by Tyler O’Neil | Daily Signal
A few weeks after his message about “86”ing President Donald Trump, former FBI Director James Comey once again revealed the Left’s nefarious strategy to silence its opponents by referring to the Republican Party as “white supremacist adjacent.”
It’s not enough for the Left to cry “racism” against the GOP. No, the Left has launched a systematic approach to compare conservatives to the Ku Klux Klan and suggest they represent a terrorist threat—and Comey is breathing oxygen into that preposterous and dangerous narrative.
MSNBC host Jen Psaki asked Comey about fighting domestic terrorism, then turned to discuss the Trump administration “testing the system.” She asked if the former FBI director thinks “there are laws that should be put in place that would help better manage” various threats.
Comey didn’t advocate legal changes, but he highlighted what he called “cultural impediments to doing this work.”
“Let’s say you work in the FBI,” Comey began. “You know that one of the two political parties is, let me put it nicely, white supremacist adjacent—at a minimum. And so, why would you want to throw your career on that side of the line and be summoned to Capitol Hill to be asked, ‘Why are you pursuing these innocent groups?’ And so, we have a cultural impediment to working effectively that should get more attention than it does.”
I think this exchange is rather revealing. You see, I remember when members of Congress called in then-FBI Director Christopher Wray to answer for a particularly notorious abuse involving “pursuing these innocent groups.”
The FBI Catholic Memo
The FBI’s Richmond office had written a report about “radical-traditional Catholics,” citing none other than the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy. That’s a noble cause, but when the SPLC ran out of Klan members to target, it began adding conservative organizations to the same “hate map” it used to expose the Klan.
Now, the SPLC’s “hate map” includes conservative Christian law firms like Alliance Defending Freedom, immigration reform groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty, and groups of doctors who oppose the Frankensteinian transgender experiments often euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.” It even branded an LGBTQ group—Gays Against Groomers—an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” because Gays Against Groomers opposes the SPLC’s transgender agenda.
Critics have long slammed the SPLC for exaggerating “hate” to scare donors into ponying up cash and to silence political opponents. The SPLC has a $730 million endowment and offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. In 2019, a former SPLC employee revealed that workers called it the “poverty palace” and called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.” For more on this, you can check out my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Yet the scam seems to be paying off, and not just financially. As I wrote in my second book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” the SPLC had a large impact in the Biden administration: advising the Justice Department and the Department of Education, getting an attorney nominated to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and getting cited by the FBI. SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged about the administration asking the SPLC for advice on combating “domestic terrorism.”
That seems darkly ironic, considering that a convicted terrorist used the SPLC “hate map” to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., for an attempted mass shooting. The SPLC condemned the attack, but kept the council on the “hate map,” anyway.
Does Comey really want to be taking the side of the SPLC on this? On Catholics, in particular, the SPLC has a horrific track record. When it branded the Ruth Institute—a Louisiana pro-family nonprofit—an “anti-LGBTQ hate group,” it quoted (as evidence of hate) Ruth Institute founder Jennifer Roback Morse, who was in turn quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
That’s right, if the SPLC were to be consistent, it would have to put the entire Catholic Church on the “hate map.”
This is the major scandal to which Comey is referring. In his mind, it is a “cultural impediment” when Republicans demand answers after the FBI cites the anti-Catholic SPLC in demonizing Catholic groups.
SPLC Goes After Turning Point USA
Of course, his remarks came right after the Southern Poverty Law Center branded Turning Point USA, the largest conservative youth organization in the country, an “antigovernment extremist group,” placing it on the “hate map” with Klan chapters and claiming the group supports “white Christian supremacy.”
This is all part of the SPLC’s modus operandi—smearing its political and ideological opponents by association with the Klan and “white supremacy” and attempting to exile them from polite society, all while making a buck by scaring people into sending it money.
The truly scary thing is that Comey appears not to agree with Wray, who said he was “appalled” by the FBI Catholic memo. Comey seems to think the outrage over the memo was the real scandal—and that outrage revealed how the Republican Party defends “white supremacists.”
Thank God he’s no longer calling the shots at the FBI.
