An uncomfortable truth: The shooting at a kosher market in Jersey City would still be getting full media coverage were the assailants and target different.  Had laid off, pale-faced, bald-pated Larry, with a history of anti-immigration rants on Facebook, taken out his frustration over demographic change at a taquería, the slaughter would have top billing on every national newspaper until Christmas.

But because the victims were orthodox Jews, with their strange payos and strict gender hierarchy, and the shooters were Black Hebrew Israelites, those kooky black gazetteers and god-botherers, we aren't being forced into yet another "national conversation" on the deadly intersection of guns and racism.

That isn't stopping some liberals from tracing a ley line from black-on-Jewish violence to white nationalism.  You didn't read the foregoing sentence incorrectly.  A leftist reporter actually suggested that Black Hebrew Israelites — the very same men (always men) who accost "ofays" from the street corner with impunity — are white nationalists at heart.

This wasn't the hair-trigger mistake of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who assumed that the killers were motivated by white supremacy but later recanted in the modern method of admitting error: deleting a tweet.  This was a serious attestation.

Jane Coaston of Vox, in attempting to decipher the puzzling enigma of why rabid Jew-haters might want to murder Jews, pushed Twitter's madcap quotient to the brink: "One thing we see with white nationalist groups (and since [Hebrew Israelites] is basically Christian Identity for black people, it makes sense) is that 'membership' can be an amorphous idea."

Rachel Dolezal, call Vox's office.

After enduring more than a little bit of flak, Coaston clarified her view, and by "clarify," I mean committed the logical faux pas of appealing to authority.  She cited an Anti-Defamation League webpage that equates "Christian identity" with white supremacy politics, as both share devotees who revile Jews and non-whites, likening them to "Satanic offspring."  She also quoted someone named Tom Metzger — an apparently popular guy in infecund white-power circles — who called Hebrew Israelites "the black counterparts of us."

There you have it.  Relying on transitive property–based reasoning, Coaston asserts that because white supremacists and Black Hebrew Israelites view Jews as usurping vermin, the groups are interchangeable, albeit in a one-way street sort of way.  It's doubtful that Coaston would argue that David Duke is a black man at heart.  Blinkered whites are the real anti-Semites, don't you see?

Perhaps you can chalk up Coaston's verbal contortions to wooly-headed argle-bargle.  Or maybe her mangling of the law of identity was a half-baked justification born out of, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Johnson, Twitter's acrimony of pseuds.  Or, just as likely, it was the inverse of white supremacy: the reactive blaming of whites for all the world's hate-filled ills.
Whatever the motivation, Coaston's abuse of language for ideological ends is of a piece of the left's larger war on argumentation.  The point isn't to bend, rend, score, tear, stretch, and patch up language to befog the intellectual opponents in debate.  Rather, it's to nullify opposition by making disagreement morally unacceptable.

Lionel Shriver describes this tactic as "linguistic skullduggery" that's used for "winning an argument without the bother of actually having one."  An all too familiar example: When leftists invoke the "privilege" of a debater's position, it isn't to add context or a deeper understanding to their point.  It's to press a big red stamp on their forehead that reads "ILLEGITIMATE."  Shiver wryly observers, "That tired injunction 'Check your privilege' translates simply to 'S.T.F.U.'"

Coaston engages in the same patois perversion.  In her view, Black Hebrew Israelites can't really be blamed for busting a cap in a few patrons of a pareve grocery.  They were only acting on behalf of white nationalists, which, in turn, means they were carrying out the will of every white person who commits such mortal sins as thinking too much immigration harms societal cohesion and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  And, while we're at it, the shooters were also acting on behalf of the Grand Cyclops-in-Chief.

Need proof?  It's right there on the ADF's website, you privileged mook!

Black Hebrew Israelites were unwitting pawns of the Great White Devil.  Coaston shifts blame for the shooting on the specter of white supremacy while depriving the assailants of agency, and thus humanity.

Liberals aren't the real racists; they don't see blacks as people at all and thus can't view them as inferior.

Coaston does another, more insidious thing.  If you're paying close enough attention, you can detect a parallel in her invocation of an omnipotent racial force.  White supremacy, by her lights, is an all-controlling movement, a vast conspiracy, numbered by pallid yet indistinguishable hordes bent on world domination.

Hear the echo of history in her formulation?  Julius Streicher could make cartoon hay out of Coaston's paranoid palaver.  She's one febrile step away from claiming that skinheads put the Romanovs up against the wall and that the KKK used venipuncture on the children of irreverent blacks.

And yet, Coaston didn't have the worst take on the kosher mart gunning.  She didn't say the Hasidic gentrifiers had it coming, like an unfortunate social media manager at The New Yorker.  Just as well, the Jersey City shooting is another case of the left's irremediable urge to blame its ideological enemies first and find justification later.  Same as it ever was, with more abstruse verbosity to boot.