Colorado Springs & The Left’s Blood Libel

Today The New York Times reports that the “Evangelical Vatican” (their words) that is Colorado Springs makes gays feel unsafe in the wake of the gay club massacre:

This community pressed up against the Rockies was known for years as the Vatican of Evangelicals — a home base for a well-funded, well-organized conservative Christian political movement that broadcast dire warnings about the dangers of homosexuality to the nation, and in the early 1990s was instrumental in making Colorado the only state to ever pass a law making it legal to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation.

That was a long time ago, before Colorado Springs nearly doubled in size, outsiders made the city an increasingly diverse place and the community began hosting a yearly Pride parade officially sanctioned by the Republican mayor. Many in Colorado Springs believed the community had moved on.

But last weekend when a gunman stormed into Club Q, one of the city’s few L.G.B.T.Q. clubs, killing five people and injuring 18 others, many members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and their supporters found reason to question whether Colorado Springs had made as much progress as they thought — especially in an increasingly armed nation awash in extremist views.

The authorities are now holding a suspect, Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22. He was released from the hospital and has been booked in El Paso County jail, according to a tweet from the Colorado Springs police on Tuesday. His motivations were still unclear.

Some in the community saw the attack as a reason to rethink their sense of safety and acceptance in Colorado Springs.

“It was definitely a wake up call,” said Brandon Flanery, who grew up going to an evangelical megachurch in the city but left the community when he came out as gay. He said that until this week Colorado Springs felt increasingly welcoming for people like him. Now, he said, it’s clear: “It’s still not safe.”

But others say the problem is not unique to Colorado Springs, or to the L.G.B.T.Q. community. It’s something much broader.

“I feel like the hyper-partisanship is national, and this idea of the loudest voice wins, the meanest voice wins — it doesn’t feel unique to Colorado Springs,” said Tom Shepard, a filmmaker who grew up in Colorado Springs in the 1990s and now splits his time between there and San Francisco. “The national discourse is very toxic. Of course, how can Colorado Springs not be affected by that?”

Yep, it’s the fault of Christians, and conservatives from coast to coast. All right-thinking people know that. Nancy Pelosi said so:

“That fight remains more urgent than ever, as right-wing extremists target transgender Americans’ most fundamental rights and freedoms.  Whether spouting dangerous rhetoric from cable news desks or openly bullying schoolchildren from the halls of power, MAGA Republicans are cruelly undermining the safety and well-being of our transgender community.  Horrified by such shameless bigotry, House Democrats are proud to march alongside our trans friends, neighbors and siblings as we work to uphold justice and dignity for all.  That is why we enacted fully-inclusive federal hate crime protections with the historic Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.  And it is why the Democratic House has twice passed the Equality Act, landmark legislation extending the full protections of the Civil Rights Act to LGBTQ Americans.

“Heartbroken for so many beautiful souls murdered by hate and guided by relentless activists across the country, let us renew our resolve to build the future that our children deserve.  Together, we will forge a safer, more just America – one where all of its people can freely and proudly exercise their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Daily Kos said so, in a piece it retracted after hearing from Matt Walsh’s lawyer:

An NBC News reporter said so:

Well, well, well, in a tweet that a NYT reporter posted a short time ago (there’s nothing in the paper about this as I write this post):

In other words, Anderson Aldrich is a self-identified queer man. We saw in earlier footage of the time last year that the SWAT team responded to the home he shared with his mother, when he threatened to blow it up, that he was a volatile lunatic. This information was widely available days ago. And yet — and yet! — the media and prominent liberal voices did not wait for more information to come out. This fit their narrative of a deranged conservative massacring gay people, no doubt urged on by Libs of Tiktok, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, and other conservative figures who dare to question the accepted LGBT narrative. It’s a replay of the Jussie Smollett hoax, in which the usual suspects accepted without question the absurd story that poor, poor black Jussie was victimized by “MAGA Country” domestic terrorists.

We conservatives have grown accustomed to this garbage. We know how the Left rolls, especially the propagandists in the media who pose as journalists. But something about this case really cracks me. They flat-out accused the strongest critics of the transgender cult, and the sexualization of children through things like Drag Queen Story Hour, of being party to mass murder. This is blood libel. It would have cost Pelosi, NBC, Daily Kos, and all the rest nothing to have waited until police released a statement about the suspected motive of the killer. But they couldn’t do it. They just knew it had to be the fault of conservatives and Christians. Even the early evidence we had that the killer was a raging psychopath did not stop them. They had the Truth. They had witches to burn.

This is not a one-off thing, as you know. I mentioned Jussie Smollett, but it goes back much further. For at least two decades now, LGBT activists have claimed that if we don’t give them whatever they want, including total affirmation of whatever they think and do, that we have blood on our hands. It is the vilest kind of manipulation, but it has worked wonders. We hear every year these fake claims that there is an “epidemic” of anti-trans violence, even though looking into the particular circumstances of all the trans people killed in a given year — as I have done before, here and here — reveals that the overwhelming majority were killed for reasons that almost certainly had nothing to do with their trans status (e.g., many of them were street prostitutes, one of the most dangerous lines of work that you can undertake).

None of that matters to activists, Democratic politicians, and the news media. Truth is inconvenient to their Narrative, which tells them to construe conservatives, Christians, and even liberals who question their radical claims and goals, as demons with blood on their hands. They did it with the horrific Florida gay nightclub massacre, which was actually carried out by an Islamic radical who swore allegiance to ISIS just before the killings, and who had a history of violence, mental instability, and who was possibly a closet case. They did it with the Matthew Shepard story, which turns out to have been about anti-gay hatred, yes, but also about rampant meth abuse. According to a journalist who reported the complexities of the story for the liberal magazine Harper’s, and who talked later to NPR, “Emblematic stories need emblematic victims. So Matthew needed to be an emblematic victim. And as soon as you have to do that, you start creating a kind of myth.”

The myth that the Left demands is that