Once upon a time, Vice was the kind of publication that focused on all the things not covered anywhere else. Covering music, drugs, and a host of other things, they provided an outlet for those that didn’t delve into politics, just wanton hedonism.

Honestly, I could at least respect that. They knew their lane and they owned it.

Then somewhere along the way, they decided to get into covering politics. Now, they’re nothing more than another lefty site that thinks guilt by association is a winning strategy.

Take this piece where they try to tie an Illinois gubernatorial candidate to the Highland Park shooter.

The Republican nominee for Illinois governor has held multiple events involving the gun store where the alleged Highland Park shooter acquired the semi-automatic rifle he allegedly used during a 4th of July shooting spree.

Illinois GOP gubernatorial nominee Darren Bailey held a January event at Red Dot Arms, a gun store in Villa Park that’s about a 45-minute drive northwest of Highland Park. And in April, the company was involved in a gun raffle to benefit Bailey’s campaign.

That’s the same store where [Highland Park shooter’s name redacted] picked up the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 semi-automatic rifle he allegedly used to kill seven people and injure 47 others in Highland Park, Ill. As the Daily Beast first reported, he acquired the gun from Red Dot Arms after he bought it online from a retailer in Kentucky called budsgunshop.com. (Guns bought out-of-state must be shipped from one licensed gun dealer to another).

It is purely coincidental that the gun allegedly used in Highland Park came from the same store that has ties to Bailey’s campaign. But it throws Bailey’s push to further deregulate guns in Illinois, as well as his bellicose campaign rhetoric that gun ownership is a key check against tyranny, into stark relief.

Except, it doesn’t.

Yes, the alleged shooter apparently bought his rifle there, but that literally has nothing to do with Bailey or his campaign. It’s only an issue because people like Vice want to find a way to tie the shooter to Bailey in voters’ minds.

I’m sorry, but that’s not going to fly with me.

Outlets like Vice routinely do things like this, though. They try to manufacture tied between people that are either meaningless or are just imaginary, such as this one. They want people to see people who have such ties as bad simply because those ties exist.

They’re trying to hurt Bailey’s campaign by linking him to a reviled mass shooter.

Yet let’s remember that the shooter’s history should have been sufficient to keep him from getting a gun under current law. The problem was that no one acted on what look liked clear indicators of violent tendencies, thus allowing the problem to grow.

Bailey had no way of knowing what was happening, but those in the gunman’s life did.

The laws we’ve been told would stop mass shooters such as Illinois’s FOID requirement did nothing to stop Highland Park, but Vice won’t write about that. They won’t examine what gun control laws are on the books in a fairly gun-controlled state and question whether those policies work.

Oh no. They’re too busy manufacturing links between people who never met, apparently.