It’s amazing. The rhetorical escalations have no upper limit. It’s hard to realize that we’re still more than a year away from the 2020 general election. The mudslinging is already way beyond any reasonable level, and everyone is just getting started.

We’re probably about to endure the most vicious, vitriolic election cycle in the country’s history. It’s going to get very ugly, and one of the ways you can tell is by looking at the level of the lies already circulating.

You’ve heard people say that President Trump is responsible for a rise in hate crimes. Now, there’s a study claiming to confirm that sentiment. We’re going to look deeply at this notion and show you the level of dishonesty running beneath all of this. It’s bad.

The Media Lie

Every major publication has been running with this one. It’s been retweeted by AOC and Bernie Sanders. It’s a pretty big story. A research team at the University of North Texas conclusively proved that President Trump is creating hate crimes. They looked at historical hate-crime data, and they found that when Trump holds a rally, that county sees a 226-percent increase in hate crimes.

That’s a huge number. It’s enough to prove that Trump’s rhetoric is the driving force behind hate crimes. We can now definitively say that Trump caused the shooting in El Paso, and every bit of hate in vitriol in this country is entirely his fault. His rhetoric probably caused Hurricane Dorian too.

You might think that last line was thrown in sarcastically, but there are real human beings on the left making this claim. The derangement is actually that extreme. Giving them a study to hide behind is dangerous, and you can bet that this is the real rhetoric that can lead to violence.

If you believe President Trump is so evil that his speech can drive people to mass shootings and create hurricanes, you will inevitably come to the conclusion that violence is the only answer.

The first problem with this “study” is that it only uses one source: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). This is a source significantly less reliable than the FBI (which is pretty bad these days).

In fact, when you look into the ADLs list of hate crimes, you find that it’s a complete joke. A majority of the crimes listed aren’t criminal at all. They include instances of hate speech, which we all know is only a charged lobbed at conservatives when they agree with President Trump. No leftist has ever been accused of hate speech.

Even if we went full SJW and pretended that mean words are a hate crime, this list of data is still useless. More than 90 percent of the instances listed are cases of anti-Semitism. That’s definitely a bad thing, but you won’t find any case of President Trump espousing anti-Semitic speech.

Even if that weren’t the case, it’s hard to blame the President for hate crimes against all minorities when the only statistical correlation is with anti-Semitism. We could assume that everything in the study is legitimate, and it would still mean that President Trump’s rallies are completely harmless to people of color.

The source of data isn’t the only problem. The 226-percent number is also deceptive. The study did not find that places visited by President Trump suddenly saw a 226-percent jump in hate crimes. What it found is that counties that were visited by President Trump had a higher average number of hate crimes (and remember most of these aren’t actually crimes) than counties he didn’t visit.

Do you see where the problem is? Campaigns tend to hit the more dense population centers. The 226-percent number is not based on population density. If you instead look at this number on a per capita basis, the increase in hate crimes drops to zero.

Here’s the easiest way to tell this entire study is a stupid lie. A few researchers wanted to test the methodologies. They applied the exact same study to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. When they did, they found a five-fold increase in hate crimes with every county she visited.

If we are using the University of North Texas’ research methodology that would prove that Hillary Clinton causes hate crimes to spike. But that would be silly. What this actually means is this study is pure manipulative propaganda, and anyone who buys into is either stupid or malicious.

That goes for the Washington Post, AOC and Bernie Sanders. They were all either too stupid to read the study, or they understood how bad it was and didn’t care. Either way, we need to be done with all of it.

Let’s recap all of the dishonesty in this one study. The source of data is completely unreliable. It lists a lot of things that aren’t hate crimes, and it pretty much exclusively looks at anti-Semitism. The percentage reported doesn’t actually show a correlation between Trump rallies and hate crimes, and when you adjust for population size, it shows that Trump rallies aren’t causing hate crimes, even with the bad data. This is the opposite of science.

President Trump is not causing an increase in hate crimes. The very notion that hate crimes are on the rise is debatable. Assuming they are, the trend shifted more than a year before he announced his candidacy. Combine all of that with the fact that hate crimes have definitely decreased over the last year and a half, and you get a pretty clear picture. Race baiting has driven division in our country. President Trump is merely trying to put everything back together again.

You can’t let the left get away with lies like this. You have to correct them every single time. There are so many people in the middle who don’t take the time to fact check everything, and they are being manipulated by the propaganda.

Never stop fighting. Never stop sharing the truth. We have to weather this storm or else we risk losing the greatest country in the history of the world.