When gunfire erupted Tuesday afternoon in Jersey City, cable news networks provided live coverage as police engaged in a standoff with the armed suspects. Liberals on Twitter began emitting their predictable rhetoric in such circumstances, blaming the National Rifle Association and smearing Republicans as somehow culpable for the shooting. At that time, little or nothing was known about the perpetrators, and there was no reason to believe the suspects were NRA members or Trump supporters, but the Left’s explanation for armed violence is a prefabricated narrative in which their political enemies are always the villains. Whenever the facts don’t fit this narrative, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) immediately change the subject, and thus we can predict the Jersey City shootout will be quickly forgotten by CNN and other left-wing outlets.

It turns out that Tuesday’s deadly attack was perpetrated by two black people, David Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 51, who were reportedly connected to the so-called “Black Hebrew Israelites” cult. While the incident is still under investigation, authorities say Anderson and Graham murdered a Jersey City police detective and then targeted a kosher market in an attack that killed three more people before police ended the standoff, leaving the suspects dead. The killers, who were also named as suspects in the weekend murder of a New Jersey man named Michael Rumberger, left behind an explosive device and what was described as a “rambling” manifesto. NBC News reported that Anderson used an online alias in social-media posts that “pushed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and praised past attacks on Jewish people in New York and killings of police officers”:

Two law enforcement officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, told NBC News that a Facebook account with the username “Dawada Maqabath” likely belonged to Anderson.… The username Dawada Maqabath appears across various other social sites and forums, with posts celebrating violence against police and spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish people. In August, a user going by the Maqabath username on a video aggregation website posted a comment under a video from radio station Hot97 about Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man who was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police officers in 2016. The comment alluded to a well-known conspiracy theory alleging that Jewish people control the government and that police were carrying out an “agenda” as part of an ongoing war.… NBC News found social media and internet posts linked to Anderson and the Maqabath username going back more than seven years. … Under the name Maqabath, Anderson frequently referred to Gavin Long, a black separatist who killed three police officers and injured four in a 2016 shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Under a video of a man reading Long’s manifesto on YouTube, Maqabath responded in 2016 with a conspiracy theory about police and Israelites, and claimed “there are no innocent cops.”

In other words, Anderson (aka “Maqabath”) wasn’t any kind of right-winger but instead appeared to embrace beliefs more common to the “Black Lives Matter” movement or the anti-Trump “Women’s March,” whose organizers openly associated with anti-Semites. While this pattern of left-wing hatred is clear enough to anyone who cares to dig for the evidence, these dots are never connected in the mainstream media. Indeed, while NBC News reporters were getting exclusive information on the Jersey City killers from their law-enforcement sources, not a word about Anderson’s motives was conveyed Wednesday to the MSNBC audience, which was instead fed wall-to-wall coverage of Democrats’ effort to impeach President Trump. So the murder of Jews isn’t news unless its fits the media’s political agenda.

This bias is blindingly obvious, as Ben Shapiro pointed out on Twitter. Because the “attack in Jersey City wasn’t by white supremacists, and can’t be blamed on Trump,” Shapiro explained, this “means no ‘national conversation’ on anti-Semitism. This has been the media’s pattern. If it comes from white supremacists, it deserves coverage and prompts Trump-centric conversation; if it’s just a massive spike in anti-Semitic attacks in NYC from non-white supremacists, it doesn’t even merit a mention.” The media, Shapiro said, “don’t give a hot damn about anti-Semitism, as they cheer on Left-wing anti-Semites ranging from [UK Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn to [Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan] Omar to [Michigan Democrat Rep. Rashida] Tlaib [and] ignore anti-Semitic violence that can’t be blamed on their political opponents.”

This see-no-evil attitude toward hate movements on the left reflects the crude partisanship of America’s media establishment: Whatever Republicans do is always wrong (because, after all, they’re Republicans), and on those occasions when Democrats are caught doing wrong (e.g., former California Rep. Katie Hill) somehow their malfeasances are also ultimately blamed on Republicans, too. In the case of deranged black Jew-haters like the Jersey City killers, the liberal media tell themselves that such violence is a reaction to racist oppression, and who is to blame for that? Republicans, of course. The entire media narrative of impeachment is based on a similar exercise in circular logic: Because it is wrong for a Republican to win a presidential election, liberals tell themselves, Hillary Clinton must be a victim of Russian “collusion” and therefore Trump is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” By turning everything imaginable into a partisan morality play, the media leave nothing untainted by their bias. Any “hate” incident that doesn’t fit their narrative? Well, they’ll just pretend it never happened.

So here we have the case of David Anderson and his accomplice, who targeted Jews in a deadly shootout within a few miles of the major media’s Manhattan headquarters, and where is the kind of in-depth coverage that these national news organizations devoted to recent incidents of “right-wing” violence? Are the people killed in Jersey City less important than, for example, Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer? And never mind the irony that the New Jersey shooter was associated with the same fringe kook cult, the Black Hebrew Israelites, who harassed the Covington Catholic boys in a high-profile January incident in D.C.

It doesn’t fit the liberal narrative. “Hate crimes” are only of interest to the media when they can be used as partisan weapons. The Jersey City shootout will disappear so quickly from the headlines that it will be as if it never happened at all, and anyone who tries to call attention to it will be accused of inciting “hate.”