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That didn’t take long. Rand Paul is exploiting the NSA controversy for fundraising.

On Sunday, the Republican senator and libertarian firebrand from Kentucky declared that he planned to file a class action lawsuit against the Obama administration, claiming the NSA surveillance programs that intercept internet communications (for supposedly foreign targets) and sweep up the phone records of Americans are “unconstitutional.” Such a lawsuit may be tough to pull off. But—coincidentally?—it’s a vehicle for Paul’s prodigious fundraising. On Tuesday, he sent out a “Dear Patriot” fundraising email asking recipients to join his lawsuit—and to make a contribution to his political action committee.

The email is full of demagogic and apocalyptic rhetoric, seemingly designed to scare people into sending their hard-earned bucks to Paul to prevent Big Brother from taking over tomorrow. Noting that he fears for “our fragile Republic” and that “this is an absolutely critical and defining moment,” Paul writes:

I fear, without your help, it could be the moment the American people quietly shrank from a fight and gave their last bit of approval over for government-run lives. I know there are those who argue Americans must give up every last one of their liberties to win our country’s ongoing fight against terrorism.

With such language, Paul is mashing up Ayn Rand and Alex Jones. The NSA programs, whether excessive or not, hardly amount to a government takeover of citizens’ lives, and there are few, if any, voices in the ongoing debate about counterterrorism and privacy advocating that Americans must abandon all their liberties.

Paul’s exaggerations get worse:

[T]oday we know President Obama’s IRS routinely targeted his political opponents and grassroots conservatives. The Justice Department targeted reporters and their families for wiretapping and harassment for daring to criticize the administration. We see the Obama administration covering up Benghazi then tapping Susan Rice — who helped mislead the American people in the wake of that outrage — for a promotion.

There remains no public evidence that Obama directed the IRS to target his foes. The Justice Department did not go after reporters for criticizing the government; it mounted aggressive—perhaps overly aggressive—leak investigations that sought information on government employees who passed secrets to reporters. And the emails released by the White House showed no Benghazi cover-up.

Paul is not bound by facts. He claims that the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were not prevented from carrying out their deadly attack because intelligence officials, “instead of acting on real intelligence warnings” from Russia, “were too busy secretly sifting through the phone and email records of hundreds of millions of Americans.” Paul is referring to the FBI not doing more after it fielded a request from Russia for information on Tamerlan Tsarnaev and its preliminary review found nothing alarming about him. Whatever happened in this case, the FBI did not fail to investigate further because its agents were pinned down rifling through all the material collected by the NSA.

Yet Paul doesn’t lose his stride. He accuses authorities of “unreasonably targeting [sic] every American into a target for spying.” This is hype. Though the phone records of Americans are being hoovered up by the NSA snoops to produce a database that can be used for counterterrorism investigations, this activity—justified or not—is not the same as targeting all citizens for spying.

Then Paul goes even further with his conspiracy theorizing: “How long until these spying capabilities suffer some ‘mission creep’ and they start using the GPS feature in your phone to track whether or not you go to gun shows?” And it’s not just gun shows: ‘What if you go to McDonalds a little ‘too much?’ How long until Big Brother tries to ‘fix’ you?”

So here’s the real worry: Michelle Obama is in a command center at the NSA monitoring your visits to fast food eateries in order to send government agents (in black helicopters?) to intervene between you and your Big Mac. That’s why, he says, you should join his lawsuit today.

But, he notes, it will cost a fair bit to get his message out. Thus, the need to send his political action committee money. Forwarding a contribution to his PAC, he insists, is how people can stop “Obama’s NSA” from “looking through the phone records and emails of a billion Americans every day!” Yes, he said, “a billion Americans.” When Paul embellishes facts to rake in the bucks, he goes all out.

Here’s the full email: