Are Hot Idiots the Future of Politics?
Or are they the present of politics?
***Hey! I plan to do Komey Klass next week, so please send your incisive social commentary/dumb bullshit to komedyklass@imightbewrong.org. One piece will be picked to serve as the jumping-off point for a discussion, and the others will provide jokes for me to steal.
(Not really. Except maybe subconsciously.)
Insanely far right Texas Congressional candidate Valentina Gomez recently posted this video to social media. (Apologies if the audio doesn’t sync with the video — it was being weird about that.)
There are so many things to say about this:
What a hate-filled asshole;
If you don’t cap your fence posts, they’ll get water damage and split over time;
Is that a real flamethrower, or did she trick out a Super Soaker?
Her declaration that she’s “done turning the other cheek” makes me wonder how “powered by Jesus Christ” she actually is;
The music is a Kanye West song, and ordinarily I’d say he has a lawsuit, but since Kanye is Kanye he may have given her permission;
This is the kind of candidate you get when districts are gerrymandered and the only real election is the primary. If there’s a Christianity-versus-Islam holy war one day, my column that day will be titled: “Gerrymandering Reform Should Be Prioritized”.
Gomez hasn’t won anything. She is — as you can see — a provocateur nutjob, and she ran for Secretary of State in Missouri in 2024 and got sixth in the Republican Primary. Which means that it is actually possible to be too crazy for the GOP; I had wondered about that given their habit of nominating obvious lunatics like Herschel Walker and Royce White. Hopefully, Gomez will fade into obscurity, and Texas’ 31st district will be represented by a normal, unremarkable Republican who thinks that vaccines are an Illuminati plot and that Trump should be unbound by any laws.
But now let me say the unsayable about Gomez: She is not entirely unpleasant to look at. And I wouldn’t immediately write off her political career, because “batshit but hot conservative woman” has become a recognizable type: Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, and Anna Paulina Luna all combine well-above-average looks with shit-for-brains politics. On the left, AOC’s looks are in no way irrelevant to her fame, if only because she’s on Fox News constantly for reasons that are too psychologically dark to unpack. I could go on: Tulsi Gabbard has some game. Kristi Noem was a beauty pageant winner. Sarah Palin was to this archetype what the Ramones were to punk. We usually don’t talk about female politicians’ looks, because there’s a long history — a 200,000 year history, actually — of assessing women based solely on looks. But that shouldn’t keep us from asking: Is the hot-but-dumb female politician becoming more of a thing, and if so, why and what does that mean?