With 2020 Census-prompted redistricting on the horizon, Alek Skarlatos is very optimistic about his chances of unseating longtime incumbent Democrat Congressman Peter DeFazio in a rematch of their 2020 contest, an outcome which could enable the GOP to recapture control of the U.S. House in 2022.
A former Army National Guard soldier and Afghanistan war veteran, Skarlatos and two friends, along with several other passengers, famously thwarted a suspected terrorist attack on an Amsterdam-to-Paris train in 2015 by subduing the gunman.
“I would formally like to say that I am running for Congress in 2022 against Congressman Peter DeFazio,” Republican Skarlatos, 28, confirmed to Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth.
“We’re incredibly excited. Oregon is one of the six states that’s gaining a congressional district, and even though Oregon is a deep blue state, that’s going to make it almost impossible for them to keep Peter DeFazio in office once the lines move.”
“We don’t know the math quite yet, but pretty much any direction my district will move will go more Republican. We’re gonna be excited to take back the House in 2022,” he concluded in the segment on the Fox News Channel.
Democrats narrowly control the House chamber as things stand now, but their lurch to the far-left has put their majority in political jeopardy. DeFazio defeated Skarlatos by a relatively narrow margin of about 52 to 46 percent in Election 2020 in race that both the Democrats and Republicans poured millions of campaign cash into.
In the second time around, Skarlatos will again face off against DeFazio, who has served in Congress for 30-plus years, in Oregon’s fourth congressional district in the southwest part of the state, which is home to the Democrat-friendly University of Oregon (in Eugene) and Oregon State University (in Corvallis).
The ex-soldier played himself in the 2018 Clint Eastwood-directed movie called “The 15:17 to Paris” which depicted the heroism in the incident as derived from a book co-written by Skarlatos and his companions Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler.
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In the brief Fox News Channel segment, Skarlatos also praised local authorities for apparently finally cracking down on left-wing anarchists who have been continuously rioting in Portland, Ore., for untold months, although he implied that it reveals a form of selective enforcement.
“Well, I’m incredibly happy to see it. It’s only about a year too late, but it’s great that they’re finally holding people in jail because over the last year you’ve seen people riot and burn down Portland for a year straight and get released back onto the street the very next day to continue to riot.
“It’s been an incredible double standard when you think about the FBI still tracking down people for trespassing from January 6…I just wish we had these same resources a year ago when all these riots were at their peak,” he noted.
Hegseth chimed in that authorities are still tracking down peaceful protesters who were on the Capitol grounds and who never actually entered the U.S. Capitol building, which is in sharp contrast to the “catch-and-release” policy that up to now has occurred in Portland.
In the runup to the November 2020 election, Alek Skarlatos, among other things, made revitalizing the district’s timber industry a priority. The industry reportedly suffered economic devastation owing to environmental regulations.
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