NBC’s Ben Collins Faces Inconvenient Facts

As we noted in our editorial this morning, left-wing activists and journalists have mobilized, without evidence, to blame the Colorado Springs LGBT club shooting on conservatives:

According to the burgeoning conventional wisdom, therefore, the true culprits for the Club Q shooting include Libs of Tik Tok, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk’s Twitter content-moderation policies, the “right wing moral panic” about drag queen story hours, and — of course — the entire Republican Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attributed the shooting to the Right’s “anti-LGBT+ campaign,” writing: “Connect the dots, @GOP.” Equality Florida press secretary Brandon Wolf told MSNBC that “right wing grifters, including politicians like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, they’ve been spewing this vile, hateful rhetoric about LGBTQ people . . . and we warned them that inevitably this would result in violence.” In the New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that the shooting “seems hard to separate” from the Right’s “nationwide campaign of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. incitement.” “Each time these things happen, the right-wing go-to is to blame ‘mental illness,’” Brian Broome wrote in the Washington Post. But “it’s right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares.”

Few voices in this cohort have been louder than NBC’s Ben Collins. Yesterday, he told MSNBC that reporters “have to have a come-to-Jesus moment” about more aggressively calling out the Right’s rhetoric on LGBT issues: “What are you more afraid of? Being on Breitbart for saying that trans people deserve to be alive? Or are you more afraid of waking up to the news of more dead people?” The day before that, he linked “the stories of dead trans people” to “a months long disinfo campaign explicitly targeting them.” He told Meet the Press that “the monthslong campaign of targeting trans and gay rights events and supporters . . . has been a persistent narrative by the anti-LGBTQ Right in the last, you know, six months to the last year,” and that “these narratives have taken such hold that they are, in fact, endorsing violence at this point.” The day after the shooting, he tweeted:

The motive for the shooting remains unclear. But the evidence of any link to right-wing ideology has yet to materialize. And when the news broke that the shooter was using “they/them” pronouns, the tone of Collins’s coverage swiftly changed:

Just like that, the shooter went from an assumed representative of right-wing anti-LGBT harassment to a victim of it. Facts may change, but the narrative never does.