Here’s Charlie Kirk, founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, which pretends to advocate for young conservatives. The op-ed at the link is headlined

I judged the Covington kids too quickly—Here’s what I missed

It’s a missive in which he acknowledged he erred in jumping on the bandwagon and smearing those children as soon as he could, along with the rest of the Liberal class, on the basis of an initial, brief, carefully edited video (my characterization of the video; he thought differently about it). Here’s how Kirk described that careful edit.

It’s not that it had been taken out of context. It’s not that the situation was more complicated than we originally thought. It’s that there wasn’t anything there in the first place. There wasn’t now, and never had been, any evidence of the high school students doing anything untoward.

It’s not a matter of the video taken out of context; it’s that the video had undergone that careful editing to fit a preconceived narrative—that anyone wearing a Trump-supporting bit of clothing was evil, that anyone from the Left confronting such a person must be right, that blacks also involved must be innocent of any wrong-doing.

Aside from that little bit, here’s what Kirk missed.

This wasn’t a case of the press lying. Not this time. I made the same judgment that they did and I wasn’t lying. This wasn’t one of the media’s usual, deliberate distortions of facts or vitriolic attacks.

Yes, this was a case of the press lying.  This was a textbook, blatant case of the media’s deliberate distortion of the facts.  The lie—not a mistake in judgment—was made clear by the full 1¾ hour video that gave the full story, a video that was available very quickly after the event.  This was a video that would have been available if the press and the rest of the Left, and pseudo-conservatives, had been willing to tarry a bit and get actual facts instead of hastening to see who could be first with the smear.  And you lied, too, with your jumping onto the smear wagon.  The lie continues to be made clear by the press’ continued attacks on those children even now that the facts are out.

It absolutely was one of the press’ most vitriolic attacks—they called for the brutal (woodchippers) murders of these children.

Here’s the other thing Kirk missed.  Nowhere in his 500-word piece purporting to explain his error is there a single minim of an apology.  Kirk doesn’t even have the grace to apologize for his monstrous error.  Or he still doesn’t understand what he’s done.