Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, says his office is planning to launch undercover operations targeting liberals.
The scandal-plagued Paxton has incentive to carve a lane for himself as the Trumpiest candidate in the primary.
Last year, he reached a deal to avoid a securities fraud trial and avoided removal from office after being impeached over corruption allegations.
That’s helpful context for his conspiracy theory-filled announcement of undercover investigations into liberals, which he said will complement President Donald Trump’s efforts to use federal agencies and the military against antifa.
That Paxton announced these supposedly undercover investigations, which he claims are “in response to the political assassination of national hero Charlie Kirk and the disturbing rise of leftist violence across the country,” is a clear indicator he sees the probes as tools to intimidate. The statement includes fact-free claims like the following:
Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. Corrupted ideologies like transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture and have unleashed their deranged and drugged-up foot soldiers on the American people.
None of that is supported by evidence. The Trump administration was caught hiding the federal government’s own assessments showing far-right extremists have been responsible for the bulk of domestic terrorism — far outpacing leftist violence — over the past three decades. “Transgenderism” isn’t an “ideology,” and there’s certainly no evidence to support the tired right-wing claim that trans people are disproportionately violent. Nor is there evidence that “drugged-up foot soldiers” for antifa — which the FBI has previously stated is not an official organization — are wreaking havoc on Americans.
“The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk marks a turning point in America. There can be no compromise with those who want us dead,” Paxton said in his statement, adding that he has directed his office to “identify, investigate, and infiltrate these leftist terror cells.”
Again, there’s no evidence the man accused of killing Kirk sought to target anyone else. And there’s also no evidence to support Paxton’s allegations about the existence of leftist “terror cells” that pose threats to Americans.
“To those demented souls who seek to kill, steal, and destroy our country, know this: you cannot hide, you cannot escape, and justice is coming,” the attorney general declared. It’s quite ironic that this is coming from an attorney general who has worked with the True Texas Project, an activist group that has been associated with neo-Nazi propaganda and has platformed blatant white supremacists.
Paxton’s threats add to the growing heap of evidence showing officials in the insurrectionist-aligned MAGA movement are using the killing of Kirk — which literally unfolded while a gunman allegedly infatuated with right-wing killers shot up a school in the next state over — to portray liberals as the true violent threats and crack down on their civil rights.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
