Leftists have a few principles to which they are always true, two of which are (1) hatred for Trump and his supporters and (2) an abiding commitment to the virtue of recycling. Vox founder and editor Ezra Klein managed to combine both when he ended 2019 by tweeting out a recycled, and resoundingly debunked, study denigrating Trump-supporters.

So it was that, on the afternoon of December 31, Klein decided to tweet out to his 2.5 million followers a March 2019 Washington Post article asserting that "[c]ounties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes," with a subtitle stating, "There is suggestive evidence that Trump's rhetoric matters."

"We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally." https://t.co/zy0093lPoH — Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) December 31, 2019

As you can see, Klein's followers have reacted with enthusiasm to a story that provides perfect confirmation bias for their belief that Trump supporters are violent "deplorables." As of this writing, the tweet was retweeted 8,000 times and garnered 15,000 likes.

The problem, as the Daily Caller noted, is that Harvard researchers completely debunked the article three months ago — and, indeed, found the opposite, which is that using the study's same flawed criteria proved even greater increases in hate crimes when Hillary hit town:

"The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway," Harvard researchers Matthew Lilley and Brian Wheaton wrote in a September article published in Reason magazine. When Lilley and Wheaton tried to replicate the original study, they found that "adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate incidents to become statistically indistinguishable from zero." The criteria relied upon for the first study actually demonstrated that rallies for former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton "contribute to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies," they noted.

Although the Daily Caller, Patrick Ruffini, and Vince Coglianese, among others, pointed out that his tweet was fraudulent, as of this post, Klein has not removed the post. Our media class never disappoints — that is, it never disappoints if you're always expecting its members to show bias and a lack of integrity.