The AK Guy's Fight for Congress

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AK53, 2, 1. That was Brandon Herrera, the AK guy shooting one of the many guns he showcases on his popular YouTube channel. Herrera, who's running for a house seat in Texas District 23, has been pushing for more expansive gun rights for years. He says he sees major progress on the Trump administration, but still there's more to do. He joins us today to discuss all things to a related in what's surprised him so far in his turn toward politics after a primary that made national headlines.

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Brandon, thank you so much for joining us. How's it going, brother? I appreciate you for having me.

Absolutely. So let's talk about guns first.

You know, you've been obviously very vocal in the past and your criticism of the ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. And now it's handled the regulations of firearms, the National Firearms Act and its restrictions on class three guns, etc.

“Broadly, have you seen the landscape change under this administration for gun rights?”

Absolutely. And do I think that there's definitely more to do? Absolutely. We're barely scratching the surface, but we've delivered on a lot of wins, the Republican Party. The big beautiful bill while it didn't remove suppressors and SBRs from the NFA, it did remove the tax, which is the entire, the taxes, the entire reason the Supreme Court back in the day decided that the NFA was legal in the first place. So that puts that on the Supreme Court chopping block once and for all.

Outside of that, our new ATF director had put forward. I believe it was 34 amendments that are just changing the way that the ATF is enforcing the law. And each one of them loosened restrictions on American gun owners.

I would have never believed, if you'd asked me two, three years ago, that I would see the day where the sitting ATF director

goes in before Congress and defends the legality of FRTs. You know, that's something that I think we should all be excited about.

Absolutely, especially for a lot of it's on the industry side, like a lot of the rules were loosened with FFLs, but even different things like if you had an NFA item, you were traveling with out of state.

You had to use, you used to have to do a form for that to inform the ATF where you were going, how long you'd be there, that sort of thing.

“They remove that restriction or they pushed it to, you have to only report if it's going to be out of the state for 365 days, which essentially just means if you move.”

So I thought, like, little regulations like that, just chipping away and chipping away at little inconveniences for gun owners until we can get to a point where, you know, we're actually able to say we're not being infringed. Now, there's a lot of acronyms here. So just to be clear for our listeners, FFLs are federal firearms licenses and NFA items are certain types of heavily restricted firearms under the National Firearms Act that we mentioned earlier. So Brandon, from your perspective, what are the big goals ahead for gun rights advocates?

I would definitely like to see nationwide constitutional carry. That's very, very high on my priority list. I'd like to see things like suppressors removed entirely from the NFA. We'd love to see the NFA get abolished entirely, but baby steps will take we can get one step at a time. I think those are things that are going to have immediate impact on the day-to-day lives of gun owners, but especially constitutional carry.

There are now more states in the United States that have some form of constitutional carry than those that don't. And that was a pipe dream 15 years ago, but we've chipped away at it state by state, and I'd like to see it combination wide. Now, the Supreme Court, a lot of this could come down to them in the near future, are you encouraged by the trends that we've seen from the Supreme Court when it comes to gun rights? I'm very encouraged by the rulings that they've made, but at the end of the day, the Supreme Court is only as good as the cases that it takes.

So there was some pushback with the Supreme Court not taking the assault weapons ban case last time. But I do know why they decided not to take it. They're trying to make sure that it applied to other states that still had pending legislation, like Illinois and things like that. But at the same time, that precedent would be very, very helpful, and it would help a lot of gun owners that are currently behind enemy lines. You know, we could have a conservative Supreme Court all day long, and they'll make, you know, great judgments on the cases they take, but if they're not taking any two eight cases, they're really not helping us out.

Right. Now, you've transitioned from making firearms YouTube content to now full-time, you know, running a congressional campaign.

What led you to run for office in the first place? Was it the second amendment policies?

“Well, that's what got me interested in it because, well, I've always had an interest in politics, but I never had an interest in running for office.”

I thought I would leave that to the psychopaths that were willing to, you know, go to the swamp. But I just, one day, I just got really, really upset at my congressman Tony Gonzalez. The vote that he made on the bipartisan, safer communities act, which was the Biden gun control bill. I just had to leave, I left me wondering why my Republican congressman is voting with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on a Democrat gun control bill. And so that got me looking into his other votes. So that was the catalyst for it, but then I just started doing more research on my congressman.

I was basically like, what's, what's up with this guy?

And the more I saw, the more I saw that he voted for, you know, trans, you know, drag shows in the military he voted for, to kill chip Roy's border bill. There's just a lot of things, and especially representing the biggest border district in the entire country, how can you be soft on immigration during the Biden border crisis? Yeah. So those things just, you know, gathered one by one until I finally made a decision that, you know, if nobody's willing to step forward replace this guy, I'll do it myself.

Now you had already forced Tony Gonzalez into a runoff, and then he was really pushed out by the party after the scandal fully broke, involving him and this inappropriate relationship with a married woman who eventually took her own life very tragic horrible situation. But now you are officially the Republican nominee and, you know, running full steam ahead for November, what has surprised you about the political process so far? It's not, I guess, something that surprised me very much because I was told over and over again by people in the know that they would be like this, but it is very funny how, how it does happen.

All of the groups and, you know, leadership and everything like that that spends so much time trying to kill you, you know, because you're a primary challenger and they just have an incumbancy protection. You know, the same people that spend millions and millions of dollars to make sure that you lose trying to ruin your life. The next day, as soon as you're the nominee, they're your best friend, they want to work with you, all of a sudden.

“And, but I understand that that's how the game is played. You know, I have no illusions about this stuff.”

It's not personal and I think that, you know, now we're all on the same side at this point, which is keeping Texas district 23 red and keeping Republican in that seat.

Yes, speaking of keeping it red, people have predicted Texas is going to turn blue for years, but then Republicans keep winning these statewide races.

“Our Democrats actually gaining ground. We see this in suburban areas in particular, but is this a real political shift or are we just seeing a byproduct of Texas growing in terms of its population?”

Well, a little bit of a little bit of both, I would say, because right now this is going to be a rough midterm. And, you know, hopefully with the end or at least a piece deal happening on the Iranian front, we would like to be able to focus on more domestic policy. Get those gas prices down, get grocery costs down. That's been my hope since this whole thing kicked off, because people vote with their wallet.

“They, you know, foreign policies incredibly important, but people go to the polls because they can't afford groceries.”

Good batter and different. And so that's, you know, fiscal policy, getting home prices down, things that affect the average person's day-to-day life.

We've got some amazing wins on immigration, like we've done some amazing things.

And I'm trying to discount that, but these are the things people vote Republicans in for.

“And so getting, getting that back on track, I think that might help us out a little bit.”

But at the same time, it's also overblown to me, in my opinion, the, the Democrat path forward in Texas. Because they've been saying this since Colin, all red, since Beto, will work.

They've always spent huge amounts of money in these Texas Senate races trying to flip the state blue.

And they every time they've failed and not by that tight of a margin. Yet almost feels like a Republican ropa dope for Democrats in Texas.

Often they do dump a lot of money into these races and never end up winning.

But Brandon, thank you so much for coming on, we'll be watching your race with interest. Absolutely, no, thank you, brother. That was Brandon Herrera, gun content creator, and Republican candidate for Texas's 23rd District. And this has been a weekend episode of Morningwire.