Brandon Herrera, a candidate seeking to replace an embattled incumbent in West Texas, owns a copy of “Mein Kampf,” poked fun at veterans’ suicide rates and claimed President Abraham Lincoln “didn’t free anybody.”
House Republican leadership is still backing him.
“Brandon Herrera has our joint ENDORSEMENT because he is an America First grassroots leader who will help us to continue securing the border, lowering costs, defending the Second Amendment, and supporting our troops and veterans,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) and Republican Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minnesota) said in a joint statement Thursday. “Brandon Herrera will faithfully serve Texas’ 23rd District, and we look forward to working with him to defend and grow our House Republican majority and CONTINUE our American comeback!”
Johnson told reporters a day earlier that he had met with Herrera recently and anticipated backing the candidate.
“We have to keep that seat, and we will. I think he’ll be a good member of Congress,” he said.
Even without House leaders’ backing, Herrera emerged two weeks ago as the party’s de facto nominee after Rep. Tony Gonzales exited a Republican primary runoff with him in response to allegations that he had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide. Herrera faces Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, a lawyer and former teacher in San Antonio, in the general election in November.
Rep. Richard Hudson (R-North Carolina) said Herrera will have the full force of the National Republican Campaign Committee behind him. But Hudson added that the hope is the committee will not have to spend resources in the reliably Republican district, which includes Uvalde, the site of an elementary school massacre in 2022.
Scalise said he had not met the candidate but was looking forward to supporting the Texan and said there’s “nothing wrong” with Herrera’s pro-gun stance.
“If you look at his opponent, the Democrat Party has lost their way,” he said. “They’re insane. They’ve shut down the Department of Homeland Security right now in the middle of a heightened terror threat. His opponent would spend every day trying to impeach Donald Trump, raise gas prices; wreck the economy. It’s a clear contrast. We need to win that race.”
Herrera, who once described himself as “very politically incorrect” in his Twitter bio, calls himself “the AK Guy” on a YouTube channel whose flippant style has drawn him more than 4 million followers as well as plenty of criticism.
The owner of a weapons manufacturer in his native North Carolina, he said he moved to Texas in 2020 seeking to live in a more solidly conservative state.
His online content, which blends firearms, politics and what he calls “dark humor,” showed him frequently testing the limits. Much of it was resurfaced politically in 2024, when Herrera first ran against Gonzales — and Herrera maintained that it was being taken out of context.
“It’s nothing different than the History Channel, just with a little bit of darker humor,” he said in a phone interview Thursday while visiting D.C.
Several of Herrera’s videos show him reenacting historical assassinations, including testing the type of guns that killed John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln or were used in various historical wars. (On camera, he said his reenactment of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was “pretty faithful to the shot.”)
In one video, Herrera “goose-stepped” to a marching song used by Nazi armed forces and fired an MP-40, a submachine gun that he called “the original ghetto blaster.” He has also showed off a 1939 English language edition of “Mein Kampf” on his podcast.
Herrera has said that he bought the book for his “historic book collection” — and keeps it alongside “The Communist Manifesto.” He doesn’t believe in either book, he said in an interview.
Democrats are already looking to capitalize on Herrera’s controversies.
“GOP Leadership’s endorsement is further proof of what we already know: House Republicans have a neo-Nazi problem,” said Courtney Rice, communications director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
But Herrera cast the attacks as an effort to “gaslight” and distract voters. “People can get upset about it if they want. I don’t particularly care,” he said. “People are actively right now searching for something to be offended by so they can avoid talking ball.”
In the 2024 election, Herrera also faced scrutiny from Gonzales and some GOP groups over his comments during a podcast he co-hosts on veteran suicides. At one point, he said: “I often think about putting a gun in my mouth. So, I’m basically an honorary veteran.”
That remark mirrored the kind of dark humor his podcast co-hosts — all three of them veterans — used to cope with past trauma, he later said. “The military has failed veterans. The VA has failed veterans. Politicians have failed veterans. The last thing they have to rely on is dark humor,” he said on the podcast.
Padilla Stout, the Democratic nominee for the seat, has since hammered Herrera for his affiliation with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization meant to support Confederate heritage, of which he has been a member. Her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the House leaders’ endorsement.
Herrera did distance himself slightly from a video re-shared by Padilla Stout, in which he is pictured at a ruined Confederate arsenal in North Carolina.
He said he didn’t write the script for the video — which shows him talking about the “War of Northern aggression” — but said he saw no issue with his actions on camera, including cleaning up the site.
“It was a historic term for it. But nowadays we call it the American Civil War.”
It was all, he said, part of a broader campaign to discredit him.
“The opposition is going to disingenuously pretend they don’t know the difference between things said in jest … and the things I actually believe,” he said.
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