A sober and trustworthy commentator on political issues speaks.

No one in the world, or at least no sane person, thinks that comedian and actor Jim Carrey is a sober and trustworthy commentator on political issues, but since he presents himself as one, like so many other reflexively Leftist entertainers today, his statements warrant scrutiny, if only to show how insane the Left has become these days.

According to the Daily Wire last Thursday, Carrey “tweeted a drawing of a three-fingered hand holding a bloody hundred-dollar bill next to a candle.” Along with this drawing, he wrote: “10,000 gun deaths in 2019 and the year is far from over. What Osama bin Laden did to us was terrible but he doesn’t hold a candle to Mitch McConnell.”

Covering this as if Carrey were sane, the Washington Times noted that McConnell wasn’t really a terrorist: “In 1983, the year before Mr. McConnell was first elected to the U.S. Senate, there were more than 31,000 gun deaths in the U.S.”

Carrey could draw this ridiculous equivalence between Osama bin Laden and Mitch McConnell because for eighteen years now he has been told by people whom he trusts that jihad terror is not a real threat to the United States (and of course that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam), and that the real problems confronting America today are “white supremacism” and “Islamophobia.”

In fact, all these years after 9/11 it has become commonplace for Leftists to claim that “white supremacists” and “right-wing extremists” are responsible for more deaths in the United States than are Islamic jihadists, and thus constitute the greater threat. This claim originated with an April 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) study that counted 106 people killed in 62 attacks by “far-right violent extremists,” as compared to 119 people killed in 23 attacks by “radical Islamist violent extremists.”

That’s it then, right? 39 more attacks by “far-right violent extremists” than by “radical Islamist violent extremists.” And there have only been more “white supremacist” attacks since April 2017, while Islamic jihadists have been relatively quiet since Donald Trump became President (hmmmm), so case closed, right?

Wrong. The most important major problem with the Government Accountability Office study is plain from page 6 of its report, where you will see that the count of fatalities committed by “far right wing extremists” and “radical Islamist extremists” begins on September 12, 2001.

What an interesting date for the Government Accountability Office to have chosen for the beginning of its survey! And how revealing. It would have made much more sense for the survey to have begun on January 1, 2001 (or January 1, 2000, for those who claim the new millennium began on that day), or five or ten years before the time of the survey itself. Instead, the GAO went with September 12, 2001.

The reason why is obvious: the whole point of this study was not actually to determine what the greatest threat to the United States really was at all, but to provide support, however spurious, for the claim that “white supremacism” was a greater threat than Islamic jihad. For obviously, if the GAO had started its study just one day before it actually did start it, the number of Americans killed by Islamic jihadists would have been several thousand more than those killed by “far-right violent extremists.”

Clearly the GAO began its survey on September 12, 2001 in order to manipulate the results so as to exaggerate the terror threat from the “far-right” and minimize it from Islamic jihadis. And that’s not all: the study doesn’t take failed plots into account. At my site Jihad Watch, I’ve tracked jihad activity in the United States and around the world every day since October 2003. In the course of that nearly sixteen-year span, I’ve posted hundreds of reports on failed jihad plots inside this country. No one was killed or injured in those, and for that we can all be grateful. But if those plots had succeeded, there would have been hundreds and possibly thousands more fatalities of Islamic jihad activity.

Is there a comparable number of failed “white supremacist” plots? Absolutely not. But does Jim Carrey know anything about any of this? Once again, absolutely not. He, like most Leftists, thinks he knows that “white supremacism” is a big threat, as is “Islamophobia.” And how many killings have there been by “Islamophobes” in the United States in recent years? Absolutely none. Go back to 9/11, and there was one instance in which an ignorant yahoo murdered an innocent Sikh because he mistook him for a Muslim. That was an immense tragedy that must not be minimized, but it doesn’t amount to a violent threat from “Islamophobia” that is remotely comparable to the jihad threat.

Jim Carrey provides us with an object lesson: Big Lies breed big idiocy, and big complacency.