In October 1998, the nation was shocked by the horrific murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard. Unfortunately, a big part of that shock was a disgusting and reprehensible lie meant to bolster the victimization narrative for homosexuals.

To no one’s surprise, Joe Biden retold that lie yesterday to mark the anniversary of Shepard’s death on October 12. Biden can’t tell the truth about himself, so why would he tell it about someone else?

“Twenty-five years ago today,” the president’s handlers posted on X, “Matthew Shepard lost his life to a brutal act of anti-gay hate and violence simply for being himself.” Biden then took credit where virtually none is due: “As Vice President, I had the honor of helping to enact the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which extended federal hate crimes laws to cover sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.”

It’s not just the past that’s a problem, but the future. “Our work will not be finished,” he added, “until we end the hate and violence that too many LGBTQI+ Americans continue to face.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likewise marked the anniversary, lamenting Shepard’s murder “simply because he was gay.” The Associated Press featured a story about this “egregious hate crime that helped fuel the LGBTQ+ rights movement over the ensuing years.”

As Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) proclaimed at the time, “Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement.” Indeed, Democrats used his death to add protections for sexual orientation to all manner of civil rights laws, including new ones, as Biden mentioned, targeting so-called “hate crimes.” Shepard is interred at the National Cathedral to maximize his impact.

We wouldn’t wish Shepard’s manner of death on our worst enemies. He was brutally beaten and tortured by two men, tied to a post, and left for dead. Hours later and only by chance, he was found unconscious and transported to a hospital where he died six days later.

But the Left immediately made Shepard a martyr of the movement to normalize gays and lesbians, which has ballooned to today’s alphabet soup of the Rainbow Mafia. They claimed the two men spotted Shepard at the bar and targeted and killed him because he was homosexual.

It was a lie. A BIG lie. And the “Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009” was based, in part, on that narrative lie.

The ugly truth is that Shepard and at least one of his killers had a homosexual relationship complicated by the purchase and sale of illicit drugs. The murder had nothing to do with homophobia, as Democrats and the Leftmedia have tirelessly repeated for a quarter-century.

It took 15 years for another homosexual man, investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez, to interview more than 100 people and publish a book titled, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard. Ironically, Jimenez set out to further the martyrdom narrative and help write a play about Shepard. Instead, the undeniable facts led him to set the record straight.

Soon after the book was published, the UK Guardian reported in 2014: “Jimenez found that Matthew was addicted to and dealing crystal meth and had dabbled in heroin. He also took significant sexual risks and was being pimped alongside Aaron McKinney, one of his killers, with whom he’d had occasional sexual encounters. He was HIV positive at the time of his death.” McKinney intended to rob Shepard of thousands of dollars in drug money.

Police agreed with Jimenez’s findings. “Shepard’s sexual preference … certainly wasn’t the motive in the homicide,” police investigator Ben Fritzen told Jimenez. “What it came down to really is drugs and money.”

Jimenez realized that Shepard was no longer “the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights movement,” but he felt that “we owe Matthew and other young men like him the truth.”

Everyone is owed the truth, which is one big reason why the modern transgender movement descended from the LGB victimization narrative is so evil — because it’s based on the lie that someone can “change their gender” and that anyone who says otherwise is a cruel oppressor. But that’s another story.

Democrats and their army of Leftmedia “fact-checkers” seem incapable of telling the truth about Shepard — or much of anything else, for that matter — because doing so would undermine their agenda. Twenty-five years after the murder and a decade after the narrative was thoroughly debunked by one of their own, they’re still lying.

For those lies, the “good Catholic” Biden was, unsurprisingly, just endorsed by a number of Rainbow Mafia groups this week. After all, he unabashedly hung that garish “pride” flag from the White House back in June, and he’s constantly banging the drum for the “rights” of the supposedly oppressed.

“LGBTQ+ Americans are living in a state of emergency,” asserted Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson, “and the leadership of the Biden-Harris administration is needed now more than ever.”

Much as with the alarming murder rate of blacks by other blacks, homosexuals and “transgender” murder victims are often killed by other disturbed individuals in the same camp. There is not a modern KKK lynching blacks and gender-confused people. Their victimization because of race or orientation is largely a lie told for political gain.

Remember, we’re talking about perhaps the single most celebrated tiny minority in the history of humanity.

Shepard’s murder was a hate crime, as all murders are, and it ought to outrage all of us. But it wasn’t the hate crime leftists wanted everyone to believe, and people should be outraged and tell the truth.