People who watched a lot of reality TV shows in the 2000s might remember Tila Tequila. In short, her family were Vietnamese boat people, meaning that they were refugees fleeing from the Vietnam War. Initially, they settled in Singapore, where she was born under the name Thien Thanh Thi Nguyen, but eventually, they moved to a gated community in Houston, TX. Unfortunately, Nguyen seems to had a rather troubled childhood, as shown by the fact that she ran away from home when she was still 16, which resulted in a pregnancy as well as a miscarriage. When Nguyen graduated from high school, she went to California with the intent of becoming part of the entertainment industries, which resulted in her becoming a social media personality and then a TV personality through a mix of modeling, singing, and other activities.
Whatever Happened to Tila Tequila?
Nowadays, Nguyen is still involved in a number of things under the name of Tornado Thien. However, her career as a TV personality seems to have come to an end for the foreseeable future in 2015 because that was when she got booted from Celebrity Big Brother because of controversial statements that she had made in 2013. Regardless, the result is that she is now making an effort to start singing again, which hasn’t met with much success. Besides that, she has released a line of e-liquids as well, which were created in collaboration with Blaze Vapors, which presumably, wanted to make use of what remained of her fame. With that said, while Nguyen is no longer in the spotlight, she does still get interviewed from time to time, which has resulted in a number of remarks that have caused people to raise their eyebrows for one reason or another. For instance, there was the time that she said that she believed that the Earth was flat rather than a spheroid, which as strange as it sounds, is actually a thing that some people still believe in the modern day.
Speaking of which, it seems that Tornado Thien picked up an interest in politics at some point in time, which is what got her booted from Celebrity Big Brother because her political views are horrendous. In short, the whole thing came to the public’s attention when she posted an article that was sympathetic towards Hitler in 2013, though she claimed that her sympathies were not tied up with antisemitism on her part. That turned out to be untrue because she went on to make a number of posts that made it very clear that she is indeed antisemitic, with examples ranging from wanting to become “an Asian version of Adolf Hitler” to wanting to “save the world from this Zionist disease.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tornado Thien has gone on to become associated with the alt-right event, as shown by her showing up at an alt-right event intended to celebrate the election of Donald Trump where she was photographed doing the Nazi salute. Suffice to say that while there have been weirder neo-Nazis out there, the whole thing is still pretty bizarre because, well, people with Vietnamese heritage aren’t exactly well-regarded by said movement and its sympathizers.
