A GOP candidate has come under fire in Texas after he posted a video of him wielding an assault rifle and joking about the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
The 2023 video unearthed by The Daily Beast is by Brandon Herrera, a YouTuber-turned-politician running against incumbent GOP representative Tony Gonzales in this week’s primary runoff election. Mr Gonzales represents Texas’ 23rd district – home to Uvalde, the site of a 2022 elementary school shooting that left 19 students and two staff members dead.
Mr Gonzales was censured by his party last year after voting in favor of gun control legislation introduced following the shooting. Mr Herrera, meanwhile, has run on a platform centering on unrestricted access to firearms.
In the video titled “The AR-180: The IRA’s Lucky Charm”, Mr Herrera wears a balaclava and wields the AR-180 while making jokes about the IRA and the British.
“Of course, in making this video, I am not doing it because I like or support the IRA,” Mr Herrera told his viewers. “They were pretty heavily socialist, of course, and really hurt a lot of innocent people.
“So I’m not doing this video because I like the IRA or I support them,” he continued. “I’m doing this video because I f****** hate the British. I’m kidding, I’m kidding, mostly.”
At one point, Mr Herrera turns to the camera and says: “Do you actually believe the Queen died of natural causes?” In another clip, while dealing with a jammed gun, Mr Herrera also said: “This is why Ireland isn’t free.”
“The IRA [were] very famously unhappy for a certain group of folks going after their Lucky Charms,” Mr Herrera also said.
At the end of the video, Mr Herrera told his viewers: “All of this was all in good fun.”
But Aidan McQuade, former director of Anti-Slavery International, told The Daily Beast the video was full of “jaw-dropping stupidity”.
“From a human perspective, Herrera’s attitude to violence seems that of an adolescent video gamer blissfully ignorant of the trauma that war inflicts on a society, and the unending grief of victims’ devastated families,” Mr McQuade told the outlet.
The Provisional IRA was the dominant republican terror group during the Troubles – the conflict in Northern Ireland lasting from the late 1960s until 1998. The Provisional IRA is estimated to have killed nearly 2,000 people during the conflict, many of them civilians.
“Coming from a comedian, as Herrera attempts to be, such attitudes would be tiresome,” Mr McQuade told The Daily Beast. “But coming from someone who hopes to be an elected representative such callous and facile thinking is inexcusable.”
Two years ago, Mr Herrera also posted a video about a German Second World War-era submachine gun, calling it the “original ghetto blaster”.
The Independent has contacted Mr Herrera for comment.