On Monday, former FBI Director James Comey confirmed rumors that had been swirling in the Twitterverse for the past few months, when he outed himself as Reinhold Niebuhr, a mysterious Twitter account composed of mostly pastoral travel photos. The Niebuhr account has attracted over 120,000 followers due to the rampant speculation that it really belonged to Comey and was providing vague, cryptic information to the thousands of users fiercely opposed to the presidency of Donald Trump. This past March, writer Ashley Feinberg had played detective in a piece for Gizmodo that gathered evidence to prove that the Niebuhr account really belonged to Comey. Monday was the first time, however, that Comey came out of the Twitter closet once and for all, admitting to the world that he was Reinhold Niebuhr by tweeting out a picture of himself.
At this point, you are probably asking yourself, who is Reinhold Niebuhr and why did Comey choose this name for his secret Twitter Account? Who is this man whose philosophy has been embraced not only by Comey, but also a multitude of political figures, such as Barack Obama, John McCain, Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Well, Niebuhr was a prominent 20th-century theologian and one of the leading intellectual forces in America in the 1940s and 1950s. He developed the philosophy of Christian Realism, in which he tried to counter the Utopian mindset inherent in a lot of Christian thinking with a political pragmatism that valued compromise, and declared that the “good” was preferable to the “perfect,” because the “good” was within reach, while the pursuit of the “perfect” was merely a naive illusion. He is the author of books such as Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man , and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Comey was so taken with Niebuhr’s philosophy that, according to the Washington Post , he based his College of William & Mary undergraduate thesis on Niebuhr’s work.
Goodbye Iowa. On the road home. Gotta get back to writing. Will try to tweet in useful ways. pic.twitter.com/DCbu3Yvqt3
— James Comey (@Comey) October 23, 2017
Niebuhr was also famous for composing the Serenity Prayer that is used in Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. This past Sunday, Comey tweeted as Niebuhr about watching pelicans in flight and thinking about the prayer.
Twitter users have been fond these past few months of dissecting the Niebuhr tweets for coded information pertaining to the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the Trump administration’s collusion and complicity with that interference. His latest tweets have spurred speculation that Comey was planning a future presidential run. Amateur Twitter sleuths came to this conclusion because the recent tweets from the Niebuhr account had been sent from Iowa and that is the site of the Iowa Caucus, considered the first step for a candidate on the road to becoming president.
It is unclear at this point why Comey chose this week to reveal himself or what role the Reinhold Niebuhr Twitter account will occupy now that the secret is out. With everything related to James Comey and the Trump-Russia investigation, though, millions will be waiting with bated breath to find out.
[Featured Image by Andrew Harnick/AP Images]
