GOP House Candidate Called Homeless People 'Cheaper Than Ham'

Meet the AK Guy Who Wants Your Vote

Brandon Herrera is the GOP candidate for Texas's 23rd congressional district, a swing seat that Republicans desperately need to hold if they want to keep their House majority. He also runs a YouTube channel under the name "the AK Guy" with more than 4 million subscribers, where he tests and reviews firearms and, apparently, road-tests material that would get a open-mic comedian booed off a stage in Lubbock.

CNN first reported the comments, and the list is genuinely something. In a 2023 video, Herrera described a gun range dummy's empty head as being "full of mush, much like the average Austin feminist." In 2024, he compared the weight of "angry blue-haired" feminists to orca whales and elephants. These are the metaphors of a man who has clearly spent a lot of time extremely online and not nearly enough time talking to women.

Then there is the ranch dressing incident, which may be the single most unhinged sentence a congressional candidate has generated in recent memory. In 2020, Herrera shot bottles of ranch dressing, rubbed the condiment on himself after they exploded, and declared that this would "make me irresistible to the fat bitches." He also shared his view, while discussing a car on X in 2023, that "4 doors means more whores." The Guardian has contacted Herrera's campaign for comment on the full range of these statements.

The Ham. We Have to Talk About the Ham.

Let's slow down on the homeless person remark, because it deserves more than a parenthetical. In 2020, Herrera filmed himself shooting a ham. Fine. People shoot things. It's Texas. But while doing so, he noted that while purchasing a ham for target practice was expensive, it was "still cheaper than a homeless person."

What does that even mean? Is he pricing out homeless people as a competitive consumer? Is this a bit? Because if it is, it requires the audience to fill in an extremely dark punchline about what you do with homeless people when you're done with them. Herrera says everything was a joke. The Republican Jewish Coalition, for what it's worth, was not laughing in 2024 when it called him "a goose-stepping extremist" after he described a Nazi-era gun as "the original ghetto blaster" and then had to clarify, publicly, that he was not a neo-Nazi.

The Seat He's Trying to Win, and Why It Actually Matters

Texas's 23rd congressional district is not a safe Republican seat. It hasn't elected a Democrat since 2015, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has added it to its target list and is funneling money to Democratic candidate Katy Padilla Stout, a former teacher and attorney. The seat opened up because Republican Tony Gonzales resigned in April amid a House ethics committee investigation into his relationship with a former aide.

Democrats are already running in a favorable environment, with voter dissatisfaction with Donald Trump registering at levels that have party strategists eyeing seats they had written off. A Republican candidate with a searchable public record of filming himself covered in ranch dressing and discussing the relative market value of homeless people is not exactly what the party ordered for a district it needs to hold.

Herrera's response to the scrutiny was to attack Stout, telling CNN: "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." He was referring to a case in which Stout was appointed as a defense attorney for a father seeking to restore parental rights after a domestic abuse allegation. Defense attorneys representing clients is, for the record, how courts work.

The 'Just Joking' Defense, Deployed Again

The "it was a joke" move is the most reliable escape hatch in modern right-wing politics. Say something cruel or dehumanizing, watch it generate coverage, then accuse anyone who objects of not having a sense of humor. It works often enough that people keep doing it.

But here is the problem with the joke defense applied to Herrera's specific catalog. The homeless person remark wasn't delivered to a comedy club. The ranch dressing sequence wasn't a stand-up bit with a setup and punchline. These were videos produced for an audience of millions, packaged as entertainment, with Herrera performing a character he clearly enjoys and intends to keep playing. When you run for Congress on the back of that character, voters are allowed to ask whether the character and the candidate are the same person. Herrera has given them a lot of material to work with.