Not for the last time, I suspect, Brandon Herrera's congressional campaign has captured the attention of the mainstream (i.e. liberal) media. The lengthy story that ran in the New York Times over the weekend isn't an outright hit piece, but will definitely provide some fodder for progressive influencers and Herrera's Democrat opponent.
First, the Times portrays Herrera as the hand-picked candidate of National Association of Gun Rights' Dudley Brown, which will help Democrats play up their narrative that Herrera is just a tool of the gun lobby.
“I was trying to drag them into the political fight,” Mr. Brown said recently, and Mr. Herrera was a particularly bright prospect. (Mr. Herrera did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) When he told Mr. Brown months later that he was considering a campaign for Congress in Texas against a Republican incumbent who had run afoul of gun-rights advocates, “I said, ‘If you run, we’ll dump money into it,’” Mr. Brown recalled.
Two years later, Mr. Herrera is the Trump-endorsed presumptive Republican nominee in the state’s 23rd District, after the incumbent, Tony Gonzales, withdrew from the race.
The Times then uses this as a jumping off point for a thesis that groups like NAGR and even guntubers with large audiences are surpassing the NRA in terms of political influence; an argument that, regardless of its truth, benefits the gun control lobby that drew a target on its back a decade ago.
“One could say, I think with a straight face, that guntube is more influential in that debate than the N.R.A. is today,” said Nick Suplina, the senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control advocacy group. “They’re reaching large audiences. They’re reaching new audiences.”
But guntubers and their fans typically espouse views on gun rights that are further in both substance and rhetoric from mainstream public opinion than those of prior generations of advocates and enthusiasts. How they will be received by general election voters is a particularly open question in the 23rd District, where the Uvalde massacre, in which a gunman armed with a military-style rifle killed 19 children and two teachers, prompted Mr. Gonzales to break with most of his party and support the 2022 bill.
“I think it just plays into people’s minds: Do we really want a representative who makes money from this type of weapon?” said Esmeralda Rodriguez, the chairwoman of Northwest Democrats, a group in Bexar County, the district’s most populous county.
I think in general it remains to be seen whether online popularity can translate to political success, though Herrera is most certainly a test care for guntubuers. We've already seen both Democrats and Gonzales mine his past videos for the most outrageous content they can find, even if they have to take things completely out of context in order to portray Herrera as a neo-Nazi, as Gonzales did two years ago.
Content that has virality is key for creators, but their opponents can also go viral by repackaging that content for a brand new audience. Democrats are going to make that their game plan between now and November in an attempt to define Herrera as someone who cares more about making money off of AR-15s than he cares about the young lives who were murdered at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas; the biggest city in TX-23.
The New York Times did its part by helpfully reminding its readers of all of the previous attacks on Herrera, though reporters apparently failed to uncover any new outrage to include in their story.
Instead, they close with this warning to readers:
Chase Welch, a firearms industry insider and the host of the Gundies, the award show for guntubers, remembered meeting Mr. Herrera in 2017 at a machine gun shoot in Kentucky, where Mr. Herrera drew male genitalia in the layer of dust coating Mr. Welch’s rental car as a joke.
But that was nearly a decade ago. “He didn’t have the benefit of experience or age, and he’s become more cognizant of the realities surrounding these political issues and how they play out on the ground,” Mr. Welch said. “He’s really put in the work.”
The message here is "don't underestimate Herrera." I view it as a call to action for NYTImes readers to get behind his opponent. You're not going to find an outright endorsement in the news section of the NYTimes, but given the politics of the paper's base of readers, I don't think that's necessary. Most folks on the left are going to read this story with varying degrees of alarm that someone like Herrera could really get to Congress.
Katy Padilla Stout isn't even mentioned by name in the Times piece, but a couple of quick internet searches will bring readers to her campaign page... and maybe the news that her campaign is severely short of cash too.
I don't know how much earned media Stout is going to get, but the anti-gun press is going to do its best t make Brandon Herrera a household name in gun-hating households between now and Election Day. TX-23 has historically been a safe Republican seat, but Democrats outpaced Republicans at the polls on Election Day, drawing 27,000 more votes than they did two years ago. The majority-Hispanic district went for Donald Trump as well, but there are concerns that the administration's immigration enforcement efforts are highly unpopular in the Rio Grande Valley and other majority-Hispanic parts of the state.
Democrats see this as a flippable seat. I do too, unfortunately. Which brings us to the part of my post where I urge you to actively support Herrera's campaign if you want to see him in Congress. I won't hem and haw and obfuscate like The New York Times. I'll be blunt: this is going to be a tight race, and Herrera will need all the help the 2A community can give him.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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