Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6, 2021.Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty
A number of Republicans who were in attendance at the infamous “Stop the Steal” rally held near the White House not long before a mob ofDonald Trumpsupporters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 have been elected to seats across the country, according to multiple news reports.
Accordingto HuffPost, at least eight people who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally went on to win their recent campaigns: Three of them were elected to state legislatures, while five won local office.
At that same rally, Trump spoke approvingly of his supporters who were planning to march to the Capitol. While he told them to be peaceful and patriotic, he also said they should “fight like hell. "
“And if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said.
Here’s a look at some of the rally attendees who won their races.
John McGuire
Incumbent McGuire, 53, won his re-election to the Virginia House of Delegates after controversy regarding his attendance at the rally, which he first revealed toThe Washington Postin an August interview.
At the time, McGuireinsisted hewas “shocked and horrified” to learn about the riot, saying he did not enter the Capitol building and was unaware of the violence until he came home later that day.
“While Delegate McGuire claims he never entered the Capitol, he stood proudly with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and proud boys in the heart of our nation,” Blakely Lockhart, McGuire’s opponent, said in a statement at the time.. “I irrevocably condemn his actions on January 6.”
“When I arrived home and saw the news, I was just as shocked and horrified as everyone else to see that people had entered the Capitol. It was a tragic day, and one we won’t soon forget,” he said, according toTheRichmond Times-Dispatch.
Marie March
Another rally attendee, Marchwonan open seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. The restaurant owner reportedly posted about herattendance at the rally on social mediaand in since-deleted Facebook postsalso warnedabout a looming “Civil War.”
In those posts, according to theRoanoke Times, March wrote of how divided the country had become and how Trump supporters would “fight and shoot and defend and die for their beliefs and life experiences.” She, too, was willing to “fight and die” for her “family” and “small businesses,“she wrote. (She owns at least two barbecue restaurants, as well as a number of other businesses, according to her website.)
In her posts, per the Times, March wrote of possible commonalities between the different political groups in America but also wondered: “Will this coming war be us killing each other in order to reset this country? Will we kill off the old OR will we kill off the young? Can we live with our conscience when we actually take human life and end their potential?”
On hercampaign website, March describes herself as a “small business owner, proven job creator, rock-solid conservative, and Trump Republican.”
Dave LaRock
An incumbent, LaRock wasre-electedto represent the 33rd district in the Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday.
A week after the rally and ensuing insurrection, LaRock called the events “an outstanding exercise of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. There was no vandalism, trash was picked up, and many times the masses sang the National Anthem together.”
Natalie Jangula
Jangulawon her racefor seat 3 of Canyon County’s city council in Idaho, where she garnered 52.3 percent of the vote.
Jangula, 35, has said she was present at the Jan. 6 rally andhas posted photosfrom outside the Capitol, though she has said she did not subsequently go inside the Capitol and does not condone the actions of those who entered the Capitol building that day, the Idaho Press reported earlier.
Christine Ead
Ead also claimed that “ANTIFA and other anarchist groups were at the rally,” suggesting they may have been to blame for the violence.
As NPR reported earlier, the false claim that the rioters were actually anti-fascistswas mentionedmore than 400,000 times online in the first 24 hours following the attack. The FBI has refuted the claim and no one who has since been charged in the attack has been found to be connected to the loosely organized left-wing movement.
Charles Ausburger
Republican Councilman (andchair of the Connecticut Republican Party) Ausburger — who HuffPost reports again won a seat on the Mansfield, Connecticut, town council — was open about his attendance at the Capitol.
In a January town council meeting, he said he saw someone get in the head with a can of tear gas and saw a woman fall down five flights of stairs,Connecticut’sChroniclereported.
“We decided at that point, it was getting out of control,” Ausburger has said, theChroniclereported. “We didn’t want to be there amidst the nonsense.”
Susan Soloway
A Hunterdon County, New Jersey, commissioner whowon re-election, Soloway faced criticism for posting — and later deleting — photos of herself at the rally on social media.
She told reporters in January that she “quickly left” once the situation escalated: “I joined with several other members of the Hunterdon County Federated Republican Women in attending the rally in support of the President on January 6. Our group was shocked, outraged, and frankly scared, when it became apparent that a group of thugs were using the rally as a pretense to attack the U.S. Capitol. As those actions unfolded, concerned for our own safety, we quickly left the area.”
Soloway initiallyfaced calls to resignfor her attendance.
Matthew Lynch
A former high school teacher, Lynch resigned from his decade-long career after activists sent a photo of him outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 to the FBI.
The 35-year-old Lynch subsequently won an open seat on a six-person school committee in Braintree, Massachusetts, garnering the second-most votes for one of the three open positions.
Lynchtold the local news website Patchin October that the FBI has visited him twice since Jan. 6, and accused those who sent the agency his photo of “slandering me as a domestic terrorist.”
He had separately been criticized for making what some teachers and students at his former workplace said were transphobic remarks on social media,Patch reportedin a separate article, noting that there were more than two dozen complaints against him.
More than 500 peoplehave been arrestedfor participating in the riot at the Capitol — which led to the deaths of at least five people — Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in June.
In September, the House of Representations' select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 issued a round of subpoenas to thoseinvolved in the planning and organizationof the Stop the Steal rally.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the committee investigating the riot, told CNN of the subpoenas: “it’s important for us to figure out exactly what the relationships were between the official rally organizers and the White House and the violent insurrectionists who launched the violence on that day.”
source: people.com
