In El Paso on the last night of September, Brandon Herrera warmed up the crowd for Ken Paxton, telling supporters the event was “a victory rally.” Paxton’s campaign had billed Herrera as the special guest for the stop.
Days earlier, a resurfaced clip showed Herrera, the Republican nominee in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, saying COVID-19 “wasn’t bad enough.” On a July 2022 podcast, Herrera said he was “here for” a virus that “unfairly targeted fucking fat people,” adding he “would have worn my mask nowhere on purpose” had he known.
The clip was the latest in a long run of remarks Herrera has dismissed as jokes, including comments about Nazis, veteran suicide, women’s bodies, and mothers who speak out on politics. None of it has cost him the backing of his party’s top leaders.
President Donald Trump endorsed him. House Speaker Mike Johnson has stood behind him. Now Paxton, the Republican nominee for US Senate in Texas, has shared a stage with him.
The day after the rally, another clip surfaced. On a 2023 episode of the Painkiller Already podcast, discussing UFC fighter Sean Strickland’s argument that women should lose the right to vote, Herrera weighed in on the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women’s right to vote in 1920.
“I’m not saying that the 19th amendment was a mistake,” Herrera said. “I’m just saying the country went to shit after.”
He then described a stunt in which he would gather signatures in Austin on petitions to “end women’s suffrage,” playing on the similarity between “suffrage” and “suffering.”
A pattern, not a slip
Herrera, 30, built a following of more than 4 million YouTube subscribers as “The AK Guy,” reviewing firearms and railing against gun control. That persona has followed him into politics.
Videos resurfaced during his campaign have shown Herrera calling a Nazi-era submachine gun the “original ghetto blaster,” discussing owning a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” and recreating the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on camera while reviewing the type of rifle James Earl Ray used. In a 2024 podcast appearance Herrera joked, “I often think about putting a gun in my mouth, so I’m basically an honorary veteran.”
Texas border czar Mike Banks, a fellow Republican, called that remark “sickening.”
A CNN review published last month documented years of vulgar comments about women. Herrera compared feminists’ weight to whales and nuclear bombs and joked that rubbing ranch dressing on his skin made him irresistible to “fat bitches.”
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who studies extremism at American University, told CNN comparing women to animals is “a way to put women in their place, to diminish their power, their authority, to belittle or degrade.”
He also aimed sexually explicit insults at Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts and her children. In a 2022 clip, he told mothers who advocate on political issues that motherhood “doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions,” describing their children as “cum trophies.”
Herrera maintains his remarks have been taken out of context.
A gun influencer running to represent Uvalde
The 23rd District stretches more than 800 miles from San Antonio to El Paso and includes Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in 2022, the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.
Herrera first ran in 2024, motivated largely by then-Rep. Tony Gonzales’ vote for a gun safety law Congress passed after the shooting. He came within a few hundred votes of unseating Gonzales in the Republican primary. This year, Gonzales ended his reelection bid after admitting to an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide. Trump endorsed Herrera within days of Gonzales’ exit.
Republican Ken Paxton stands with Brandon Herrera
Herrera’s comments have drawn criticism from both parties over the years, but the Republicans at the top of this year’s ticket have embraced him anyway. In El Paso, Herrera declined to answer questions from El Paso Matters, saying he didn’t have time.
Paxton’s own race against Democrat James Talarico is close, and he has spent the final weeks of the campaign urging Republican turnout. Sharing a stage with Herrera puts him in company of a candidate whose comments have become a centerpiece of Democrats’ case in the 23rd District.
Herrera faces Katy Padilla Stout, a San Antonio attorney and former teacher, in Nov. 3rd’s midterm election. Early voting in Texas starts on Oct. 19.
Herrera’s and Paxton’s campaigns did not respond to requests from Courier Texas for comment by publication time.
