Mo Brooks kicks off his Senate campaign with a whole bunch of election lies

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) kicked off his campaign for one of Alabama’s Senate seats on Monday by regurgitating falsehoods about the 2020 election that echoed claims made by the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Brooks is running in the Republican primary for the seat currently held by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), who is retiring.

“In 2020, America suffered the worst voter fraud and election theft in history,” Brooks told supporters at a rally. “All of America would know that if the news media was not suppressing the truth as they’re doing.”

President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in both the electoral college and the popular vote in 2020, while lawsuit after lawsuit alleging fraud and theft brought by Trump and the Republican Party was thrown out of federal courts.

The pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol cited many of these myths and falsehoods and have said they sought to overturn the election results with their attack.

Brooks is connected to those attacks. He gave a speech to the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, where the stated goal was stopping the certification of election results by Congress. It was at that same rally that Trump spurred the Capitol attack, rallying supporters against Congress.

Brooks has long supported false claims about the 2020 election, lamenting in December of 2020 that other Republicans had eventually rejected Trump’s lies about his loss in the race.

Perhaps forecasting the tone of his upcoming campaign, Brooks was joined at his kickoff rally by former senior Trump administration staffer Stephen Miller. Miller endorsed Brooks’ campaign at the event.

Miller was the architect of much of Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant policies and was a stalwart defender of the administration. Like Brooks, Miller espoused conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, falsely alleging that an “alternate” slate of electoral college voters would deliver a second term for Trump.

The former Trump adviser has long maintained connections to the white nationalist movement with whom he shares a zeal for anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric.

Brooks’ campaign announcement follows in the steps of extreme rhetoric and actions he has engaged in during his time in office.

In 2019, while claiming that Trump had been vindicated in the Mueller report, Brooks quoted from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” during a speech on the House floor while attacking Democrats.

The year before that, Brooks claimed in a congressional hearing that rocks — not climate change — were responsible for rising sea levels.

Attempting to explain why so many Republican members of Congress were retiring ahead of the 2018 midterms, Brooks cited “the assassination risk.”

Republicans went on to lose control of the House that year.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.