Don’t be ‘weak & gay’: Republican announces congressional run with controversial video
by Curated December 27, 2024 · Gay News / Gay Pride / Gay Rights / The Advocate
Author: Ariel Messman-Rucker
Despite a crushing defeat at the polls in August, Republican Valentina Gomez — best known for her viral “don’t be weak and gay” campaign video — is once again running for office and making headlines for a new controversial video that shows her pretending to execute an immigrant.
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On December 18, after losing the 2024 Missouri Secretary of State primary election earlier this year when she only managed to capture 7.5 percent of the vote, Gomez announced that she is moving to Texas and running for the 2nd congressional district seat which has been held by Rep. Dan Crenshaw since 2019.
Gomez, who has sparked controversy in the past for posting videos on social media showing her firing guns and lighting LGBTQ+ book on fire with a flame-thrower, made the announcement in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, where she criticized the former Navy Seal and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, captioning the video, “I don’t fear pdfs, criminals, or the crooks in DC. I only fear God.”
“I’m running for Congress in Texas, and I’m taking down a RINO and a dinosaur once and for all because Congress is full of crooks like speaker Johnson, who is just a little man with no balls that funds Ukraine and betrays the American people every chance he gets and Dan Crenshaw who is only good at betraying his fellow navy seals,” Gomez said in the video.
But the 25-year-old political hopeful’s announcement is being overshadowed by a controversial video posted on December 26 that appears to show Gomez performing a mock execution of an immigrant. The video, which has since been removed from X, shows her “firing a handgun into the back of the head of a dummy tied to a chair with a black bag over its head,” according to The Independent.
“It’s that simple, public executions for any illegal that rapes or kills an American. They don’t deserve deportation, they deserve to be ended,” she said in the video.
The video was flagged by X for potentially violating the social media platform’s rules against “violent speech” and, at the time of publication, no longer appears on X.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, the country’s largest Latino civil rights group, criticized Gomez’s video, saying that this kind of “vigilantism” has led to “deadly consequences” in the past.
“LULAC denounces violent crime in our nation and expresses its deepest condolences to its victims and their loved ones,”the group’s president Roman Palomares said in a statement obtained by The Independent.
“However, we believe in the Christian principles of justice, not retribution. Using public executions as a hook to a politically motivated message fuels blind hatred. This kind of language is intended to appeal to an extreme base of individuals who believe the lie that all immigrants are here to harm others.”
This isn’t the first time Gomez has tried to elevate her public profile by making a controversial video. In the past, she’s tried to attract right-wing voters by making a video that equated gayness to weakness (via Newsweek).
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Original Article on The Advocate
Author: Ariel Messman-Rucker
