Why are the actions of a deranged environmentalist, worried that too many people harm the Earth—the El Paso killer—blamed on President Trump? The “current climate of hate legitimized by the MAGA ethic” is so much a part of the religion of the left that asking for examples is an insult to intelligence. Here’s what one person in my Facebook feed said when someone else questioned the left’s religion by pointing out that “Trump has outwardly, formally, and officially on several occasions announced his stand against all hate groups. Burning a church does not help to Make America Great Again, so no, it was not a MAGA inspired event.”

I have a very informed opinion about what is going on in this country. The flames of bigotry and hate are being fueled and condoned by Trump. I won’t insult your intelligence by citing the numerous documented instances. Bottom line for me; You as a minority supporting this man is akin to a victim of child abuse listening to MJ.

This is extreme condescension, and emblematic of the way the left infantilizes anyone who disagrees with them. The attempt to shame a minority into returning to the left’s plantation. Disagreement among the groups they feel they own is especially appalling to the white left; when they lose control over their subject identity groups it’s like a child abuser losing access to their victims. They lash out.

But there’s also the dig about insulting your intelligence. Realizing that just about every “numerous documented instance” turned out to be a hoax, I asked for an example. He posted two.

The anti-Trump (at best) New Zealand Christchurch killer. And the anti-Trump synagogue shooter here in the United States.¹

Those are two very good examples of how blind hatred of Trump is at best self-defeating and at worst is fueling the deadly hatred the left claims to oppose. Blaming Trump for fueling those killings is coming out unequivocally in favor of hatred. The only way Trump or any political leader could have adjusted their speech to appease the synagogue shooter or the New Zealand shooter would have been to engage in hate.

The synagogue shooter hated Trump. He hated Trump on general policy, and he hated Trump because Trump is friendly to minorities, including Jews. He hated Trump, that is, because Trump does not support hatred. The shooter was inspired by Trump only in the sense that Trump is not spreading hate and the shooter wanted him—and everyone else—to be hateful. That makes it an extraordinarily disingenuous example to provide. It reminds me of Lincoln’s complaint against Democrats who engaged in similar logic in the lead-up to the Civil War:

A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!” — Abraham Lincoln (Address at Cooper Institute)

Trump doesn’t spread hatred, a killer claims that’s what inspired his murders, and the left blames Trump for… what? Not being hateful enough to appease mass murderers?

The New Zealand shooter was mostly a nutbag in the vein of Charles Manson (among his many strange claims were that he wanted to trick the left into banning guns, so as to start a race war, and hoped to ascend to Valhalla), but within his craziness he most closely identified with “the People’s Republic of China” and the 99 percenters, and called himself an ecofascist. Unless you think Trump is socialist and green, there seems to be no sense in which this could in any way be tied to what he says.

Nor, being in New Zealand, did the killer seem to care about what Trump said. To the extent he does pay attention to politicians, though, the sense in his manifesto is that if politicians in general had spread more hatred, he wouldn’t have been compelled to kill. Much of that is probably self-serving, but it’s also the only sense in which political speech could be said to have inspired his crime.

The left has become so filled with hatred that everything is colored Trump to them, even when it’s literally anti-Trump.

It’s also typical of the left, that the way to confront evil is to appease it.

Of all the examples he could have chosen, the two he chose as most powerful were both cases where the killers claimed to despise their respective political leaders because those leaders did not spread hatred.

Does that not say something powerful about how the media lies?

Most of the media coverage of these killings is convoluted sophistry to cover up the fact that the killers were anti-Trump. Their manifestos and their past posting history made that simple fact clear.

But it’s even worse than just twisting the facts after the killings. These killers seem to have been partly inspired by a disappointment that the media’s image of Trump turned out to be false. The media told them Trump was hateful, and they discovered the media lied to them. The El Paso murderer, another ecofascist and fixated on over-population, appears to have been more of the same.

They discover that the media lies to them, but also that the media will make them famous if it feeds into the media’s Trump hysterics.

These killers knew how to manipulate the press. They knew that the press’s blind hatred of Trump would get them the news coverage they wanted. If they were inspired by hatred, it was the media’s hatred of Trump that inspired them.