House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and former editor of Breitbart News, a white supremacist on Thursday.

Pelosi made the slanderous accusation twice during her weekly press briefing. “What’s making America less safe is to have a white supremacist named to the National Security Council as a permanent member,” Pelosi said.

“It’s a stunning thing that a white supremacist, Bannon, would be a permanent member of the National Security Council.”

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“It’s a stunning thing that a white supremacist, Bannon, would be a permanent member of the National Security Council and dismissing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director … of national intelligence as members,” she continued.

While leftists have long loved to hurl the “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” labels at Bannon and Breitbart, the accusation is utterly false and has been repeatedly debunked.

In November, Breitbart announced it was readying a lawsuit against a major media organization for describing the site as “white nationalist.” At least three major media outlets — the Chicago Tribune, CBS, and the Los Angeles Times — have also had to issue corrections for referring to Breitbart Senior Editor Milo Yiannopoulos as a white nationalist.

Despite clear evidence to the contrary, Pelosi isn’t the first high-profile Democrat to assert that Bannon is a white supremacist. In December, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also made the accusation. “Donald Trump has doubled down on racism and bigotry. He’s got as his strategic adviser, a person who is a white supremacist,” Warren told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

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But even Cooper, not exactly a paragon of unbiased, bipartisan virtue, felt it necessary to correct her. “Wait a minute. There’s no evidence he’s a white supremacist,” he said.

Pelosi should know better than to use such dangerous and misleading rhetoric. Fomenting public hysteria about imaginary white supremacist bogeymen lurking in the White House will inevitably lead only to further division, if not violence — including the sort that occurred in her home region Wednesday night in reaction to a scheduled speech from Yiannopoulos.