Brandon Herrera has a suggestion for animal shelters with too many kittens.
“I hate to see animals put down for no reason,” the Republican nominee in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District said on a podcast last year. “At the bare minimum, they could at least collaborate with the local Chinese restaurant. Don’t let it go to waste, you know?”
The clip, first reported by Meidas News, draws on a long-standing racist stereotype that Asian people eat cats and dogs. It’s also the latest in a string of resurfaced remarks Herrera, a gun influencer running to represent Uvalde, has dismissed as jokes.
In resurfaced remarks over the last few weeks alone, Herrera has been heard saying COVID-19 “wasn’t bad enough” because it didn’t kill more “fucking fat people,” and that the country “went to shit” after women won the right to vote. Courier Texas has also reported on his vulgar comments about women and children and his jokes about Nazis and veteran suicide. None of it has cost him the backing of top Republicans, including President Donald Trump and US Senate nominee Ken Paxton, who campaigned with Herrera in El Paso last month. Herrera spoke before Trump and Paxton at a rally in San Antonio on Oct. 7.
The kitten remark
Herrera made the comment on “The Josie Show,” a podcast hosted by conservative online personality Josie Glabach, in an episode that aired last October. Glabach had been describing how she adopted a kitten, then took in its three siblings after learning they were slated to be euthanized.
The clip resurfaced this week after the anti-Trump social media account PatriotTakes posted it.
Herrera, 30, has built a following of over 4 million YouTube subscribers as “The AK Guy,” reviewing firearms and railing against gun control. He first ran for the seat in 2024, motivated largely by then-Rep. Tony Gonzales’ vote for the gun safety law Congress passed after the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. He came within a few hundred votes of unseating Gonzales.
The seat has been vacant since Gonzales resigned in April.
Since then, his past comments have kept surfacing. On a 2023 podcast, he said, “I’m not saying that the 19th amendment was a mistake. I’m just saying the country went to shit after.” On a 2022 podcast, he said COVID-19 “wasn’t bad enough.”
A CNN review last month documented years of vulgar comments about women, including comparing feminists’ weight to whales and nuclear bombs. He has also described the children of mothers who speak out on politics in sexually explicit terms, joked about veteran suicide, and called a Nazi-era submachine gun the “original ghetto blaster.”
Herrera has called his remarks jokes.
A tightening race
The new clip comes as a poll released Wednesday by House Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC, showed Herrera and his Democratic opponent Katy Padilla Stout tied at 46%. Internal polls relesed by political groups should be viewed with caution, but the result suggests a closer race than expected in a district Trump handily carried in 2024, and was redrawn in 2025 to paint an even deeper shade of red.
Herrera also has a decisive fundraising advantage over his opponent, though past reporting from Mother Jones showed 96% of the money he’s raised has come from out of the district, and 84% has come from out of state.
“Voters know Brandon Herrera offers nothing but sick and perverted video content,” Padilla Stout said in a statement to the San Antonio Current. “That’s why this race is tied with two weeks to go.”
The 23rd District stretches more than 800 miles, from San Antonio to El Paso. Herrera and Padilla Stout also face independent Ben Mendoza.
Early voting runs through Oct. 30. Election Day is Nov. 3.
