While corporate media has remained aghast at former President Donald Trump’s recent and allegedly unplanned meeting with controversial figures Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, the same pearl-clutching could not be found pertaining to Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and his documented ties to a believed black supremacist professor dubbed “anti-Semitic.”

The first-term senator, who took office Jan. 2021 after a special election, is a week away from his runoff election with Republican candidate Hershel Walker to retain that seat and determine whether the upper chamber remains 50-50 or shifts to the barest of Democratic majorities at 51-49. With the stakes apparent, the continued defense for the incumbent has been blatant and was solidly hypocritical of late.

Citing reports from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Fox News reported on Warnock’s ties to Leonard Jeffries, uncle to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), stretching back more than 30 years. The record shows that Jeffries had been removed from his position with the City University of New York (CUNY) system for antisemitic and black supremacist teachings, but less evident was a connection to the senator and his chief influencers.

As the outlet reminded, Warnock’s time as reverend at Atlanta, Georgia Ebenezer Baptist Church was preceded by a decade at NYC’s Abyssinian Baptist Church from 1991 to 2001 where he spent six years as a youth pastor before serving under Rev. Calvin O. Butts for four years as assistant pastor.

During those years, Jeffries was hosted by the church no less than three times as a speaker.

When first he spoke at the church, Jeffries was undergoing legal challenges to retain his job as head of the Black Studies Department at CUNY. According to a 1991 AJC report, he had been accused of preaching “Jew-hatred like a religion” and was quoted in a speech from July 20 of that year saying, “For years I grew up as a youngster just like you did going to movies where the African peoples were completely denigrated. That was a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood, where people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani and what not. It’s not being anti-Semitic to mention who developed Hollywood. Their names are there.”

As the ADL put it when they deemed Jeffries an “anti-Semitic” speaker in 2017, “Leonard Jeffries, the former head of the Black Studies Department at the City College of CUNY, and a professor there since 1972, has espoused racist and anti-Semitic views and theories since at least the early 1980s, when his comments–made while he was department head–began to attract public attention.”

“In the spring of 1988, a white student wrote an account in the student newspaper of his experience in Jeffries’ class, Black Studies 101,” the ADL explained. “The student recounted numerous times when Jeffries constructed large parts of his class around anti-white arguments.”

His premiere at the church took place following the AJC report and he addressed his problems with CUNY that had been reported by The New York Times with additional details about an interview with a Harvard Crimson reporter who alleged Jeffries had referred to his college outlet as a “Jewish newspaper,” and threatened the student’s life. The professor did not deny the accusations.

The following year, Jeffries would speak again at Abyssinian and be quoted saying, “Black people are under siege.”

The professor’s rhetoric would continue for years and he was just one of the controversial figures hosted by Butts at the church. In 1995 Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was brought in as a speaker. Butts also did not condemn Black Liberation Theologist Louis Farrakhan, known for preaching at the church attended by former President Barack Obama, when in 1986 he called Judaism a “gutter religion.”

While the former professor’s congressional nephew, considered a front-runner to replace House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as leader of the Democratic caucus, has stated his disagreement with the theories espoused by his uncle, the same could not be said for Warnock who proudly reflected on his connections with the Abyssinian church.

Of his former pastor, Warnock said, “Calvin Butts taught me so many things. Calvin Butts taught me how to take my ministry to the streets. The work of the Lord doesn’t stop at the church door. That’s where it starts. His pulpit was the public square.”

Meanwhile, when it came to Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, Warnock praised the extremist organization in 2013, “Its voice has been important for the development of Black theology.”

“It was the black Muslims who challenged black preachers and said, ‘you’re promulgating … the white man’s religion. That’s a slave religion,” he went on. “You’re telling people to focus on heaven, meanwhile, they’re catching hell.”

Republished with permission from American Wire News Service

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Kevin Haggerty

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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