Representative Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) slammed members of the House’s conservative Freedom Caucus during a recent campaign event, accusing them of being “grifters” and “performance artists.”
At an event hosted by the Texas Liberty Alliance PAC in Houston over the weekend, Crenshaw said the conservative movement has “grifters in our midst, not here, not in this room. I mean the conservative movement.”
“Lie after lie after lie, because they know something psychologically about the conservative heart — we’re worried about what people are going to do to us, what they’re going to infringe upon us, that’s the nature of conservatism,” Crenshaw can be heard saying in video posted to Twitter by lawyer Ron Filipkowski.
Wowie! Dan Crenshaw trashes ‘Freedom Caucus’ members Greene, Brooks, Gohmert, Gosar, Jordan, etc, as “performance artists” while defending Kinzinger. “We have grifters in our midst .. lie after lie after lie.” 🍿 pic.twitter.com/hoaGOcOx9s
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 7, 2021
Crenshaw directed his rebuke toward “everybody in the Freedom Caucus – all of them.”
The Caucus is led by Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, though he will be replaced by Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania next month.
Representatives Mo Brooks of Alabama, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Paul Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia are all members of the caucus, though Greene was not in office during the Trump administration. The caucus was created in 2015 by conservatives who were disenchanted with party leadership for compromising with Democrats and then-President Barack Obama.
Crenshaw said that among two types of lawmakers — performance artist and legislators — members of the Freedom Caucus fall into the former category because they “get all the attention.”
“They’re the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well,” he said. “They know how to recite the lines that they know our voters want to hear.”
He went on to accuse members of the caucus of not voting in support of much of Trump’s agenda during his time in office. In comparison, he highlighted the voting record of Representative Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.), who was a vocal Trump critic but voted with the former president “almost 99 percent of the time.”
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