The Tweets, The Trauma, And The Terrible Mustache

Jorge Borrego blames a hard childhood for years of racist and homophobic posts. His real record at Texas Public Policy Foundation is worse.

Texans, Jorge Borrego wants you to know that he’s grown up. The tweets that he posted between 2013 and 2017, back when he was allegedly locating his penis, casually dropping the n-word, using slurs for gay people, and quoting Hitler, don’t reflect who he is today. He was only 16 back then, or 20, old enough to be working legislative staff jobs in Austin. You know, the whole timeline on that “kid stuff” gets fuzzy fast when you’re the GOP nominee for the most competitive House seat in Texas.

Nine tweets surfaced first, courtesy of conservative Substack the Current Revolt who apparently got the “audit your own guy” memo, and Borrego’s initial response was, “I was 16 lol,” capped with a crying-laughing emoji, as if the N-word variant he used on his own cousin was a typo.

Then the Tribune kept digging and found dozens more. Cocaine references. Meth references. A whole cottage industry of Ask.fm answers about roids, sexting, and pornography as a source of “inspiration.”

And, oh lord, there’s so much to unpack here… before we even get to the mustache or the rumors of who or why he was set up.

See, there are a lot of things about this story that are absolutely hilarious. But there are some things in this story, especially about the excuses Borrego used, that pissed me off. And once you hear them, they’ll piss you off, too.

Let’s just start with the funny part first.

I mustache you to look at this picture and tell me if you think this is real facial hair. I have my doubts.

What do you call an angry man with a mustache? A pistachio.

Borrego has worn the same Yosemite Sam special through every campaign photo since he announced, and the theory going around is that it’s less a personal style choice than a strategic decision by someone on his team who, looking at his background, said: “We need a distraction.”

Now, I can’t confirm the original source of the tweets (and we’ll get to that rumor). I can’t confirm the mustache was a defensive maneuver. But I can confirm that both facts entered the discourse within about six hours of each other, and “there are no coincidences in Austin.” - Tony Buzzbee.

Here’s what isn’t funny.

Borrego’s excuse for the slurs and the cocaine talk was that he used “dark humor to cope with trauma” growing up around addiction, that his dad was incarcerated, and that a teenage mom raised him. That’s a real story, and I believe it happened to him.

But let’s talk about what that excuse actually asks you to swallow, because Texas is full of people who grew up exactly like that and didn’t turn into raging racists about it. Broken homes, addiction, a parent in and out of the system. That’s not a rare biography in this state. And the overwhelming majority of people who lived through it did not spend their late teens and early twenties calling their own cousins slurs and treating “gay as fuck...you see i actually said it” as content.

Trauma is real. It is also not an excuse generator that only some people get access to, and it does not explain why the joke specifically had to be racist and homophobic, or why he kept making versions of it for four more years.

Here’s the part that actually gets me, though. Kids who grow up in the middle of addiction and incarceration and instability, the ones living the version of “trauma” Borrego is invoking, don’t usually walk straight out of high school into a four-year degree. They’re surviving a system that was not built to get them to a college campus by eighteen, let alone by way of a clean, uninterrupted shot at it. Borrego got that shot. He made it to UTSA fresh out of high school, on a path stable enough to later land a master’s from Texas A&M and a job pipeline straight into Austin. Someone made that possible for him. Probably his mother, the one he’s using as a supporting character in his trauma narrative right now. The same woman apparently held things together well enough that her son didn’t fall through any of the cracks that swallow so many kids in his situation.

So no, this isn’t a story about a guy who survived something hard and came out a little rough around the edges. It’s a story about a guy who got the opportunities that trauma usually steals from people, who had a mother who made sure of it, and who’s now cashing in that hardship as an excuse for choices he made as a legal adult with a verified Twitter account. That’s not dark humor. That’s an insult to every kid who had it just as bad and didn’t get the soft landing, and it’s an insult to the mother who worked to give him one.

And “I was 16 lol” doesn’t hold up either, because the Tribune’s second batch of tweets ran through 2017. Borrego was pushing 21, working in Austin, already building the resume that would land him a K-12 policy job at Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Which brings us to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF).

TPPF likes to describe itself as a “nonpartisan research institute.” It is neither nonpartisan nor is it a research institute. It is the idea factory for the Texas GOP’s entire agenda. School vouchers, abortion bans, deporting undocumented immigrants, gutting climate regulation, and making it harder to vote. Borrego was the K-12 policy director who helped build the voucher push Abbott finally rammed through last session, the one now draining public dollars into private tuition across the state.

TPPF’s CEO from 2018 to 2021 was Kevin Roberts. Roberts left TPPF to become president of the Heritage Foundation, where he became the architect and public face of Project 2025.

Reporters who’ve traced the document’s DNA back to its source keep landing in the same place, in Austin. TPPF is an official contributor to Project 2025, and a lot of what’s in that manifesto, like defund-public-schools stuff, the anti-abortion stuff, the deportation stuff, was pioneered in Texas first, under Roberts, at TPPF, years before it got national packaging.

So when I call TPPF a fascist organization, I’m describing an outfit that incubated the operational plan for consolidating federal power around one man’s will, Christian nationalist billionaires like Tim Dunn bankroll that, and that treats democratic guardrails, public education, voting access, checks on executive power, as obstacles to be legislated around. It is the Texas version of the Heritage Foundation because it is where the current head of the Heritage Foundation learned to do this. Borrego built his career inside the state chapter of the same movement that wrote the plan to reshape the federal government around Trump.

A man who spent his late teens and early 20s spewing hate, racism, homophobia, and excessive drug use on the internet went on to work for one of the most fascist organizations in America, and then grew a stupid mustache to run for office.

That’s the resume Texans should actually be scrutinizing in HD118. More than the mustache. More than the tweets, even though those are real and ugly and worth every bit of the scrutiny they’re getting. TPPF tells you who he chose to become as an adult, on purpose, with a paycheck attached. And honestly, it isn’t that far from the tweets he made less than a decade earlier.

And who leaked the tweets to the Current Revolt?

Of course, we can’t expect them to reveal their source. But I’ve received a few calls this week about Republican internal polls, about Greg Abbott being desperate, and about where the GOP wants to spend their money.

And the word on the street is that it was an inside job. The GOP is offering Borrego up as a sacrificial lamb so they can call that House Seat a loss and focus their efforts and money on bigger fish.

Is it true? Let’s see where Greg Abbott’s money lands after the next filing deadline.

Here’s what we know for certain. Jorge Borrego spent his late teens and twenties posting racist and homophobic garbage under his real name. He then spent his career building the intellectual scaffolding for Project 2025 at one of the most influential far-right think tanks in the country.

None of that requires a leak, a conspiracy, or an inside job to be disqualifying. The tweets are real. The TPPF résumé is real. The excuses don’t hold up, and neither does the facial hair.

Whether the GOP is quietly writing HD118 off is a separate question, and we’ll know more once the money moves. But Kristian Carranza doesn’t need Republicans to sacrifice this seat. She needs Bexar County to show up in November and finish what 2024 almost did.

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