Identity politics have so warped the establishment media’s collective hive minds that, just because he was black and gay, NBC News is singing the praises of a 20-year-old man who allegedly sought out a 14-year-old boy for sex.

In a lengthy piece that has to be read to be believed, here is NBC’s glowing biography of an alleged child predator:

[Alain] Malcolm was tall and handsome. The oldest son of Jamaican immigrants, he wholly subscribed to the idea of the American dream. In high school, Malcolm was vice president of the Future Business Leaders of America club, assistant captain of the tennis and swim teams and a member of the student council and Model United Nations. He started a social marketing business at 15. After graduating in 2016, Malcolm filled his Instagram and Facebook feeds with photos of New York high-rises, bathroom selfies in three-piece suits and links to news articles in which he was featured. He went to community college while working as a junior buyer for a local circuit-board manufacturer and was the subject of a Connecticut Public Television series that profiled recent high school graduates. Earlier this year, he was named one of Litchfield County’s 40 Leaders Under 40. Malcolm was also gay, which was difficult growing up in a religious family in Torrington, a sleepy former mill town in the northwest part of the state, friends said. “It’s not easy to be black, Jamaican, a Jehovah’s Witness and gay in Torrington, Connecticut,” said Allie Morrissey, a friend of Malcolm’s. Starting in high school, Malcolm used apps like Tinder and Grindr to meet men from around the state, friends said. On that October night, he had come to Bristol to meet someone younger, purportedly a 14-year-old boy “going on 15,” according to a video posted by the digital vigilante group known as POPSquad.

And here is where things went horribly wrong for Malcolm:

When Malcolm arrived, he found that there was no boy — there was only POPSquad. For the 126th time in two years, the group — an acronym for Prey on Predators — had catfished a man on the internet, posing as an underage teen on hookup apps and luring him into a meetup, this time at an empty home whose owner allows it to be used for the group’s stings, according to POPSquad.

Now, I ask you… Ever, in the history of journalism, has an alleged child predator received five glowing paragraphs of hagiography before his alleged crime was detailed?

This POPSquad that NBC News hates so much just happens to be an online version of NBC’s own Dateline program, To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 to 2007–the idea being to use the Internet to lure child predators out into the open where they are publicly exposed and shamed on camera.

One of NBC’s targets also killed himself back in the day, just as Alain Malcolm did in October, just 30 minutes after being confronted with POPSquad’s cameras. But now…

NBC is not only on its high horse condemning as vigilantes those inspired by NBC’s own To Catch a Predator; the far-left network is attempting to excuse an alleged child predator by presenting him as The Homecoming King Next Door led astray by those very same vigilantes.

Worse still, what we have here is a major news organization openly lobbying Facebook and other social media groups to blacklist POPSquad and other groups like it.

In fact, NBC actually brags about the blacklisting it has already accomplished through its inquiries:

After an inquiry from NBC News, Facebook temporarily suspended several predator hunter accounts, removed some individual posts and deleted at least one group entirely. Some groups voluntarily removed their own pages to escape what they saw as a purge. POPSquad appeared to be unaffected.

But, hey, maybe this is a good thing.

Maybe NBC News is finally going to use its power for a moral good — to put an end to this disgraceful era of public shaming. From where I sit, this would be a healthy turnabout from a craven media that have spent years championing and emboldening the Woke Fascists who shame, boycott, de-platform, and personally destroy people over jokes, decades-old tweets, offbeat opinions, honest mistakes, and slips of the tongue.

Or…

Is NBC News only opposed to the shaming of alleged child predators, especially those who hit so many sweet spots on the Identity Politics Checklist?

I think we all know the answer to that.

Overall, I actually agree with NBC News.

Private citizens (including Dateline reporters) luring their fellow private citizens into a trap that will ruin their lives by plastering their face all over the world on digital “Wanted” posters, and doing so without a trial, without the ability to challenge the evidence in the court of public opinion, is wrong.

It was wrong when NBC did it, and it is wrong now.

But what does it say about NBC News that the only form of public shaming, of online vigilantism it wants stopped is this particular form?

And what does it say about NBC that the only public shaming victims NBC News wants to defend are not those who have been annihilated by the Humor Vigilantes or the Ten-Year-Old Tweet Vigilantes or the Rodeo Mask Vigilantes or the You’re Fired for Opposing Gay Marriage Vigilantes, but those who apparently showed up at a house to have sex with a child?

It speaks volumes.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.