Alek Skarlatos is a veteran hero who helped stop a terrorist attack on a Paris-bound train in 2015. He is about his run for Congress in Oregon’s 4th congressional district. He discussed his endeavor with Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren.
Skarlatos, 27, hopes to flip the seat Republican against 33-year incumbent liberal Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio.
“He decided after taking down a terrorist he is ready to take down the swamp in Washington, D.C.,” Lahren said Thursday of Skarlatos.
He’s ready to “fight for the rural people of Oregon and show that not all young people are crazy and liberal and leftist and that they believe in the Second Amendment. They believe in freedom. They believe in small-town America and he is ready to win,” she added.
Skarlatos played himself in the 2018 Clint Eastwood film “The 15:17 to Paris,” which depicted the attempted attack on a train from Amsterdam to Paris. Skarlatos and two of his friends, Anthony Sadler and Spencer Stone, were traveling in Europe in August 2015 when they incapacitated an Islamist gunman.
Since then he came in third on the show, “Dancing with the Stars,” and now the hero wants to help flip his district red, FOX News reported.
Skarlatos told Lahren his district is made up of timber, fishing, grass seed farming, rural and working-class, blue-collar people who’ve “had a tough time over the last 30 years.”
“Economically since the timber industry went away, things have really gone downhill and the incumbent Democrat is not doing anything to help us,” Skarlatos explained, “it really just made me want to stand up and fight for the people that I live with.”
Skarlatos won the Republican primary in May with more than 86 percent of the vote.
“This is somebody who could’ve just taken his fame from a Clint Eastwood movie and just been happy with that, but no, he said the people in my district, they haven’t been fought for,” Lahren said. “We have a Democrat that just keeps getting reelected over and over and over again.”
She said his race is similar to so many across the country, saying people are “tired of watching Democrats run their cities into the ground and not pay attention to the little people.”
Lahren said that despite Portland’s “craziness,” Skarlatos’ district wants the timber industry and good-paying jobs back, not what the radical leftists are offering with the Green New Deal and “other things that are going to completely decimate their livelihood.”
“He’s ready to fight for them and he’s a young conservative ready to do it and I think he is going to win,” she said.
