Democrats just sent an openly angry man to Congress.
He even took out the Republican in charge of protecting the House majority.
And Stephen Miller stars in one old video the new congressman would love to forget.
Richard Ojeda Mapped Out an Elevator Ride He’d Rather Nobody Remembered
Democrat Richard Ojeda pulled off one of the bigger upsets of the 2026 midterms. He knocked off US Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC), the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District.
The Associated Press counted 138,707 votes for Ojeda and 132,692 for Hudson. NBC News reported that Republicans had held the seat since 1963, and President Trump carried the district by 13 points in 2024.
Ojeda didn’t bother with humility. “WE JUST UNSEATED THE CHAIR OF THE NRCC,” he posted on X. “IT’S A NEW DAY IN AMERICA.”
But his new day drags an old tape behind it.
During a 2022 episode of his online show, Ojeda LIVE, the retired Army major went after Stephen Miller, the immigration hawk President Trump has since picked to run the West Wing as Chief of Staff.
“Stephen Miller needs to be thumped. That guy’s a friggin’ worm,” Ojeda said. “I would be willing to go to jail for. I mean, how much would I get for just cracking him a couple times?”
And he wasn’t finished. “You know, I’d be willing to go to jail to kick the **** out of him,” Ojeda continued. “I’d be more than happy to find myself in an elevator with him, and I’d whoop his *** from the first floor to the fifth floor, and be happy to go to jail.”
He picked the venue. He counted the floors. He even priced out the jail time. Most hotheads at least skip the logistics.
The Apology Came With the Grudge Still Attached
The clip resurfaced in October 2025, barely a month after Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University, while the country was still reeling.
Ojeda’s damage control went like this: “That said, political violence has no place in our society. I know that better than most.” He waved the remarks off as “four years old” and promised he “would not use those same words today.”
And notice what he retired. The words. Not the feeling.
“I’ll admit I was angry then, and I’m still angry now,” Ojeda told Fox News Digital. “People like Stephen Miller disgust me,” he added, before conceding that violence “isn’t the answer.”
Trump campaign spokesman Kush Desai didn’t buy the act. “Unfortunately, Democrats disgustingly supporting political violence is nothing new,” Desai said. “Neither Stephen Miller nor any other member of the administration is going to back down.”
And Ojeda went right on campaigning as the angriest man in the room. “People say that I’m angry. Well, angry is an understatement,” he said in a campaign ad, before signing off with a line that could double as a mission statement: “I approve this message because I am angry and I’m ready to fight back.”
Ojeda Already Learned What a Beating Costs
That “better than most” line carries real history.
In May 2016, two days before a West Virginia state Senate primary, a man at a Logan County political cookout asked Ojeda for a campaign bumper sticker. When Ojeda bent down to put it on the man’s truck, the man pounded him with brass knuckles and knocked him cold, according to witnesses and state police.
Ojeda ended up in the hospital with a concussion and eight facial fractures, WSAZ reported. He blamed politics from his hospital bed. “That’s what happens when you stand up against the machine that’s been controlling West Virginia for so many years,” he told Fox News Latino.
The attacker, Jonathan Porter, pleaded guilty in April 2017 to unlawful assault, a felony carrying one to five years in prison. At sentencing, Porter apologized and claimed Ojeda had provoked him.
So when Ojeda asked his livestream audience how much time he’d get, he wasn’t exactly guessing in the dark.
Maybe it’s just coal-country talk. Ojeda says he grew up around miners who “talk tough and don’t mince words,” and plenty of good, hardworking people in those hollows do exactly that. But most of those miners never had their faces rebuilt after a political beating, only to turn around six years later and joke on camera about handing one out. That history makes the tape worse, not better.
National Democrats Saw the Tape and Circled His District Anyway
But the resurfaced video didn’t cost Ojeda a thing with the people who matter inside his party.
In August 2026, ten months after the clip surfaced, the House Democrats’ campaign arm added Hudson’s seat to its “Districts in Play” target list. Campaign finance reports showed Ojeda outraising every one of his Democrat primary rivals despite the backlash, according to Lootpress.
After winning that primary, Ojeda bragged that voters “wanted a fighter, and they got one.”
Some Democrats warned during the October 2025 uproar that “violent words precede violent actions.” Their party’s campaign machine put Ojeda’s race on its wish list anyway.
Now flip the script. Picture a Republican nominee who once laid out a five-floor beatdown of a top Biden aide on his own show. Democrats would have demanded his name come off the ballot by sundown. These are the same folks who spent years branding January 6 an insurrection, even though President Trump told supporters that day to march “peacefully and patriotically.” Plenty of them shrugged through the summer of 2020, when Black Lives Matter riots burned American cities, rioters attacked federal courthouses, and a mob seized and torched a Minneapolis police precinct.
Ojeda’s tape also lands in a party that keeps cranking up the volume on Miller. US Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called for Miller’s firing and branded him a “Dangerous Xenophobe.” US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called Miller a “sadist.” Other Democrats have already pledged lawfare against the new Chief of Staff before he finishes unpacking his office.
And that kind of talk doesn’t stay on cable panels. An assassin killed Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025. A gunman came within inches of killing Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, and Secret Service agents foiled another attempt at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course two months later. In June 2022, police arrested an armed man near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home. The pattern of left-wing political violence already has a long list of targets, and Miller’s name sits near the top of the Left’s enemies list.
But Ojeda also had help from an unlikely corner: the war crowd. According to WRAL, Hudson cheered on the war with Iran, and Ojeda ran as the skeptic in a district anchored by Fort Bragg, later saying “the Iran war has played a huge role” in his win. The neoconservatives who pushed President Trump toward that fight handed a Democrat with a violent-rhetoric problem the biggest break of his career.
Voters in the district got more than a war skeptic in the bargain. They got class-war rhetoric straight out of the Bernie Sanders songbook. “It’s time for us to stop taking every single penny that we find and shoving it into the pockets of some billionaire who has more money than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes,” Ojeda told WRAL. He has also vocally supported abortion and led a teacher strike during his West Virginia state Senate days.
Come January, Ojeda takes his seat in a House run by Democrats who already promise to haul Miller before their committees. Hearings mean hallways, and Capitol Hill has no shortage of elevators. Nobody should have to wonder whether a sitting congressman meant what he once said about a witness.
Richard Ojeda once asked his audience how much time he’d get for cracking Stephen Miller a couple times. The man who beat him at that 2016 cookout already answered the question in a West Virginia courtroom: a felony plea that carries up to five years.
Sources: Breitbart News, “Democrat Richard Ojeda Said He Would Be ‘Happy to Go to Jail’ for Beating Up Stephen Miller”; Breitbart News, “Meet The Accidental Winners in North Carolina’s Congressional Delegation”; Lootpress, “Democratic Candidate Richard Ojeda Faces Backlash Over Resurfaced Violent Comments About Trump Adviser”; Fox News, “Dem candidate under fire for saying he’d ‘kick the s—’ out of Trump advisor Stephen Miller”; RedState, “Watch: Newly-Elected NC Democrat Has History of Shockingly Violent Rhetoric Towards Stephen Miller”; WRAL, “Democrats storm to surprise US House victories in NC, led by ex-paratrooper and an anti-war message”; WFAE, “Ojeda defeats Republican campaign chairman Hudson in NC’s 9th Congressional District”; Carolina Journal, “Democrats add NRCC chair Hudson’s seat to 2026 districts in play”; Chapelboro; CBS News; WSAZ; Fox News Latino; Associated Press via WV Public Broadcasting and The Washington Times
