An inflatable eagle swayed outside the Parq Social event center in Cedar Park in late September, welcoming people to the ninth annual Texas Faith Fest.

Inside the main lobby, attendees clad in crisp suits and capped in red MAGA hats clustered around booths for Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and local conservative talk radio shows. Attendees could shoot hoops alongside a cardboard cutout of basketball player Sophie Cunningham, a recent champion in the movement to block trans players from women’s sports. One vendor handed out tiny Jesus figures. Another distributed samples of his children’s book featuring AI-generated rabbits who learn about Jesus and how to lobby Congress.

The roughly 250 attendees represented some of the most ardent Christian conservatives from around the state trying to shape the future of American policy. Among them were numerous elected officials, including state legislators and members of the State Board of Education. The full day of panels included discussions on faith in school curriculum and how to combat sharia law. But many attendees were eager to see one man in particular. Around 11:30, they packed into the main event hall, filling the seats and lining the walls.

“New leaders are rising. This is what the future looks like, ” Jonathan Saenz, president of the social conservative group Texas Values, said to the audience as he introduced the keynote attendee, Republican Congressman Brandon Gill.

The youngest Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives strode onto the stage, wearing a navy blue suit and the characteristic swoop in his hair that has earned him comparisons to Clark Kent. Elected to Congress in 2024 at the ripe age of 30, Brandon Gill has quickly become a figure beloved by the conservative movement and despised by Democrats. In his  question-and-answer session with Saenz, he recalled his journey from growing up on a cattle ranch outside of Abilene, to studying at the Ivy League university of Dartmouth, to winning over Texas Congressional District 26, a deep-red seat that encompasses a large swath of suburban and rural North Texas.

Since taking office in January of 2025, Gill’s snarky commentary and trolling of high-level officials has turned him into a viral right-wing celebrity and one of the most anticipated speakers at the midterm GOP convention in Dallas last month. His embrace of hardcore anti-immigrant sentiment and Christian nationalist ideology has resonated with many conservatives who believe immigration is at the heart of the nation’s economic, housing, and employment problems. As members of the old guard in Texas, including Senator John Cornyn and Governor Greg Abbott, have fallen from favor with many in the Trump-dominated conservative base, Gill’s rapid rise to star status is emblematic of a party that is sharpening around the edges to embrace more hardline politicians that will carry out their America First vision.

“He’s young. He’s dynamic. He is putting people’s feet to the fire,” Benjamin Shrader, president of the Austin Young Republicans, told the Texas Observer at Faith Fest. “I think he could be the president one day.”

In a ruby-red district that went +23 for Trump in 2024, Gill’s Democratic opposition is nominal, and he is largely focused on playing a booster role in the U.S. Senate race in Texas by going after James Talarico and other prominent Democrats.

Gill was among the top right-wing politicians to get behind Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton during the Republican Senate primary. He published an April endorsement in Breitbart that hailed the attorney general as a MAGA warrior who weathered a “politicized impeachment trial.” He assailed Senator Cornyn’s record for fueling the “Islamization of Texas” and stated, “Texas needs a Senator who is eager to join the fight, not one reluctantly dragged to the Right in order to placate Texans during a heated primary election.”

Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser described it as a calculated move that, although risky, has already paid off for the congressman in some respects. “I think it showed that he had a good sense of where the party base was at,” Steinhauser said. The Republican Party activist corps has been heaping praise upon the young congressman, especially in the aftermath of his Dallas convention speech. Some have likened his rhetorical style to the late Charlie Kirk, a leader in the young conservative movement.

Long before Gill ran for Congress, he was developing his digital-first approach and deepening his ties to the Christian conservative movement. While studying at Dartmouth, he became president of the school’s conservative newspaper, the Dartmouth Review, and led a student ministry called Christian Union. College is also where he met his wife Danielle, the daughter of right-wing conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza. Gill became an investment banker and settled down with his wife and two kids in the idyllic North Texas suburb of Flower Mound.

D’Souza gave Gill a direct tie to MAGA and President Donald Trump himself. The prominent Indian-American author and filmmaker has produced numerous right-wing and conspiratorial works, which have been sharply criticised and debunked. At Faith Fest, Gill described the unique relationship he has with his father-in-law, stating that D’Souza has “encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy, and history, and political theory.”

In 2022, Gill joined D’Souza at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for the premiere of his new film 2000 Mules, which details how Democrats supposedly rigged the 2020 election. Gill established a right-wing news site that year called the DC Enquirer, which became one of the film’s biggest promoters. The site also reported on the top culture war issues of the day, until it fizzled out around the time Gill was elected to office in November 2024. The Enquirer’s former editor-in-chief is now the current director of operations for Paxton’s Senate campaign.

When Gill ran for Congress in 2024, he clinched the Trump endorsement and swept the floor with 10 other opponents in the Republican primary. He has been one of the president’s fiercest attack dogs since they both took office in January 2025.

Gill has continued to obsessively focus on culture war issues, taking the battle with him onto the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Congress’ foremost investigative arm. In May, the chairman of the committee appointed Gill to lead a new Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses.

The task force was given a six-month authorization to investigate “illegal race-based or national origin discrimination in employment matters and academic institutions,” as well as “the abuse of immigration and social welfare programs,” and “efforts to censor and suppress Americans’ speech.” Gill is also on a number of oversight subcommittees, including its Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) facsimile, where he has gone after alleged fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

These oversight hearings have spawned tons of viral moments for the congressman, who has used them as an opportunity to corner witnesses with leading questions—and sometimes misinformation—to cast certain policies and programs as woke, wasteful, or fraudulent. He questioned the Smithsonian director over Latina Power merchandise sold at the museum. He asked the American Bar Association president if she thinks the next Supreme Court Justice should be transgender. He asked a reproductive rights legal expert to name her favorite method of abortion.

In the modern age of politics, where Congress doesn’t actually engage in much lawmaking, and where most activity is centered in committee hearings, this sort of C-SPAN grandstanding is the coin of the realm.

Political science professor Matthew Wilson at Southern Methodist University said Gill’s social media strategy has helped him target a base of hardcore conservatives who tend to be active in primaries and push the boundaries within the party. “He seems to have an instinctive sense of how far he can push the envelope without hurting himself,” Wilson said. “He is smart, and rhetorically gifted, and able to package a pretty hardline message relatively effectively.”

Gill has frequently railed against both legal and illegal immigration. According to recent polling from the Texas Politics Project, 60 percent of Republicans believe that the government is allowing too much legal immigration, and Gill is tuning into that discontent. He has filed various pieces of provocative legislation—the sort meant to excite the base rather than actually get enacted. Gill’s proposals would further constrict current legal pathways by tightening visa requirements, eliminating birthright citizenship, or outright banning migration from certain countries.

One of Gill’s first acts in Congress was a resolution to impeach U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg for blocking Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to El Salvador. In February—following a Minnesota fraud scheme by a group of mostly Somali-Americans—Gill proposed a 25-year moratorium on immigration from Somalia. In July, he introduced the Citizenship Act of 2026, which would officially label undocumented immigrants as “invaders” and prohibit the children of “invaders” from receiving birthright citizenship.

In his efforts to malign whole minority groups for violence, fraud, or abuse of the welfare system, Gill frequently cites the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The innocuously named group was founded by a white supremacist in the 1980s, uses flawed methodology, and has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one congressional hearing, for example, Gill cited CIS statistics claiming 81 percent of Somali households in Minnesota are on some form of welfare—numbers that have been debunked. He has also cited their drastically inflated figures on birth tourism.

Gill appeared on the CIS podcast in February of this year. “Gill’s knowledge of and commitment to the immigration issue suggests he’s likely to play an outsized role in the inevitable reshaping of our immigration policy,” CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian said in his introduction on the episode.

“Thanks for having me,” Gill responded. “We obviously use y’all’s research pretty often.”

Since then, Gill has called upon Krikorian and other CIS staff to testify as witnesses in congressional hearings on the abuse of U.S. immigration laws.

Gill’s Democratic opponent in November is Steven Shook, a 45-year-old intensive care nurse. In an interview with the Observer, Shook argued that the policies Gill supports would undermine the existence of his own mixed family. “His father-in-law was an immigrant who came here on an education visa and became a citizen,” Shook said. “But he wants to close all those pathways. Under his own ideas, he wouldn’t have a wife or children because his father-in-law wouldn’t be here.”

In September, Gill introduced a law that would harm some of America’s most vulnerable populations by eliminating the Restaurant Meals Program (RMP). In nine states, the RMP allows people who are elderly, disabled, or homeless to use their SNAP benefits at approved restaurants because they are unable to cook meals themselves. Gill has justified the elimination of the RMP by filing it under the category of government waste, fitting into his broader criticisms of SNAP during his work on the DOGE subcommittee.

“SNAP is supposed to help struggling Americans put nutritious food on the table, not stick taxpayers with the bill for fast food,” Gill told Newsweek, calling the RMP a “ridiculous loophole.”

Gill recently flew on Air Force One with the president and has joined him at rallies in Texas. In Harlingen, Vice President JD Vance lauded him as “one of the great all-stars, in not just Texas, but in the American Republican Party.”

Steinhauser said he could see Gill running for a higher office someday, like senator or governor. Others are suggesting a future presidential run. Texas Values President Saenz pressed him about it on stage at Faith Fest.

“What does the future look like for Congressman Brandon Gill?” Saenz asked.

“Right now, we’re focused on beating Democrats in November,” Gill said, announcing he’d be traveling around the country to rally for Republican candidates. “But I’m currently running to be the next chairman of the House oversight committee.”

U.S. Representative James Comer of Kentucky is finishing out his term as the committee’s chairman, a post that he used to repeatedly investigate the Biden administration and the Biden family. That means the post for top Republican on that committee will be up for grabs. Despite his lack of seniority, Gill is vying for the seat up against another North Texas congressman, Pat Fallon.

“If you are inclined to be an attack dog, inclined to go after people, that is a perch from which you can wield a lot of power,” Wilson said. However, he also warned that the likelihood of Democrats reclaiming control of the House this November means Gill might have to settle for ranking member of the committee.

The post Is Brandon Gill the Future of MAGA in Texas?  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On the last Sunday of September, a dozen volunteers gathered on the South Side of San Antonio alongside Republican candidates Jorge Borrego and Carlos De La Cruz. “This is where our efforts matter the most,” said Borrego, who is running for Texas House District 118. “If we win this district, it’ll get us over the finish line in November.”

The group of volunteers at Mission De Lago Golf Course bowed their heads in a prayer for victory before they set out to knock on doors. “The church needs to get engaged in government and put a final end to the separation of church and state,” local pastor Mark Lugo said. “Lord, I pray for these two gentlemen that are in this fight.” The group then split off to load up their cars with campaign swag and literature.

The 118th is a purple-ish swing district that forms a crescent around San Antonio from the southwest to the northeast. It’s considered to be the most flippable of the Texas House seats this cycle, and it’s also a microcosm of this year’s gubernatorial race. The Democrats’ champion Kristian Carranza, a 36-year-old political organizer who has aligned herself closely with gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa and her plan to end school vouchers. Borrego, who is 30 years old, comes straight from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), the influential conservative think tank where he helped push the private school voucher program that Governor Greg Abbott signed into law in 2025. 

Borrego is hoping to thwart Carranza’s second attempt to flip the district, which was once a Democratic stronghold until Republican John Lujan flipped the seat in a low-turnout special election upset back in 2021. Ever since, it’s been a top target for state House Democrats, who’ve thus far failed to wrest back the South Side-centered seat. In 2024, an overall disappointing cycle for the minority party, Carranza lost by 3.5 points to Lujan. But this time, the seat is up for grabs after Lujan made a failed primary bid for Congress, and Carranza is hoping to ride a wave of growing discontent with Republican Party leadership in Texas.

“She has a real shot,” Jon Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told the Texas Observer. “Not only is she getting good support from state and national Democrats, but looking at her contribution list, there are a lot of individual donations.” Carranza has raised a total of over $800,000 throughout the course of her campaign from over 5,000 individual donations, campaign finance records show. 

As the former education policy director at the TPPF, Borrego has earned endorsements from Abbott and numerous other state representatives, as well donations from top conservative political PACs. Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC, one of the biggest political donors to Texas Republican candidates, has poured roughly $400,000 into Borrego’s campaign. That, and contributions from other PACs, makes up the vast majority of his over $700,000 total haul throughout the campaign. But Borrego burned through much of that cash early in the cycle. As of October, Carranza has a significant cash-on-hand advantage of $383,000 to Borrego’s meager $22,000, per the latest campaign finance filings. 

Right now, the Republican said he’s less concerned about funding and more focused on making connections at the door. “My opponent in the primary also had a significant amount of cash on hand over myself, and I still won two to one,” Borrego said.

Borrego hopped in his truck to blockwalk in a quiet South Side neighborhood near the golf course, like he’s done almost every day since July. He set a goal to knock on twice as many doors as the margin of victory between Carranza and Lujan in the previous race, which was 2,600 votes. Carranza told the Observer she’s knocked 7,000 doors so far this cycle and knocked 10,000 during her first campaign.

For every unopened door, Borrego left a handwritten note with his phone number. Others welcomed him into their homes. He pitched them on lower property taxes, public safety, and higher quality schools for their kids. But Borrego said he doesn’t think public schools need more funding. When asked about the 170 public schools that have closed in Texas since 2023, Borrego told the Observer that superintendents simply aren’t budgeting properly.

“We fund public schools at $105 billion a year. If you break that down, that’s enough to send every student in Texas to UT-Austin twice over,” Borrego said, citing a statistic that experts have said is technically accurate but doesn’t account for inflation and one-time federal funds. Borrego put per-student funding at $18,000 based on the total state education spending, which includes local, state, and federal dollars that are divided and stretched differently depending on the district. The actual per-student allotment is $6,215, putting Texas among the lowest in the nation for public school funding.

Borrego said he would, however, be interested in expanding the state’s Texas Education Freedom Accounts, which funneled $1 billion of public funds into vouchers for private and home schooling. “If we have another surplus, and the composition of the wait list is right, I would 100 percent be willing to expand the school choice program,” Borrego said. The recently appointed Texas comptroller and GOP nominee Don Huffines has called for the Legislature to double its funding of the program. 

The candidates were planned to participate in a forum last month with the League of Women Voters (LWV) and Raise Your Hand Texas, a public education advocacy group. It was a rare opportunity for citizens to hear from both candidates about their policy positions, but the room full of attendees was left anxiously waiting for any sign of Borrego. The Republican never showed, forcing the LWV to pull out of the event based on their rules of non-partisanship.

“We cannot proceed with just one candidate,” said Jill Torbert, president of the San Antonio LWV, before they vacated the room.

Borrego told the Observer there had been a scheduling conflict with a private event that he would not disclose. It was later revealed that Borrego had sent the League an email less than two hours in advance explaining that he would be unable to attend.

“I tried my best to make both events work,” Borrego told the Observer, “and it’s with deep regret that I couldn’t make it.”

Carranza stayed behind to speak with a representative of Raise Your Hand Texas, a group that Borrego was at odds with during his time at TPPF. In hearings before the Texas Senate Education Committee, Borrego dismissed Raise Your Hand’s statistics showing that Texas wasn’t adequately funding public schools, and spoke in support of the $10,000-per-student private school voucher allocation.

In Borrego’s absence, Carranza directed her message at the crowd. “I’m so grateful that you showed up for me. As you see, I’m here. I’m always going to show up for you.” She went on to propose an increase to the basic allotment and said she would vote to end school vouchers, the STAAR test, and state takeovers of local school districts.

Carranza said growing up in San Antonio public schools taught her the importance of a strong public education. Her views were fortified by her public university education at Texas A&M Universtiy-Corpus Christi. But at the age of 21, Carranza was forced to pause her higher education to take care of her mother, who suffered from chronic health issues. She returned to college this year on a grant program and graduated this summer.

“For me, this is all about making sure that I’m providing more opportunities for other families like mine to get ahead,” Carranza said.

After the event, she called out Borrego on social media for being a no show, and he responded by challenging her to a debate in Spanish. “Mr. Borrego could have shown up to our scheduled forum and spoken in whatever language he wanted to,” Carranza told the Observer, “but he decided not to show up.”

It’s not the first time the two candidates traded barbs on social media. In late August, news outlets reported on a maelstrom of salacious old tweets that Borrego posted between 2011 and 2016. Many of the posts referenced cocaine use, sexual acts, and deployed a variety of curses, slurs, and stereotypes. “The posts in question were crude and immature jokes I made when I was a kid,” Borrego told the Texas Tribune, also stating on X that he was around 16 at the time. “Those posts do not reflect the husband, father, or public servant I am today.”

Carranza posted a condemnation of Borrego’s “lude, racist, and perverse” posts, stating that he was “unfit and unable to serve in a position of public trust.”

Controversies aside, both candidates have tried to recenter the conversation around affordability. Borrego said he would support Greg Abbott’s plan to lower property taxes, which includes an elimination of school district property taxes and a requirement for localities to get two-thirds voter support to raise rates. Like Abbott, he believes this can be achieved without raising other forms of taxation if the state has another budget surplus.

Rachel White, a University of Texas professor focused on education policy, said Abbott’s plan could likely only be achieved “with a complete overhaul of the state’s school finance system.”

Carranza said she thinks the best avenue to lower school district property taxes is to ensure that the state is carrying its fair share of public education funding. “When the state underfunds schools and diverts money to vouchers, the burden shifts onto homeowners through local property taxes,” she said. “Raising the basic allotment and putting a surplus into public schools is the most direct way to bring property taxes down.”

With Election Day approaching, the contest for the South Side seat is shaping up as a test of voters’ satisfaction with the state’s leadership and the future of Texas education. Failure to take back the most flippable Texas House seat in would spell disaster for Democrats. But if Carranza makes it across the finish line, it’s possible she’ll be accompanied by a wave of others.

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