Republican Valentina Gomez, who is running for Missouri secretary of state, posted a video on her social media telling her voters not to be “weak and gay.”
Gomez, a 24-year-old real estate investor, ran through a predominantly LGBTQ neighborhood in St. Louis during the video. reported WCPT820 radio.
“In America you can be anything you want, so don’t be weak and gay,” Gomez said while jogging in a bulletproof vest. “Stay damn hard.”
The clip then flashed to a photo of herself holding a gun.
Gomez is running for Republican Secretary of State of Missouri, and with the state heavily red, it is likely that the winner of the Republican primary will win the general election.
Gomez is a prominent advocate for gun rights and regularly posts photos of herself holding and firing firearms
The incumbent secretary of state, Republican Jay Ashcroft, is running for governor of Missouri, leaving the seat open. Gomez is participating along with three other major rivals in the Republican primaries, which will take place on August 6.
However, Gomez has attracted much more attention than her counterparts simply because of her controversial stances and provocative videos.
Chief among these was when she shared footage of herself setting fire to two LGBTQ books in February, characterizing the literature as “nurturant, indoctrinating and sexualizing.”
“When I am Secretary of State, I will BURN all the books that groom, indoctrinate and sexualize our children. MAGA. America first,” she said wrote on X.
Gomez used a flamethrower to ‘groom, indoctrinate and sexualise’ books in a viral video shared as part of her campaign
Viewers were quick to comment on her latest campaign video, which was posted on May 12, with many people calling her “cringe” and “pathetic” for walking around wearing a bulletproof vest.
Liberal radio host John Shannon wrote, “Nothing shows weakness more than jogging in the morning with a Kevlar vest on.”
There were some comments in support of her, but they were destroyed by a barrage of attacks and jokes at her expense.
Gomez has built a reputation for wading into conservative culture war issues — one of her favorites is protecting children from the “transgender agenda,” as she puts it on her campaign website.
She attacked transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney prior to Mulvaney’s speech to students at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit college in St. Louis.
“That guy is mocking women,” Gomez said in a video filmed in front of the university campus: ‘No matter how many operations, injections or hormones you get, a man will never become a woman.’
Gomez recently attacked Dylan Mulvaney, who spoke at a Jesuit college in Missouri. She called Mulvaney ‘a guy’ with ‘a penis’
Since the secretary of state became Missouri’s top election official, Gomez has floated plans to overhaul the election system.
She believes the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, possibly prompting her idea to “remove electronic voting machines to successfully transition to universal paper ballot counting,” according to her campaign website.
She also supports the use of the National Guard to monitor polling places in Missouri.