National Rifle Association board member and conservative columnist Ted Nugent claimed that an FBI investigation into the fatal police shooting of a teenager with a pellet gun was “another hollow attempt” by President Obama “to stir up racial controversy and divide America further in order to keep Americans from focusing on the gross ineptitude of Obamacare and the never-ending scourge of lies and scams spun by his administration.”

On October 22, 13-year-old Andy Lopez was shot seven times by a sheriff's deputy in Santa Rosa, California. The deputy, identified by media as a “gun expert” , apparently believed that the pellet gun Lopez was spotted carrying was an AK-47 assault weapon. Indeed, the toy gun had a striking resemblance to a real AK-47. Controversy stemming from the shooting has spurred numerous protests and vigils in Santa Rosa.

In addition to internal investigations by two local law enforcement agencies, the FBI has begun an independent investigation. An FBI spokesperson told local newspaper The Press Democrat that “It's a civil rights-type of case.” Local law enforcement have welcomed the FBI investigation, with Sheriff Steve Freitas stating, “They notified us what they were going to do and we said 'Great we'll welcome that.'”

The premise of Nugent's column -- that the investigation is meant to create racial strife -- is suspect. Civil rights investigations are not always about racial discrimination. In fact, according to the FBI, the most common civil rights complaint “involves allegations of excessive use of force by law enforcement personnel.”

Still, Nugent used the FBI investigation to accuse President Obama, the Obama administration, the Democratic Party, and civil rights leaders of promoting racial strife, while also accusing those groups of being the real practitioners of racism.

Writing in a November 6 column for conspiracy website WND titled “The Racist Democratic Party,” Nugent called protesters of the Lopez shooting “politically correct dolts” and wrote that, “We shouldn't be surprised if Al Not-So-Sharpton and Jesse 'Shakedown' Jackson show up to fan the ever so faint embers of the never-ending racism scam.”

Nugent claimed that “Mr. Obama's administration has routinely scrambled to score political points by dividing, polarizing and pitting Americans against each other,” before suggesting that a federal investigation into the shooting of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was meant to “stir up racial strife.”

He also theorized that the Obama administration creates racial animosity to generate votes from the minority community in a “vote scamming” scheme:

The Obama administration looks to stir up racism where there is none because they believe there are big political points to be scored in the minority communities. It's call vote scamming. Meanwhile, due to the big-government central planning boogie woogie of the Obama administration, minority communities have been led to the economic slaughterhouse at the hands of their great scam master leader.

Concluding that “real racism, however, isn't dead,” Nugent wrote, “It's morphed into government-sanctioned racism that has been engineered and implemented to enslave minorities while at the same time conning minorities into supporting the slave masters in the Democratic Party.” He added that the Democratic Party “has conned, manipulated and destroyed minority communities for over 50 years.”

Despite his own history of racially inflammatory rhetoric, including the endorsement of racial profiling, Nugent frequently levels charges of racism against the Democratic Party and its policies. In an August 28 column for WND, Nugent used the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech to claim that the Great Society programs of the 1960s are “responsible for more destruction to black America than the evils of slavery and the KKK combined.” In a February 20 column titled “I Honor Blacks - The Dems Destroy Them,” Nugent called Obama “the clear and present engineer of the destruction of black America.”