Congressional hopeful participated in Jan. 6
When pro-donald Trump insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol a year ago in a bid to block the certification of Trump’s election defeat, Alma Arredondo-lynch proudly stood near the front of that electiondenying crowd.
She routinely espouses the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
She blames the Jan. 6 attack on antifa and Black Lives Matter activists, who she insists were ushered into the Capitol by corrupt police officers.
She brags about her refusal to provide names or phone numbers to FBI agents who questioned her for an hour in Hondo about her participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Two years ago, she publicly offered this suggestion as a way to keep Muslims out of the United States:
“I’m a rancher, I keep a lot of hogs. I’ll be happy to supply the blood if you want to provide the airplanes. And we can spray a fine mist all over our country. Muslims cannot live where there is pigs’ blood.”
There’s one important thing I forgot to mention about Arredondo-lynch: She is a Republican candidate for Congress.
Arredondo-lynch, 66, is a Concan-based dentist/ rancher challenging freshman incumbent Tony Gonzales in U.S. District 23, a sprawling piece of political terrain that stretches from San Antonio to West Texas.
It would be easy to dismiss Arredondo-lynch as a farcical fringe figure, a campaign perennial engaging in vanity-project politics.
It’s true that she is running in her third consecutive campaign cycle for the District 23 nomination and will almost certainly fall short for the third consecutive time.
It’s also true that nearly 70 percent of the $125,000 she raised for her 2020 candidacy came from personal loans she made to her own campaign.
At the same time, one of the weirder aspects of Arredondo-lynch’s fitful political career is that no matter how unhinged some of her public utterances sound, they haven’t placed her outside of the Republican mainstream.
In 2020, she finished a solid third in a field of nine Republican primary candidates in District 23.
Four months after Arredondo-lynch made her infamous “pigs’ blood” comment, delegates to the 2020 Republican State Convention elected her to the State Republican Executive Committee.
It’s a party post that Arredondo-lynch held on the day she joined insurrectionists last year at the U.S. Capitol.
No one questioned whether the “pigs’ blood” declaration made her a bad choice for a position in the Texas Republican Party. After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, she encountered no pressure to resign her position.
In fact, the lone source of controversy for Arredondo-lynch among her fellow Republicans concerned her decision to endorse a Democrat, Ryan Guillen, in a 2020 Texas House race. (Guillen has since switched his allegiance to the GOP.)
In a Facebook post after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Arredondo-lynch gushed, “I had an exciting and
unforgettable time (in Washington, D.C.).”
That take is less contentious within the GOP than Gonzales’s vote last May in favor of the creation of a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the Capitol attack.
Gonzales was one of only two Texas Republicans to support the commission’s formation, and the other one, Van Taylor from Plano, is drawing intense heat on the issue from his four primary challengers. (Gonzales and Taylor subsequently opposed the creation of a House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack.)
“I was there on Jan 6. I didn’t see anything that warranted the formation (of a commission),” Arredondo-lynch said Thursday.
She added that the purpose of the Jan. 6 gathering “was to unite us as patriots. We all felt that the election was stolen.”
Arredondo-lynch said the instigators of violence that day were leftists determined to rile up the crowd and make Trump supporters look bad.
“The people on the scaffolding were trying to egg people on. Those people were antifa. They threw tear gas at us,” she said. “None of us wanted to go inside (the Capitol). We just wanted to take pictures.”
The blame-antifa argument from Republicans started coalescing within moments of the Jan. 6 uprising. Like the 2020 election-fraud theory, it crumbles under scrutiny.
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 700 people involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Those individuals have consistently proven to be members of neo-fascist, whitenationalist groups such as the Proud Boys, the Patriot Boys and Qanon.
On Thursday, the FBI arrested Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, on a charge of seditious conspiracy. In an interview last year with the New York Times, Rhodes conceded that members of his militia stormed the Capitol, saying they had “gone off mission.”
Arredondo-lynch won’t defeat Gonzales in this year’s GOP primary. But she also won’t be ostracized from the Republican Party for her views. And that says a lot about what’s wrong with our politics.