Uvalde’s Next Congressman Might Be a Gunfluencer

In the latest battle of the Republican civil war, a Texas moderate is challenged by “The AK Guy.”

Brandon Herrera is a YouTube star who makes a living shooting large guns for people to watch on small screens. The 28-year-old gun influencer, known online as “The AK Guy,” has built a following of more than 3 million followers with videos including a reenactment of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and another in which he carefully examines a firearm behind a Rhodesian flag, a symbol adopted by white nationalists. And he just might be elected to represent Uvalde, Texas — the site of a horrific mass shooting at an elementary school — in Congress.

After the 2022 massacre that killed 19 children and two adults, Congress passed the first gun-control legislation in decades, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. It expanded background checks for those under 21, closing the “boyfriend loophole” that allowed some people convicted of domestic violence to buy a firearm and increasing funding for mental health and school safety. Tony Gonzales, Uvalde’s current representative, was one of 14 House Republicans to vote for it, prompting not only his censure by the Texas GOP but also Herrera to challenge him for the Republican nomination. During the primary this past march, Herrera received just under 25 percent, but thanks to two other candidates, Gonzales was held to less than 50 percent, forcing them into a runoff.

The May 28 election is shaping up to be a major battleground in the ongoing civil war within the Republican Party across the country. So far, the Establishment has been on offense: Eight members of Congress who led the push to oust Kevin McCarthy as House speaker have drawn primary challenges from his corner of the party. This race in south Texas is what Steve Bannon calls the “epitome of the struggle,” giving the MAGA right perhaps its best opportunity to take a scalp of its own.

A prickly moderate, Gonzales is not popular on Capitol Hill, but he was especially sharp on CNN last month when he laid into two of his colleagues who endorsed Herrera. “I serve with some real scumbags,” he said on Inside Politics. “Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties. Bob Good endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime.” The attack galvanized further right-wing opposition to him, with Representative Eli Crane quickly tweeting his rage over the comments and his decision to endorse Herrera.

“I was never a fan of Tony Gonzales,” Crane says. “I was planning on staying out of it. But when I saw what he said on CNN basically calling a couple friends of mine Klansmen, that’s where I draw the line.” The former Navy SEAL is particularly irate because Gonzales was a fellow veteran. “Tony came from the same branch of the service that I did. Honor, courage and commitment are our core values. To me, you have no honor if you go out there and you smear people politically.”

Gonazles’s district stretches along the banks of the Rio Grande from the edge of El Paso to San Antonio, an area larger than all of New York, and is majority Hispanic. Traditionally, it has been a swing district, and Gonzales positioned himself accordingly. But the combination of Republican friendly redistricting in Texas along with the shift in support among Hispanics in South Texas for Donald Trump has made it a much safer district for the GOP.

For Bannon, the godfather of the MAGA populist right, the demographics only elevate the symbolism around the race. “This part of South Texas is, I think, emblematic, of where we can make huge inroads in shifting with a, quote, unquote, minority district,” he says. “It may be minority as far as ethnicity goes or race goes, but these are majority MAGA. And this is why the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas is so important to us to prove the theory of our case.” Gonzales has been a leading voice in the GOP in trying to forge compromise immigration legislation and sparked rage on the right when he attacked the hard-line proposals of his colleague Chip Roy as “not Christian.”

Gonzales isn’t taking all of this lying down. He has brought House Speaker Mike Johnson to the district to fundraise for him and has bought $786,000 worth of ads to attack Herrera for making a joke about veteran suicide on a podcast. Those aren’t the only controversial comments that have dogged Herrera. He has faced real scrutiny in Trump world after the Daily Beast reported that the right-wing hopeful mocked Trump’s youngest son, Barron, on a podcast.

Then there is the fact he doesn’t have roots in Texas. Herrera is a longtime resident of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and announced his candidacy at a Young Americans for Liberty event in Orlando, Florida. Gonzales sniped in a recent press conference that his opponent had only just recently visited “over half of the counties” in the district for the first time. Though Herrera has a rabid fan base online, they are not disproportionately located in the San Antonio suburbs and gritty border towns that make up the district.

The MAGA faithful aren’t really voting for Herrera — they aren’t even really voting against Gonzales per se — but rather against the Establishment. As one veteran Texas Republican consultant put it, for Republican voters, “it’s 90 percent” about the MAGA-Establishment fight and “10 percent about these individual candidates, this district, and the issues.”