A freshman congressman got a crash course in PR after a video has surfaced of him threatening a protester and telling him, "I'll drop your ass."
Representative Steve Knight, a Republican congressman whose district includes Palmdale and Santa Clarita, confronted anti-immigration protestors outside after an open house event at his new Simi Valley office on Friday. A man who called himself "Mike" shook Knight's hand—rather forcefully, it seems—telling the politician, "You told me you didn't vote amnesty and you did. I looked it up on the Internet. You lied to me." Mike then gives him a sarcastic pat on the arm.
In response, Knight gets up in Mike's face and says to him, "If you touch me again, I'll drop your ass."
In the remainder of the video, the protestors claim that the congressman voted on a bill that provided funds for Obama's "amnesty" for immigrants. Knight, a former LAPD officer according to the L.A. Times, says he voted on a different version of the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
On an online forum for a group calling itself "Save Our State," a letter was posted calling for Knight to apologize for his threat that was "childish and uncalled for." The letter added:
When a Congressman tells a private Citizen that he’s "going to drop your ass", while surrounded by his security agents that are most probably armed. That is not only abusive it also crosses a dangerous line. I think it’s fair to say that Steve Knight has some anger issues, and quite possibly a screw loose.
This version of Save Our State was formed out of the remains of its previous iteration, an anti-immigrant activist group that was named by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.
