Meet the Gun-Toting Influencer Who—Thanks to the Tony Gonzales Scandal—May Soon Be in Congress

In 2024, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) complained about his colleague, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Gaetz was embroiled in a sinister scandal involving a Florida tax collector, an associate of the congressman accused of sex trafficking; Federal investigators also reportedly looked into allegations that Gaetz moved underage women across state lines for sexual purposes. The DOJ declined to prosecute Gaetz, who maintains his innocence, but in 2024 Gonzales reminded everyone, remarking: “I serve with real bastards like Matt Gaetz. He paid minors to have sex with them at drunken parties.” It didn’t help that Gonzales said it on CNN — enemy territory for the House Freedom Caucus. The deputy had made enemies on his right.

Now, two years later, Gonzales is mired in his own scandal and faces a primary challenger on Tuesday who nearly beat him last time: Brandon Herrera, AKA TheAKGuy. If he gets 50% of the vote in Tuesday’s Republican primary, he will likely be on track to represent Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, which a Democrat hasn’t 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 the wishes of GOP leaders in 2024 and throwing $12,000 to his PAC and $3,500 to his campaign last July. The Freedom Caucus endorsed Herrera last week. This is not the case with Trump; 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 supported him.

The remarks that Herrera has accumulated over more than a decade of living online — early videos on his YouTube channel show him shooting, yes, Kalashnikovs in 2015 — have come to dog him. He has made several videos posing with Nazi-made weapons; in one, titled “Testing the Weapon That Killed Adolf Hitler,” he shouted: “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, letter of cessation, winks to the ultra-right, weapons galore: in 2026, what is unusual about all this?

“A guy like me would never have been able to run if we didn’t have President Trump,” Herrera said in an interview with TPM. “He would say a lot of things that a Republican candidate could not have said 10, 12 or 15 years ago.”

“We don’t need to pretend to be something we’re not,” he added.

Some call it “saying the quiet part out loud,” others denounce it as a magnification of public life that turns off most people and makes political participation a cynical, never-ending slog that finds ways to confuse cruelty with honesty. Herrera, who told TPM he plans to focus on veteran suicides and the border once in Congress, presented his style as indicative of an end to meaningless virtue signaling that served to sugarcoat the grim realities of governance while barring outspoken Americans from public office.

“The gem that’s like, ‘Oh my God, can you believe this guy said that?’ “really starts to die,” Herrera said.

Herrera began his career as an influencer focusing primarily on guns. He has a video on how to buy a machine gun legally and has documented the process of designing a large weapon he calls “AK-50” across several videos. After 2020, he began to focus more on politics. Herrera became a vocal supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Wisconsin man who fatally shot three people during a protest in 2020. After a jury acquitted Rittenouse of homicide and other charges, Herrera released a video celebrating the verdict that he began by drinking a beer, then taking three shots. He called the combo “The Rittenhouse.”

This brand of humor shines through in Herrera’s videos. It was born on the Internet and speaks to several overlapping audiences at once: those who are lulled by irony, people with a quirky sense of humor, people who celebrate and enjoy political violence.

Gaetz played a key role in helping Herrera move from niche YouTube stardom to politics. After leaving Congress and a brief stint as Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Gaetz launched a streaming show on which Herrera was a guest.

Herrera denied that Gaetz initially recruited him to run.

Herrera lost by about 1 percent in the 2024 runoff. The district is enormous: the size of West Virginia, it stretches from suburban San Antonio to El Paso. This area encompasses a large portion of the US-Mexico border.

Gonzales is now mired in scandal. A former Gonzales aide initially posted texts suggesting he had an affair with a staffer who later committed suicide by self-immolation. Her husband later posted more texts and repeated the allegations.

That led many to predict that Herrera would defeat Gonzales, if not by securing more than 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, then at least in the May runoff. Herrera told TPM he believes Texas redistricting in 2025 has made Texas-23 more conservative, eliminating the need for a moderate like Gonzales.

Much of Herrera’s message focuses on his deep appreciation of guns and the Second Amendment. It’s familiar territory for conservatives, but it became more complicated this year after two CBP agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in January.

The shooting sparked national shock and prompted the Trump administration to take a more low-key approach in 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 defense against a tyrannical government: What did all that mean if they weren’t willing to defend an armed but peaceful protester who had been killed by federal agents?

Herrera released a video after the killing in which he said he fell into a gray area: “Two things can be true,” he said: “Pretti didn’t deserve to die, but this wasn’t a baseless execution either. »

When TPM asked him about the Pretti shooting, he took a harder line.

He said he thought it was Pretti’s gun — infamous for accidental misfires — that was to blame, not the officers who fired. He called the shooting “lawful but horrific” but suggested Pretti was ultimately responsible for walking into the situation.

“That’s when you start turning off the taillights of police SUVs, that’s when you start fighting with the officers and not obeying lawful orders – that’s when things happen,” he said.