien, a businessman from Whitefish Bay and a former Navy SEAL, is one of three candidates seeking the 2026 Republican nomination for governor. There are several candidates seeking the Democratic nomination as well. The current governor, Democrat Tony Evers, decided not to run for another term.
On his campaign website, Berrien has said, “Our daughters’ sports teams and locker rooms are at risk because of radical social experimentation,” meaning the presence of trans people.
In ads, he has said, “Take it from a dad and a coach, I will keep boys out of our daughters' sports and locker rooms,” and praised Donald Trump for “protecting our daughters' sports.”
But on Medium, he has “clapped” for — similar to a “like” on Facebook — an article by Lee on ethical pornography and a post by another author on polyamory. His campaign staff said he didn’t know Lee was not cisgender, the Journal Sentinel reports. The paper reports that he also follows other accounts that write openly about sex and sexuality.
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His campaign staffers said he hasn’t used the Medium account much since 2019, but the Journal Sentinel found the account had been in use this year. However, after the newspaper queried him about the writers of sexually explicit content, he stopped following most of them. Those he was still following as of last week include a blog called Sexography “and two individual accounts with sexually provocative content,” the paper reports.
A campaign spokeswoman said Berrien wasn’t being hypocritical. “It is absurd to suggest that Bill would know about a particular author’s personal choices or by reading one article by an author would agree with everything else they wrote,” she told the Journal Sentinel.
“It is also absurd to suggest that reading articles about sex as a happily married adult man with three children is in any way out of line with conservative Catholic values,” she added.
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Berrien declined to speak to the Journal Sentinel, but he gave this statement to the Associated Press: “There are a lot of important issues that are affecting our state and nation, but what is the mainstream media focused on right now? Some stupid articles I read years ago, not the plans I have to reindustrialize our state, turn the economy around, and bring prosperity for all through work.”
He also posted on X, “Is this the best they can do? Just days after I promised to stand with President Trump to protect our state, stop the woke indoctrination, and keep boys out of girls sports, they came after me with the same failed attacks they tried with President Trump. Garbage political hits didn’t slow President Trump down, and the Democrats and the media’s latest attempts to keep me out of this fight won’t work either.”
A Democratic strategist who isn’t working for any gubernatorial hopeful told the Journal Sentinel that Berrien is clearly being hypocritical.
“If you want to go and criticize people's freedom to live the way that they want to live and try to restrict those freedoms, on one hand, and expect that you yourself can do whatever you want, that’s exactly the kind of hypocrisy that people have concerns with,” said the strategist, who was not named. “You can’t have it both ways.” Berrien is “not ready for prime time,” the strategist added.
Dan Degner, president of the conservative group Wisconsin Family Action, told the AP his organization’s political action committee will endorse a candidate for governor in the Republican primary next year but “would have to have some pretty in-depth conversations with [Berrien] before we would consider an endorsement.” Some Republicans have called on Berrien to end his campaign or predicted that these revelations would sink it, TV station WCCO reports.
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