Noemie Emery at the Weekly Standard decries the Angry Left’s perfection of “secondhand hate“:

The left, which invented first “hate speech” (opinions they didn’t like) and then “hate crimes” (crimes judged less on the criminal’s actions than on what he was presumed to be thinking), has now gone on to its epiphany, which is “hate” defined not by your words or deeds but by what other people have decided you really think. “Hate” is no longer what you do or say, but what a liberal says that you think and projects on to you. You are punished for what someone else claims you were thinking. It hardly makes sense, but it does serve a political purpose. You could call it Secondhand Hate.

Emery’s first example cites Maureen Dowd, whose rote thoughtlessness was seized with gusto by local self-appointed mind readers.

Since then we have witnessed an explosion of secondhand hate as the local Angry Left have failed spectacularly to understand what led to the Wake County School Board revolution. The local newspaper has undertaken a crusade of late to infer racism (since it can’t be found and therefore stated outright, and passive aggression means never having to say you’re sorry, because hey, you never really said anything), the local Angry Left bought opinion is required to continue to parrot a “resegregation” theme when not actually making up news stories chock-full of the racism that isn’t there, angry leftists from other counties write local newspapers to compare the new school board majority to the Ku Klux Klan, and local angry teachers’ union presidents write barely literate marching orders about the need to, um, have plant our flag in the sand and make sure they hear form us load and clear.