Mike Johnson

Because this is a family newspaper, I cannot quote the piquant term that Brandon Herrera, a Republican House candidate in Texas, used to refer to children in a 2023 video. I can only report that he called them “trophies” for getting a man to ejaculate. Nor, alas, am I allowed to repeat the obscenities that Herrera, a gun influencer, used to explain why the opinions of mothers are without value. I can only say that he argued, essentially, that getting pregnant requires no special skill.

Two weeks ago, ahead of a fund-raiser that Mike Johnson, the House speaker, was holding for Herrera, The Austin American-Statesman reached out to Herrera’s campaign about these resurfaced comments. Herrera’s team responded with a crude visual pun that, once again, is too vulgar for me to describe here.

I can, however, tell you about the Nazi and eugenics stuff. In a 2022 video, Herrera and a buddy in sunglasses and a balaclava tested a Nazi-era submachine gun, then goose-stepped to a Nazi marching song. Herrera called the weapon “the original ghetto blaster.” In a 2024 podcast, after calling for abolishing Social Security, he joked that we should also “abolish old people,” laughing along as his co-hosts riffed about killing them off as in the cult horror film “Midsommar.”

Herrera became the Republican nominee in his South Texas district in March after the sitting congressman, Tony Gonzales, withdrew due to a sexual harassment scandal. Somehow, unlike Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat, Herrera hasn’t become a household name. I haven’t seen much public hand-wringing about the decision of the pious Johnson to raise money for Herrera, nor debate about what his candidacy means for the Republican Party’s attitude toward women, Jews or seniors.

That Herrera has flown somewhat under the radar is a testament to a fundamental asymmetry between the parties, as well as in our discourse about them. Thanks to Trump, misogyny and extremism among Republicans have become what journalists sometimes call a dog-bites-man story, something so ordinary and predictable that it breaks through only when it reaches an absurdly high threshold.

I regularly speak to people who follow politics closely but haven’t heard of Cory Mills, a Republican representative running for re-election in Florida. One ex-girlfriend of Mills won a restraining order against him after saying he threatened her with revenge porn. Another, whom he was seeing at the same time, told the police he’d assaulted her, though she later recanted. (He denies both charges.) Mills is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of both sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations. Yet it barely made a stir when Trump endorsed him in the Republican primary, which takes place next week; polls show him ahead in the four-way contest.

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