“People are now realizing there’s a lot of value in affinity groups and doing volunteer-led initiatives like this,” 25-year-old Cait Camelia, one of the founders of Hot Girls for Zohran, tells Vanity Fair. “The Hot Girl brand has become a little bit of a blueprint.”
Camelia, who explained this wasn’t initially intended to become an organization, was inspired by Hot Girls for Bernie, a hashtag turned grassroots campaign that began trending in 2020 when supporters of the Vermont senator rallied online in the lead-up to the Democratic primaries. “Bernie Sanders is hot and so am I,” one Twitter user said at the time; “#hotgirlsforbernie is a state of mind and a state of being,” wrote another.
This blueprint—since adapted and perfected for Mamdani—perhaps even dates back to “Crush on Obama,” the viral 2007 YouTube video featuring a young woman singing about her love for then US senator Barack Obama who called herself an “Obama Girl.”
Courtesy of Hot Girls 4 Zohran.
“More stuff like this will be popping up all the time,” Obama told The Des Moines Register at the time, and he wasn’t wrong. The playbook inspired 24-year-old conservative influencer and journalist Emily Austin, who, after interviewing 67-year-old former governor Cuomo for the debut episode of her new podcast, The Emily Austin Show, last week, launched a Hot Girls offshoot in his honor.
