But journalism is supposed to function on evidence, not speculation, and there never was any evidence that supported the storyline

Hmmm.  From The Enduring False Narrative About the PULSE Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda by Glenn Greenwald.  The subheading is:

Politicians and activists should stop ratifying the fiction that Omar Mateen was motivated by anti-LGBT hatred. It dishonors the victims and obscures the real motive.

I remember at the time of the attack five years ago that the investigation, as reported in the press, was quite muddled.  There was a clear effort to make this an example of Islamic extremism against LGBT people rather than an example of Islamic extremist hatred of Western government actions in the Middle East, specifically the actions of Obama in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.  

And as so often happens, the investigations continued and the reporting faded away.  I think I have read Glenn Greenwald before on his disavowal of the persistent MSM narrative that the Pulse nightclub attack was an example of Muslim hatred of LGBT and his belief that that narrative has been disproven.

In this piece, however, he lays out his evidence and reasons for overturning the myth and establishing the truth.  

On the fifth anniversary of the PULSE nightclub massacre in Orlando, numerous senators, politicians and activist groups commemorated that tragic event by propagating an absolute falsehood: namely, that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was motivated by anti-LGBT animus. The evidence is definitive and conclusive that this is false — Mateen, like so many others who committed similar acts of violence, was motivated by rage over President Obama's bombing campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and chose PULSE at random without even knowing it was a gay club — yet this media-consecrated lie continues to fester.

On Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) falsely described the massacre as an "unspeakable act of hate toward the LGBTQ+ community.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) went even further, claiming “the LGBTQ+ community was targeted and killed—all because they dared to live their lives.” Her fellow Illinois Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin, claimed forty-nine lives were lost due to “anti-LGBTQ hate” (he forgot the +). These false claims were compiled by the gay socialist activist Matt Thomas, who correctly objected: “the shooter literally picked PULSE at random from Google after security was too tight at the mall he went to first,” adding that while LGBT groups “are hopeless of course,” too much money and power is at stake for them to give up this self-serving fiction. But he asked, “Shouldn’t the bar be a little higher for senators?”

Greenwald then goes on to indict the mainstream media as the primary purveyors of this fake news.

Liberal propagandists who pose as journalists treated this storyline as definitively proven. The massacre was “undeniably a homophobic hate crime,” Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic. “Let’s say it plainly: This was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people,” Tim Teeman wrote in The Daily Beast. In USA Today, James S. Robbins speculated that Mateen was likely “trying to reconcile his inner feelings with his strongly homophobic Muslim culture.” In the days following the killing spree, one writer in USA Today, Steph Solis, even accused those of questioning this narrative of propagating bigotry and exhibiting cruel indifference to gay suffering: “Those who insist the shooting was solely an Islamic terror attack try to erase the LGBT community from the narrative, causing only more pain by invalidating their experiences in this ordeal.”

But journalism is supposed to function on evidence, not speculation, and there never was any evidence that supported the storyline that he was driven by hatred for LGBTs. The evidence that was available suggested the opposite.

This is the most compelling piece I have read summarizing all the after-action investigations and evidence.  Greenwald's is a pretty compelling case.  Is it correct?  No idea, but I am inclined to believe that he has the better of the argument.  

But if I accept that, then it adds an indictment to Obama and Clinton.  If they sought to create a false narrative to cover the fact that the proximate cause of the Pulse nightclub massacre were their foreign policy actions, then it is beyond despicable.  It echoes the Benghazi coverup where an Egyptian Copt resident in the US was arrested for production of a video antagonistic to Islam held to be the primary ignition of the embassy attack when both the State Department and CIA knew otherwise.  

Cowardly, but posturing politicians unmoored from human decency, facilitated by a partisan media uninterested in reporting facts, are two factors driving some of our political turmoil today.  The Mandarin Class have become too accustomed to lying and ordinary Americans are tired of discovering they are being lied too.  

Which relates to something I saw in passing in the past few days.  Trump apparently emailed out a triumphalist message in the bombastic language that so aggravates the finer sensitivities of the mainstream media, a list of things which the MSM denied were true before the 2020 election but which now are coming to be acknowledged as true.  

I cannot find those emails and it is hard to find any reference to his claims using google.  I have to resort to a summary from the Washington Examiner.  

Here is the list and my assessment of the veracity of the claims.  As often happens, Trump overclaims but I think he is indisputably broadly correct.  

Hydroxychloroquine works - Well, the jury is still out but there are plenty of continuing research papers which keep emerging regarding its efficacy when combined with other drugs and administered early in the infection.  Probably his weakest claim.  My guess is that it will turn out the hydroxychloroquine does work under certain conditions but that it will not be proven to be a miracle drug as it was originally positioned.

The Virus came from a Chinese lab - Jury is till out on this one as well but there has been a sea change in "expert" opinion.  Up until a month or two ago it was the received wisdom that the virus did not come from a lab at all.  It had natural origins.  Anyone making a different argument was deplatformed, mocked and ridiculed, or otherwise punished.  As Fauci's emails have now entered into the public arena, it is now obvious that the inner circle of the health task force always knew that there was a reasonable probability that Covid-19 was indeed a manufactured virus and that there was also a reasonable probability that it was accidentally released from the lab.  We have a lot more evidence to accumulate and may never know the full story but it does now appear that a lab accidental escape was always considered a reasonable probability.  There certainly is already a greater amount of evidence for that theory than there is for the alternate wet market theory.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was real - True.  This was pretty obviously real at the time and has been increasingly well-documented as time has progressed.  The magnitude and extent of Hunter's crimes is still little discussed in the mainstream media but his own actions and behaviors keep forcing the issue into public awareness.  

Lafayette Square was not cleared for a photo op - True.  This is very recent but the most recent government report makes it seem pretty definitive that the mainstream media reported what they wanted to believe rather than what the evidence supported.  

The ‘Russian Bounties’ story was fake - Jury is out but the evidence is weighted towards this having been a fake story.  Once again, the issue is not so much that there is definitive evidence.  The issue is that the original evidence was minuscule and suspect but the MSM treated as a writ in stone.  

We did produce vaccines before the end of 2020, in record time - True and pretty indisputably so.  He was mocked for his original aspirational target but, going against the advice and recommendations of his medical experts, he drew that line in the sand and he delivered.  The Mandarin Chattering Class mocked him but they were wrong.  Was he simply lucky?  Possibly.  But he did what he said he would do - deliver a vaccine before the end of the year.  

 Calls to mind the opening stanza of a William Blake poem:

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again. 

Blue state lockdowns didn’t work - Increasingly likely true.  More evidence keeps coming in and the analysis will continue for some years but I have not seen any evidence so far that lockdowns reduced deaths much less that any putative reduction in deaths justified the economic destruction.  

Schools should be opened - Poorly worded but increasingly likely true.  School closings in many states were clearly a political sop to unions.  In other states, clearly there was an excess of hysteria.  The data from the very beginning indicated a virtually zero risk of death to children.  Even for adults, within 3-4 months of the outbreak, it became clear that only the elderly with multiple morbidities faced any degree of real danger of mortality.  Infection?  Possibly.  Death?  Unlikely as long as fit.  Those advocating for school closures have done immense harm to the bottom 40% of students.  

Critical race theory is a disaster for our schools and our country - Increasingly clear that this is true but with a caveat.  While that position is shared by most Americans, it is obvious that the Mandarin Class are nowhere near letting go of it.  Within 2-3 years, I suspect most Americans and a majority of the Mandarin Class will all acknowledge that this was a disastrous excursion into authoritarianism, bigotry, racism, and anti-semitism with no upside.  But we aren't there yet.   

Our Southern Border security program was unprecedentedly successful - This is perhaps the most indisputably true claim.  All you have to do is look at the border numbers for illegal crossings and detentions and the humanitarian crisis as people from poor Central America seek to escape poverty by heading north before the border closes again.  

The specific arguments are less critical to some degree than the MSM and Mandarin Class clear intention to hide the facts and maintain political positions unsupported by known facts.