Back in 2024, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) complained about his colleague, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Gaetz was embroiled in a lurid scandal involving a Florida tax collector, an associate of the congressman who was charged with sex trafficking; federal investigators were reportedly also looking into allegations Gaetz had moved underage women across state lines for sex. The DOJ declined to prosecute Gaetz, who maintains his innocence, but in 2024, Gonzales reminded everyone of it, remarking, “I serve with some real scumbags like Matt Gaetz. He paid minors to have sex with them at drunk parties.” That Gonzales said it on CNN — enemy territory for the House Freedom Caucus — didn’t help. The congressman had made enemies to his right.
Now, two years later, Gonzales is mired in a lurid scandal of his own and up against a primary challenger on Tuesday who came within a hair of beating him the last time around: Brandon Herrera, AKA TheAKGuy. If he clears 50 percent of the vote in the GOP primary on Tuesday, he’ll likely be on a glide path to represent Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, which a Democrat has not won since 2012.
Herrera is a 30-year-old YouTuber. Gaetz gave him an early boost in his political career, inviting him to speak at a June 2023 field hearing criticizing the ATF, campaigning for him against GOP leadership’s wishes in 2024, and throwing $12,000 to his PAC and $3,500 to his campaign last July. The Freedom Caucus endorsed Herrera last week. Trump hasn’t; his leadership PAC sent Herrera a cease and desist letter demanding that he stop using Trump’s image to create the “false impression” that the president endorsed him.
The remarks that Herrera has racked up in more than a decade of online life — the earliest videos on his YouTube channel show him shooting, yes, Kalashnikovs in 2015 — have come to dog him. He’s done several videos posing with guns made by the Nazis; in one, titled “Testing the Gun that Killed Adolf Hitler,” he screamed, “For the Fatherland.” In a 2024 podcast appearance, he joked about the high suicide rate among veterans.
“If it makes everyone in the room feel better, I often think about putting a gun in my mouth,” Herrera said. “So, I’m basically an honorary veteran.”
Offensive remarks, a cease and desist letter, nods to the ultra-right, guns galore: In 2026, what’s unusual about any of this?
“A guy like me could have never run had we not had a President Trump,” Herrera said in an interview with TPM. “There’s a lot of things that he would say that a Republican candidate could not have said 10, 12, 15 years ago.”
“We don’t have to pretend to be something we’re not,” he added.
Some call this “saying the quiet part out loud,” others decry it as a coarsening of public life that repels most people and makes political participation an endless, cynical slog that finds a way to confuse cruelty for honesty. Herrera, who told TPM that he planned on focusing on veteran suicides and the border once in Congress, cast his style as indicative of the end of meaningless virtue signaling that served to sugarcoat the grim realities of governance while barring plainspoken Americans from public service.
“The pearl clutching of, ‘oh my God, can you believe this guy said this?’ is starting to really die off,” Herrera said.
Herrera started off his influencer career focusing mostly on guns. He has a video on how to buy a machine gun legally, and documented the process of designing a large gun he calls an “AK-50” across several videos. After 2020, he started to delve more into politics. Herrera became an outspoken supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Wisconsin man who shot three people during a 2020 protest. After a jury acquitted Rittenouse of homicide and other charges, Herrera posted a video celebrating the verdict that he began by drinking a chaser of beer and then taking three shots. He called the combo “The Rittenhouse.”
That brand of humor runs through Herrera’s videos. It’s internet native, and speaks to multiple overlapping audiences at once: those deadened by irony, people with off-color sense of humor, people who celebrate and enjoy political violence.
Gaetz played a key role in helping bring Herrera from niche YouTube stardom into politics. After leaving Congress and a short-lived stint as Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Gaetz started a streaming show on which Herrera has been a guest.
Herrera denied that Gaetz initially recruited him to run.
Herrera lost in a 2024 runoff by around 1 percent. The district is enormous: around the size of West Virginia, it extends from the suburbs of San Antonio to El Paso. That area encompasses a large section of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Gonzales is now mired in scandal. A former aide to Gonzales first released texts suggesting that he had an affair with a staffer who later committed suicide by self-immolation. Her husband later released more texts, and repeated the allegations.
That’s led many to predict that Herrera will defeat Gonzales, if not by gaining more than 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, then in a May runoff. Herrera told TPM that he believed Texas’ 2025 redistricting had made Texas-23 more conservative, eliminating the need for a moderate like Gonzales.
Much of Herrera’s messaging focuses on his deep appreciation of guns and the Second Amendment. It’s familiar territory for conservatives, but has become more complicated this year after two CBP agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in January.
The shooting set off national shock and prompted the Trump administration to move to a more understated approach towards its mass detention and deportation campaign. It also presented a problem for right-wingers who had spent years arguing that the Second Amendment was the best means to defend themselves against a tyrannical government: what did all of that mean if they weren’t willing to defend an armed but peaceful protestor who was killed by federal agents?
Herrera released a video after the killing in which he said it belonged to a gray area: “Two things can be true,” he said, “Pretti didn’t deserve to die, but it also wasn’t just a baseless execution.”
When TPM asked about the Pretti shooting, he took a harder line.
He said that he believed that Pretti’s gun — infamous for accidental misfires — was to blame, not the officers who shot. He called the shooting “lawful but awful,” but suggested that Pretti was ultimately to blame for entering the situation.
“It’s when you start kicking out the taillights of police SUVs, it’s when you start grappling with police officers and not obeying lawful commands — that’s when things happen,” he said.
