SAN ANTONIO – Brandon Herrera is a 28-year-old YouTube gun influencer with over 3.4 million subscribers and half a billion views. In a 17-minute video, Herrera, wearing a tight black T-shirt and a backwards baseball cap, shows plays the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Jr. using a replica head containing a condom’s worth of fake blood.
“That just feels really bad,” Herrera says in the video after blood splatters everywhere.
Herrera, that is The AK man, which manufactures guns and also shoots them online is also running an elementary school Tuesday that could take out a sitting member of Congress in a district where just two years ago there was a horrific mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Herrera has nearly 500 videos on his YouTube channel, with titles ranging from “Testing the Gun That Killed Abraham Lincoln” to “SUPER CURSED GUN IMAGES,” “HORRIBLY CURSED GUN IMAGES” and “LITERALLY FUCKING GUN IMAGES.” In a video from 2022 that has almost 2 million viewsHerrera tests a submachine gun from Nazi Germany and goosesteps to a marching song often associated with Nazi soldiers. (Herrera, who seems to be doing all this for fun, tells viewers that if they don’t see anything wrong with a song about “a soldier missing a pretty girl at home,” they should “go ahead and hit the subscribe button.” “)
And on Monday, Herrera, wearing jeans and brown Western boots, stepped out of a white Dodge Challenger with Oregon license plates and walked into the Thirsty Horse Saloon, a bar in north San Antonio, for an afternoon meeting to kick off early voting.
Herrera will participate in Tuesday’s elections against Rep. Tony Gonzales, a moderate who defied the Republican Party on gun control and immigration, winning him. a rebuke of the Texas GOP and this unusual primary that could end his career.
Herrera’s candidacy raises the strange question of whether a candidate whose entire personality makes viral content about guns is electable in a district that’s only moderately Republican and that was one of the worst mass shootings in US history – and that is also on edge due to a wave of unlawful border crossings.
Herrera denied Gonzales, a 43-year veteran, an outright majority in a splintered primary in March, setting up the two-way race for the nomination against a Democrat. A Herrera victory on Tuesday would be bad for Gonzales and possibly even worse for the threatened majority of the House of Representatives. The 23rd Congressional District in West Texas is made up of a majority of Latino swing seats normally in the hands of moderates – no famous ‘gunfluencers’ supported by Matt Gaetz, the incendiary Republican from Florida who campaigned there with Herrera at the Thirsty Horse on Monday.
Gonzales, a two-term incumbent who has upset some of his Republican colleagues in DC (he called Gaetz a “asshole” on CNN last month) has been increased more than three times as much as Herrera. But Herrera has a huge following of gun-loving people who love him, and it’s hard to predict how that will affect Tuesday’s election, especially as the anti-Gonzales sentiment has now consolidated around Herrera .
Gonzales, a former Navy chef, has taken up a crude joke Herrera made about veterans’ suicide. “I often think about putting a gun in my mouth… so I’m actually an honorary veteran,” Herrera (who, for the record, is not an actual veteran) said on a podcast, a joke of which he claims it was taken out of context. . Gonzales didn’t think it was funny. “There are parts of the country where that’s cute or funny, but it’s not cute or funny to a veteran who’s been through this,” Gonzales told reporters after his campaign announced it was using the comment in an attack ad.
Herrera has come onto the radar of the pro-Israel lobby, which last week launched its own ad campaign against Herrera, saying he “glorifies the Nazis and mocks the Holocaust.” according to Jewish Insiderwhich also reported that Herrera was a member of a group that celebrates the Confederacy and is registered to vote at an address in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Herrera tweeted February 2021 that he was about to move to Texas, and he now says he lives in San Antonio. Asked about his hometown and the Challenger with out-of-state license plates, Herrera’s campaign told me: “Ever heard of a rental car? The campaign could not be reached for comment.”
In a very brief interview on The Thirsty Horse, Herrera, who personally had none of his wacky YouTuber energy, claimed that Gonzales was afraid to engage with him about policy discussions. “It says a lot because Tony can’t attack me on policy,” said Herrera, wearing a dark Ray Ban as he drinks a neon yellow drink in a plastic cup. Herrera has a beard and a head of slicked-back slate hair, and he carries himself with the confidence of someone who does something on camera for a living. “All he can do is try to take me out of context or twist jokes, and that doesn’t work.”
A few minutes later, a woman with an icy blonde bob and wearing a “Let’s go Brandon” shirt had me shown out of the bar by two men, who said the event was “closed” to journalists.
Herrera is here today mainly because Gonzales opposed the Republican Party’s border security bill earlier this year and voted in favor with Democrats. passed the first gun control measures out of Congress for decades after a gunman in his district killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school on May 24, 2022. The gun reform law became a turning point for Congress, which passed bipartisan legislation to end gun reform. “boyfriend loophole” and expanding background checks – largely because of what happened in Uvalde.
But for those who could send Herrera to Congress, the vote was seen as a pandering to Democrats on gun control, which is largely not up for debate even after a horrific shooting.
“These politicians who came here [after the shooting] were just pushing [gun control] down their throats,” said Uvalde County Clerk-Elect Donna Williams, who had not decided last weekend who she would vote for on Tuesday. Williams, who lives on 15 acres just outside Uvalde, believes the shooting was a product of mental illness and not gun culture.
But more than gun rights, border security appears to be the biggest factor in this race. The 23rd District is vast and sparsely populated, stretching from El Paso to San Antonio along the border with Mexico. Voters here bring the record number of illegal border crossings in the past year and the phenomenon of ‘bailouts’, when migrants are fleeing from the police literally jumping out of a vehicle and causing dangerous high-speed chases.
“They just run and hide, and sometimes the police find them and sometimes they don’t,” said a business owner from Hondo, a small town halfway between San Antonio and Uvalde. “Our kids can’t be outside because you never know who is outside.”
Williams feels safest when she carries a gun on her property at all times. “They’re breaking into houses, breaking down fences… other states don’t really see what we’re going through.”
Gonzales, whose campaign is advertising support from the union representing U.S. Border Patrol agents, has maintained his vote against House Republicans’ border bill. close the door to asylum seekers. Gonzales called the bill — led by another Texan, hardliner Chip Roy — “unchristian” and “anti-immigrant” in its approach to securing the border with Mexico.
Herrera, meanwhile, is a Second Amendment absolutist and has been clear about his position when it comes to tactics to secure the border and reduce immigration. He says he will “block any spending bills that don’t include finishing the wall, returning to the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, and ending the bogus asylum claims racket.”
The few people I spoke to at Herrera’s event before I was kicked out were generally familiar with the concept of a YouTuber, but not specifically with Herrera’s content.
Ben Taylor, a 71-year-old retiree, described it as “edgy” and “not always in the best taste” – and it’s easy to see that someone 71 wouldn’t necessarily be interested in a video of Herrera doing a parody of an Eminem song with other “guntubers” because he got kicked off Instagram or shooting an AR-50, which for most of us is just a really big gun.
Taylor was nonetheless disappointed with Gonzales and concerned about border security and the strain an influx of new people will have on natural resources, especially water supplies. “I think it says something that someone my age is going to vote for Brandon instead of Tony,” he said.
Meanwhile, a 37-year-old voter named Preston, who didn’t want to share his last name, said he likes that Herrera, a Gen Zer, “isn’t petrified.”
Herrera, who was ready to remove himself from our conversation after two minutes, said it had to tell the Republican establishment something that it couldn’t slow down its momentum.
“It’s not moving the needle the way they want it to, and people are sick of it,” he said, his yellow drink sweating in the Texas afternoon heat. “Money doesn’t have as much power in politics in the age of social media as they would like.”
