When I was a younger man and life was more fun, first thing in the morning I would roll over, snatch the ashtray off the nightstand, plop it on my chest, and light me up a Newport. Man, I miss third grade. But now that I’m closing in on 100, I’m snatching the iPhone and checking the news — which is just as unhealthy.

Anyway, it was a little before 6 a.m. on Sunday morning when I first learned of the Covington Catholic High School controversy. By then it was big news, and there was no question it would get bigger. So even though it was my day off and I had a television in need of viewing, I clicked around looking for this thing called facts.

Outrage? There was plenty of that.

Indignation? Everywhere.

Self-righteous virtue signaling? Please.

What I failed to uncover, though, were facts.

Although the establishment media, the left, and (to their never-ending disgrace) the boys’ own Catholic school had already publicly condemned these MAGA-wearing kids as the second coming of the KKK, there were no facts to back up any of this.

Oh, there was plenty of selectively edited video flying around, plenty of stories like this one in the far-left Washington Post that deliberately misled readers into believing the facts were all known, and the overnight hate-shriekers at CNN and MSNBC were already hoarse from turning it up to 11… But where were the facts?

There were none. So I said nothing. I tweeted nothing. I wrote nothing. Because that is what adults are supposed to do, especially when you are talking about the reputations of 16-year-olds, about dooming kids to Internet infamy.

And then…

Just before I was going to make my much-practiced move of turning off the iPhone and firing up the Keurig and Blu-ray player (all at the same time, thank you very much), I saw this at National Review…

“The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross.”

Might. As. Well. Have. Just. Spit. On. The. Cross.

And now we come to the saddest part of this little rumination of mine… I was not at all surprised.

The timestamp on the National Review story is January 20 at — get this — 2:55 a.m.

Before we get to why that’s important, let’s back up a bit.

At the very least, consumers of alternative media — you know, our customers — expect us to not act as amplifiers for the establishment media. At the very least, if nothing else, alternative media should be a place where we are not the media’s toadies, where we do not unquestioningly spread MSM narratives.

But here is National Review, so desperate to preen its own precious virtue, so besotted with kissing the ass of the establishment media, so filled with a raging hate for Trump supporters, that this pathetic, self-righteous, dishonest piece of suckuppery published at 2:55 in the morning.

And you have to read the purple sanctimony to begin to believe it:

For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great.

The human capacity for sadism is too great, y’all.

Wait, wait, wait… This one’s even better:

Over the years, I’ve heard (and perpetrated, I confess) some imaginative definitions of the “seamless garment,” or “consistent ethic of life.” It’s a matter of identifying a common principle that can be shown to underlie and unite various causes — the abolition of abortion, of euthanasia, of the death penalty, of you name it — that most people would say are disparate and unrelated. How heightened border security might be of a piece with protecting unborn children is less intuitively obvious than most such hypothetical linkages I’ve encountered.

Am I the only one getting lost in the middle thing?

This is contemptible behavior on the part of National Review… How desperate to be on Morning Joe are you that you rush to your keyboard in the middle of the night to condemn 16-year-old boys — Might. As. Well. Have. Just. Spit. On. The. Cross. — when you don’t have all the facts?

Who does such a thing … to kids?

What’s more, National Review left the piece up long after the FACTS proved the kids had done nothing wrong. It was only when the backlash against Might As Well Have Just Spit On The Cross became too intense that it was finally memory-holed.

To make matters worse, this is the second time in 72 hours National Review served as the anti-Trump media’s fake news-amplifier. Guess what time the first one launched — “A New Report Accuses Trump of Suborning Perjury, the Gravest Allegation Yet” — at 11:41 p.m.

National Review really should change its motto From “Can We Please, Please, Please Be On Morning Joe” to “Fake News Never Sleeps.”

But again, I have to back up a bit to set the stage…

So far, every single one of the media’s Russia collusion “bombshells” has proven to be a fake news hoax. Not some of them, not a majority of them… Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

So, when BuzzFeed published its “bombshell” Thursday night (at 10:11 p.m.) claiming President Trump suborned perjury… I mean, come on. And if the media’s fake news-past is not enough prologue for you, how about the fact that the BuzzFeed report was based on two anonymous sources… I mean, seriously, come on.

When this happens, when the establishment publishes a story like this, this is precisely when consumers of alternative media most count on us to take a breath, to bring in some context, to be skeptical and circumspect. In other words: to be adults.

Well, National Review waited exactly 90 minutes to not only amplify what was, on its face, an obvious piece of bullshit, National Review spent a few hundred words — not looking at the countless reasons the story smelled rotten, but why it was so gosh-darned important.

You see, the walls are closing on Drumpf, fer real, this time. Fer real.

Because harrumph, harrumph, harrumph –“And let’s recall, the alleged order to lie was about the immensely important matter of a presidential candidate’s reported desire to secure an extremely lucrative business deal from arguably our nation’s chief geopolitical foe — a foe that was even then attempting to interfere with an American presidential election” — harrumph, harrumph, harrumph.

Why not just title the piece “Our Plea to Receive a Phone Call From Jake Tapper’s Booker.”

Which brings me back to the demonic attack on the kids from Covington High School.

The media deliberately fabricated this Covington story, deliberately demonized a bunch of kids as a means to knock their own BuzzFeed humiliation off the Sunday front page. This was the media literally engaging in Orwell’s Two Minute Hate as a means to distract the population. And anyone with an IQ that bumps into room temperature knew this.

But there was the unreliable National Review, a mere 72 hours after its previous fiasco, holding the media’s coat and cheering them on as they assaulted a bunch of innocent kids.

Shame on them.

National Review is fake news.

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