Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, appeared on yesterday’s edition of “Washington Watch” to address a recent Department of Homeland Security report that right-wing “sovereign citizens”are responsible for at least two dozen violent attacks in the U.S. over the last several years.
As Media Matters points out, such sovereign citizen attacks come as incidents of far-right violence, such as shootings at a Kansas City Jewish community center and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, are on the rise. But Poe was having none of it, and joined Perkins in suggesting that the Obama administration is simply fabricating the evidence of far-right violence, and accusing Obama of referring to conservatives and Christians as terrorists.
“They’re not credible,” Poe said. “The idea that Americans who are conservatives, that disagree with the president, are just as threatening as ISIS, whose whole existence is to kill us in the name of their religion, even though the president won’t say ‘Islamic terrorists,’ he’ll call people on the Right terrorists, is nonsense, it is just utter nonsense. There is no evidence of anything like that and once again more fear tactics out of the administration.”
“It’s concerning to us because of the, in my opinion, how the president so meekly addresses Islamic radical terrorists who want to kill us in the name of their religion, in how he deals with them and yet he’s really quick to call out the Right with absolutely no evidence that they are just as serious threats to our country. It’s very disturbing that the president would take that political position,” Poe said.
When Perkins asked the congressman if he would hold a hearing to ask DHS officials “why they continue to put Americans in their crosshairs,” Poe called it “an excellent idea” and claimed that the administration is “more aggressive toward Americans, Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and concerned about them being threats to the country, which they’re not, than they are about the real threats to our country.”
“It’s mind-boggling why they would be this way, but to answer your question, yes, there will be questions and we will just ask them an obvious one: show us some proof of this situation that they claim that all of these different folks that you mentioned are threats to our country.”
