‘Don’t be weak and gay’ candidate announces run for Texas seat

Valentina Gomez, the MAGA Republican infamous for her ‘don’t be weak and gay’ mantra, has announced she is once again running for election, against Texas’s Dan Crenshaw, despite a bruising defeat in August.

Well-known for her literal firebrand videos burning LGBTQ+ books with a flamethrower, shooting guns and telling people not to be ‘weak and gay’, the controversial Republican candidate lost the 2024 Missouri Secretary of State primary election in August and placed sixth out of eight candidates with just a 7.5 per cent share of the vote.

On Wednesday (18 December), the 25-year-old announced she was moving to Texas to contest the 2nd congressional district seat of Republican politician and former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw.

Crenshaw recently attracted heat on social media for a “meltdown” video which shows him upset over not getting a pay rise.

“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.

She captioned the video: “I don’t fear pdfs, criminals, or the crooks in DC. I only fear God.”

I’m running for Congress in Texas.
I don’t fear pdfs, criminals, or the crooks in DC. I only fear God. pic.twitter.com/sWiZBOdTmf

— Valentina Gomez (@ValentinaForUSA) December 18, 2024

Gomez, who worked for Nestle before entering politics, first grabbed the public’s attention in February when she took a blowtorch to a pile of LGBTQ+ books – including Queer: The Ultimate LGBTQ Guide for Teens, and Naked: Not Your Average Sex Encyclopedia – in a video shared on social media.

“This is what I will do to the grooming books when I become secretary of state,” Gomez said in the video.

“These books come from a Missouri public library. When I’m in office, they will burn.”

The clip was subsequently removed from Instagram, with Gomez saying she was “censored”. She was eventually removed from Instagram all together in September.

In the months that followed, Gomez engaged in more aggressive, firebrand political tactics including sharing a video where she told voters not to be ‘weak and gay’ as she jogged through the LGBTQ+ neighbourhood of Soulard in St Louis and attacked Democrat Barbara Phifer over her trans grandchild.

In October, resurfaced video footage shared with LGBTQ Nation showed Gomez dancing at a New Year’s Eve party at New York’s Hudson Yards mall, where RuPaul’s Drag Race season 10 winner Aquaria provided entertainment.

When asked about the validity of the video and whether it was hypocritical even her anti-LGBTQ+ stance, Gomez told PinkNews: “When I dance at a party it’s controversial but when a pedophile shakes their genitals in front of children is considered normal. F****ts are the problem, and you guys don’t like it because I call out your pedophilic behavior.

“My hips don’t lie, and neither do I. Let Dancing With The Stars know I am the only one who can shock their ratings and Make them Great Again.”