Covington Rorschach test shows liberal PC pathology

Sometimes, a pep rally is just a pep rally. Sometimes, a smile is just a smile. And sometimes, a hat is just a hat.

Only among the most deranged partisans could a universal sports ritual, a common high school activity, a typical teen face and patriotic headgear be construed as evil symbols of patriarchal oppression.

These, however, are the soul-sapping, lunacy-inducing times in which we live.

Nobody loses their marbles when black NBA stars make the universal “OK” gesture with one hand. Or two. It’s all in good fun.

But when reputation-destroying agitators plundered the photo collection of the Covington Catholic High School basketball team in search of evidence to bolster their prefabricated narrative that the white Kentucky boys must, must, must be unrepentant bigots, the 3-point celebration transmogrified into menacing proof of R-A-C-I-S-M.

Liberal pot-stirrers tweeted celebrities and journalists an image purporting to show that the Covington kids — still under siege after being slandered last week at the March for Life rally by Native American agitator Nathan Phillips — had flashed white supremacy signs. The teens were pictured on the sidelines of a basketball court in their uniforms, paying tribute to a teammate who had just scored.

No, they did not hail him with Hitler salutes, but with the innocuous 3-point, A-OK sign.

Undeterred by basketball fans who futilely tried to explain the actual meaning of the hand gesture, monomaniacal leftwing detectives marked all the Covington athletes’ fingers with cuckoo redfont circles and disseminated their fevered forensic analysis across social media with enraged captions, including this one sent to the pope:

“This is the All White hand sign. This is Covington Catholic school. Is this what they teach at this Catholic school? Is this how Jesus wanted it?”

In truth, internet trolls had ripped a screenshot from the team’s video montage of pep rallies — where students had dressed up as nerds, businessmen and Hawaiians or painted themselves blue, white and (gasp!) black at various competitions.

It’s not racism. It’s athletic boosterism.

But the media manufacturers of racism won’t stop because the ideological incentives to convict first and verify later are far too strong. Time after time, liberals see racism where it doesn’t exist, fabricate it when they can’t find it and ignore it within their own ranks.

They didn’t stop after hysterically spreading campus hate crime fakery cooked up at my alma mater Oberlin College, where excitable nitwits claimed a student walking around with a blanket wrapped around her was a lurking racist in a KKK hood; at Michigan State, where a “noose” turned out to be a lost shoelace; or at Bowling Green, where a purported group of Klansmen turned out to be lab equipment covered with a white cloth.

The Covington hoax is more than just the epitome of fake news. It’s a cultural Rorschach test that measures the impact of Trump-hating confirmation bias on the viewer’s intellectual honesty and emotional stability. Those calling to protest, dox, stalk or kill the MAGA hat-wearing kids and their families over a selectively edited video planted by a foreign instigator prove, once again, that political correctness is a pathological disorder.