The press blamed Christian conservatives for the Pulse nightclub shooting. It was a vicious smear.

The June 12, 2016, Pulse nightclub shooting is, among other things, a searing indictment of the national press’ eagerness to believe the absolute worst about the Right and about Christians in particular.

It was casually assumed that the gunman, Omar Mateen, targeted Pulse specifically because it was a gay bar. But even more than that, his avowed Islamic State affiliation was overlooked so that certain reporters, pundits, and editorial boards (ahem, New York Times) could claim that the shooting was motivated by conservative U.S. politics and "an effort to approve discrimination against gay and transgender people nationwide under the guise of religious freedom."

So, this is how an Islamic terror attack was blamed on American conservatives and Christians.

Some outlets went even further, concocting a conspiracy theory that the Pulse shooting had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism — that Mateen was an uncomfortably closeted homosexual and a regular at Pulse, and that this had to do with his grudge against the LGBT community.

However, putting aside for a moment the obvious flaws in arguing that any evangelical conservative is somehow to blame for the actions of a Muslim man with whom he has never met or spoken, there is no evidence showing Mateen targeted Pulse because it was a gay bar. And in fact, there never was any evidence of this, as the now-concluded trial of his wife demonstrated.

“Mateen had never been to Pulse before, whether as a patron or to case the nightclub. Even prosecutors acknowledged in their closing statement that Pulse was not his original target; it was the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment complex,” the Huffington Post reported this week in an article with the clearheaded headline, “Everyone Got The Pulse Massacre Story Completely Wrong.”

It added, “They presented evidence demonstrating that Mateen chose Pulse randomly less than an hour before the attack. It is not clear he even knew it was a gay bar. A security guard recalled Mateen asking where all the women were, apparently in earnest, in the minutes before he began his slaughter.”

Much of this was even reported at the time by responsible news outlets in the gay press, no less. Yet, many mainline newsrooms adhered to the conservatives-are-to-blame-for-this-homophobic-attack narrative because it was easy, and because it looked like it “confirmed” what so many journalists seem to believe about Christians and conservatives.

The New York Times’ editorial board, for example, wrote a vicious and dishonest editorial claiming that attacks like this one "occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.”

The opinion site Slate blamed conservatives with a story titled, “How Conservative Christian Activists Spent Decades Fomenting Anti-Gay Hate in Orlando.”

“[W]e can’t ignore America’s homegrown homophobia,” argued a Washington Post op-ed.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper used the Pulse massacre as an opportunity to berate Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, over her past opposition to same-sex marriage — which, by the way, is not the same as approving violence against homosexuals.

Obnoxious partisan operatives were, of course, eager to get in on the action. ThinkProgress’ Zack Ford argued that “conservatives won’t identify the Orlando shooting victims as LGBT” because it’s “simply a continuation of the tactics regularly used to perpetuate stigma and discrimination against” members of that community.

And all of this without a single shred of evidence that the shooting had anything to do with homophobia, conservativism, Christianity, or whatever else the above authors appear to dislike.

National Review’s David French put it well this week when he wrote in response to the Huffington Post article, “It’s fashionable to mock American Evangelicals for their alleged ‘persecution complex.’ Scornful elites shake their heads and mock the decision of Evangelicals to vote for Donald Trump. Indeed, I’ve had my own issues (for very different reasons) with Evangelical hypocrisy in 2016 and beyond.”

“But if you want to know why American Christians sometimes feel as if they’re under siege, realize this — at the highest levels of media and in the complete absence of evidence, influential people tried to make the case that Christian and Republican ‘hate’ was partially responsible for the worst jihadist massacre since 9/11,” he added.