Standing in a San Antonio barbecue joint last month, the Speaker of the House told Texas voters they had a clear choice: the "common sense" of the Republican nominee, or the "crazy" positions of his Democratic opponent.

The Republican nominee was Brandon Herrera. And until very recently, the people calling him crazy were Republicans.

The New York Times reported this week on how the party got from there to here. It is a short trip, and nothing about Herrera's record moved.

What Republicans said about him when it was convenient

Herrera, 30, is a YouTuber with more than four million subscribers who built his following on gun reviews and inflammatory jokes. He ran in 2024 against the district's Republican incumbent, Tony Gonzales, and ran again this cycle.

Both times, the party's leadership was against him. Mike Johnson opposed him. So did President Trump.

Gonzales and his allies spent millions making the case, and the material they used was Herrera's own video archive:

• A joke that a Nazi-era submachine gun was "the original ghetto blaster" and "Hitler's street sweeper."
• A joke making light of veterans who die by suicide. The Republican Jewish Coalition spent millions in 2024 amplifying that one. Its ad said: "Fools like Brandon Herrera who mock veterans do not belong in Congress or Texas."
• Video of Herrera showing off his ownership of a 1939 English edition of Mein Kampf. He says it is part of a historical book collection and vehemently denies being antisemitic.

Then Gonzales was forced out — first out of the race, then out of Congress — over a sexual misconduct scandal. And, as the Times puts it, top Republicans quickly closed ranks around Herrera.

That is the entire explanation. Not a retraction, not new information, not an apology. A vacancy.

We documented the same instinct in how Johnson handled the Gonzales scandal itself: a Speaker who calls himself a "zealous guardian of due process" telling reporters it wasn't "time" to discuss a resignation, while rank-and-file Republicans said out loud what he wouldn't.

The timing of Johnson's fundraiser

Here is the detail that makes the reversal hard to explain away.

In the days before Johnson rallied for Herrera and held a fundraiser for him, another video surfaced: Herrera, in July 2022, using crude sexualized language to insult Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action after the Sandy Hook school shooting.

We wrote about what he actually said and about Texas Republicans walking away from reporters rather than answer for it. That post is from July. The Speaker's fundraiser came after.

So this was not a case of the leadership not knowing. The video was in the news that week. Johnson went anyway.

He is not apologizing, and he says so plainly

Asked about the remarks, Herrera told the Times he wouldn't use that language as a candidate, but that he is not sorry:

"I know the difference between the way that you speak in a comedy performance, so to speak, and the way that you speak in a political environment."

And on his critics:

"What they're going to do is they're going to pretend jokes are policy, and they're going to purposely pretend that they don't know the difference."

He also told the Times that the only people who have ever cared about the videos are "either in the media or in D.C."

That last claim is worth testing against the map.

The district includes Uvalde

Texas's 23rd District stretches from San Antonio to El Paso along the border. It contains Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary School in 2022.

Herrera's position, per the Times, is that he opposes all new restrictions on firearms — including red flag laws, the specific measure designed to take guns from people who have signaled they intend to hurt someone.

His Democratic opponent, Katy Padilla Stout, says she decided to run specifically to stop a gun influencer from representing Uvalde. Her family hunts and owns guns; she supports age and mental health checks.

At a gathering of women in San Antonio, she paused before recounting Herrera's remarks about Watts to check that children were out of earshot.

"That is not the type of person you want making decisions for you and your children."

A candidate who jokes about Nazi weapons and mocks veteran suicide, who opposes every new gun restriction, running to represent the town where a gunman killed 19 children in their classroom — that is not a media obsession. That is the job description colliding with the résumé.

Nobody has represented the district since April

There is one more piece of this the Times surfaces, and it belongs to a third Republican.

The seat has been empty since April. Governor Greg Abbott has not called a special election to fill the remainder of Gonzales's term, and his spokesman declined to explain the reasoning.

Padilla Stout's read on it:

"Why wouldn't you call a special election? Because you're scared you're going to lose."

Whatever the motive, the effect is fixed: for months, everyone in this stretch of the Texas border has had no vote in the House at all — and no one to call about a VA claim, a Social Security check, or a Medicaid denial. The party that spent millions arguing Herrera was unfit has been content to leave the seat vacant rather than risk it.

What actually changed

Line the two positions up.

2024: Johnson opposes Herrera. Trump opposes Herrera. A Republican group buys millions in ads saying he does not belong in Congress because he mocks veterans.

2026: Johnson headlines his campaign event and his fundraiser, days after a fresh video, and describes him as the "common sense" choice.

Between those two dates, Herrera did not withdraw a single joke. He has said explicitly that he won't. The one thing that changed is that the Republican majority is narrow and this seat is red by 15 points.

That is the whole standard. Not what a candidate said about veterans, or Hitler's weapons, or the mothers of murdered children — just whether the party needs the vote. Herrera understood the arithmetic better than his critics did, and said so:

"After a brutal primary on all sides, the focus has to be bringing the party together."

It worked. That's the part worth remembering in November.

Source

• The New York Times, "Nazi Jokes and Vulgar Insults: The Edgy Gun Influencer Embraced by the G.O.P." by Bayliss Wagner (August 16, 2026). Photo by Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times.