Sen. Ted Cruz submitted a video address to conservative activist Frank Gaffney’s “Nevada National Security Action Summit” last night, in which he put his own spin on the event’s theme of claiming that President Obama doesn’t care about America’s national security and threw in a casual lie about a nonexistent Obama administration “ban” on “rhetoric against radical Islamic terrorists.”
Cruz defended Gaffney, an anti-Muslim activist and birther who has recently been in the news for providing shoddy polling data to Donald Trump, laughably claiming that “Frank Gaffney has been attacked over and over again for having the courage to stand up and speak the name ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ of the enemy that is waging jihad against us,” something that he said Obama won’t do.
He then went on to casually lie about recent remarks that Attorney General Loretta Lynch made about anti-Muslim hate speech. Lynch told a Muslim group that the Justice Department would “take action” when it sees anti-Muslim rhetoric that “edges towards violence,” later clarifying that “of course, we prosecute deeds and not words.”
According to Cruz, however, Lynch has now imposed a “ban on anti-Muslim rhetoric, what she considers rhetoric against radical Islamic terrorists” which is being used to force Americans to “submit” to the Obama administration and is having a “chilling effect” on people reporting suspicious activities, including the neighbors of the San Bernardino shooters. Of course, these neighbors were probably not silenced by comments that the attorney general made after the shooting.
Cruz started out his comments by praising Gaffney, saying that the activist “is a patriot, he loves this country, and he is clear-eyed about the incredible threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”
This, Cruz said, was in contrast to President Obama, who has left the issue of terrorism “festering unattended” because preventing terrorism is “peripheral at best to his core progressive agenda, an agenda that appeases our enemies before actually defending the national security interests of our great country.”
