Last month, Florida Rep.-elect Maria Elvira Salazar tweeted out a straightforward concept:
“I was born in Miami — a community built by survivors; my parents fled Castro’s socialist nightmare. We can’t just let the socialist left destroy the American Dream for our children! Join The Freedom Force & FIGHT BACK today!”
The idea is simple. Whereas the left-wing “Squad” has four or five “women of color” with antipathy toward America, who thrive on grievance and division, the “Freedom Force” consists of a diverse, bullish group of newly-elected GOP representatives. Most of these members either survived totalitarian regimes or deep poverty; more importantly, they love America. Additionally, they all are racial minorities.
“I want to create a force within my freshman class that will have to be reckoned with. A force of reason, a force for freedom, a force for democracy,” Salazar recently told NBC. “When I hear this democratic socialism that is being presented within the Democrat Party, I can only tell you that only brings misery, oppression and exile. And how do I know? Because I have lived it and I have covered it.”
The “Force” is part of the most eclectic freshman Republican class in party history. The GOP more than doubled the total number of conservative congresswomen (to nearly 30), and they constitute the overwhelming majority of 2020 flipped seats in the lower chamber.
Rather than “listening and learning,” as social media clichés read all summer, Leftists lashed out at the group. They ignored the patriotism, success and sacrifice, and instead said the new name should be “Klan” or “farce” — apparently without considering the backgrounds of these incoming politicians.
Not sensing any irony from the Squad’s juvenile shenanigans the last two years, Minnesota’s controversial Rep. Ilhan Omar said “it sounds ridiculous to me. I think they think they’re in high school. We’re in Congress.”
Utah Rep.-elect Burgess Owens, a former professional football player raised in the Jim Crow South, set the record straight last week.
“We have a group of people who believe in our country, believe in God, family, respect for women and authority, and the other side hates everything I just mentioned,” Owens said. “So I think the great thing is that the American people drift toward the light, they’re going to love our message.”
Raised in the USSR, Indiana Rep.-elect Victoria Spartz is understandably alarmed at the progressive left’s push toward socialism. She recalls the horrors of communist rule, and now she’s afraid — two decades after arriving here — that her past could return.
“I grew up in the Socialist Republic of Ukraine. I saw what happens when it runs out of money and it is not pretty,” Spartz said last month. “And now we’re building socialism. I’m kind of going full circles. I can tell you what is going to be next. It’s very sad for me to see that.”
The first American of Iranian descent elected to Congress, Stephanie Bice will represent the Oklahoma City area come January. She is focused on shrinking government.
“Government doesn’t do things well,” Bice recently told The Dispatch. “There’s too much bureaucracy and red tape. I’ve seen it on the state level and I know that it exists on the federal level as well. A smaller federal government is how our Founding Fathers imagined it would function, and unfortunately when you grow it, it’s very difficult to shrink it.”
Rep.-elect Nicole Malliotakis, who just turned 40, will be the only Republican woman serving New York City.
“I think what you’re going to see is a group of individuals who are going to serve as a counterbalance to the values of the socialist squad,” Malliotakis, daughter of a Cuban mother and Greek father, told CNN. “We don’t believe we should be dismantling the economy. We don’t believe we should be destroying free market principles. We don’t believe in Green New Deal. We don’t believe in packing the courts.”
The other three Freedom Force members have similar beliefs and concerns.
“Americans just want to have opportunities to succeed,” Florida Rep.-elect Byron Donalds said this week. “They don’t want people in Washington telling them how they’re going to go about doing that. They want to have the freedom to choose for themselves, and I’m here to fight for that.”
Florida Rep.-elect Carlos Gimenez said “we’re not here to fundamentally change the country. We want to make the country better.” Miami’s mayor since 2011, Gimenez was born in Havana, five years before the Cuban Revolution.
“Right now America’s under attack by members of the socialist squad,” California Rep.-elect Michelle Park Steel believes, “who are looking to chip away our freedoms and really dismantle our economy and really our country and we need to fight back and we’re really passionate about that.”
Steel and fellow California Rep.-elect Young Kim are the first Korean-born women in congress.
At least eight incoming Republican lawmakers are now in the Freedom Force. Half of those listed are under age 50.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
