Gary Kreep, a longtime antigovernment activist, “birther” and hate group leader who uses anti-Obama rhetoric as a proxy for anti-Muslim hate, has emerged victorious in a tight race for a seat on San Diego’s Superior Court, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

Kreep, who received the San Diego County Bar Association’s lowest rating of “lacking qualifications,” beat opponent Garland Peed, a deputy district attorney of 27 years who received the county bar association’s highest rating and who was supported by local police unions and sitting judges.

The San Diego Superior Court is part of the state’s trial court system, which handles a wide variety of cases, including civil lawsuits and felony criminal cases. Kreep will serve a six-year term and earn an annual salary of $178,789.

Discussing his surprise victory with the Tribune, Kreep said, “I think the government’s increasingly being seen as the enemy. And the idea that we were going to have more government lawyers become judges is something that resonated with people.”

Kreep, who in recent years has received national attention for filing numerous “birther” lawsuits claiming baselessly that President Obama is constitutionally ineligible for office because he is supposedly not a U.S. citizen, is no government lawyer.

He is, however, founder and head the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), an anti-Muslim hate group that insists Muslim terrorists, with Obama’s help, are engaged in a campaign to destroy the U.S. Constitution and establish a government based on Islamic Shariah law.

In a 2011 fundraising letter for USJF, Kreep suggested that the president is a “stealth jihadist,” Marxist, and “strident enemy of America,” who “is working to destroy our sovereign republic.”

“When you put together the puzzle pieces, the picture becomes clear: Barack Obama hates America … and you!” he wrote.

He also bragged about the USJF’s efforts against “liberal groups that seek to steal YOUR basic freedoms,” especially “the gun-grabbing, border-erasing globalists at the United Nations.”

Kreep founded USJF in 1979 and has worked there full-time since 1992, involving himself with all manner of bigots and antigovernment activists.

In 2008, he worked with Rick Scarborough, head of the virulently anti-gay Vision America, to raise money to fund a lawsuit demanding that Obama produce his birth certificate. The same year, after a California Supreme Court decision legalized same-sex marriage in that state, he filed a lawsuit asking the state to stop issuing gender-neutral marriage licenses.

In 2009, Kreep successfully sued the Californian Department of Transportation for revoking an adopt-a-highway permit granted to the San Diego Minutemen, a nativist extremist group so extreme that other border-vigilante “Minuteman” groups have rejected it.

In 2011, he filed a brief asking a federal court to overturn several verdicts against antigovernment icon Bernard von Nothaus, creator of an alternative currency called the “Liberty Dollar” and head of his own marijuana-smoking church, who was convicted in March 2011 on charges of conspiracy and counterfeiting.

This spring, he signed on to represent Gary Stein, a Marine sergeant who was given an “other-than-honorable” discharge for Internet postings in which he described the president, among other things, as a “domestic, economic and religious enemy.”

As a Superior Court judge, Kreep will no longer be permitted to represent clients as an attorney. He will also be required to abide by California’s Code of Judicial Ethics, which, among other things, notes that “expressions of bias or prejudice by a judge, even outside the judge’s judicial activities, may cast reasonable doubt on the judge’s capacity to act impartially.”

Philip Carrizosa, a spokesperson for the California Administrative Office of the Courts, told Hatewatch that sitting judges may not engage in political activism, except as it pertains to the administration of justice. Asked if challenging the president of the United States’ citizenship would be considered unacceptable political activism, Carrizosa said, “He would have to cease doing that.”