Via Gateway Pundit, Trump fans will grumble that Kelly’s putting on a show here to try to win back conservatives after the debate dust-up. I doubt it. Why would she need to win back an audience that she hasn’t lost? The anger, I think, is real, and the reason it’s real is because the double standard is so egregious.

By the standards of Democratic demagoguery after Gabby Giffords was shot, the left owns every drop of blood spilled by cop-killers since BLM got going. Remember, the argument at the time wasn’t that Jared Loughner had read or heard some particular bit of right-wing invective that had inspired him to shoot Giffords. The argument was that the sheer accumulation of lefty-bashing by the right, from talk radio to Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” map to signs carried at tea-party rallies, had somehow created an “atmosphere” of rage that Loughner had tapped into as permission to murder a member of Congress. It’s the same argument the left uses when it tries to shift blame for JFK’s assassination from fellow traveler Lee Harvey Oswald to the anti-Kennedy Birchers in Dallas. Rage towards the left and its agenda is the true criminal offense. Pinning it to an actual crime, regardless of who committed it, to make accomplices of all conservatives is a formality. That’s why, to answer Kelly’s question, the “atmosphere” of rage towards cops promoted by BLM can’t similarly be said to have influenced the degenerates who have been murdering officers: Rules of civility that are designed to criminalize opposition to liberalism can’t be applied to a left-wing movement, no matter how overtly violent their rhetoric (“pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon”) gets.

In fact, incredible as it may seem, at about two-thirds of the way in here the guy debating Katie Pavlich (and Kelly) actually repeats the lefty smear that Loughner was a tea partier. Pavlich tries to call him on it but he doesn’t miss a beat. Even here, with Kelly demanding accountability from the left for its double standard on incendiary rhetoric, the lie that the tea party somehow bears responsibility for Giffords’s near-murder slides easily into the conversation. And you know what? I bet Fowler really believes it. I don’t think he was knowingly lying in repeating the long-ago debunked theory that Loughner was some sort of right-wing crazy instead of a regular ol’ crazy. I think left-wing opinion makers built that narrative so quickly and solidly after the shooting that even now, four years later, it remains an article of faith among some Democrats that Loughner was moved by conservative rhetoric to try to kill Giffords. We’re never going to get Stalinists to apologize for this game. They invented it and they’re better at it than we’ll ever be.