President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally, Thursday, Aug. 15, 2019, in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

It’s the new year, but the liberal media left the old year with one last piece of fake news, with a side of TDS.

Democrats like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) have encouraged the harassment of Trump officials. People on the left have demonized both Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters.

While it seems that Trump supporters are often being attacked or harassed by those on the left, the liberal media constantly seems to be suggesting that it’s Trump supporters who are violent as a matter of course, inspired by the president.

Vox founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein tried to suggest this was backed up by statistics.

"We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally." https://t.co/zy0093lPoH

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) December 31, 2019

Wow. That sounds like a huge increase.

But not so much.

Klein was citing an old Washington Post article.

From Daily Caller:

But what Klein didn’t tell his 2.5 million followers was that the article was based on a study that was thoroughly debunked months prior by researchers at Harvard University.

“The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway,” Harvard researchers Matthew Lilley and Brian Wheaton wrote in a September article published in Reason magazine.

When Lilley and Wheaton tried to replicate the original study, they found that “adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate incidents to become statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Whoops. Also when you don’t put statistics in context they don’t mean much.

Even if it’s not a lie, the percentage tells us nothing.

226% of what? 1? That would be a whopping 3.26 hate crimes.

Who are the perpetrators? Trump supporters? Probably not. Trump opposition? Most likely. His rallies attract Resistance protestors, and they’re a violent bunch.

— Eric Spencer (@JustEric) January 1, 2020

Exactly. Trump supporters have often been attacked outside rallies which might explain any actual stat, if there was one. So you’re not only going to attack them, but then blame them for being attacked?

The researchers questioned whether the failures in the survey may have been precipitated at least in part by bias for a desired result.

But guess what the researchers did find? They found that in fact the rallies for Hillary Clinton “contribute to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.”

Will Klein be tweeting that out anytime soon?

Will he be deleting or correcting his tweet? Don’t bet on it.