“I never thought leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. Originally tweeted by Adrian Bott in 2015, the meme has served as a shorthand for voters who support increasingly cruel policies and then act shocked when those policies hurt them. It’s a joke and a warning.

But Valentina Gomez is not a joke.

She is, however, a walking, talking, gun-toting, slur-spewing manifestation of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. And now, after running a failed campaign in Missouri, she’s taken her extremist circus to Texas, where she plans to run for Congress.

This is not just about one candidate. This is about what she represents: the mainstreaming of fascist ideology in American politics. Anyone still denying the parallels between the current administration and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany is either lying or willfully blind.

So, who is she?

Valentina Gomez Noriega was born on May 8, 1999, in Colombia. She immigrated to the United States with her family in 2009 and settled in Jersey City, New Jersey. She earned her undergraduate degree from Central Connecticut State University in 2019 and an MBA from Tulane in 2020. Her resume includes a stint at Nestlé Purina, a job she claims she was pushed out of for her “critical” views of LGBTQ+ people.

She gained notoriety after posting a video in which she used Elon Musk’s Not-A-Flamethrower to burn a pile of LGBTQ+ books. This moment became her political origin story. She announced her run for Missouri Secretary of State in late 2023, leaning heavily into common far-right talking points. She campaigned on promises to remove voting machines and deploy the National Guard to oversee elections—proposals that are not only authoritarian but also well outside the legal jurisdiction of the position she was running for.

Despite endorsements from figures like Matt Gaetz, Gomez came in sixth in her primary election. But taking this massive “L” in Missouri didn’t stop her. In December 2024, she declared her intent to run for Congress in Texas.

Her congressional announcement video was profanity-laced and conspiratorial. She introduced herself by attacking Speaker Mike Johnson and Dan Crenshaw, before closing with a gun and a grin. “I’m coming to Texas to speak the truth, cook the crooks, and save the children. Buckle up, Texas, because this ain’t my first rodeo.”

But… this is her first rodeo. There’s no indication that Gomez has any meaningful ties to Texas beyond thinking it might be easier to win here. Nobody loves Texas more than Texans, and she’s not only a transplant, but a Columbian immigrant. She lost her first election in Missouri, so she’s trying again in a new location, bringing with her a brand of politics that hinges on attention-grabbing violence. This is politics as performance—authoritarian cosplay.

She’s the kind of politician who thrives on violent rhetoric. That was never clearer than last week when she posted a photo of herself on X executing a dummy tied to a chair with the caption: “This is cheaper than deportation.”

Didn’t someone just do this less than a hundred years ago?

The Final Solution was Adolf Hitler’s plan to annihilate the Jewish people of Europe. After years of escalating persecution—including anti-Semitic propaganda, stripping of civil rights, and forced displacement into ghettos—Nazi leadership decided that deportation wasn’t enough. It wasn’t efficient.

So they created extermination camps. Gas chambers. Death marches. And in a matter of years, they murdered six million Jews. That was the Final Solution: mass executions as state policy.

When Valentina Gomez posts a photo of herself pretending to kill an “illegal” with the words “this is cheaper than deportation,” she is invoking one of the most horrifying policies in human history.

It would be easy to dismiss Gomez as a fringe figure or a failed candidate, but that would be a mistake. Because she’s not alone. Her rhetoric, once the domain of anonymous online forums like 4chan, is becoming increasingly mainstream among far-right politicians and pundits.

We are not in a moment of isolated extremism. We are witnessing a movement that celebrates violence, demands ideological purity, and scapegoats the most vulnerable people in our society.

The attention she continues to receive is not just a symptom of online radicalization. Every time someone like her is dismissed as a joke, the Overton window shifts a little further.

There are people in power today, right now who are either too cowardly or too complicit to name what’s happening. But we must.

What starts as demonization becomes dehumanization. What starts as propaganda becomes policy.