You don’t hate the mainstream media enough. Truly.

Reuters decided that the most patriotic thing for it to do over the Independence Day weekend was to publish a picture depicting a black woman surrounded by (racist) white men with masks on the Washington, DC, metro train.

This, the media decried, is the level to which Donald Trump’s presidency had degraded American society: a black woman surrounded by hateful white supremacists à la Rosa Parks.

Here is how The Washington Post described the photograph:

In the photo, a Black woman sits alone on a seat inside a Metro train on July 4 looking in the direction of the camera. Around her in the crowded car are masked members of Patriot Front, a white-supremacist group that was seen marching by the hundreds through D.C. that morning. The image, captured by photographer Cheney Orr for Reuters, hit the news wires and then social media, drawing millions of views and provoking widespread commentary.

The intimidating-looking men in the photo are indeed from the white supremacist group Patriot Front. They believe that people of non-European descent cannot be American because they invariably fail to assimilate. What utter nonsense.

However, Patriot Front is not violent. In fact, it’s fairly milquetoast in its activism. Like other radical elements on both the Left and the Right, it preys on the vulnerabilities of our young men, seeking to fill the hole of loneliness they feel by developing a fraternity. Yet when that fraternity is bonded by the notion of ethnic or classist supremacy, it’s headed down the path of doom.

Patriot Front holds protests, hangs signs, and hands out flyers. It was formed in reaction to the 2017 Charlottesville rally-turned-riot. Did a group of these members ride the DC Metro? Yes. But do you know what didn’t happen? The black woman was not harassed, insulted, assaulted, or bothered in any way.

Are these men a picture of what Trump’s presidency and MAGA have turned America into? No. As columnist Larry Elder points out, Patriot Front is a very small group. It has maybe 600 members total, and being in DC for the holiday weekend for a demonstration is not unlike the activist hacks on the Left who caused a stink by protesting America. Most importantly, regardless of Patriot Front’s stance on who is or isn’t an American, it was neither hateful nor harmful toward that black woman.

There was, however, another woman on a different train not too long ago who presents a far deadlier contrast. Iryna Zarutska was on a Charlotte, North Carolina, train full of black faces. She should have had every reason to think she would be unmolested. And yet she was murdered by a mentally insane black man because she was white. Leftist policies put that man in her path. He had a criminal record a mile long and should have been in prison. But because the Left insists that putting black men in jail is racist, he was allowed to be a menace to everyone on that train — namely, Zarutska.

At the time, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles — who resigned this year — excused herself from culpability, saying, “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health.” She added that mental illness is “a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease.” Lyles had more compassion for the deranged maniac than for the young woman he callously murdered.

It’s not just Zarutska, though; it’s any person whom leftists perceive might deserve violence according to their virtue-signaling doctrine. It’s Charlie Kirk and nearly Donald Trump. It’s Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, and other illegal-alien murder victims. The Left’s heroes and villains are predetermined, regardless of the facts. Ergo, the black woman on the DC train was the victim and the Patriot Front the villain solely because of the narrative that Marxists are so invested in maintaining — that America is a racist country.

Unfortunately for them, superficially picking victims and heroes usually backfires spectacularly when scrutiny is brought to bear. The black woman is seriously mentally ill and has been for years. Not too long before the Reuters photo was taken, she pulled down her pants and mooned the car while screaming unnervingly — a fact that The Washington Post conveniently left out.

Patriot Front is a white supremacist group and should be condemned. But the black woman wasn’t a victim of racism. She is, however, a victim of her own mental health crises and Leftmedia narrative-twisting.

The most telling aspect of this story is that it was just a blip in the news cycle. The racism dogwhistle didn’t hunt, so the talkingheads will simply have to wait for the next photograph to exploit.