Thanks NCD. The best way to let events from controlling your life is to face facts. The NPR article does just that. Knowing our history is key to enacting change. When four little black girls were killed in the bombing of a Birmingham church, this was the response of the National Review:

"The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur - of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. Some circumstantial evidence lends a hint of plausibility to that notion, especially the ten-minute fuse (surely a white man walking away form the church basement ten minutes earlier would have been noticed?). And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court's manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice." 

—National Review, October 1, 1963

The National Review attempted to blame blacks

Conservative Mona Charen had an outrageous response to the massacre at Mother Emmanuel in Charleston. 

Countless people were heartbroken by the news of Wednesday's massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, but conservative writer Mona Charen seems to have been doubly upset. Writing in National Review, she complained that the prospect that the tragedy could be politically exploited by Democrats was “even more depressing” than the actions of the killer. “The heinousness of a person who can sit for an hour studying the Bible and then open fire is unfathomable,” Charen wrote. “Even more depressing, if that’s possible, is my suspicion—and I truly hope I’m wrong—that this event will play a role in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Later, when the crassness of the phrase “even more depressing” in this context was pointed out to her, Charen amended the sentence. But her article's flaws run much deeper. Charen takes a curiously blinkered view of how atrocities are politically exploited, citing examples of political haymaking that pale in comparison to those who respond to racist murders by downplaying the role of bigotry

https://newrepublic.com/article/122095/national-reviews-racism-denial-then-and-now

National Review is mainstream and it still carries the crazy. This is common among Conservatives.

To give credit, the Weekly Standard is taking Conservatives who said the bombs were false flags to task

https://www.weeklystandard.com/andrew-egger/the-arrest-of-bomber-cesar-sayoc-and-the-false-flag-conservatives

For a significant number, Conservatism is a cult