RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not that it’s fair to blame national political figures for all the acts committed by their supporters either. But Paul Krugman of the New York Times suggests that whatever the motivation, whatever the political affiliation of a particular criminal and regardless of the facts of each case, Mr. Trump is at fault:

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a wave of hate crimes. Just in the past few days, bombs were mailed to a number of prominent Democrats, plus CNN. Then, a gunman massacred 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Meanwhile, another gunman killed two African-Americans at a Louisville supermarket, after first trying unsuccessfully to break into a black church — if he had gotten there an hour earlier, we would probably have had another mass murder.

All of these hate crimes seem clearly linked to the climate of paranoia and racism deliberately fostered by Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and the media.

This latest column in the Times is obviously compelling evidence that Mr. Krugman is no better at analyzing violent attacks than he is at predicting the pace of economic growth or forecasting stock market moves. But even a casual news consumer knows that such moral confusion has not been confined to Mr. Krugman since the Saturday massacre. And history has shown that it really has nothing in particular to do with Mr. Trump.

“Conservatives Don’t Get to Mourn,” is the headline on an insightful piece by Karol Markowicz, who writes in National Review today:

After every horrible mass shooting, when we should be mourning together, looking for solutions to stop future attacks, consoling the families of the victims, there’s an immediate rush to make sure conservatives know they do not belong to that wider American community feeling the pain. Worse, there’s a constant allusion to the fact that those on the right are responsible for the slaughter. Republicans spend the time following these attacks not in mourning like they should be but beating back the sickening idea that they inspired the shooter.

Just last year, Mr. Krugman’s colleagues at the Times had to correct an editorial and somehow managed to beat a libel suit from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin by arguing in court that they had accidentally blamed her for a mass shooting to which she had no connection.

Yet to this day even the corrected editorial smears Ms. Palin by mentioning her in the context of “heated political rhetoric on the right.” The Times editorial notes in passing that the man who shot Republicans at a congressional baseball practice was a supporter of Bernie Sanders. The Times was right not to blame Mr. Sanders for the evil acts committed by James Hodgkinson, and in doing so it upheld the Krugman standard, which holds that only Republicans should be blamed for violence, regardless of the perpetrator.

A new corollary holds that it’s helpful to give news consumers the impression that anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of the Trump era. Various media have spent the last few days quoting an Anti-Defamation League study claiming a surge in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017.

George Mason University law professor David Bernstein writes at Reason magazine’s Volokh Conspiracy blog:

There are several problems with relying on this study for Trump-bashing, however. The first is that the study includes 193 incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions as anti-Semitic incidents, even though by the time the ADL published the study, it had been conclusively shown that the two perpetrators of the bomb threats were not motivated by anti-Semitism. One can only guess why the ADL chose to inflate its statistics in this way, but none of the explanations speak well of it.

Second, the ADL report itself acknowledges that some of the rise in incidents may simply be due to better reporting (”more people are reporting incidents to ADL than ever before”).

Third, “college campuses saw a total of 204 incidents in 2017, compared to 108 in 2016.” How many of those incidents emanating from traditional forms of anti-Semitism that one might associate with Trumpian populism, and how many from leftist/pro-Palestinian sources? The ADL doesn’t say.

Fourth, the ADL counts ambiguous incidents as anti-Semitic incidents, so long as they were reported as such.

Most media outlets aren’t leaving much room for ambiguity in their efforts to tie the President to the evil committed by others. On Sunday, one day after the Pittsburgh attack, CNN’s Victor Blackwell interviewed Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer. When Mr. Blackwell mentioned the ADL study, Mr. Dermer reminded him that, sadly, the problem is hardly new. Here’s an excerpt: