JTA — A gun-rights activist whose YouTube output includes videos admiring Nazi firearms will be the de facto Republican nominee for a closely watched West Texas congressional district after his primary opponent, an incumbent dogged by scandal, dropped his reelection bid Thursday.

Brandon Herrera, known on YouTube as “The AK Guy,” pulled more votes in this week’s primary than Rep. Tony Gonzales. The two were slated for a runoff election in May before Gonzales, now facing a congressional ethics investigation and calls from House leadership to bow out of the race, admitted to having had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.

“I look forward to being the voice of TX23 that our district deserves. From the border to oil theft, water rights, data centers, and many other issues,” Herrera wrote on X following Gonzales’s exit from the race. Gonzales says he will finish out his term.

During the pair’s first primary matchup in 2024, Gonzales had called Herrera a “known neo-Nazi” and compared the GOP’s right flank to the Ku Klux Klan while criticizing its opposition to Israel aid.

Herrera, a firearms manufacturer, is known for his YouTube channel, where he has more than 4 million followers. On his channel, he reviews guns and takes historic weaponry to the firing range. That has included Nazi weaponry: He referred to a Nazi gun as “the original ghetto blaster” in a 2022 video, a seeming reference to the Jewish ghettos during World War II, and restaged Hitler’s suicide by firearm in a 2025 video.

In those videos, he and his associates also performed mock goose-steps and Nazi salutes for the camera and played Nazi music. Herrera has also been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and made jokes about veteran suicides.

“This should be obvious, but I am not, nor have I never been a neo-Nazi,” Herrera wrote on X in 2024 in response to criticisms. He has also claimed a close friendship with Sebastian Gorka, a first-term Trump aide whose association with a far-right Hungarian group raised alarm bells in the Jewish community in 2017.

Texas’s 23rd District includes parts of San Antonio and El Paso as well as Uvalde, the site of a 2022 elementary school mass shooting. It is predominantly Hispanic and Republican, but Democrats, running attorney and former public school teacher Katy Padilla Stout, are eyeing the district as a potential flip amid widespread discontent with the Trump administration.

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