Man oh man, how things can change in a flash. For the last several days following the deadly mass shooting at an LGBT club in Colorado, the press and its leftwing allies have been railing against the right, suggesting that its opposition to the sexualization of children provoked the killings.

Far-left figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chasten Buttigieg, and others have run the gambit, blaming everyone from Lauren Boebert to Tucker Carlson. And then, like a ton of bricks being tossed off a cliff, news dropped that the killer is “non-binary” and that he will go by “they/them” pronouns in his court filings and appearances.

How could that be? Nancy Pelosi had already pronounced “MAGA Republicans” as responsible for inciting the shooting. The White House had blamed a right-wing environment of “LGBT+ hate.” Then there was NBC News’ Ben Collins, who fancies himself a “misinformation reporter” (he should mean that literally, as you’ll see). He went on a rampage, accusing right-wing media, including Breitbart and Libs of TikTok for the heinous crime.

I talked this morning about an inflection point in this country right now, specifically for reporters:

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? pic.twitter.com/1B4FqNrZSQ

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 22, 2022

What was Collins to do with the news that the shooter wasn’t actually a Trump-loving, Tucker Carlson-watching Christian conservative? Well, he needed to shift the narrative, and he needed to do it fast. Instead of admitting his error, noting that he never should have jumped the gun, he quickly shifted to defending the shooter.

The Colorado Springs suspect was 15 when they requested a name change to Nick Brink.

Brink was subject to a "particularly vicious bout of online harassment," and had one YouTube video, a profanity-laden cartoon dubbed “Asian homosexual gets molested."https://t.co/zJoX6kv4Z0

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 23, 2022

Encyclopedia Dramatica, the hate site that compiled years of records of online bullying of the Colorado Springs' suspect, updated the page when they realized Aldrich had an entry for years, adding Aldrich "SHOT UP A GAY BAR BECAUSE HE WAS TIRED OF ALL THE 'HARRASSMENT'!" pic.twitter.com/22vUhnQyRN

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 23, 2022

Don’t you see? Now that we know the shooter is part of a privileged class and doesn’t fit into the neat boxes the left loves to use to blame the right for every mass shooting, the killings are now the fault of online “edgelords” who supposedly made fun of the shooter. How very convenient, right?

According to Collins, the fact that this lunatic was bullied online seven years ago explains why he decided to shoot up a nightclub. It couldn’t be that the guy was just a mentally-ill nutjob who had kidnapped his family a year prior, never facing charges for some inexplicable reason. Instead, because Collins is so married to always blaming the right for everything, he’s now willing to defend a murderer in the process. It’s an incredible shift to witness happen in real-time.

What’s also been amazing is to see the overall standard regarding “gender identity” change on the left. For years, we’ve been beaten over the head with proclamations that misgendering someone for any reason is bigotry. Even when it comes to men trying to get into female prisons, we’ve been told their “identity” must be respected. Yet, finally, we’ve found a situation where that doesn’t apply. That has led to many suggesting that the killer is lying in order to defend himself against hate-crime charges.

That doesn’t pass muster. One, lawyers are not going to risk their careers to knowingly lie for a defendant, especially when there’s nothing to be gained. The man is charged with five counts of first-degree murder that will put him away for life without parole. The hate-crime charges are all but irrelevant in that context. Two, because of what Collins posted, we know the shooter was bullied for his “identity” in the past. Three, his being “non-binary” actually offers a reasonable explanation for his connection to the club. Certainly a more reasonable one than suggesting he watched Tucker Carlson.

Regardless, the leftwing’s insanity surrounding “gender identity” has painted them into a corner. They’ve been so absolutist, even attempting to censor jokes on the topic (i.e. The Babylon Bee’s nearly year-long Twitter suspension), that now they can’t do anything but affirm a man who shot up a gay/transgender nightclub who himself claims to be transgender. This was the inevitable result of booting any tenuous grasp of reality in exchange for political gain, and things only get more absurd from here.