Brandon Herrera, the Republican nominee for Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, has a documented history of vulgar and demeaning comments about women’s bodies, intelligence and sexuality, according to a new CNN review of his videos, social media posts, and podcast appearances.
Herrera, who built an online following of more than 4 million subscribers as “The AK Guy” on YouTube, dismissed the remarks as jokes when CNN asked him about them. But the report lands as top Republicans—including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump—have thrown their support behind Herrera’s campaign. The GOP incumbent Herrera wants to replace, Tony Gonzales, resigned amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into his conduct with a former staffer who later died by suicide.
Among the comments CNN documented: Herrera repeatedly compared feminists’ body weight to whales, elephants, and Cold War-era nuclear bombs; he joked that rubbing ranch dressing on his skin made him “irresistible to fat bitches”; and he told his audience that a gun-range training dummy’s hollow head was “full of mush—much like the average Austin feminist.”
He also aimed sexually explicit insults at Shannon Watts, founder of the gun-safety group Moms Demand Action, using vulgar slang to describe her and her children in posts he later bragged about. The online harassment Wells faces as a result of Herrera’s comments, she told CNN, “is worse than it’s ever been.”
This isn’t the first time Herrera’s online persona has trailed him into politics. During his failed 2024 primary campaign against Gonzales, as reported by Jewish Insider and San Antonio Current respectively, past comments joking about Nazi imagery and veteran suicide surfaced as a liability. Herrera dismissed the critiques and the backlash he faced as a result, saying his remarks were part of a comedic bit. After narrowly losing the primary runoff in 2024, Herrera came back this year, and inherited the nomination outright once Gonzales dropped out amid the ethics probe.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who runs a research lab on extremism and polarization at American University, told CNN Herrera’s comments went beyond crude humor. Comparing women to animals, she said, is “a way to put women in their place, to diminish their power, their authority, to belittle or degrade.” She connected that kind of rhetoric to broader patterns her research has linked to political violence.
Herrera pushed back on that characterization in a statement to CNN, and used the opportunity to attack his Democratic opponent, Katy Padilla Stout, over her past legal work representing a father in a parental-rights case tied to a domestic abuse allegation. Stout’s campaign responded she was court-appointed to the case and had an “ethical obligation” to represent her client, adding there was “no comparison” between her career in public service and Herrera’s as a YouTube gun influencer.
The race for Texas’ 23rd congressional district—a sprawling, largely rural district stretching across South and West Texas along the border—has traditionally leaned Republican, and Herrera is favored to win it. The district includes Uvalde, the site of the deadliest school shootings in Texas history, meaning a gun influencer who built his following partly by opposing a post-Uvalde school safety bill would represent the community where that massacre happened.
But the seat’s unusual path to an open nomination, combined with Herrera’s controversial online history, has drawn national Democratic attention.
Whether Herrera’s past comments become a defining issue in the race—or fade into the background the way similar controversies did during his 2024 run—will likely become clearer as the district’s voters get more exposure to both candidates ahead of November.
