Former congresswoman Michele Bachmann participated in a "Global Prayer For US Election Integrity" livestream event Wednesday night, where she delivered an unhinged rant in which she asserted that the results in Tuesday's Georgia Senate runoff election and the storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump Wednesday were really part of a left-wing "coup."
Bachmann reported that she was attending the so-called Stop The Steal rally on the National Mall, which was aimed at preventing Congress from certifying the Electoral College results in favor of Joe Biden, and had gone into the Capitol to pray when it was invaded by angry Trump supporters.
But Bachmann insists that those who breached security and ran loose through the Capitol were actually left-wing "rabble-rousers paid to put together a coup."
"You know the kind of people that we were with [at the rally]," Bachmann said. "The nicest, friendliest, happiest people. It was like a family reunion out there. It was incredible. It was wonderful. And then all of a sudden this happens. And it reminded me of Moscow in 1917 with the Bolsheviks, where there were rabble-rousers who dressed up in the opposition's clothing and had a violent event in the streets. And we saw what happened to Russia: Russia went into 70 years of captivity. I am telling you, I'm not a betting woman, but I would put $1,000 on any table to say this wasn't the Trump crowd. This didn't look anything like the Trump crowd or the prayer warriors. These were rabble-rousers. Paid rabble-rousers."
"This is a coup," she continued. "What you observed today was a coup. Does anybody honestly believe that this young pajama boy running for U.S. Senate in Georgia [Jon Ossoff], who produced Chinese propaganda films for the Chinese, that he was elected senator today? Or this guy who's a pro-abortion-loving pastor [Raphael Warnock], who is in charge of a child's camp that abused little children, does anybody think that this cat was elected as senator in Georgia? We're talking Georgia! This was a coup in Georgia with these same phony machines run by Stacey Abrams down there—she's not even elected, but she's running this state—with these bought-off phony Republicans down in Georgia. It was a coup so that the Senate was lost today—not lost, stolen today—and now they want to finish the job, and they want the coup to be done today, on Jan. 6, so they can seal the deal with Joe Biden as the next president of the United States. Today was the day to have the coup, to put it all in process and have it come to the head. That's what this was. This is a coup. Don't think for a minute that these were nasty, naughty, ridiculous, hillbilly Trump people. That is not what you saw today. These were paid rabble-rousers, paid to put together a coup."
Who are these “rabble-rousers” Bachmann speaks of? While the hard-right points to anti-fascist activists, New York Times reporter Adam Sternbergh has put together a list of the Trump loyalists who stormed the Capitol. Among them: neo-Nazis, far-right activists, and QAnon conspiracy theorists.
