Political correctness is a cancer. And perhaps the entity most debilitated by it is the FBI.

Following the slaughter of 10 people at the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, we learned that the suspected assailant, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, was previously known to the FBI because he was linked to another individual under investigation by the bureau.

It’s not the first time, and conservative columnist “Sundance” reminds Americans just how many other mass shooters — most of whom were terrorists — were previously known by the agency. “The FBI knew in advance the Pulse Nightclub shooter (Omar Mateen) and were tipped off by the local sheriff,” he writes. “The FBI knew in advance the San Bernardino Terrorists (Tashfeen Malik). The FBI knew in advance the Boston Marathon Bombers (the Tsarnaev brothers) tipped off by Russians. The FBI knew in advance the Garland, Texas, shooters (Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi). The FBI knew in advance of the Parkland High School shooter (Nikolas Cruz). The FBI knew in advance of the Fort Hood shooter (Nidal Hasan); and now the FBI knew in advance of Ahmad al-Aliwi Alissa.”

The filtering of those cases through the lens of political correctness was especially egregious, and the template for it was set by the Obama administration when the FBI, then led by Robert Mueller, eliminated 876 pages and 392 presentations from its counterterrorism training manuals. It deleted terms such as “al Qaeda,” “Muslim Brotherhood,” and “jihad,” even as it insisted “training must emphasize that no investigative or intelligence collection activity may be based solely on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious affiliation.”

Thus, despite intercepting a series of emails between Nidal Hasan and terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki beginning as early as 2008 — the same Anwar al-Awlaki whom Obama ordered to be killed by a drone strike — no action was taken against the man who eventually killed 13 and wounded another 32 at Fort Hood. Astonishingly, Obama referred to that slaughter as “workplace violence,” and former General George Casey, the Army’s top officer at the time, lamented that though the slaughter was horrific, “if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Omar Mateen? Despite placing him on a terrorist watch list in 2013, and investigating him twice — the second time because he was in contact with an American who joined ISIS in Syria and blew himself up in a suicide bombing — the agency concluded those contacts were “minimal” and removed him from the list. After Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 others, then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch initially redacted incriminating references to radical Islam from the 28 minutes of 911 calls he made while perpetrating the carnage. According to Lynch, that censorship was an effort to prevent Mateen from furthering “his propaganda.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev? Despite two separate warnings to the FBI and the CIA from Russia in 2011, the FBI closed out its file on Tamerlan Tsarnaev after interviewing him and his family and deciding he posed no risk. The FBI knew he had spent six months of travel to a known Islamist terrorist training center in the Dagestan-Chechnya area in Islamic Russia, yet suspended an investigation of him anyway.

Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik? The politically correct purge of the Treasury Enforcement Communications System in 2009 deleted Farook’s ties to terror group Tablighi Jamaat, leaving the FBI a day late and dollar short in terms of preventing him and Malik from killing 14 and seriously injuring 22 others.

Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi? According to ABC News, “An undercover FBI agent had exchanged social media messages with Simpson days before the attack and was sitting in a vehicle outside the Garland convention center when the attack began. As the agent drove around Simpson and Soofi’s car, which had stopped abruptly, the attackers got out and opened fire with military-style rifles. The agent drove away and was stopped by police.”

During the trial of Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, who had supplied weapons to the duo, prosecutors asserted that information about the undercover officer was “classified.”

Nikolas Cruz? On January 5, 2018, a person close to Cruz contacted the FBI’s Public Access Line and told them about his ominous media posts, his expressed desire to kill people, and his gun ownership — all of which, according to protocols, should have precipitated his assessment as a potentially deadly threat and the forwarding of that assessment to the FBI Miami Field Office.

None of it happened, and Cruz killed 17 and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Shortly thereafter, FBI Director Christopher Wray asserted that he was “committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our processes for responding to information that we receive from the public.”

Several searches using a variety of different keywords yielded nothing in terms of that investigation and/or review.

And it’s not just mass murderers. Columnists Howie Carr and Glenn Reynolds remind us that the FBI missed some of the 9/11 hijackers, failed to catch Russian mole Robert Philip Hanssen in its own ranks for more than 20 years, ran an inept crime lab that precipitated flawed testimony against defendants for over two decades, conducted wiretaps of journalists, deliberately set up Michael Flynn, allowed four Boston men to rot on death row for 35 years for a murder they didn’t commit while shielding the real killers from justice, and framed Atlanta security guard Richard Jewell for a crime he did not commit.

Moreover, the double standard engineered by political correctness becomes impossible to ignore. Thus, in contrast to much of the above, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation was a series of corrupt endeavors based on sources agents knew were bogus, even as they lied to the FISA Court to get warrants. Nonetheless, 50 FBI agents were employed by the Trump-Russia investigation to maintain a narrative that eventually became unsustainable.

And last year, even as riots were occurring in cities across the nation, the FBI sent 15 special agents to Talladega Superspeedway to investigate a “hate crime” based on a “noose” discovered in a garage that had been assigned to black driver Bubba Wallace. It turned out to be a large door pulldown that had been there since 2019.

In stark contrast to its investigations of those riots, the FBI has conducted an extensive investigation of the January 6 riot at the Capitol that has revealed its ineptitude prior to it: Parler warned the agency of “specific threats of violence,” and Wray admitted the agency had received “raw, unverified, uncorroborated information” that was ostensibly shared with Capitol Police. Yet former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund says that information never made it to him.

Why the seeming double standard between the FBI’s investigation of riots precipitated by BLM and antifa last summer and the riot on January 6? Perhaps this photo of FBI agents taking a knee in solidarity with BLM is indicative.

“Looking at the FBI’s record, it’s hard not to conclude that it is far better at pursuing press and political opponents than at actually keeping us safe,” Reynolds asserts.

Not hard. Impossible.