As we have noted several times before, once Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton adopts a new talking point, nothing is going to stop him from repeating it, no matter how many times it is pointed out that the claim he is making is demonstrably false.
This fact was on display on Barton’s “WallBuilders Live” radio program today, where he falsely claimed that under President Obama, his organization was designated as “an enemy of the state.”
Barton was responding to a question from a listener who wanted to know what constituted a “domestic enemy” as mentioned in the Oath of Office that members of Congress take in which they vow to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Barton said that nobody can agree what that term means today because we, as a nation, no longer rely on God to objectively establish what is right and wrong and so the definition now largely depends on who you ask.
As evidence of this, Barton claimed that his group and several other Religious Right organizations were labeled as domestic terrorists by the Obama administration.
“In the Obama administration,” Barton said, “WallBuilders was listed as an enemy of the state and that was part of what was being taught, along with the American Family Association, along with Focus on the Family, along with the Family Research Council, and so we were all on the list as domestic terrorists in the Obama administration.”
In reality, the AFA was once mentioned in a training for a few dozen Army soldiers in 2013 as being a hate group, based on information gathered by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Barton has repeatedly falsely claimed that his WallBuilders organization has been designated a “domestic terrorist” organization by the SPLC, which he then somehow managed to exaggerate even further by falsely claiming that his group had also been labeled as such by the FBI.
And now the false claim has been aggrandized even further, to the point where now Barton claims that he was tagged as “an enemy of the state” by the entire Obama administration.
