We’re not sure what’s worse: a disgraced former acting head of the FBI calling for increased federal surveillance of mainstream conservatives as potential “domestic terrorists,” or an esteemed American university giving him a platform from which to spew such authoritarian garbage. As bad luck would have it, we got both last week during a panel discussion at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics titled “Protecting American Democracy: Lessons from the Capitol Riot.”

Prior to becoming a CNN contributor, Andrew McCabe was, of course, an essential figure in the FBI’s efforts to frame former President Donald Trump for crimes committed by his political opponent, Hillary Clinton — namely colluding with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. He’s also a proven liar, having been caught doing so “both under oath and not under oath on several occasions” according to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. So shame on the University of Chicago for swapping spit with this jackass.

During the discussion, McCabe sounded Chicken Little’s alarm against the domestic terrorism threat posed by, for example, those tens of millions of voters who continue to doubt that Basement Joe Biden won a fair and square election in 2020, and those tens of millions of parents who don’t take kindly to the racist indoctrination of their children by hard-left teachers, administrators, and school boards.

Here’s what he said about how that rag-tag band of hooligans and sightseers managed to evade the watchful eye of federal law enforcement prior to staging their unarmed non-insurrection on January 6:

Are you going to catch this threat if your focus is only on the traditional, right-wing extremist — those groups that we know about … the fringes of the right-wing movement? And I think the answer to that is ‘no.’ … [Federal law enforcement] may have been looking in the wrong direction. It’s those very fundamental assumptions about what constitutes a threat that I think could be the most impactful. And it’s entirely possible that when the intelligence community and the law enforcement community looks out across this mainstream … they didn’t assume that that group of people — business owners, white people from the suburbs, educated, employed — presented a threat of violence, and now we know very clearly that they do. So that’s, um, I, I think that’s, to me as a former law enforcement leader and a lifetime, you know, lifetime agent um, and counterterrorism, um, specialist, that’s the part that really concerns me the most.

So there you have it. Rather than joining Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, and Mark Milley in their quest to root out those 17 neo-Nazis and white supremacists that so “threaten our democracy,” McCabe is calling for a “rapid and complete response by law enforcement,” including surveillance of — let’s just say it — Trump supporters. The dude is rotten to the core.

But there’s more: “I can tell you,” said McCabe, “from my perspective of spending a lot of time focused on the radicalization of international terrorists and Islamic extremist and extremists of all stripes … that this group shares many of the same characteristics of those groups that we’ve seen radicalized along entirely different ideological lines.”

Yep, when I think of flagpoles, MAGA hats, and middle-aged white guys, my mind immediately makes the connection to car bombs, highjacked airliners, and mass-murdering Islamist cutthroats.

Interestingly, McCabe decried “a lack of transparency on the part of leadership across the law enforcement spectrum” concerning the events of January 6, but not in the way we’d expect. No, McCabe doesn’t seem to be too concerned about the FBI’s use of agent provocateurs to incite conservative groups into bad behavior — for example, Ray Epps and other earpiece-wearing participants who repeatedly exhorted others to “go into the Capitol” that day, and yet somehow managed to avoid prosecution for their leadership roles in the J6 riot and have their faces surreptitiously removed from the FBI’s Most Wanted posters.

Nope, nothing to see here, folks. Just a distraction to keep us from focusing on the real threat, the pressing threat, the existential threat of indignant parents and angry Trump supporters.