If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a left-wing radical commits murder, can we ever know the motive?

First came Charlie Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, who stated plainly his desire to eliminate Kirk because "some hate can’t be negotiated out." Even after Gov. Spencer Cox (R.) of Utah said a message on one of the bullets—"hey fascist! CATCH!"—revealed Robinson’s intent, the New York Times reported that, while "many on the right" say the message "placed Mr. Robinson on the far left," the message "may not be a reliable signpost to the suspect’s political beliefs." Another Times piece stipulated that "the image that has initially emerged of Mr. Robinson is not at all clear." Who can know?

Then, on Wednesday, a gunman opened fire on an ICE facility in Dallas. He had scrawled "ANTI-ICE" on an unused bullet and left handwritten notes about his desire to make ICE agents feel "real terror." The Times again: "The actual motivation behind messages written on the bullets in both Mr. Kirk's assassination and Wednesday's killing are still not known." Who can know?

Enter NPR, which told listeners the following about the crime: "Immigration and immigrants have been at the center of the political divide, often portrayed in a negative light." See, the attempted massacre of ICE agents was actually caused by disparaging portrayals of immigrants, and we all know who’s responsible for those.

When a sex addict murdered eight people in Atlanta in 2021, that was laid on the doorstep on the political right, too. "8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, With Fears of Anti-Asian Bias," the New York Times reported. The assailant told police he was a nymphomaniac, testimony backed up by friends and family, but never mind. The Times brushed that aside in favor of what he most definitely did not say. "Investigators said they had not ruled out bias as a motivating factor even as the suspect denied such racial animus once in custody," the paper wrote. Guess which part made it into the headline? The Times was not alone. The Washington Post characterized the shooting as "a culmination of a year of racism." The media succeeded in igniting a full-blown national panic based on a complete fiction.

You know when the media will take the word of a mass murderer, though? When a 19-year-old white supremacist murdered 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, the Times didn’t mince words: "The gunman in the Buffalo mass shooting was motivated by racism." The paper described a manifesto "riddled with racist, anti-immigrant views that claimed white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color." In this case, his words were what the Times might call a reliable signpost.

The denialism of the New York Times and similar institutions—denial of the pervasiveness of left-wing extremism and the varieties of left-wing extremism, including an obviously ascendant and violent transgender extremism—is widely assumed to be a product of partisan bias and a desire to hide the ball. But we are starting to fear it is worse than that—its kind of delusion and extremism. What if elite media institutions like the New York Times can't actually see what's self-evident to the rest of us?