For three days after the Colorado gay nightclub massacre Democrats and their media allies smeared conservative opponents of drag queen groomer hour as “stochastic terrorists” who are to blame for the tragedy. 

Then, to their chagrin on Tuesday, the suspect’s lawyers filed court papers saying he identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns “they, them.” 

Suddenly their right-wing homophobia narrative collapsed in a heap. Not that it caused them any self-reflection. They will just wait for the next opportunity to weaponize a tragedy. 

Of course, for all their emoting, they never had any genuine concern for the five Colorado victims, who were just weapons to wield against their most effective opponents on the right. 

Just as the left transformed George Floyd’s death under the knee of a white cop into a race civil war that won them votes in the 2020 election, they planned to turn the Club Q massacre into a new culture war. They are panicking because Elon Musk has dismantled the left-wing censorship regime on Twitter that propped up so many of their dishonest narratives, so their aim is to justify a new round of censorship by pretending conservatives are provoking anti-LGBTQ violence. 

There is no tragedy they will not exploit for political benefit. But their haste to judge has left them with egg on their face. 

Whatever the story is behind Colorado suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich’s gender reveal, what has been obvious from the start is that he is a mentally ill person whose life was littered with red flags that should at least have kept him away from guns. 

Why did authorities not act on a 2021 complaint from Aldrich’s grandparents that he planned to carry out a mass shooting, as reported Wednesday by KKTV 11 News from old arrest papers? 

There are lots of useful lessons to be taken from the tragedy, but demonizing Fox News is not one of them. An obese 22-year-old who reportedly was bullied at school, Aldrich had been abandoned by his drug-addict, porno-actor father, and left to the tender mercies of a mother with her own drug habit, run-ins with the law and a “severe borderline personality disorder.” 

None of this was of any interest to Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times Op-Ed staff writer who didn’t even wait until the bodies were cold before politicizing the massacre in a mendacious piece titled “Club Q and the Demonization of Drag Queens.” 

Her line is that far-right villains such as Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis are responsible for fostering an “escalating anti-gay and anti-trans violence [and] growing moral panic about children being ‘groomed’ into gender nonconformity.” 

“They don’t get to duck responsibility if a sick man with a gun took them seriously,” she says. 

Her pantheon of evildoers included conservative writer Chris Rufo. But a cursory glance at his work reveals careful, evidence-based essays mainly in the prestigious City Journal. He has done parents a service by shining a light on the sinister ideological origins of Drag Queen Story Hour and attempts to hypersexualize children, indoctrinate them into “queer theory” and confuse them about their sex. 

This is serious reporting that the Times will probably get around to doing in a few years when it becomes impossible to ignore class actions from grown-up children who were tricked into ruining their lives with gender surgery and hormone therapy. 

Goldberg also named Matt Walsh, The Daily Wire writer who unflinchingly covers the sick fad of surgical mutilation of children done under the euphemistic cover of “gender affirmation.” His reporting forced Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University transgender clinic to “pause” its lucrative and irreversible gender surgery on children, including double mastectomies on girls. 

Goldberg also threw in QAnon and the Proud Boys, for smear by association. 

Equally dishonest was NBC, where two of the worst disinformation activists in the media, Ben Collins and his collaborator Brandy Zadrozny, the doxing specialist, piled onto the opportunistic orgy of blame. Fox News and the entire Republican Party were to blame for Colorado in their telling. 

Elon Musk also is guilty because he unbanned psychologist Jordan Peterson, satirical site Babylon Bee and Libs of TikTok, an account which simply reposts videos taken off the social media platform TikTok, showcasing the self-published views of the nation’s most unhinged leftists, including teachers who boast about secretly bombarding their young charges with sexual propaganda. 

“We follow online hate trends [and] since April and March the LGBT community has been the main focus of this hatred,” said Zadrozny. “There is a pipeline. It starts from some smaller accounts online like Libs of TikTok, it moves to the right-wing blogosphere, and then it ends up on Tucker Carlson or it ends up out of a right-wing politician’s mouth. It’s a dangerous cycle and it does have real world consequences.” 

Collins delivered an even more extraordinary diatribe on NBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday, blaming the Colorado massacre on anyone who has voiced opposition to kids being subjected to the sexual burlesque of Drag Queen Story Hour. 

“We have to have a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment here as reporters,” he said. 

“Are we more afraid of being on Breitbart for saying that trans people deserve to be alive or are we more afraid of the dead people?” 

Who is saying trans people “don’t deserve to be alive?” 

Precisely nobody. 

But Collins’ monologue was built on that straw man, as the boomer fools alongside him on NBC’s set nodded along to his self-aggrandizing fantasies. 

“These bodies are not in the ground yet and they are being used as political props right now,” said Collins, “explicitly for electoral or monetary purpose.” 

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. 

It is Democrats and their media allies who have been using the Club Q victims as political props. 

Claire McCaskill, the former Democratic senator, popped up on NBC to cast blame on Trump and DeSantis, as the strapline “WAPO: Club Q shooting follows year of bomb threats, drag protests, anti-trans bills” appeared on screen for subliminal emphasis. 

“Donald Trump has written the playbook that a lot of politicians are following . . . Ron DeSantis is embracing this with everything he’s got that somehow making people different than you a bad guy gets people to vote for you . . . It is terribly depressing and evil and bad for our culture . . . You get violence.” 

I mean, hello. McCaskill just described the “ultra MAGA,” “semi-fascist” demonization strategy the Democrats deployed so successfully for the midterms. 

This is their playbook in a nutshell. Accusing their opponents for their own hateful tactics. This time it backfired. But there will always be a next time.