Here’s a pretty good illustration of how today’s Republican Party works.
In 2024, the Republican Jewish Coalition spent $400,000 on an ad campaign against a Texas congressional candidate named Brandon Herrera, calling him “a goose-stepping extremist who pals around with online Nazis.”
Herrera had previously joked about veteran suicide on his YouTube channel, an incident that the ads used to conclude that fools like him “do not belong in Congress or Texas.”
As the Republican incumbent who Herrera was challenging, Tony Gonzales, put it: “Brandon Herrera thinks veteran suicide is a joke. He has no business representing #TX23 in Congress.”
This year Herrera ran for Congress again, and the establishment lined up against him, again. But then, when he won his primary in March, everything reversed. This month, Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to San Antonio to campaign for Brandon Herrera as the “common sense” choice.
If you don’t know him, Herrera is a 30-year-old gun YouTuber with more than four million subscribers.
He runs a company that builds and restores firearms, and his online personality is deliberately abrasive and anti-establishment.
He’s now the Republican nominee in Texas’s 23rd District, a huge stretch of West Texas running from San Antonio nearly to El Paso. (He moved there from North Carolina in 2021.)
And when I say abrasive, I don’t mean somebody found a mildly inappropriate tweet from 2011 or whatever.
In a 2022 video, Herrera shows off an MP-40 — a Nazi-era submachine gun — and calls it “the original ghetto blaster,” an apparent reference to the murder of Jews.
The video itself is soundtracked to “Erika,” a Nazi marching song. He’s also discussed owning a 1939 English-language edition of Mein Kampf, which he describes as part of a historical book collection.
And here’s Herrera’s veteran-suicide joke: “If it makes everyone in the room feel better, I often think about putting a gun in my mouth. So, I’m basically an honorary veteran.”
There’s also a resurfaced 2022 video in which he attacks Shannon Watts — the mother of a victim of the Sandy Hook school shooting, and the founder of Moms Demand Action, the gun-control group — in crude, sexualized terms.
These are just jokes, Herrera says. There’s a difference, he’s insisted, between the provocative character he plays on the internet and how he’d behave as a congressman.
You know what? Fine.
I’m not going to spend this piece pretending to be shocked that a YouTuber whose entire brand is saying outrageous things has said outrageous things. It’s not even shocking that he won the nomination.
The most interesting character in this story isn’t Herrera, really. He’s exactly the piece of shit he’s always been.
Instead, it’s the Republicans who said that Herrera’s online history was disqualifying, and then, the moment they were stuck with him, did a total rhetorical U-turn.
On March 3, Herrera finished first in the primary, winning 43.3% to Gonzales’s 41.7%, thus forcing a runoff on May 26.
But then Gonzalez’s campaign imploded: he’d admitted an affair with an aide who had died by suicide.
Republican leaders, Mike Johnson included, didn’t wait for the runoff to force Gonzalez out of the race. They publicly called on him to drop out, handing Herrera the nomination. On March 5, Gonzales finally quit, “heeding calls from House Speaker Mike Johnson.”
Trump then endorsed the guy. Herrera, he said, “will never let you down.”
So they opposed this guy in two primaries, spending millions calling him an extremist. Then they pushed their own incumbent out of the race in his favor, flying to San Antonio to campaign by his side.
Nothing about Brandon Herrera changed since 2024—except, that is, whether Republican leaders found themselves stuck with him.
Republicans are lining up behind this guy, of course, because they could lose the seat. Trump carried the 23rd by 15 points in 2024, but the district has a competitive history, and Herrera’s nomination has Democrats seeing an opening. On August 5, the DCCC formally added TX-23 to its target list.
The Democratic nominee in the district is Katy Padilla Stout, a San Antonio attorney and former public school teacher who represents children in the foster care system. She says she got into the race specifically because she didn’t want a gun influencer representing a district that includes Uvalde.
Yeah, that Uvalde. Nineteen children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary School there in 2022.
Herrera is close to a gun-rights absolutist — he opposes any and all new restrictions, including red-flag laws. Padilla Stout isn’t a gun-hater, either. Her family hunts and owns firearms, but she supports age restrictions and mental-health checks. As Texas Public Radio has put it, this race a referendum on gun access.
To be fair, it’s still a Republican-leaning district. Herrera says the voters he meets care more about affordability than videos he made years ago, and Republicans who’ve dealt with him in person tell reporters he’s a thoughtful and restrained guy.
But some moderate Republicans quoted by the Times are considering voting Democratic. And Herrera says he doesn’t need to moderate.
Honestly, I almost respect that. At least the guy, unlike Republican leaders, isn’t bullshitting voters.
But Mike Johnson and the rest? Well, those guys need everyone to forget what they were saying a few months ago. How the hell did Brandon Herrera go from too extreme for Congress to “common sense” without changing a single position?
This isn’t unique to Herrera, obviously. It’s one of the defining features of the party in the Trump era. Republican leaders lay down their red line, saying it would be unacceptable to cross it. But then crossing the line becomes politically useful, and so you do it anyway.
Trump insults your wife, like he did with Ted Cruz? Well, you endorse him all the same.
He humiliates you publicly? Well, you still vote for his nominees.
He ends your career? Well, like John Cornyn, who just voted for Todd Blanche, you fall in line anyway.
And if your candidate makes jokes you call unacceptable? Well, you spend millions attacking him. Then he wins, and you get on a plane to Texas.
If something is genuinely disqualifying, it stays disqualifying, even when the political circumstances change. That’s what the whole fucking word means. So what changed? Did Herrera apologize? Did the RJC decide its own $400,000 campaign was unfair?
Or did they just need the fucking seat?
We know the answer.
Maybe Herrera wins. Maybe the voters of the 23rd hear about Herrera’s edgy videos and jokes, shrug, and send him to Washington anyway. That’s their call, though it’d be the wrong one.
But don’t rewrite the fucking history. Republicans knew exactly who Brandon Herrera was. They agreed with you and I about it, for fuck’s sake. Then the circumstances changed, and none of it mattered anymore.
That sure as shit isn’t “common sense.”
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