Republican candidate Christine Drazan appears to be strengthening her ties to right-wing extremists as the race for governor of Oregon gets closer in the polls.
According to a review of Drazan's campaign finance records, the conservative megadonor David Gore and his wife have given him a total of $70,000 this year. Drazan served as the House minority leader and served in the state legislature from 2019 to 2022.
Included in that is their recent $20,000 campaign donation.
Gore is who? The far-right Tea Party Patriots, which helped plan the rally in support of former President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, which sparked the deadly uprising at the U.S. Capitol, have been heavily financed by the Oregon libertarian.
According to The Intercept, Gore has donated a total of $449,000 to the three affiliates of the Tea Party Patriots in recent years. He donated $124,000 to the Tea Party Patriot Foundation, $275,000 to the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, and $50,000 to Tea Party Patriot Action between 2018 and 2021.
Gore contributed $100,000 to the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund in January 2020, among other things. That donation more than doubled all of his prior federal contributions made by him since 2007, and it provided a sizable infusion of funds for the organisation, which had only $11,200 in cash on hand at the beginning of that year.
Interestingly, Gore gave $150,000 to the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund about a week after the uprising at the Capitol, according to FEC filings.
In addition to her financial ties to Al Gore, Drazan recently invited far-right militia leader and opponent of the government B.J. Soper to speak at one of her campaign events.
At her campaign event in Terrebonne, Oregon on September 1, Soper gave Drazan's supporters "a rousing call to arms," according to a local website. He cited the goal of his group, People's Rights, which, according to him, is to defend people at all costs from federal government intrusion, as justification for his support of GOP candidates like Drazan.
"If all else fails, we do that physically," Soper said in his remarks. That is currently our guiding principle.
Additionally, he compared the heart of Oregon to a military outpost and warned Drazan's supporters of "an assault coming our way — a socialist, communist assault" that would aim to rob people of their way of life. It's time for us to take control of this redoubt, he declared.
Here is video of Soper speaking at a campaign event for Drazan.
Soper has a long history of organising far-right militias. He was dubbed "an emerging leader in a growing national movement rooted in distrust of the federal government, one that increasingly finds itself in armed conflicts with authorities" by The Washington Post in 2016. According to the article, law enforcement officials view individuals like Soper as "dangerous, delusional, and occasionally violent."
According to the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a group that exposes movements that pose a threat to democracy, Soper founded the Pacific Patriot Network in 2015, which it describes as "a far-right paramilitary network under the direction of Oath Keepers." Members of Oath Keepers, whose leaders are currently on trial for seditious conspiracy, and Three Percenters, a militia, were part of Soper's network.movement that supports the notion that a select group of devoted "patriots" will defend Americans from tyranny by the government.
In addition, Soper established the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard, a group that trains with combat-style rifles and concealed handguns and engages in "basic infantry tactics," according to The Washington Post. He spent a few weeks "standing guard" at the Sugar Pine Mine in Oregon in April 2015 during a dispute between miners and the federal Bureau of Land Management. He donned paramilitary camouflage fatigues, carried an AR-15 rifle, and carried a load of ammunition.
Soper's campaign speech for Drazan comes after she twice declined to declare her support for Jo Rae Perkins, a supporter of QAnon who is running for the U.S. Senate in Oregon. According to QAnon conspiracy theorists, a group of Satanic, cannibalistic child sex abusers are running aWhen Trump was president, a global child sex trafficking organisation plotted his downfall. (Yeah.)
Perkins also went to the American Capitol's insurrection on January 6, 2021. The coup attempt was referred to as "the American Revolution" by her.
In response to a question about Perkins' support in August, Drazan merely wished her "the best."
When asked why Drazan appears to be aligning herself with right-wing extremists in the final weeks of her campaign, Drazan spokesperson John Burke did not respond.
Instead, Burke attacked Tina Kotek, Drazan's Democratic rival, and claimed that the only people who think Drazan is a right-wing extremist are they and unnamed HuffPost editors. (There is no proof that any HuffPost editors know who Drazan is or that they think she is a right-wing extremist.)
Burke asked that his entire statement be made public, so the following is it:
"Only the editors at HuffPost and the Kotek campaign think Christine Drazan is a quote 'right-wing extremist.'" Oregonians are aware that this line of inquiry is absurd and represents a last-ditch effort by Democrats to retain a governorship that they have held for almost 40 years. Christine Drazan is focused on the issues that are most important to the residents of our state, in contrast to Tina Kotek, who is primarily concerned with disseminating absurd conspiracy theories like this one.
Additionally, Katie Wertheimer, a spokesperson for Kotek, avoided saying that the company thinks Drazan is a right-wing extremist. She claimed that Drazan is actually appealing to extremists in order to secure their support before the election.
In Oregon, there are very real threats to our democracy, according to Wertheimer. Christine Drazan is courting the support of election sceptics, insurrectionists, and MAGA supporters rather than standing up for what is right.
In her three-way race against Kotek, who served in the state legislature from 2007 to 2022 and was House speaker from 2013 to 2022, and independent Betsy Johnson, a Democrat who served in the legislature for 20 years, Drazan currently has a slight lead in the polls.
Since 1982, Oregon has not had a Republican governor. Johnson's influence as a well-funded independent and a potential spoiler, however, led The Cook Political Report to recently downgrade this race to a toss-up.
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