'Black Hawk Down' pilot Mike Durant aims for Alabama Senate seat, lauds American principles over liberal media

EXCLUSIVE: Former U. S. Army Special Operations aviator Mike Durant is making a splash as the newest candidate in the Republican race to become Alabama's next U.S. senator, joining an already heated contest to replace retiring Republican Sen. Richard Shelby at the end of his term.

Durant, who was famously shot down during the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia and portrayed in the 2001 film "Black Hawk Down," told Fox News in an exclusive interview that his experience in the military, and as a small business owner working with the Department of Defense, had prepared him to take a stand for average Alabamians against the Biden administration's "mismanagement" of the country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjOl4zdMXZI

Durant expressed his desire for America to hold on to the founding principles that made it great, rather than cave to pressure from the liberal media seeking to tear them all apart in their efforts to appease Big Tech companies.

"There's a frustration level that is arguably at its highest point now with the current administration, the kind of decisions that are being made. And if I had to point to a single event that just put me over the top, it's probably the way the withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled," Durant said when asked why he decided to jump into the race after his now-opponents, Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., and businesswoman Katie Britt, had already been campaigning for months.

"I just couldn't believe it understanding the decades of sacrifice, thousands of lives lost, and just to see complete mismanagement because you have people in positions of authority who are career politicians – they don't understand the implications of their decisions," he said, seemingly referencing President Biden who has spent over 50 years of his life in public office.

Durant said when compared to most career politicians, he has lived two lives. He pointed to his time in the U. S. Army as well as his subsequent career as a business owner. He added that because of those experiences he had a much better understanding of the issues facing Americans and couldn't see himself being angry on the sidelines any longer.

When asked how his experiences would help him stand out from Britt and Brooks, Durant argued that the longer one stayed in politics, the further they distanced themselves from the real world.

"You don't understand what's really going on out there with average Americans, average Alabamians in this case, what impacts them, what their values are. You get sucked into the Washington machine," he said. "The founding fathers, their vision of this was not that. Their vision of this was citizens serve, they represent their constituents, they get something done, and they go back home."

Britt and Brooks each have extensive experience working in politics. The former served as Shelby's chief of staff before becoming president of the Business Council of Alabama, while the latter was first elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 2010 after serving a number of years in the Alabama state legislature and as a member of the Madison County Commission.

Durant pointed to the 2020 election of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., a former college football coach who never held elected office, as evidence that people were looking for fresh ideas and outsiders.

While discussing his experience as a small business owner, Durant, who served as president and CEO of Pinnacle Solutions Inc. until reportedly turning control of the company over to his employees this month, said he knew what it was like to worry about the well-being of employees and their families, especially when working with the federal government and the accompanying uncertainty of whether a contract would be paid or not.

"When my contract doesn't get funded, I'm not getting paid. So now I have to figure out, how do I support the families and the workers that I have in my workforce, not only from a business perspective, but once the funding is turned back on again, how am I going to get it back?" he said.

Turning from his experience, Durant explained that his biggest concerns when it came to the issues facing the country were rising inflation and increases to the national debt.

"Raising the debt ceiling doesn't help that issue. I think holding fast on cutting costs, cutting programs that are not value added that gets us to a balanced budget is absol... (Read more)

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