John Oliver Turns 'Last Week Tonight' on San Antonio-Area House Candidate Brandon Herrera and His 'AK Guy' Videos
The HBO host's Monday segment focused on the Republican nominee in Texas' 23rd District and a widely circulated video from his gun-review channel, in the final week of early voting.
Comedian John Oliver used Monday's episode of the HBO satire show Last Week Tonight to rip San Antonio-area U.S. House candidate Brandon Herrera over his history of provocative social media content, the San Antonio Current reported Wednesday. The segment centered on a widely circulated video from Herrera's gun-focused YouTube channel in which the candidate reviews a German World War II-era MP 40 submachine gun and calls it the "original ghetto blaster" and "Hitler's stress sweeper"; the video then shows Herrera and an associate goose-stepping to a song popular during the Nazi era.
"It does feel that the Republican Party has been getting way too comfortable with some, at best, Nazi-adjacent shit," Oliver said on the show, per the Current. Herrera, a Second Amendment advocate known to his fans as the "AK Guy" with more than 4.3 million YouTube subscribers, has also taken flak for a podcast revelation that he owns an original copy of Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf, and for degrading comments about overweight women, jokes about veteran suicides and referring to children as "cum trophies," the Current reported.
Herrera is running in a widely watched midterm race for Texas' 23rd District against Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, a former public school teacher whose campaign has focused on the shortcomings of Gov. Greg Abbott's school voucher program and the affordability crisis. Padilla Stout has also called out Herrera for a video in which he fires bullets into cutouts of children at a location near the site of the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, which sits in the district. Early voting continues through Oct. 30, and polls reopen on Election Day, Nov. 3.
