Victoria Villarruel is no stranger to controversy. But now, the vice presidential candidate for La Libertad Avanza (LLA) is facing heat from an unlikely corner of the internet: supporters of the musical group Bulletproof Boy Scouts or Beyond the Scene, better known as BTS.
On Wednesday, social media users on X (formerly Twitter) unearthed a series of xenophobic tweets from 2020 in which the far-right congresswoman maligned the K-Pop sensation, suggesting its band name sounded like a sexually transmitted disease.
Victoria Villarruel on X: “@kalipolis O de enfermedad de transmisión sexual” / X (twitter.com)
Villarruel has previously come under fire for her unwavering support of military officers implicated in crimes against humanity. In September, the congresswoman held an apologist tribute at the Buenos Aires City Legislature to pay homage to the “victims” of left-wing guerrilla groups prior to and during Argentina’s last military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.
The response of the BTS A.R.M.Y., an acronym for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth, has been swift and bracing. Here are a handful of its most biting tweets:
Responding to a baffling Villarruel tweet in which she urged a critic to “go ask a Korean with green hair to shoot you with a tranquilizer dart,” one X user wrote: “I hope that after what has happened with BTS that Villarruel drops out and goes off to live on her genocidal father’s pension, don’t be a leader, sister, you’re everything that’s wrong [sic]”
Responding to the same tweet, Alejandro Kim, who describes himself as a lawyer and the former vice president of the Korean business chamber in Argentina, quipped: “I know you spend your days meeting with genocidaires, but BTS moves half a point of South Korea’s GDP. If you don’t like Jimin and pink hair, you can try Seokjin, who’s serving in the military. Congratulations! You fused xenophobia, racism, and ignorance into 200 characters.”
Former Union por la Patria (UxP) presidential candidate Juan Grabois joined the pile-on, announcing: “If you mess with BTS, you mess with me, Mrs. Evil. Don’t fuck with k-pop.”
User @__smokessprite wrote that: “the last time a politician messed with BTS (trump) the army bough all the seats where he was doing one of his campaigns and it ended with Trump talking to empty seats.”
Indeed, this is not the first time that the BTS A.R.M.Y. has taken aim at a far-right politician. In 2020, it claimed credit for derailing an event for President Donald Trump after flooding its campaign with ticket requests for a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Trump team was ultimately forced to cancel planned events for the anticipated overflow crowd, and attendance for the rally itself was lower than expected.
The BTS A.R.M.Y. was established in 2013 and has upwards of 40 million members, all of whom are fiercely loyal to the South Korean pop group.
