It would be virtually impossible to list all the ways the Republican Party has gone off the rails during the Trump era. Brazen corruption. Naked bigotry. Relentless lying. Remorseless cruelty. And an embrace of all sorts of extremism.
For the next few weeks, Right Wing Watch on HQ will highlight some of the miserable MAGA candidates on the ballot in November.
Let’s start with southwestern Texas and the 23rd Congressional district, where Republican nominee Brandon Herrera is in a tight race with Democratic opponent Katy Padilla Stout. In this majority Hispanic district, Herrera isn’t getting any help from Trump’s plummeting popularity among Latino voters. But Herrera’s biggest trouble is his own mouth.
Herrera made his name as “The AK Guy” on YouTube with videos that mixed gun obsession with dehumanizing rhetoric. His trash-talking internet personality and “second amendment absolutism” endeared him to right-wing supporters. But it’s not as popular with voters in the district that was home to the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, where 19 children and two teachers were killed by an 18-year-old with an AR-15 style rifle.
Herrera dismisses many of his comments as dark humor and complains that reporters are using his videos to “try to make me seem like a piece of shit.” Honestly, they don’t have to try that hard:
Herrera marched to a Nazi war song while describing a Nazi-era machine gun as the “original ghetto blaster” and “Hitler’s street sweeper.”
Shortly after a shooter targeting Latinos killed 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, Herrera said people should be “really glad” that mass shooters were using guns and not truck bombs.
He mocked the founder of a gun-safety group Moms Demand Action by saying, “The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say” – part of a pattern of demeaning sexist insults directed at women.
When he was involved with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, he called the Civil War the “war of Northern aggression” and “the war for Southern independence.”
He spread memes associated with the Boogaloo movement, which has carried out violence in hopes of sparking race war.
After Rep. Tony Gonzales backed bipartisan gun safety legislation that strengthened background checks for gun buyers under 21 and tightened restrictions on guns for domestic abusers, an outraged Herrera launched an unsuccessful challenge in the 2024 Republican primary. This year he forced the incumbent into a runoff before Gonzales withdrew in the face of a sex scandal.
Suddenly Republicans who had denounced Herrera as an extremist were saddled with him as their candidate. Trump has endorsed him. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, who will apparently do anything to protect Trump and preserve the Republican majority, is lying about Padilla Stout’s positions while portraying Herrera as “very serious” and “very thoughtful.”
Johnson has described the race as “a contrast election between common sense and crazy,” which may be true – just not in the way Johnson meant it.
