CNN and The Guardian on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026, rolled out a midterm hit package on Brandon Herrera — the gun YouTuber known as “The AK Guy,” Republican nominee in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, and a friend of this magazine — mining years of edgy comedy clips for “derogatory” lines about feminists, gun-control activists, and other political targets.

The timing is not subtle. Democrats have put TX-23 on the board after Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned amid a House Ethics probe, and Democrat Katy Padilla Stout is trying to turn Herrera’s old internet persona into a character indictment. CNN even platformed an academic who floated the claim that jokes like his are “reliable predictors of political violence.”

Herrera’s answer was the same one he has given for years: they were jokes from a comedy-and-guns channel with millions of subscribers — not a policy platform — and the people clutching pearls about “fat blue-haired feminists” are selective about what counts as violence. On X Wednesday afternoon he wrote that he “forgot I was this funny,” then flipped the script on critics who, he said, celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder while calling his feminist jokes “political violence.”

Man, I forgot I was this funny.

What’s funnier though, is the same people who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder saying that me joking about “fat blue haired feminists” is “political violence.”

This is why CNN+ failed so bad they had to shut it down. https://t.co/AT6fTzQ50v— Brandon Herrera (@TheAKGuy) September 9, 2026

In a statement to CNN, Herrera also pointed at Stout’s own record as a court-appointed defense attorney who fought to restore parental rights for a father after a domestic-abuse allegation — the kind of case file that sits awkwardly next to a campaign selling itself as a children’s champion. “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,” Herrera said.

Stout’s campaign told CNN she was appointed by the court, that her “ethical obligation was to represent her client,” and that there is “no comparison” between her child-welfare work and Herrera’s online mockery. That is the lawyer’s dodge, not a rebuttal of the facts Herrera raised: she did take that representation, and she is now asking voters to treat YouTube ranch-dressing bits as disqualifying while asking them to ignore the parental-rights fight she chose to wage.

House GOP leaders and President Donald Trump have already backed Herrera in the race to replace Gonzales. Trump promised voters on Truth Social that “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” The DCCC has sent money to Stout and listed the seat as a target. The media cycle Wednesday was designed to make Republican leadership squirm. Herrera’s counter is simpler: comedy is not violence, receipts matter more than vibes, and the Democrat lecturing him about “serving children” has a court file she would rather keep off the front page.

Sources