Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
The race for Texas’ 23rd District was guaranteed to be troubling. Headed into the Republican primaries, the incumbent, Rep. Tony Gonzales, was facing one of the ugliest sex scandals in recent political history. His main opponent, Brandon Herrera, is famous as a gun influencer from Uvalde, the site of a horrific mass shooting at an elementary school, and had come under fire for making light of the mass murder of Jews. The majority-Hispanic district, a huge stretch of land along the Mexican border, was set to elect either a man accused of horrific sexual misconduct or a man known as the AK guy, who likes Nazi jokes.
The two had previously run against each other in the 2024 GOP primary, with Gonzales narrowly beating Herrera in a runoff.
But in 2026, Gonzales’ scandal turned out to be the greater liability. In late February, it was revealed that Gonzales had had an affair with a female staffer in 2024; on Sept. 13, 2025, the staffer died from self-immolation after blaming the affair for her marriage’s disintegration. Texts provided by the staffer’s ex-husband showed Gonzales pressuring the staffer, even as she expressed discomfort with the situation. Gonzales did eventually admit to the affair. He kept his campaign going, however, and on Tuesday was forced into a runoff with Herrera. On Thursday, Republicans urged Gonzales to step aside, and that night he ended his campaign. Now, because of a recent redistricting that turned the district solidly red, the AK Guy looks to have an easy path to Congress.
Herrera was certainly the less radioactive candidate of the two. But he comes with his own issues. Immediately after the news was announced, Democrats dug up old YouTube clips that seemed to point to Nazi sympathies. In one video, from 2022, Herrera filmed himself goose-stepping while holding an old German rifle as a Nazi marching song plays. He calls the gun “the original ghetto blaster,” presumably in reference to the mass murder of Jews, and characterizes the whole episode as a “forbidden LARP,” or live-action role-playing game. In another clip, he shows off his copy of Mein Kampf.
Molly Olmstead
Uvalde May End Up With a Representative Who’s a Gun Influencer
Read More
In reality, if you watch Herrera’s content, there’s no indication he’s sincere in his Nazi leanings. Instead, his real passion is provocation. Herrera, who is 30, bearded, and brawny, likes to joke around with his fellow GunTube bros, using crude and often sexual language and cracking up whenever they stumble upon anything taboo. His YouTube channel often consists of him and his pals shooting things with different guns or commenting on “internet gun fails.” This edgy approach has helped him amass more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube. And he doesn’t seem to think too hard about any of his controversial decisions: He had a copy of Mein Kampf, he said, simply because he collects “historic books,” including The Communist Manifesto. He doesn’t see a problem with LARPing as Nazis, as he has LARPed as Soviet soldiers too.
That edgelord thoughtlessness appears to be core to Herrera’s identity in a way that could certainly cause issues in Congress. (A Democrat will oppose him in November, but the district is considered a solidly Republican one.) He once joked that he shot at a dummy “as homeless people are frowned upon and, as it turns out, illegal to shoot at.” Another time, he quipped, “I often think about putting a gun in my mouth, so I’m basically an honorary veteran.” And in the Nazi gun video, his friend asks him, in a German accent, if he’s hiding any White Claws under his floorboards. In case there was any question whether he’s aware of how he comes off, he has challenged those who might have a problem with him, accusing them of being humorless for taking offense. In the video with the German rifle, he plays a Nazi marching song before taking a swipe at any potential anti-Nazi scolds who might be watching. “If you’re one of the few people out there that realizes there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the song we just used and it’s a bunch of soldiers singing about a pretty girl they miss at home, go ahead and hit that Subscribe button,” he said.
-
The Senator Who Cost Kristi Noem Her Job
Unsurprisingly, Herrera had the more extreme political positions of the two Republican candidates. Because Gonzales had voted for some light gun-control measures after Uvalde—which, as a reminder, was an incident in which 19 students and two teachers were shot to death at an elementary school—Herrera had come to see the representative as a fake Republican and attacked him for being weak. But apart from his advocacy for absolute gun freedom and his promise to stand by Donald Trump 100 percent, Herrera is more style than substance. He memed his way through his campaign and bragged about “bullying” Gonzales. He held events with Kyle Rittenhouse, the gunman who killed two men at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin but was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Rittenhouse knocked on doors with Herrera on one of the final days of his campaign. Herrera speaks of political matters in simplistic action-movie language, talking of giving “reinforcements” to the “good guys in D.C.” His campaign slogan is “Let’s Go Brandon.” (This is a lightly coded way to say “Fuck Joe Biden.”)
With Gonzales out of the race, we’ll never know if a more establishment Republican (albeit one with a lethal sex scandal) would have defeated a hard-right internet campaign built on what Herrera acknowledges are “fucked-up” jokes.
Without the runoff rematch between Herrera and Gonzales, we won’t learn whether there are limits to how much internet edginess an electorate can handle. Gonzales’ misconduct has meant a strange reality, hard to imagine four years ago, when 19 elementary school children were killed in one horrific act. Uvalde, a place synonymous with grief due to gun violence, will almost certainly be represented by a man who has made his career glamorizing and joking about assault rifles.
