Bob Brooks, a Democrat seeking to flip a congressional district in Northeast Pennsylvania, shared a meme on Facebook that stated “the problem is not guns,” the day after a self-described white nationalist killed nearly two dozen people at a Texas Walmart in 2019. The post also included the logo of a right-wing, anti-government organization.
Brooks — a 53-year-old burly, goatee-sporting firefighter and union leader — has cast himself as a Democrat who can win back White, non-college-educated voters who have fled the party since President Donald Trump’s first campaign in 2016.
But Brooks’s prolific posting on his private Facebook page shows how the candidate, now embraced by the Democratic establishment and some liberal groups, had at times appeared to engage with right-wing ideas before running for office.
Brooks’s posts, obtained by The Washington Post and previously publicized on a local blog, also include one calling former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick a “douchebag” during his protests around police brutality and another post that defended police in the wake of widespread protests following George Floyd’s killing in 2020.
Brooks, in response to questions about his posts, said “a bunch of DC insiders who don’t want more working people in office are selectively digging up years-old Facebook posts,” but apologized for some of them.
“I’ve shared a few stupid things over the years, and for that I am sorry,” Brooks said in a statement. “I believe who I’ve fought for and my values have always been clear.”
On Aug. 3, 2019, Patrick Crusius entered an El Paso Walmart seeking to kill Latinos, killing 23 people and injuring 22 before pleading guilty to federal hate-crime charges.
A day later, Brooks posted a meme that read: “The problem is not guns. It’s hearts without God, homes without discipline, schools without prayer and courtrooms without justice.” The meme included an image of actor Clint Eastwood holding a rifle and a skull superimposed with the roman numeral III, an image often associated with the Three Percenters, a right-wing anti-government militia group that Canada later declared a terrorist entity because of its links to bomb plots targeting U.S. government buildings and Muslim communities.
A Brooks spokesperson said the Democrat regrets the post and “wishes he never made it,” but had “zero awareness” of the Three Percenters logo on the meme.
The district Brooks is seeking to represent is 23 percent Latino, according to the Census Bureau.
Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown and the first Latino to lead the Latino-majority city in the district Brooks hopes to represent, said while he would not have posted such a meme, it was a stretch to assume that when Brooks posted it, “he connected it in any way to the ethnicity or race of the people who were murdered at that Walmart.”
“When I endorsed Bob, it wasn’t for whatever he might have posted on Facebook in the past. It was based on the person that I knew as a candidate and what he represented,” Tuerk said.
Some of Brooks’s supporters say Democrats need to avoid politically purity tests, something the party has been criticized for in recent years. Winning back White, working-class voters — and shedding the Democratic Party’s elitist image — means embracing candidates who might make off-color comments, they argue.
Supporters of U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine have made a similar argument. Platner has been roundly criticized for responding dismissively to a cartoon about sexual assault in the military and downplaying the challenges service members face in reporting sexual assault in unearthed Reddit posts from 2013.
Brooks’s entry in the contentious May 19 primary was heralded as a recruiting coup for a party eager to oust Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pennsylvania) in its quest to retake the House this November.
Some of Brooks’s high-profile supporters — including Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and the liberal Working Families Party — were aware of these Facebook posts before they backed him, according to multiple people familiar with the endorsements, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private vetting process.
“If you want candidates grown in a lab who lived their whole lives to run for office and never changed their mind, then Bob Brooks isn’t for you,” Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pennsylvania), who endorsed Brooks’s run last year, said in a statement. “But if you want a guy who spent decades serving his community as a firefighter — who will fight hard for the Lehigh Valley — that’s Bob.”
Manuel Bonder, a Shapiro spokesperson, reiterated the governor’s support for Brooks when asked about the candidate’s posts. Spokespeople for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who also endorsed Brooks, did not respond to requests for comment.
Two days after the Wall Street Journal reported on July 1, 2019 that Kaepernick urged Nike to cancel sales of shoes that include an image of the Betsy Ross flag, Brooks posted a meme featuring the flag that read, “Colin Kaepernick doesn’t like this flag, so I’m gonna share it.”
“The first thing in a long time both democrats and republicans are doing together!” Brooks wrote on Facebook. “Thanks douchebag for helping bring the country together again on something.”
The Brooks spokesperson said that while the candidate “understands the need for reform within the police system and will work in Congress to root out police brutality,” he believes that there are “other ways to protest that do not involve kneeling during the anthem.”
Brooks also posted a defense of the police on June 26, 2020, in the wake of Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, praising the officers who responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. “I guess we have forgotten the good ones,” Brooks wrote. “Wanting change within the police departments to weed out the bad cops is fine. But please remember the good ones.”
To show the range of Brooks’s online activity, his campaign provided nearly three dozen Facebook posts, including support for President Joe Biden and anti-Trump memes.
“Here is my party line right here! Ill vote for who protects it! Hint, his ass isn’t in office right now,” Brooks wrote in 2019 when Trump was president. The images on the post included the badge of the International Association of Fire Fighters, the national firefighters’ labor union.
In 2018, he called members of Congress “scumbags.” “Whether it is democrats or republicans, the fact is none of them are about us,” he wrote.
Brooks is running in a competitive Democratic primary against former federal prosecutor Ryan Crosswell, former Northampton County executive Lamont McClure and engineer Carol Obando-Derstine. Mackenzie, the Republican incumbent, flipped the district in 2024 by unseating Susan Wild.
Brooks, a first-time candidate without a college degree, has made his appeal to White, working-class voters central to his campaign.
“I have a unique ability to get to the voters who have left this party in droves and to bring them back to the party because they can see themselves in me,” he said in an interview this month with Rabbi Moshe Kurtz.
Nick Gavio, a spokesperson for the Working Families Party, a liberal political party that endorses candidates, said Brooks’s Facebook posts came up during the party’s endorsement process, with members of the group asking the candidate about them in December 2025 as they decided whether to back him in the race.
“Bob’s a guy who has a background that is really helpful for where the Democrats need to go these days,” Gavio said. “We’re hemorrhaging working-class voters left and right.”
The post Democrat in key race defended guns after mass shooting and insulted Kaepernick appeared first on Washington Post.
