Ted Cruz sent a fundraising email on behalf of the radical gun group Gun Owners of America yesterday, boasting that he was “honored to work with GOA” to stop gun legislation after the Sandy Hook massacre and declaring that President Obama’s gun control efforts “have nothing to do with keeping Americans safe, and everything to do with his left-wing hatred of your liberty and your rights under the Constitution.”

Cruz has a close relationship with GOA, boasting of their endorsement at a presidential debate in September, joining a conference call with its members in which he credited the group for his election to the Senate, and appointing the group’s chairman, Tim Macy, to lead the “Second Amendment Coalition” he launched just days after 14 people were shot and killed in San Bernardino, California.

When GOA mobilized to help defeat background check legislation in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, the New York Times identified Cruz as the gun group’s “key ally in the Senate.”

GOA is, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “a more radical alternative to the National Rifle Association,” which through an absolutist stance against any and all gun regulation has helped to push both the NRA and the gun debate to the right and away from any possible compromise.

But what’s most troubling about GOA is the radicalism of its executive director, Larry Pratt, who has ties to white supremacists and the militia movement and whose insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment is bolstered by a steady stream of conspiracy theories, many of them directed at President Obama. Just this weekend, for instance, Pratt speculated that although the president has tried to remove “pro-American” officers from the military, he has not gotten all of them, so if he were to try to commandeer the military as his own private defense force he would likely meet with a violent insurrection.

Pratt’s and GOA’s extremism is evidently no problem for Cruz, however, who signed on to an email raising funds for the group that sounds exactly like any of Pratt’s rants, declaring that President Obama “hates the 2nd Amendment for the same reason he hates most of what is in the Bill of Rights – it limits the power of government and protects the liberty of individuals” and that the president is “angry at the American people for rising up against him in defense of our liberty.” He urges GOA members to sign a petition calling for the defunding of a potential Obama proposal to expand background checks at gun shows and, of course, to give generously to GOA so that the group can continue “exposing the truth behind the anti-gun politicians’ real agenda of mass confiscation.”

Here are some excerpts: