Gilbert Garcia: GOP congressional hopeful proudly participated in Jan. 6 attack

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 election-denying 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.