Members of the Freedom Caucus, the most extreme group of House Republicans, just elected a new leader, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. His first act was to announce he has just tested positive for COVID-19.
Perry is a far right wing extremist who has repeatedly spread falsehoods about election fraud – and compared Democrats to Nazis.
He was first elected to Congress in 2006, ran unopposed or with no Republican challenger several times, thanks in part to what was later found to be an unconstitutional gerrymandered district.
Rep. Perry, “an outspoken Pennsylvania Republican, played a significant role in the crisis that played out at the top of the Justice Department,” in December of 2020, The New York Times reported, “when Mr. Trump considered firing the acting attorney general and backed down only after top department officials threatened to resign en masse.”
Perry introduced Trump to DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark, the acting chief of the civil division, who “was sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s view that the election had been stolen.”
Mr. Perry introduced the president to Mr. Clark, whose openness to conspiracy theories about election fraud presented Mr. Trump with a welcome change from the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who stood by the results of the election and had repeatedly resisted the president’s efforts to undo them.
Congressman Perry was also one of just 18 members of the House to vote against a resolution condemning the dangerous anti-Democratic conspiracy theory QAnon, “a collective delusion that alleges President Donald Trump is fighting a Satan-worshipping cabal of elites who abuse children,” Buzzfeed reported last year, noting the vote came just “three days after its followers targeted Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski with death threats.”
In June Rep. Perry compared Democrats to Nazis, as The Jerusalem Post reported, when he said: “It wasn’t a government in Germany that took the people’s rights away immediately. It was fascism. Fascism took it away, because the government put the heavy hand on the companies and the companies did the government’s work. Well look around, ladies and gentlemen.”
Image via Scott Perry for Congress/Facebook