For years, Brandon Herrera made a running joke out of how much women weigh. He put it in his videos, on his podcast appearances, and on stage at a campaign rally.

Cold War nuclear bombs, he told his audience in 2023, weighed "approximately four times as much as the average Austin feminist." In a 2024 video he compared the weight of "angry blue-haired" feminists to killer whales and elephants. This summer he said that when "a blue hair on the news says that a semi-automatic AR-15 is an assault rifle, she is both fat and wrong."

Those are three of the many examples CNN published on September 9, 2026, after reviewing the videos, podcasts and social media posts of the gun YouTuber known online as "The AK Guy" — the man Republicans have nominated for an open congressional seat in South and West Texas.

Herrera's answer, given to CNN in a statement, is that they were jokes.

What he actually said

Herrera has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube. The material CNN reviewed spans at least seven years, and the same bit comes back over and over.

• At a March 2024 rally in San Antonio with former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Herrera told the crowd that the amount of fentanyl needed to kill everyone on the planet weighed about the same as "26 Austin feminists."
• In a 2023 video he said a gun range dummy's empty head was "full of mush — much like the average Austin feminist."
• In a video where he shot bottles of ranch dressing and rubbed it on his arm, he said it would "make me irresistible to the fat b*tches."
• On a podcast he said "there's no ugly women in Norway" because "the Vikings didn't take the ugly ones," then said that is why women in Siberia "are built like f*cking refrigerators."
• In a 2019 video he said he wore a wedding ring, despite not being married, as "thot repellant" — using a crude term for a promiscuous woman. In another he shouted "be gone, thot" at a picture of a cartoonishly sexualized young model inside a gun safe, adding that "she's probably got diseases I can't pronounce."
• He told his audience he had named one of his guns after the adult film star Stormy Daniels, "because it's been through so much hell and abuse and we've run the shit out of it to just abuse it thoroughly." Months later he bragged that his team had buried the gun, blown it up, and been "an asshole" to it — still using her name.

He also went after women who work on gun violence. He mocked members of Moms Demand Action as not attractive enough, and used a sexual slur to describe the children of the group's founder, Shannon Watts. We wrote about that one when it resurfaced in July, along with the three Texas Republicans in Congress who walked away from a reporter rather than answer for it.

The seat he is running for

This is not a random open seat.

Texas's 23rd came open because Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned in April, in the middle of a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether he "engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual employed in his congressional office." Gonzales had admitted on the radio to an affair with a woman who worked for him, after calling the rumors "completely untruthful" four months earlier. The staffer died in 2025. We laid out the whole sequence, including how long House leadership let it sit, in our piece on Mike Johnson's two standards.

So the district's last representative left over how he treated a woman who worked for him. The party's replacement built an audience partly on rating women's bodies. And the Democrat he faces in November, Katy Padilla Stout, is a woman — a former teacher and attorney.

The expert CNN asked

CNN showed its findings to Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who runs the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University. The lab studies how hate and extremism spread, and has a research track on gendered violence.

She said comparing women to animals is a "way to put women in their place, to diminish their power, their authority, to belittle or degrade." She added: "If you're referred to as an animal, you're not actually even fully human, right?"

Pointing to her lab's research, she told CNN that spreading misogynistic statements can feed extremists who are willing to commit real violence.

"I think if we want a safer society overall, we should also be worried about candidates like this who help normalize things that we know are reliable predictors of political violence."

His response was to attack his opponent's client

Herrera did not apologize. He called the remarks jokes, and then went after Stout's legal work.

CNN reported that Stout represented a father last year who was trying to restore his parental rights after a domestic abuse allegation. Herrera's statement to CNN put it this way:

"It's disappointing that CNN would allow someone to allege that jokes about feminism lead to violence when Stout is fighting to return children to the parent convicted of abusing them."

Read that carefully. Herrera says "convicted." CNN described an allegation. And Stout's campaign told CNN she did not pick the client at all — she was appointed by the court to handle the appeal, and her "ethical obligation was to represent her client." Her campaign added that "there is simply no comparison to the career Katy has dedicated to serving children and families, and the career Brandon Herrera has made mocking them."

That is a court-appointed lawyer doing the job a judge assigned her. Herrera turned it into an accusation, and upgraded an allegation to a conviction while he was at it.

Shannon Watts, who has been on the receiving end of Herrera's posts for years, told CNN the online abuse she faces from both sides of the aisle is "worse than it's ever been."

"When I started Moms Demand Action, I had no idea I would receive threats of death and sexual violence. What I noticed right away was the attacks on me were much different than men who supported gun safety. It was obviously very gendered and misogynistic."

Republican leaders knew, and backed him anyway

Herrera's record was public well before CNN went looking.

Trump endorsed Herrera on Truth Social, writing that "Brandon is strongly supported by many Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Texas" and promising voters that "HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!" Speaker Mike Johnson rallied with him in San Antonio this summer — after spending 2024 helping fund the campaign against him. We covered that reversal in August.

Even now, some Republicans will not go along. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which in 2024 announced a $400,000 ad buy for his primary opponent and called him "a goose-stepping extremist who pals around with online Nazis," told Politico it "has a longstanding policy of speaking out against those who traffic in Nazi ideology, and this is another case."

Herrera expects the videos to keep coming up, and argues voters will weigh other things more heavily. "For better or worse, my entire life is on the internet. So, I am an open book in that regard," he told the Los Angeles Times, arguing people will vote on guns and the border instead.

He may be wrong about that. Trump carried this district by 15 points in 2024, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee still put it on its target list last month and sent money to Stout — because of him.

What the job actually decides

The videos are why people are talking about this race. The votes are what would change lives in it.

Herrera campaigns on Trump's endorsement, and the last section of his issues page is headed "Standing with President Trump." Trump's agenda has already hit the 23rd District:

• Trump's budget bill cut Medicaid. Counting those cuts and the pandemic-era Affordable Care Act subsidies that expired alongside them, the Joint Economic Committee's House minority puts more than 41,000 people in TX-23 on track to lose health coverage by 2034.
• The same bill made the largest cut to food assistance in history. More than 31,000 households in TX-23 used SNAP to buy groceries in 2024.

What the record shows

CNN found years of videos, posts and podcasts in which the Republican nominee in Texas's 23rd District compared women's weight to nuclear bombs, killer whales and elephants, called a woman on the news "both fat and wrong," and used sexual slurs against a gun safety advocate and her children. He called it comedy and answered by accusing his opponent — a court-appointed lawyer — of returning children to an abuser, saying "convicted" where CNN reported an allegation. He is running for a seat that came open because the last congressman to hold it resigned during a sexual misconduct investigation, and Trump and Speaker Johnson are backing him.

Source

This post is based on CNN's September 9, 2026 review of Brandon Herrera's videos, social media and podcasts by Allison Gordon, with Morgan Leason contributing, and on the San Antonio Current's contemporaneous report, linked above. Photo of Brandon Herrera in Somerset, Texas, February 26, by Brenda Bazán/AP.