If you want to get acquainted with Brandon Herrera, the gun influencer currently favored to win a tight congressional race in South Texas, his YouTube channel offers many opportunities.
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channel → want → opportunities
You could feast your eyes on his most-watched video, with 13 million views, wherein he uses a rifle and head and torso ballistics models to recreate the assassination of JFK.
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he → feast → JFK
Or there’s the one where he calls a World War II-era machine gun the “original ghetto blaster” and goose-steps to the tune of Nazi military songs.
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he → ’ → songs
In an episode of his podcast, he brags about owning a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and, departing from his interest in Nazis, he has also appeared with the neo-Confederate group Sons of Confederate Veterans and calls the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.”
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he → brag → Aggression
In an article about Herrera’s excesses and his successes, the New York Times declined to print some of his most profane viral statements “because this is a family newspaper.”
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this → decline → statements
I suspect Mother Jones readers may prefer the unabridged edition, so here goes: In a 2023 video, Herrera referred to children as “cum trophies.”
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Herrera → suspect → trophies
Of mothers’ views on current events, he said, “Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions.”
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I → say → opinions
When Austin-American-Statesman reporter Faith Bugenhagen asked the Herrera campaign about those remarks, the team replied with a photo of a cream pie (the baked good, to be clear).
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team → ask → pie
Herrera, whose campaign slogan, naturally, is “Let’s Go Brandon,” is what’s known in online parlance as an edgelord—an influencer whose entire brand consists of off-color jokes and offensive remarks designed to titillate, outrage, and garner attention.
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brand → let → attention
This gambit is not new; the shock jocks of talk radio’s glory days (think early Howard Stern) figured this formula out decades ago—though at 30, he wouldn’t remember all that.
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he → think → that
But these days, shit posting alone is not enough to win votes; witness the recent crashing and burning of James Fishback, the Florida groyper who lost the Republican gubernatorial primary with only 10 percent of the vote.
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who → win → vote
Or the case of Casey Putsch, the Ohio challenger to Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor whose campaign included antisemitic dogwhistles.
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campaign → include → dogwhistles
In that primary, Putsch got just 17.5 percent of the vote.
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Putsch → get → vote
What sets Herrera apart from these mere provocateurs is his massive online fanbase: 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube, where he is known as the AK Guy, after the abbreviation for Avtomat Kalashnikova, the Russian phrase for automatic rifle.
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he → set → rifle
In 2024, wearing a “More Liberty Less Government” t-shirt, he successfully built and fired the prototype of an AK-50, a long-range rifle that has long been the holy grail of automatic weapon enthusiasts.
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that → wear → enthusiasts
Herrera’s success proves that a candidate can harness an online following into a formidable campaign—one whose true supporters are not voters in his district but rather a geographically dispersed, chronically online group of (mostly-male) fans.
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supporters → prove → fans
This model is adjacent to the “network state,” a concept coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and a former colleague of venture capital titan Marc Andreessen.
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model → coin → Andreessen
In Srinivasan’s vision, digital networks can amass physical land, forming new sovereign nations.
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networks → amass → nations
Herrera’s campaign proves they can do something potentially even more powerful: They can accumulate an impressive amount of political capital—thus transforming a scattered online audience into a powerful base and financing juggernaut.
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They → prove → base
Indeed, Herrera’s campaign is funded almost entirely by people outside his district.
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campaign → fund → district
In recent months, he has solicited campaign donations on his YouTube channel, sometimes offering donors entry into a raffle for a Cold War-era collector’s item, an AC-556 machine gun.
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he → solicit → item
What he does with his donations is unclear; they are funneled through an unregistered opaque entity.
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they → funnel → entity
Jacob Ware, an extremism researcher with Georgetown University and the author of the 2025 book God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, has observed this phenomenon firsthand.
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Ware → observe → phenomenon
“In the past people would have idiosyncratic or individual ideas but wouldn’t be able to build political movements on that because they were just so disparate,” he said.
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he → have → that
But now, thanks in large part to social media, this scattered group of people can come together around a shared interest to back “a local candidate and pour their resources and hopes and dreams into him, thinking this is a foothold in the national political picture.
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this → scatter → picture
What makes the success of this impassioned Second Amendment advocate even more improbable is that his district includes the sites of two high-profile mass shootings: Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in 2022, and El Paso, where a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019.
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supremacist → make → 2019
A poll earlier this year conducted by the gun control advocacy group Giffords surveyed 600 likely Texas Republican voters in the Senate runoff and found overwhelming support for firearm safety policies like background checks and red-flag laws.
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poll → conduct → checks
Despite those headwinds, as of mid-August, Herrera was leading his opponent, Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, by six points.
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Herrera → lead → points
He has also garnered powerful endorsements from like-minded celebrities, including right-wing podcasters Tim Pool and Benny Johnson as well as a motley crew of organizations: the Freedom Caucus Fund, MAHA Action, and the National Women’s Prayer and Voting Army, to name a few.
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He → garner → few
Conspicuously absent is the National Rifle Association, which Herrera has criticized for being a fusty boomer relic that is overly accommodating to gun safety groups.
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that → criticize → groups
After initially supporting Tony Gonzales, Herrera’s opponent in the primary, House Speaker Mike Johnson did an about-face this summer and began campaigning for Herrera.
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Johnson → support → Herrera
As someone who has tirelessly promoted traditional family values, Johnson is an awkward spokesman for a candidate whose statements about children and mothers are profane enough to exclude them from the pages of the New York Times.
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statements → promote → Times
No such awkwardness faces President Donald Trump, who endorsed Herrera in a March post on Truth Social: “Brandon is strongly supported by many Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Texas, and Republicans in the US House,” he wrote.
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he → face → House
“HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
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HE → let → YOU
Raised in a military family in the Fort Bragg-adjacent community of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Herrera’s interest in firearms began in middle school and obviously never waned.
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interest → raise → school
He dabbled in building guns as a teen.
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He → dabble → teen
After a short undergrad stint as a pre-law student at a nearby Christian college, he dropped out to focus full time on manufacturing firearms through his business, The AK Guy Inc., and building his YouTube channel.
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he → drop → channel
In 2020, he moved to Texas, where he plugged into a thriving community of firearms enthusiasts and launched his gunsmithing company.
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he → move → company
The following year, he built and fired the AK-50, a move that immediately increased his prestige in the firearms world.
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that → build → world
The Uvalde school shooting happened two years after Herrera moved to Texas, and in response, lawmakers in the state introduced new legislation to tighten firearm regulation.
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lawmakers → happen → regulation
…and 46 more, not listed.
The Aporia
