Right-wing influencer Valentina Gomez, who regularly leans on attention-seeking stunts such as burning Qurans to spark outrage online, has announced she is running for Congress in Texas, just one year after losing a statewide race in Minnesota.
In a video announcing her campaign for the 2026 congressional election, Gomez vowed to “save Texas” before launching into a stream of anti-Muslim rhetoric, including a line about wanting to “kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas” – a remark that immediately went viral and drew widespread condemnation across social media.
“Vote for me so we can kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas, save our daughters from being raped by a Muhammad and protect our soldiers from being murdered in broad daylight,” Gomez said in the video.
She continues to say that she will make Texas “the worst place for groomers, terrorist Muslims, pedophiles, and illegals to live in”, and that she will save Texas from “falling to Islam” the same way New York City, Michigan, and Minnesota have.
“If Texas falls to Islam, it’s simply because you didn’t vote correctly. God bless you all,” she said at the end of her message.
Within minutes, critics began zeroing in on what they view as the defining feature of her public persona: overt, attention-seeking Islamophobia.
“She clings to Islamophobia like a career lifeline, because without borrowed hate, she’d be nobody,” one social media user posted on X.
Another social media user argued that she was calling for “religious cleansing”.
“When she says ‘kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas,’ that’s not politics – it’s a call for religious cleansing. Valentina Gomez went from ‘America First’ to ‘Israel First,’ in the process became the face of extreme Islamophobia,” journalist Ahmed Bedier posted on X.
Another person posted: “Gomez is more so a symbol of civilizational decay than any Muslim-American I’ve ever met.”
Although Gomez claimed in August that she had not received any money from the pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), she has openly asked it for support.
Critics that replied to her video (many of whose posts were hidden by Gomez) called her out for her potential ties to Aipac, with one social media user asking if the group had paid her well for her congressional campaign.
Gomez responded to the post on X, saying: “nah, but your mom is”.
Irony
Another major theme in the backlash was the irony that Gomez is an immigrant herself while pushing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hate, a contradiction many users were quick to highlight.
Born in Colombia, Gomez emigrated to the US in 2009 at the age of ten.
“I thought we were against foreign-born nationals serving in the US Congress or do we make an exception for violent psychopaths who hate Muslims,” one social media user posted.
Another argued that Gomez was following in the footsteps of other minority groups in the US who condemned other minorities as a means to gain access to white America.
“Many Irish and Italian immigrants read the WASP room and showed their racism toward Black people to show that they were real Americans,” they posted.
“This woman, an immigrant from Colombia, reads the US room again and becomes an Islamophobe to show she’s a real American.”
Others pointed out that Gomez has no real political strategy – a weakness they say contributed to her loss in Minnesota – and that her only consistent achievement in recent years has been generating rage-bait, not genuine political support.
“A reminder that @ValentinaForUSA ran for Missouri secretary of state with a desperate & performative online campaign that focused on calling people f*ggots”, one social media user posted on X. “She finished sixth in the Republican primary. I’m thankful this app isn’t real life.”
Journalist Zaid Jilani also responded to Gomez’s video on X, saying: “She has run for so many things and never won, which tells you how even Republicans think she’s a fascist freak, yet constantly goes viral online which tells you where the fascist freaks congregate.”
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Source: News Agencies
