While allegations that the IRS subjected conservative groups to special scrutiny have completely unraveled, the right-wing Truth in Action Ministries is still standing by them, releasing a video this week featuring ex-Rep. Michele Bachmann, radio host Bryan Fischer and former Southern Baptist Convention official Richard Land about the Obama administration’s supposed misuse of the tax agency for political purposes.
Bachmann alleges in the video that “the Internal Revenue Service took it upon themselves to persecute American citizens based upon their beliefs, whether they’re conservative, whether they were Christian.” Land, claiming that the phony scandal was much worse than Watergate, demands that IRS officials “go to jail” for their purported attempts to “diminish the freedoms of American citizens.”
Fischer, for his part, claims in the video that the IRS became the government’s “religious police.” “Leftists and bureaucrats in the federal government are now trying to use the IRS to repress and to punish religious speech they don’t like and political speech they don’t like,” he says. “And now they are looking at cracking down on churches, they’ve made some kind of secret deal with an atheist organization that they are going to monitor churches for any kind of political communication from the pulpit, and this is beginning to sound a lot more like communist China or communist Vietnam than it is the United States of America.”
The video concludes with Land calling the IRS the Obama administration’s “weapon … against those who would dare to criticize the government.”
“It’s like pointing a gun at your political opponents,” he says. “That is a violation of so many of the Bill of Rights it would take more time than we have to discuss them.”
Watch highlights here:
